The falling rain shimmered and with a light pop a figure flashed in and out of being, leaving the country lane with only the shadow of the hanging trees, the perfume of earth rising from the undergrowth, soaked out from beneath.

In Albus's opinion it was unwise to go conspicuous. Following his spell of invisibility he cast a charm to conceal his footprints and one to quiet the sounds of his steps. He was almost without presence. Only the prickling of his magic was felt as his aura brushed the hedgerows, little cheeps of surprise fluttering about as he moved up towards the top of the hill. He could not help the tension in his body. It wasn't as if every eve the headmaster set out to destroy part of another's soul.

Thunder rumbled somewhere high above. Any lighting that followed was lost in the white of cloud-reflected sun, the intense brightness of the sky patched with grey and summer blue, the colours mixing like the inky smudging of paint. The rain fell a little harder.

Severus had told him that Voldemort had been absent for some weeks. While there was nothing unusual in the Lords undertaking of secret, solitary activities, the nearly six week period of absence was not.

Without instruction the Death Eater's stirred against themselves. 'Failure' was not a word any of the faithful wanted to hear, (lest it was spoken to one of their masked neighbours). Severus had described them like circus lions in the ring, waiting for the master to show. With no sign of the curtains raising their attention turned to one another, claws beginning to uncurl. Bellatrix particularly was becoming intractable.

Whatever had so engrossed the Dark Lord as to neglect his circle was, Albus knew, not going to be a good thing. He could only construe a few reasons as to what Voldemort was doing. Most assumed Voldemort to be hunting for information to help him understand his failure to possess Harry, his duel in the graveyard with Harry, a weapon to defeat Harry; now that the prophecy between himself and the boy had been so utterly lost. One obsession forced to end and another begun. To Albus it meant the Lord was almost assuredly out of the country, giving himself a little more cover in his own hunting.

Almost at the end of the lane, Albus took no time to reflect on the village, the graveyard or the Riddle house, but continued round the bend for the corpse, separate and distanced from Little Hangleton.

Triumph lit the corners of his mouth. He raised a hand and felt: muggle repelling charms and layers of complex dissuading magic, subtly done, almost untraceable, but still he felt there script floating on the air like spider's silk.

The old shack was as invisible as he. He had to be right.

Months – years – of searching, sifting for a sixth of needle lost in hay that covered the stretch of the globe. If he was right then inside this beggar's nest was a piece of him. A small abhorrent slather of the man himself, and once arrested from its soiled hovel he would use the edge of Gryffindor's Sword and cut a little more of the lord away.

Whatever thieved and debauched curio laid waiting for him, Albus vowed it would soon join the tattered spoils of Tom Riddles Diary, now carefully kept in an innocuous draw within his own office. Poor Lucius, but Albus could not help the satisfaction he felt in knowing that Voldemort knew his Diary lay in the hands of his old, much hated professor; and at this Albus afforded a small smile.

xxx

Carefully Albus striped the magic cocooning the shack, like a master thief delicately assuaging the locks of an ancient vault, patiently, cautiously, should he trigger the swift vehemence of some hidden pitfall.

Gingerly, his old limbs supple, Albus slipped between the wards and saw the old shack trussed up with ivy leaf, its green deeper, verdant in the falling rain. Most of the windows had fallen in or if remained had been cracked with frost from many winters gone by.

The grey above rumbled and a sudden shift of light illuminated one side of the shack in brilliant brightness.

Albus moved forward, his eyes wandered over the ground near the door, curious to see if a curled form of snake bones remained, it had not, but Ogden's memory had been from a long time ago.

The door swung back too quickly on itself and a plume of dust and feathers blew into the air. Albus entered. Dark stone walls and little light meant Albus's had to falter, his hands finding the wall as he allowed for his eyes to adjust. The air pulsed. He could feel Tom.

The prickling vitriol of the man's spirit suffused the house, the earth trembled with it and he followed the stench, growing ever stronger, to a small room at the back. Pausing before the door, he ran a hand over the worm-riddled wood and saw the cowed form of an ugly girl; her skewed eyes brimmed with tears as she cried silently against her bed. Long, long ago was this the room of Merope Gaunt. Albus frowned, he would not have expected Voldemort to bury a part of himself within his mother's room, or perhaps he had not known. Even with his soul intact, the creature hadn't felt in the same way other's do. Perhaps suffering from such an early age had numbed Tom; perhaps he was born broken.

Gently he pushed the door open and crossed the threshold. An iron bed supported the tattered carcass of mattress, its contents dragged all over the floor by mice and other animals; and there at the centre of soiled feathers, not boarded up, but with floorboards ripped open, squatted an open box within a brown hole.

The thief had arrived to find the vault opened and the contents gone. Who?

'Were you looking for this, professor?'

Albus whirled around and then he forced himself to freeze. In front of the grey walls alight in red, a pair of eyes stared, the rest of the monster diffusing into being as he shed his spell of invisibility.

Horror numbing him cold, Albus felt his own invisibility slip away and he held his wand consciously steady at the floor.

Time passed in the patter of falling rain, each droplet echoing on the tiled roof above, running down and slithering fat along the shard of window remaining in its frame. No amount of scheming or reflection could have predicted the situation Albus's now found himself in. With care he controlled each exhale and inhale of his breath, and waited for his host to speak. It would be rude for the guest to lead, and hostility at this party could turn the war irrevocably in the Dark Lord's favour. Caution. Horror and caution.

Finally Voldemort came forward, and Albus watched his hands reach inside his robes, take a parcel of velvet, lay it inside the box and open the green fabric to reveal the winking gold of Marvolo Gaunt's ring. Then the same tapered white fingers, quaking slightly, took the infamous yew wand and laid it on the ground. With the fingertips of his wand hand still touching the handle Voldemort levelled his eye's with Albus's own, and Albus saw the reptilian slits dilated to a near roundness, the white skin chalked whiter still, and the Dark Lord spoke in his cold susurrus, a slight tremble breaking the otherwise iced composure of his voice.

'And I quote: "We both know there are other ways of destroying a man – merely taking your live would not satisfy me, I admit…". You are a man of your word, are you not, Dumbledore? Do I have your word? Will you hear me out and keep your vengeance at bay?'

'Yes.'

'That is well.' And then Voldemort did something not even the disorientated fantasies of Albus's dreams would have configured; Voldemort rolled his wand to Albus's feet.

Then deliberately he turned from his surrendered stick, collapsing in a quivering fit against the furthest wall, and Albus saw the line of veins raised on the back of his neck like blue scars, leaching sweat as he fought for composure.

In what fantasy had Albus stepped into? And quite seriously, for a moment, he question his own sanity and then of the quaking wraith who he already knew to be insane.

'I knew you were to becoming soon because I have seen it, just as I have seen the touch of my ring will kill you…you have known about my horcruxes for some time; this year you will instruct the boy in my past, you will teach him and when you die you will send him to finish your hunt'. Voldemort turned his head, an involuntary twitch twisting the marble stillness of his face. No longer against the wall his body turned, slowly, and with effort he made to face Albus.

'Why do I know this?...because I have seen. Vaticination is not an art I have often practiced, destiny for me was contingent with volition; ruthless perseverance and cunning. Commit fully and fate will lay on you its guiding hand...'

Albus said nothing but continued to watch the man, unsure whether to watch his strange movements from the corner of his eye or to gaze at him directly. Provoking this creature was not something Albus wanted.

'I asked to see, after draining chemicals of lucidity – a tincture of my own making, and a ritual - ancient Assyrian glyphs latticed over by own aura, I lay beneath the sky. "When the Sun and Moon are invisible, the king of the land will increase wisdom." No sun. No moon. I pushed. And pushed and the star took me – and – and! In its light it burned a knowledge into me that I can never escape from…'

The cold voice stuck and the throat swallowed back the hisses coming from the gaping mouth. Voldemort's head twisted from side to side and the white hand slid out to find the wall, while the other he raised, bringing it to the head, trying to quell the shivering that had taken possession over his entire body.

'They have all abandoned me – all have betrayed me!', the voice cracked, 'Why am I, who was to be so gifted, I, who despite the drag of suffering was to always break its stranglehold, to be punished so utterly?'

'If I am to be used in this life as the catalyst for some great future, to have been given a purpose and to have fulfilled that purpose, why punish me with the epitome of my fear – of my shame? When my fear is my shame and my shame my fear…as if death were not wrong enough…but why a child's hell?'

'Why such contrast to my power and might? IF! If I am to suffer, can I not least suffer with the dignity of knowing my own name? Can I not remember the acts to which they call my crime? Why pull everything away from me? Why leave a being in so much want of touch, but so foul? Why an abandoned, ugly, child? - why would destiny, who has aroused such a passion in me for life, encouraged me to reach for it all – demanded I do so – deny me that which it has insisted is my calling, my obligation, and then cast me into a state of eternal rejection?'

'Why use love against me!? Why drown me in its need?...why!?'

Pattering rain on the tiled roof above mingled with the ringing silence left when the man's words had ended, its gentle thrumming quietening the shrill note still left skipping on the air.

Albus studied the other man, his eyes cold and hard, trying to digest the fevered ramblings, the insane absurdity of the situation. The terrible emotion of the questions asked could have only been sincere, what truth was in them Albus didn't know, but only understood that this shaking wraith was as far removed from the tyrant he had duelled in the ministry as a kitten's mewl is from a lion's roar. Vulnerable in a way that Albus had never seen before, perhaps vulnerable enough for Albus to quietly take the rains. Disturbed and intrigued, with questions of his own stirring in his mind, Albus's eyes wandered over the rubied slits of the other before settling to stare fully into their glazed pools of red.

'Madness?'. Voldemort blinked. 'This was not a departure from sanity!'

'If you ever understood, ever actually were as sagacious as you pretend to be, you would understand the label you prescribe "my madness" is but the greatness of a creature that is not like you!' Voldemort's spitting hiss lingered.

'Do you feel you have any sanity left to depart from?', Albus asked coldly. 'Sane men don't slaughter whole families and call it destinies calling'.

Voldemort's face cracked with a vile grin. 'Destiny or whatever name you use to call her with, is the only force and the only power. She is beyond Slytherin, beyond you…even beyond me…and no one, Dumbledore, no one will ever understand her workings - we are all gears turning a machine that can never contemplate itself, or understand, but turns because it does so for her amusement only'.

Voldemort tried not to look down at his own hand in case its tapered white had withered black and small. How could he explain to Dumbledore the horror that he knew awaited him in the future. He doubted that he could have convinced himself, knowing his own self would tell him to fight, rage at fortune no matter what, that force of will could turn the current of destiny upstream if he demanded it to – but belief in such thought would be lies. Voldemort knew, had felt with every quivering particle of his being, the truth of the future and his role within it: Lord Voldemort was to die, ignorance his finality.

'…and she has chosen Potter. Not because he is special, or skilled, but because his "victory" over me will inspire society to create something wonderful', Voldemort seethed and then he turned his head and laughed. 'You see, Lord Voldemort dose indeed create a revolution in magic, but he only seeds it with his death…his greatest, most noble desire is something he can never be a part of. Despite his genius and devotion to the art of magic, Lord Voldemort is only the front for the rest of the world to unite against.'

'And every future (and there are many!), every twist and turn for Voldemort ends the same way-!?' The high voice faltered, the thin legs giving way as Voldemort's back hit the wall. He lost control. His mind reeled as he desperately tried with the remains of his conscious to size himself, drag away the frothing stars dancing about his vision.

xxx

The final push his mother gave him tore at the ties holding the little remains of his sanity together, as he felt himself again and again falling into dust; sinking, his limbs broken, his mewling cries chocked back by ash.

Both names pulled from him as his shrinking brain made him dimly aware of the knowledge he had so preciously nutured, coveted and guarded, that which he had defined himself with and his genius, was trickling away like sand, leaving only a pitiless need; an infant's instinct for touch. Innocence had never looked so foul.

Destiny, cruel fate and the gears that turn, had made a mockery out of him. The child he had been and the monster he was fused into a creature that was both and neither. The thing was powerless while he powerful; helpless when he was supreme; in want of love, when he all his life had rejected it, scorned those who lived by it and fled from all idea of such a feeling… but his conviction in its triviality had never quite covered his fear of it…it was only when after the void had burned its terrible truth into his brain that his heart slacked, the truth of his fear he could not stop as it flowed like blood from a wound he simply could not close…that all his life amongst his many fears was one that had haunted them all…that rejection was his fear, and it was rejection he was condemned to eternally.

Tom was nothing and now he had learned Voldemort was but a means to a revolution, to be catalysed only in the event of his death and in society's rebellion to that of his life work and philosophies.

He had sounded mad, he knew he sounded mad, but he had no further option. His only hope was in the magic near most powerful to his own; Dumbledore was his only means to the end he chose for himself - his choice, and not of some numbers spun in the leering gaze of the cosmos.

He felt like the leviathan, like a near-god who in its crawl along the ocean floor had been met by a sudden eruption of molten earth; and this creature had been right to think itself peerless to all other of earth's creatures, but wrong, so wrong to think it could stand untrammelled in the face of all other forces, wrong to forget the power of the earth itself; but now drowning in the scourging rush of an element so foreign to its own had been forced to realise that greater powers do indeed exist.

Nothing, no matter how great, how righteous, or how much volition a spirit may possess, was safe. Nothing was concrete. All was a lie. Nothing sacred. That all, be it atom or soul, was simply a number destined to play out its role, to fulfil a sequence, and in doing so titillate the desires of some greater cosmic force.

Tom had realised that night, lost in the passage of the star, for the first time in his life that god exists. God exists in a myriad of smiling, snarling faces, kind and cruel, watching all with concern and indifference; a great towering bulk of everything conceivable and everything beyond; with no law of morality governing its action…just …narrative.

xxx

Voldemort's mind slid back into focus and he found his own wand pointed at him along with the tip of the other he now knew to be the Death Stick.

'I reject them both. I reject Tom and I reject Voldemort. It will be my choice. Mine.' Voldemort's words slurred with almost unintelligible hisses.

'What will? What is it you want, Tom? What is it you're trying to ask for?

'DAMN YOU!' was Voldemort's shrill shriek, its piercing note wounding Albus's ears.

'WHAT!'

Slowly, pale limbs uncurled themselves from the crumbled body, and finally without meeting his old teachers iced eyes, Voldemort spoke, his voice a tremulous whisper. 'Make me in mind, in body, and in spirit…transfigure me…'

Albus drew closer and leaned his face further to the hunkered figure, making his voice as steady as he could, 'Yes?'

Keening breath escaped Voldemort's mouth as he struggle to master his own tongue, the two forked tips poking obscenely out of his dribbling mouth.

Albus waited, careful not to move, careful to keep breathing; noticing the ruby pools cloud over as tears welled at the silted corners of Voldemort's eyes; still not looking at him.

'I..make me a serpent..', and then almost inaudibly, Voldemort followed his request with, 'make me ignorant'.