Scarlet. Ivory. Vacant gaze. Red hair, dark hair. Legs and arms spread and pinned to the wall like a butterfly on a cork board. Mouth open in a silent scream. Blood on his hands, in the corner of his mouth, and in the quiet drip onto the floor.
Harry's eyes snapped open as he stared up into the darkness, chest heaving for air. For a second, the images still swirled through his head, like the after-flash of a camera burnt on his mind. He sat up, shoving his twisted duvet aside. The bed sheets were drenched in a cold sweat.
He rubbed his eyes. Riddle's contact details and office hours were still tacked onto his fridge, and he stared at them now. He had moved to stand in the kitchen, cold seeping into his toes as he clutched a glass of water in his hand.
He wished his hand was shaking. It wasn't. It was perfectly steady.
He knew there was something deeply wrong with him.
In the Auror department they had called it a traumata, a response to all of the things he'd seen. It wasn't that unusual, "the job gets to you after a while."
The job did get to him, but not in the way they thought.
They wanted him on Voldemort's case the most, because apparently he was so good at making links and understanding the man, his motives, his thoughts. If only they knew.
He sipped his water.
He felt it. At those ones. It was like something extra in the copper of the blood, in the emptiness of the victim's eyes – something dark, like a shadow that sunk into his bones and hooked into his guts like chains.
His heart was speared onto the wall like their bodies, in a parody of a museum collection. Always the same. Voldemort did so love to collect things, he knew that. He wished he didn't. He wished he didn't know of Voldemort's tendency towards trophies.
He didn't know why the monster did the things he did – without any seeming purpose or cause. There didn't seem to be any greater plan, and if there was, it was jumbled – blocked off from him, like a frosted window which only allowed him to see a distorted version of the view.
But he could feel it.
With any other crime scene, any other case, he could analyse, he could do his best, he could feel sick at the worst stains of humanity.
At Voldemort's crime scenes, he felt the possessiveness, the monstrous almost-love – so fleeting, when he held their lives in his hands – the rush of power, the beauty the man saw in death, all of it blurring indistinguishably with absolute terror.
He didn't know why he felt it. They said it was because of the first incident, the Avada Kedavra connection. It was muffled, but when he stepped into the man's crime scenes – into his mind and into the blackest aspects of his soul – he could feel it and it claimed him.
The most awful, terrible things coupled with the wildest of joys, and it terrified him because whenever he'd been to one of those scenes he would come home with bloodlust itching beneath his skin and thoughts of murder slipping through his dreams.
He'd see people on the street and wonder, involuntarily.
The man made him feel violated. Voldemort made him feel like he was the killer, that he could be the killer … that maybe lines of red tape should become redder and then broken entirely for the sake of greater justice.
The worst part was that he thought the link went both ways, even if he couldn't pinpoint it, because over the years the crime scenes got more elaborate – like Voldemort was trying to impress him.
To show him what he could do.
And all the time his own reputation grew: the boy, the Auror who could maybe catch Voldemort – who could defeat him; the victim that had once gotten away, or so they said. The Boy Who Lived.
He shook his head to clear it, fingers clenching tightly on the glass. Looked at the contact details, black against his fridge.
Hermione said he was breaking. That maybe he just needed someone to talk to about the horrible things he'd seen, to be told that feeling disgusted and frightened and guilty was normal.
What he had wasn't normal.
They knew he could get into the man's head, the whole Auror department exploited it. They didn't seem to realise that it wasn't like flicking through the pages of a book, it was getting sucked straight into the story and feeling everything.
Voldemort did the crimes. He did the crimes – and there was no way to say that, to express that, without sounding insane.
He wasn't insane, he just…
The wiring was wrong. Crossed too much with the mind of a psychopath, uncaring of anything but his own desires.
Maybe that was why he'd gotten into working as an Auror in the first place: a sense of needing to compensate for the bloody hopes in his head, the way his pulse quickened guiltily, as if in greeting, when he stepped into Voldemort's gallery of crime.
And he was good at his job.
He needed to keep doing his job unless he wanted to sleep with another victim in his head. He needed to stop Voldemort before the man consumed his own mind entirely, dragged him into a world where he was the one the Aurors hunted. How long could one stare into the abyss, after all? Especially when the abyss stared back so vividly.
And every so often it would return to that one, the worst one. To his parents.
Red hair. Dark hair. And a baby in a crib.
He saved them. He killed them. It all tangled and he hated it.
It didn't even make sense in his head.
Dumbledore had once told him he empathised with Voldemort too much, and maybe that was true. There was no sympathy involved, just the kills as if they were his own.
And he didn't even know who Voldemort really was.
There was never a mirror with which to see himself – see Voldemort – and he always saw it from the man's own eyes.
He drained the glass and set it down.
No mind healer could help with that.
He was like Tom Riddle's magical-muggle psychiatry career. He was unprecedented.
Riddle had been interesting, that was for sure. They'd just talked on the first session yesterday, not about anything in particular, just chatting.
He didn't let his guard down.
He had too many people in his head already to add another, and he wasn't cruel enough to let anyone else crawl their way in either.
It wasn't a nice place to be.
There were some things psychiatrists couldn't fix.
He wasn't broken. There was nothing wrong with his mind to fix, there were no issues to resolve, or no more than most people had, anyway.
He just happened to kill someone in all the ways that counted and festered in his heart every time he walked into certain crime scenes, like the trigger of a gun that never had the safety on.
He had a soul bond with a mass-murdering psychopath.
The last Voldemort crime scene had been the final straw. A boy: his age, dark-haired, so obviously a replacement for the real target – for him – with his heart torn out. In the heart's place was a butterfly, pinned down, still alive, just like a collector would, always still alive when the crime scene was discovered, but never able to fly again.
No, his head wasn't to be messed with, because there truly was something dark there, something he never wanted to face again by poking around.
He decisively burnt the small business card.
Tom Marvolo Riddle was beyond frustrated.
It had been a week – a whole, bloody week – and Harry Potter had yet to turn up in his office again.
He stabbed a knife moodily through his sketch pad, and through the carefully drawn features immortalised on the page.
The boy was supposed to come back. He'd done everything right.
What had he missed?
Was he supposed to give him more time? Another push? He frowned.
He'd been able to feel the boy's emotions since that day – it had been a matter of deduction to work out whose the feelings were, because he didn't see how they could so suddenly be his own.
Even if they felt like it.
Before, the only happiness he'd got, the greatest power and delight, had been when he held a fragile life in his hands with the full knowledge that however much they pleaded, he was going to rip it away.
Wizards were supposed to be gods – and once, in his adolescent years, he'd intended to rule them all as Dark Lord. To make them better, and to rule the muggles too.
But that wasn't true power; he'd found that out with time.
Power was immortality and control, and wizards weren't gods. They were the same as the muggles. Magical, yes, and a step up the ladder, but their thoughts and fears … they were the same. Weak.
He'd always been able to see into people's minds; though not quite so literally before he discovered the art of legilimency, manipulation and seeing the patterns had always been devastatingly simple for him.
It was useful, it allowed him to twist the webs of the world to suit his own needs, and while he'd once intended to use it to help them … they didn't deserve his help. They weren't worth his help.
Ironic that he'd carved out this path for himself then. The psychiatrist. The person who helped others. Some said people became mind healers in an effort to diagnose and help themselves, but he was flawless and above them in every way.
If they knew his mind, they would call him a monster and a freak. Maybe he was, but he was the greater creature and their tiny dreams and minds bent beneath his scrutiny and talents.
He fixed them up, he played with their minds, all for the control and the delight of forcing them to face their own fears.
Maybe he was trying to understand them, their stupidity, their common emotions, because it was never anything he had felt himself, before the boy.
Maybe he needed a guise for murder, and maybe he occasionally found gems.
His line of work was fantastic because he got to work with broken minds, interesting minds, minds that came to rely and depend on his assistance so utterly that it was a rush within itself.
And they thought he was kind.
He was the Lord of the Shadows; he dictated the darkest aspects of their world and ruled them silently from above mere mortal thrones of existence, as puppet master. His toys, his marionettes, like Lucius Malfoy smiling and speaking on his strings.
It could be rather unfortunate for the man's treatment, if he didn't make the election run smoothly.
Potter still hadn't come back.
Had he known who he really was? Somehow realised? He didn't think the boy had.
No, he couldn't have, or the Aurors would have already been here.
He had to admit, when this soul connection had first been born, his immortality, he'd been sceptical of having the boy's emotions flitting about in his head.
Until he realised how his own emotions were affecting Harry in turn; then it became truly fascinating.
The boy was so good, so in conflict with him, and yet, as shown, still susceptible to repeated conditioning, to his emotions.
He never gave the boy anything bad. He didn't give him anger or further pain – not directly anyway, outside of murdering his parents and then his godfather when the man had got too close to his trophy, but…
No. He gave Harry the happiest moments of his life, spliced into murder and violence in the most confusing, sinful combinations possible.
He'd always loved the rush of power he got from holding someone's life in his hands, and to know that one person shared that love of murder, understood him – however involuntarily – was thrilling.
But the boy hadn't come back.
It wasn't anywhere near as fun if he didn't come back, if he couldn't pick through his head and guide him and fix him and break him and mould him.
His jaw clenched.
Why hadn't he come? Yes, he hadn't liked the thought of a psychiatrist, of people in his…
Oh. He didn't like people in his head. He'd said that himself, hadn't he? That it was common, and indeed it was. But Harry's situation wasn't. His head was beautifully crowded by his own shadow.
He knew exactly what he had to – was that the door?
Harry couldn't believe he had come here again. He'd sworn not to – he didn't even know what was dragging him back. Well, okay, he did. But he consoled himself with the fact that Riddle was a remarkable psychiatrist, and he wasn't here for himself.
It was professional interest, nothing else. The man was a criminologist, after all. He'd talked to the Auror Department about the matter, and they'd agreed that Riddle would be useful to have on board.
The door to the office opened, and the man stared at him for a few seconds, before smiling.
"Harry. Please, come in. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Did he suddenly remember they were supposed to have daily sessions? He withheld that comment, and the venomous bite it was served with, neatly walking over to his desk and sliding his sketchbook into a drawer, locking it with a discreet flick of his wand.
Harry watched his movements curiously, warily.
"How would you psychoanalyse Voldemort?"
Now this could be an interesting development.
He gestured for Potter to take a seat on his sofa again, moving over into his chair.
He didn't work for free, after all…
A/N: Yup, so I'm back. Next time you will actually meet other characters outside of Tom and Harry...promise. Hope you like this. I was told it was quite similar to Dancing with Deceit, and premise wise it probably is, but I think this is different. And yeah. Different scenarios...different history. Different spin on the prophecy as always :P (though that's not come up yet)
