"This is ridiculous. Absolutely, completely ridiculous. Lord Voldemort is not dead. He is simply…waiting for His opportunity. Lord Voldemort has bested death before and why shouldn't He be able to now?" In his head, Voldemort always capitalized his own pronouns.
"Oh God, here he goes again. Shuddup! Stop talking about yourself in third person, you bloody twat!" Sirius Black snapped.
"Avada Kedavra!" Voldemort hissed, menacingly brandishing his makeshift wand (which was really a whittled down stick) at the man, but nothing happened. Not even a single spark. At this, Sirius Black laughed…guffawed, really. Severus Snape, sitting in the far corner of the room with Lily Evans, rolled his eyes, and they were joined by other assorted giggling across the room.
"Oooo look! Voldy's on the prowl! Everyone run! Run for your lives!" the Weasley boy yelled, throwing his arms up in the air. Then, he snapped his fingers theatrically. "Oh, wait a tic…"
Voldemort gave a piercing glare at all of them, and clutched the wand. He crossed his arms against his chest and muttered, "Lord Voldemort will kill you all as soon as He figures out how."
He longed for solitude, for one precious moment of silence. These people were always smiling and laughing and chattering; it made his skin itch. Sometimes—he couldn't believe it—sometimes, they danced, two-stepping freely and wildly around the campfires they built. Even Severus Snape was prone to smiling in this wretched place. Occasionally, they would sit together roasting marshmallows on long thin sticks (plucked from the ground, for God's sakes). They squished the fat, bloated puffs between a layer of chocolate and graham cracker and happily shoved it all down their gullets.
It was disgusting. In life, he had never indulged in such sweets. They were very…sticky…sometimes, gooey. They reminded him of the orphanage, where he would survive on stolen candy and chocolate for days at a time. As he grew older, he lost his appetite completely and stuck to clean, somewhat bland, foods: rice, bread, fruits, steamed vegetables. By the time he rose to power, Lord Voldemort was a strict vegan. He never ate here, as he was never hungry. He drank a lot though, downing whiskey by the bottle.
When Voldemort managed to sequester himself away, he was besot with voices in his head, screams and moans that belonged to people he'd murdered. He could identify each and every voice through the roar. When he weighed his options carefully, he decided the headaches were worse than the feeling that his skin wanted slither away and join the other party.
It was a village, this afterlife: a sunny little clearing with darling little cottages and cute little shops and quaint little pubs. It curiously resembled Hogsmeade. In fact, he could see Hogwarts in the distance, beyond the hills. When he first arrived, he would often hike there, but after a distance, through some powerful enchantment, he ended up disheveled and bruised back at the beginning of the village.
Voldemort was sitting at the bar in the Hogshead, drinking a pint, when Albus Dumbledore sat down next to him. He looked almost fifty years younger; wrinkles had vanished and his red hair was thick and lustrous just a hint of silver. "Hello, Tom. How are you today?"
"Name's Voldemort, Dumbledore. Say it with me: Vol. De. Mort."
Dumbledore chuckled. Voldemort punched him in the face, but it hit something like a solid wall of air right in front of Dumbledore's crooked nose. "Ah. Not so well then."
"What do you mean by that, anyway? What do you mean, 'today'? You ask me that everyday, as if something exciting might have happened. But nothing ever does. It's just One. Long. Goddamn. Day." Voldemort waved his hand through the air as he said this, as if his words were an orchestra and he was conducting. Then it felt heavy all of a sudden, so he dropped it back onto the bar.
He followed it with his head, leaning on an outstretched arm, lazily tracing his forearm where his dark mark should have been. Voldemort gave a heavy sigh, flopping his head over, gazing into the mirror behind the bar at his young looking face; he no longer had his snake-like visage, with slitted red eyes and pale, leathery skin. Noble, he thought that face was, a conqueror's face. Now he looked handsome, if a bit weary, with dark hair and chiseled cheekbones leading up to dark eyes, surrounded with tiny crow's feet. They were barely there, but to him it was like staring at the cracking, barren earth. It was the face of mortal decay.
"Oh, Tom," Dumbledore sighed. "You should try to find a little peace. You'll be here for a long time." But Voldemort had passed out. Dumbledore patted him on the shoulder, smiled a little, and poured himself a drink.
Eventually he decided that maybe, if he killed himself, it would reverse everything. Sacrifice, that's what lead to this whole thing, right? Harry Potter's self-fucking-sacrifice, that noble little prick. Perhaps if he sacrificed himself, he would spring back to his old body; even living within a moldering corpse would do and he would eventually restore himself to glory.
He filled his pockets with palm-sized rocks and walked into the lake, breathing in lungfuls of water as he sank. In the end, he just sat there at the bottom of the lake, watching mermaids swim around, doing all those tribal mermaid things. At least they looked appropriately somber and sullen for the severity of his situation.
He stuck his head in an oven and tied a plastic bag over his headed, but it quickly became uncomfortably moist and hot.
He slit his wrists and throat with a broken shard of glass, but kept bleeding and bleeding, walking around everywhere covered in crusted red flakes.
"Clean yourself, Lord Voldemort. It's disgusting," said Severus Snape, after many days.
"Yeah, you smell something awful," added Sirius.
Which wasn't true. No matter what, he never had that greasy mortal stink in this place, which was the one good thing. He bathed three times daily when was (oh how painful, the past tense) alive. Voldemort detested bodily fluids. He vividly remembered bedding a young, beautiful Slytherin girl as a teenager, and the slick sheen of sweat that covered them as they rubbed together like dogs. It was so much less than he'd expected; the payoff was just a strangled feeling in his throat, a buzzing cloudy headache, and the shuddering release of semen.
Later, Albus helped him bandage the cuts.
He hanged himself, and kept hanging for hours and hours, swaying merrily in the breeze.
"All in all, he's a rather sad case, don't you think? Poor bloke," Remus Lupin said, shaking his head as he glanced over at Voldemort's swinging body.
"Poor bloke? Murderous, conniving, shamelessly evil bloke, that's more like it," said James Potter.
"Oh, now, James," Lily said. "He's obviously torn up about his life."
"Come on!" James and Sirius said in unison.
"This is Voldemort, we're talking about! He killed you! And ME!" James said.
"And me," said Snape.
"Me too," came an unrecognizable voice in the distance.
"Me too," said another one.
"Yeah, he's killed about a fourth of the people here!" James said.
"Well, that's all over. I mean, he can't hurt anyone now, can he?"
"He hurts my head with all his bloody whining."
"Yeah, can you annoy someone to death? Even if they're already dead?"
Lord Voldemort cut himself down and marched over to them. "No one pities Lord Voldemort! I am the most powerful wizard in history! Salazar Slytherin's blood runs through my veins! You're all mudbloods, blood traitors, pathetic weak animals lead meekly to slaughter! You deserved it!" Voldemort stormed off to the bar to drink himself into a coma.
"God, he's pathetic. To think I used to idolize him," Snape said.
Lily clucked her tongue in a sympathetic sort of way. "Poor bloke."
