Chapter 8 – Riddle me this 2: Electric boogaloo
…
Elsewhere
Overhead, a deep red sun burned brightly over a nearly empty city street.
Its lone resident, Tom, groaned loudly. "Can I please just go home?" he begged aloud. "I mean … wherever home is, exactly."
This memory loss he was dealing with was almost as annoying as his stupid trek through the astral plane. However, he didn't know what else he could do other than continue on until he found the exit in the hopes of finally finding his way out of here and back to … wherever it was he belonged.
Wherever it was he needed to go, the pit in his stomach was telling him to hurry.
In the meantime, though, he was stuck in an empty street framed by towering skyscrapers made of glass and steel. So he did the only thing he could think of.
He walked.
And walked.
… And walked.
Nothing. Just more buildings and the empty clack of his shoes echoing down the street as the ghostly being continued walking.
Finally, he just stopped.
"Really? Nothing?" he demanded. "It's bad enough I'm stuck in this bizarre dream world, but now nothing is even going to happen?"
Groaning, he reached up and rubbed his temple, feeling warm skin under his fingers even with his translucent appearance. Frowning, he tried to make sense of things.
When this whole thing started, that one ghost had called this place the astral plane. But what exactly did that mean for him? Was he a ghost? Was he dead, and this his afterlife? Why couldn't he remember anything? Even wracking his brain, all he could come up with were fleeting images with no context, and his name, Tom Riddle. There weren't any details. He didn't know where he came from, or how he ended up here. He didn't even know where he was trying to go. He simply had this unceasing impulse to leave this place, as if there was somewhere terribly important he had to get back to.
His eyes narrowed. If this was the astral plane … and assuming he wasn't dead, which was an assumption he simply had to make, if only for his own peace of mind … then maybe he had suffered some kind of trauma or something, and his spirit had been knocked out of his body. Maybe his memory loss was somehow connected to that.
Maybe … maybe if he got his memories back, he'd be able to pull himself together enough to get the hell out of here.
At the very least, recovering his memories was a start. But how was he supposed to do that?
Groaning, he started rubbing his temples more aggressively as he tried and failed to come up with a solution. However, he suddenly stopped and pulled his ghost-like hands down to stare at them.
If this was some kind of spiritual dimension … then what if it was connected to him? He seemed to be a spirit, and if the astral plane was a realm of spirits, then by being here … maybe he was helping to shape it? Why else would he seem to be standing in the middle of a city street, of all things? And … the physical world was crafted from physical matter, built out of dirt and trees and stone. So the spiritual plane … it had to be constructed out of spiritual matter somehow, right? After all, he wasn't just floating around in some nebulous void. This place had shape, and texture. And just as the physical world could be shaped by its inhabitants through physical means, with people building and tearing down things, then maybe the astral plane was also shaped by its inhabitants, but in ways that were more … abstract. Maybe it somehow reflected its own spiritual visitors, making them and their thoughts a part of its reality.
Maybe all the weird things he had experienced had been the result of his own confused mind reaching out and subconsciously shaping the world around him just like the strange power he had recently discovered allowed him to shape it consciously.
And if he combined the two …
Closing his eyes, he reached down to his core, finding that odd new power and letting it fill him, causing his transparent green form to glow more and more brightly until the street around him lost its gentle ruby glow from the sun overhead and instead glittered like it was crafted from emerald.
Slowly opening his eyes, he extended his luminous hands while focusing on one of those vague shadows of memory he felt floating around in his mind.
To his delight and amazement, the world around him started shifting.
Colossal buildings and stretches of sky slowly spun in place as if they were nothing more than images reflected on enormous mirrors arrayed all around him, thinning to nothing as they continued their rotation, before gently revealing strikingly different images on the other side as they steadily and silently spun into place.
As the last enormous spectral mirror finished rotating and the final cracks in the world around him sealed, Tom grinned victoriously, looking around at what looked like the hallway of an ancient stone castle.
More interestingly, he wasn't alone. All around him, robed teenagers streamed through old-fashioned wooden doors and began thronging through the ancient hallways.
"A school? In a castle?" Tom wondered in bemusement, barely flinching as several of the students, if students they were, passed through his ghost-like form on their way down the crowded hallway. "Interesting choice."
"Merlin, you were incredible in class today!" a student in a nearby cluster praised one of his fellows.
"Why, thank you, Nott," an eerily familiar voice replied in a smooth, if slightly condescending, tone.
Wide-eyed, Tom watched as the bobbing heads of students parted enough to reveal … Tom.
The tall, slender teen striding confidently down the hallway surrounded by nearly fawning classmates … was him. The same hair, the same controlled gait, he was even wearing the same neatly pressed uniform as the teen, albeit without the black robe.
"Am I a genius, or am I a genius?" the spectral visitor proudly boasted to himself as he watched the living memory play out around him, hopefully helping to jog the rest of his memories in the process.
"The professor hadn't even shown us that spell yet!" one of his double's apparent sycophants pointed out excitedly. "How did you get it so perfect on the first try?"
"Quite simple, really," his double explained. "I had already taught it to myself back in our first year."
From the expressions of the toadies around him, this was evidently a rather impressive feat.
"Allow me to offer you some insight," his double offered as they continued down the hallway, their spectral visitor following closely behind. "The things we're learning here? They're not just how to pass tests, or find careers, or become productive members of society."
His double's eye roll was practically audible on that last part, but he wasn't done.
"What we're truly learning here," he continued, "is power." His voice sounded nearly worshipful on that word, but he continued on. "That's what magic truly is, after all. Power. The power to make change, and to shape reality as you see fit." He chuckled. "You could say that, as wizards, power is our very birthright. I would argue that it's in fact our obligation, and it's one I take very, very seriously."
Many of the starry-eyed boys clustered around him nodded in fervent agreement with this claim, but his double seemed to spot a silent dissenter in their ranks. "You disagree?" he asked the boy.
The boy shrugged. "I just don't see what's so great about power," he replied. "I mean, what difference does it make?"
The other boys seemed to feel he had spoken blasphemy, but his double simply smiled. "Why, power makes all the difference in the world, my friend." As the entranced boys turned back to him, he continued. "When you study the history of our world, you realize that its really a story of power. Who had it, and who didn't, but had the courage to seek it. Those people went on to shape the very fabric of our world. In the process, they became something more than mortal. They became legends, immortalized and revered, while the powerless … well, they became less than footnotes in their wake. They became … nothing." His double sounded like he was nearly preaching by now. "The lust for power is in our very blood. That insatiable hunger to leave a mark on the world, to shape and mold it, is the fire that drives us, enslaves us, makes us more than simply animals. Those who would claim otherwise are simply too weak or cowardly to admit it." He chuckled. "As much as the weak hate it, the drive for power is the very essence of what it means to be human."
His double's charming grin turned decidedly hungry as he continued. "And I personally aim to be far more than mere human."
As the cluster of students continued down the hallway, however, their spectral visitor remained behind.
"Obsession, thy name is … me, I guess," he commented aloud after hearing the other him raving about power. "Lovely."
Sighing, he turned and headed in the other direction.
"So I've apparently got a bit of a power complex, and a fondness for surrounding myself with fawning lackeys," he observed unhappily as he walked. "That's just fantastic."
Stopping, he stood in the same place he had appeared in the hallway to begin with. He had no idea if that mattered, but it seemed fitting regardless.
Focusing, he drew on his power while centering his mind on another shadowy memory. Pushing outwards with his glowing hands, he watched as, once again, the image of the world around him broke down as if nothing but reflections on a series of giant mirrors as they slowly spun in place, bringing with them a different image.
However, when they settled, the image they revealed was not too dissimilar from the previous one, given that he still seemed to be in the same castle, with its hard gray stone walls and floor. This time, though, he was standing in a rather lushly furnished room that practically oozed comfort and indulgence, with plush, squashy-looking chairs and boxes of sweets squirreled away on more than one richly tooled wooden table. Sharing the room with him was a somewhat opulent-looking older man wearing a smoking jacket and pouring himself a sherry, doubtless the owner of the room. And somewhat unsurprisingly, Tom's double was there as well. Given the dozen or so plates littered with the remains of what looked like a sumptuous meal, he assumed that his double was here as a straggler from some kind of dinner party.
However, his host didn't seem to be aware his double was still there, which his double corrected by stepping forward and appearing to admire a rather odd-looking hourglass before gently tapping on it with a fingernail, producing a clear, musical chime.
"Oh. Look sharp, Tom. Wouldn't want to be caught out of bed after hours," the older fellow good-naturedly chided upon spotting his straggling double. However, the teen simply stood there silently, a thoughtful, if slightly hesitant, look on his face, as if debating with himself about saying something. "Something on your mind, Tom?" the older man asked in familiar concern, apparently noticing the same thing.
"Yes, sir," his double answered, apparently choosing his words carefully. "You see, I couldn't think of anyone else to go to. The other professors … well … they're not like you. They might … misunderstand."
"Oh, good, I'm a brown-nosing tool. This just gets better and better," the spectral visitor complained quietly as he watched his double's behavior.
"Go on," the older fellow prompted, intrigued and clearly not put off at all.
The teen began stepping towards the fireplace as he continued, his smooth, controlled gait a stark contrast to the hesitancy in his words. "I was in the library the other night. In the restricted section. And … I read something rather odd about a bit of rare magic. It's called, as I understand it … a horcrux."
From the look on the professor's face, this was clearly the last thing he had expected to hear. "I … beg your pardon?" he asked, his voice both deeply astonished and fairly disturbed.
"That's got to be a good sign," their spectral audience commented to himself.
"Horcrux," his double clarified for his increasingly disturbed-looking professor. "I came across the term while reading, but … I don't fully understand it."
His professor was evidently not comforted by the fact that he hadn't misheard the boy. "I'm not sure what you were reading, Tom, but this is very dark stuff. Very dark indeed," the nervous professor told him, likely in the hopes of getting his double to abandon the conversation.
The teen, however, never even flinched, simply maintaining his steady gaze at the professor. "Which is … why I came to you," the boy explained, his polite but utterly unwavering expression all but insisting that he would not be leaving without answers.
Answers, it seemed, that his professor was willing to provide, for all his discomfort. "A horcrux … is an object in which a person has concealed a part of their soul."
Their ghostly eavesdropper felt a sudden bolt of alarm run through him upon hearing those quietly uttered words.
"But … I don't understand how that works, sir," the teen admitted, clearly not at all surprised by the explanation as he stepped towards the professor in undeniable interest.
"One splits one's soul and hides part of it in an object," the professor reluctantly explained, clearly hating the entire conversation, but unwilling to turn the boy away. "In doing so, you are protected, should you be attacked and your body destroyed."
Riddle's face was completely expressionless. "Protected?" he asked quietly.
"Oh, please tell me you didn't," their audience begged upon spotting the almost ravenous light in the teen's eyes.
"The part of your soul that is hidden keeps you bound to this world," the uncomfortable professor said. "In other words … you cannot die."
As the professor spoke those words, a torrent of emotion ran through his double's dark eyes, which the teen seemed to try to hide by turning to the fireplace.
"And how does one split his soul, sir?" the teen asked quietly, crushing any hope his spectral observer had that he hadn't made one of those things.
"I think you already know the answer to that," his professor replied, troubled eyes fixed on the teen's back.
And sure enough, he was right.
"Murder," the teen whispered, gently fondling a strange black ring he wore.
"Yes," the professor confirmed, his voice sounding hoarse. "Murder rips the soul apart. It is a violation against nature."
With those words, the disturbed professor seemed to relax slightly, clearly certain that the horrid conversation had run its course.
He was about to be disabused.
"And … can you split the soul only once, sir?" the teen asked quietly, still fondling his ring. "For instance, isn't seven–"
"Seven?! Merlin's beard, Tom!" the professor exclaimed in abject horror. "Isn't it bad enough to consider killing one person? To rip the soul into seven pieces …" The look on his face said he was wondering if he had ever truly known this boy in the first place. "This is all hypothetical, isn't it, Tom? All academic?" he asked, an almost pleading tone in his voice.
The teen turned around, his face schooled into a polite mask. "Of course, sir," he assured the man, his darkly glittering eyes giving voice to the lie in this words. "It'll be our little secret," he promised.
By the professor's expression, he couldn't quite make himself believe the boy, no matter how much he wanted to.
Their spiritual eavesdropper barely saw it, though. He was stepping through the back wall and passing into the shadowed hallway outside. As he continued down the labyrinthine stone corridors, his ears kept ringing from the conversation he had just overheard, and his eyes were fixed on his ghostly hands.
"I made those things," he tried to process. "I … is that why I'm here? Did I do all that? Did I murder seven different people just to tear and mutilate my own soul?" He shook his head as he tried to come to terms with what he might have done. "Was I really that stupid? That blind? I killed at least—at least!-seven innocent people, and in the end … who even knows what kind of effects doing something like that would have on the rest of your soul? To have it so twisted and mangled and broken?" Barely noticing, he passed through the doors of the castle and strode across a massive, rolling green lawn leading towards a glassy black lake. "Is that why my memory is so shattered?" he asked himself. "Is it because of what I did to my own soul? Or was I killed, and this is what happens when you have a horcrux keeping you from just passing on?"
As he stood there, staring out across a lake that shone like a black mirror as it reflected the glittering stars overhead, he finally asked the question that was really haunting him. "Do I even want the rest of my memories back?"
He had seen the look in his double's eyes when they were talking about horcruxes. He never even flinched when the professor explained how they were made … or what it cost. He just … didn't care.
Is that what he'd see next? If he made this place reenact another of his shadowy memories, would he see himself murdering some innocent person just to mutilate his own soul? Would he be seeing something even worse? After all, someone who could discuss the topic of murder so casually even as a teenager … someone who could even say the word "murder" with the kind of quiet relish that his double had seemed to … what else might he be willing to do?
What else might he have enjoyed doing?
Groaning, he scrubbed his hands through his hair, tousling the neatly parted ghostly locks and turning them into a wild mess as he struggled with the fear of what he might see next.
After a moment, though, he realized he had already made a decision.
He was terrified of what he might see, but … he needed to know. Even if he could get out of here without recovering his memories, he couldn't spend the rest of his life wondering what he might have done.
He didn't want to know. But he needed to know.
And so, as every fiber of his non-being begged him to drag his feet, he hesitantly focused on another hazy impression of a memory as he reshaped reality around him, the world breaking apart into images on giant mirrors that slowly pivoted, revealing a very different image on the other side.
A very, very different image.
"What is this, a nursery?" he asked aloud as he looked around at the warm-looking room he was standing in, the floor of which was strewn with toys suitable for a very small child, leading the way like bread crumbs to a crib, in which a black-haired infant was sitting while a red-haired woman knelt at the side mumbling something to him.
"Why am I here?" Tom asked curiously, not seeing a double of him anywhere.
His gaze returned to the infant.
"Is that … is that me?" he wondered incredulously. Strange as that would be, as he reflected on it, he supposed it shouldn't necessarily be that unexpected. He was dealing with random memories scattered through his subconscious, after all. They wouldn't necessarily all be in chronological order, so why shouldn't he end up encountering some from his childhood?
Upon stepping closer to the crib, though, and spotting the child's bright green eyes, he realized he wasn't looking at a younger version of himself.
"Hey, it's that kid from the crater," he noted in surprise. "Huh. This must be from before he leveled his house with that obscurus thing."
However, just as he started wondering why he was seeing a memory of this kid, and from there, just why he'd experienced so many of them earlier, he caught sight of the red-haired woman's face.
She was terrified.
With her hair, she might have always had a pale complexion, but now, she looked downright ghostly, which was saying a lot, coming from him. One of her hands was even trembling from where she was clutching the side of the crib, but her eyes, the same shape and color as the child's, were absolutely steady as she reached out one thumb smeared with blood and gently painted something on the child's forehead, making the infant giggle as her touch tickled him. Her face, however, said humor was the last thing on her mind just then.
"Blood for blood," she whispered, "soul for soul." Her steady, determined green eyes welled with tears that didn't fall. "My life for yours."
Pulling her thumb away, she revealed what looked like a lightning bolt painted on the child's forehead.
Leaning forward, she gave her child a lingering kiss on top of his messy black hair.
"I love you, Harry," she promised, tears finally falling down her cheeks as the bloody mark disappeared from the boy's face.
Tom jumped as a pained scream suddenly sounded from somewhere outside the door to the room, before it suddenly cut off with a deathly finality.
The woman flinched as if a blade had been driven deep into her heart, but she simply kissed the boy once more on the forehead where she had painted the strange mark.
Rising from her knees, she stood and turned to face the door with steel in her spine and resolve in her eyes.
In the sudden silence of the room, the faint metal click of the door's latch seemed to echo as loudly as any scream. However, the door itself swung open in dead silence, gliding on oiled hinges as it slowly revealed a tall, shadowy figure standing on the other side.
The woman's chin raised slightly as the robed and hooded figure glided into the room with a smooth, serpentine grace that seemed oddly familiar to Tom.
The woman never flinched as the robed figure stepped closer to her.
As for the figure himself, he drew to a stop as he stared down at the woman from eyes hidden deep inside the shadows of his hood.
By the chuckle that emanated from it afterward, however, he was apparently amused by the woman's bravado.
"Stand aside, Lily," the figure commanded her, amusement and thinly veiled impatience audible in the figure's odd, almost hiss-like voice.
Curiously enough, though, Tom could swear something about that voice was also familiar to him, though he couldn't figure out why.
"Take me instead," the woman told him, not budging.
For a moment, silence answered her near order, but soon, more quiet chuckling echoed out from that cavernous hood.
The woman finally flinched as two thin, unnaturally pale hands emerged from folds in the robe, rising to the edges of that black hood to gently lower it to the figure's shoulders with long, spider-like fingers.
"Ew," Tom eloquently described the vision unveiled to them all.
The figure was utterly hairless, and his skin was deathly pale, with a slightly scaly, almost snakeskin-like pattern to it.
Worse than that, the figure's nose was mere slits in his face, while his utterly inhuman, snake-like eyes glared at the room with a murderous red glow.
"Do you expect to bargain with Lord Voldemort?" the figure asked her, the sibilant hiss in his voice more prominent than ever with his ghastly visage revealed.
The woman looked on his face with horror and disgust, but stood her ground anyway. "Please, don't kill Harry," she begged. "Take me instead."
By the expression on Voldemort's face, he had never encountered a temerity like this woman's. However, all he did was smile, thin lips pulling back to reveal glittering white teeth.
"Well well," he commented. "Even if I hadn't promised one of my most loyal followers to try and spare your life, I might be tempted to do so anyway. Such courage is a terribly rare commodity these days."
Again, Tom was struck with a disturbing sense of familiarity as he listened to the figure's voice, and the smooth, cultured tones that subtly underlay his monstrous hissing.
However, he was distracted from this thought as Voldemort produced a pale, bone-handled wand from his sleeve.
"Stand aside, girl," he ordered the woman. "You know you can't stop me."
The woman simply shook her head.
The figure seemed taken aback by her refusal. "I am Lord Voldemort," he said, almost incredulous. "I wield power you cannot fathom. You are less than nothing before me. But I, being a gracious lord, am offering you the chance to stand aside and live. And yet you refuse to take it?"
The woman swallowed, and nodded. "Harry's my son," she said. "I'll never stand aside."
Voldemort's ravenous red eyes still seemed confused, but the way his fingers tightened on the handle of his wand spoke of rage.
"So be it," he spat as he raised his wand at her. "Avada Kedavra!"
An emerald bolt of light raced towards her, and the woman's eyes closed in calm acceptance.
And satisfaction.
As the sickly green light struck her, Tom's eyes widened as a blue, translucent copy of the woman that seemed fairly similar to his own form was violently torn away from her body to vanish into thin air, while her physical body was left to fall to the floor, lifeless.
Of even greater surprise to Tom, though, the mark the woman had painted on the child's forehead suddenly became visible once again, emitting a pale, ghostly glow that was the same shade of the woman's eyes, or his own astral body.
However, the robed man never reacted, suggesting this glow was only visible in the astral plane, and not the mundane one. Instead, the wizard simply stared at the fallen woman for a moment.
"Yet another choosing to be less than a footnote in history," Voldemort muttered in disgust. "Pathetic."
A chill ran down Tom's spine at those words, and at how he recognized them from what his double had been preaching to all those students earlier.
That's why this … monster in front of him felt so familiar, why his gait and his voice kept ringing bells in his head. This … this was him.
"You're … me," Tom whispered in horror.
His mind reeled as he tried to reconcile this monstrous being with himself, and with the handsome, charming teenage double of himself he had watched speak with a professor just minutes ago.
If it wasn't for the bells of familiarity constantly ringing in his own head, he wouldn't be able to believe they were one and the same. That … he became this thing. His voice, his appearance, his everything … it all seemed like some perversion of himself. Of humanity.
"Is this … is this what happens to someone who gives up so much of their soul?" Tom asked, horror and disgust warring for dominance inside him as he looked at this thing. "Or … or did I do other things, worse things, to make myself into this?"
Voldemort finally raised his serpentine red eyes from his latest victim to the infant standing in his crib.
"What am I?" Tom whispered as Voldemort casually stepped over the woman's body and glided towards the child.
For a moment, Voldemort simply stood there, staring down into the large, confused eyes of the small child.
His grip tightened on the bone handle of his wand.
"No," Tom begged. "Oh, please, no."
Like a rising guillotine, Voldemort's arm slowly lifted until his wand was pointed directly at the child's face.
"I don't want to see this. I don't want this memory," Tom whispered. However, for all his horror, he couldn't look away, either.
He had to see.
"And so ends prophecy," Voldemort said quietly as his wand lit up in a green glow. "AVADA KEDAVRA!"
Just as with the woman, a sickly green light launched from the wand to strike at the boy.
Once it touched him, though, things took a different turn.
The glowing green rune lighting up the boy's forehead suddenly turned blinding, and the sickly green light was deflected back at Voldemort, absolutely tearing through his body with a torrential wave of blistering light that continued on to blast a cavernous hole through the roof and wall behind him.
But that wasn't all. As Tom tripped over his own feet and lay half-sprawled on the ground, watching this all with wide, astonished eyes, he witnessed a terrible, hideous … thing being driven out of Voldemort's disintegrating body. The lightly glowing image was nearly black, like putrefied flesh, and it was small, almost infant-like, even, but bearing Voldemort's face, and with a body that looked half-skinned and horribly disfigured.
Worse than that, though, it was cracked, with lines spiderwebbing all across its mutilated form like it was made of glass that was slowly coming apart. In fact, as it was wracked by the reflected blast of Voldemort's own spell, Tom watched as a piece of the thing tore off, left behind as the rest of the horrible thing was whisked away, torn through one of the surviving walls as if connected to a bungee.
Where the rest of that thing was being pulled to, Tom didn't know, and at the moment, he didn't particularly care. He was busy watching as that sheared-off portion of the hideous thing floated towards the bleeding mark on the child's head, burrowing its way deep inside like a parasite mindlessly digging its way into an open wound before finally vanishing from sight.
As things stilled, the spectral witness to the event slowly climbed to his feet, turning from the empty robes and abandoned wand on what remained of the floor to the crib, where the child lay, unconscious, but breathing, and with a freely bleeding mark on his forehead where the woman had drawn the strange rune.
As he looked down at the child, Tom gave a quick snort of amusement. "I guess the woman got the last laugh after all," he remarked.
He had no idea what she did, or how it worked, but she had laid a trap that protected her child and destroyed that snake-eyed bastard all in one fell swoop.
As Tom admired the woman's cunning, he noted that it was rather strange to be rooting against himself, apparently, but he didn't care. That … monster that had entered the room couldn't be him. He refused to believe it.
Though, as he studied the bleeding mark on the boy's forehead, and remembered what had just slithered inside it … he wondered if that wasn't actually more than just denial on his part.
"That thing that was torn out of his body," he thought aloud. "That must have been his soul. After all, this is the astral plane, so it'd make sense that a soul would pass through here on its way to wherever it goes after someone dies. And if that spell I– … he … was using somehow tore a soul free from a person's body, then that would explain what I saw it do to that woman." His eyes darkened. "And if … he … had truly gone and mutilated his own soul as badly as he had hinted at to that professor … then it would make sense for it to look as horrible as what I saw."
His gaze on the boy's new scar sharpened. "And if he had truly torn his soul apart almost seven times, then it would make sense that it might be weak, and vulnerable to being torn apart again even when he didn't mean it to be." He gently reached out and traced a finger through the air over the boy's scar. "So … what if that was me?" His mind raced. "I've been seeing all these memories about this kid. I couldn't make sense of that before, but … what if that piece of Voldemort's soul that latched on to this kid was … me?" Pulling his hand back, he started pacing across what remained of the room. "It has to be. There's no other reason I'd have had all those visions about this kid if I wasn't connected to him, right? So what if … what if I had latched on to the kid, only to get torn free later somehow? That could explain how I ended up here, and even why I can't remember anything really well. That's gotta be it. It has to be it!"
He knew he was more than a little desperate to believe he was right, but he was okay with that. He could handle being some piece of that monster's soul, torn free and cast adrift. He could deal with that. He could consider himself his own person that way, distinct from that snake-eyed monster that had just killed an innocent woman, along with whoever it was that had screamed earlier, all for a chance to murder a toddler.
He could handle being something that had been torn free from that thing. He couldn't handle being that thing himself.
This distinction probably didn't make any real sense, but he didn't care if it was rational. He just needed to believe that wasn't really him that had walked in that door.
No. More than that. He needed to know it wasn't him.
"I need to see another memory," he decided. Hastily selecting another hazy impression, he reached for his power and hurriedly shifted reality around him.
This time, the rotating mirrors turned more quickly, responding to the haste of his desperation as they folded another world into being around him.
A very dark, tiny little world.
"What is this, a coffin?" he wondered, looking around at the tiny wooden box. After a moment, however, he started making sense of what he was seeing. "No, this … is this a cupboard? Under some stairs?"
It was. More than that, though, it was also apparently a room, given the small child burrowed into a ratty mattress thrown on the floor of the dingy little closet.
"Oh, for– … who the hell but this poor kid in a freaking cupboard?" he demanded, outraged on the kid's behalf, given how he might have … well … lived in his scar for a while. And … also might have come from the guy who killed the kid's family in the first place on top of that. "I mean, the little bastard already lost his parents, isn't that bad enough? What's next, you're gonna chuck him into a dog-fighting ring with a steak tied around his neck?"
Shaking his head in disgust, he crouched down on the grimy floor of the ridiculously small cupboard.
"Hey, kid," he said softly to the little boy. "I'm sorry about all this. I really am. I swear I didn't mean for any of this to happen. Or … I hope I didn't."
He knew the kid couldn't hear him, but he didn't care. He was pretty well as mentally and emotionally fucked up as they came right now, so he needed to say that to the kid, whether it made a difference or not.
As the kid lightly tossed in his sleep, his matted mop of black hair shifted enough to reveal a livid red scar on his forehead, apparently still with him even a few years after getting it. At least, Tom assumed it had been a few years, going by how the kid seemed to have aged. Of course, given the poor kid's living arrangements, it wouldn't surprise him if the kid had been malnourished to the point of looking younger than he was, too, so who knows how much time had really passed since that night.
As he was watching the kid, though, the boy went from tossing and turning to outright thrashing under his ragged, threadbare blanket. Leaning back, Tom worried the kid was having a seizure, but the kid began groaning in pain and pressing his hands against his forehead as if trying to hold his skull together, all while his eyes were clenched tight in pain.
However, as the kid's groaning and thrashing began to speak of more than just pain, but outright agony, things all around them got … weird.
Tom jumped as one section of the dusty cupboard broke out in heavy, spiderwebbing cracks. As he moved, though, he realized it wasn't the wall that was sporting cracks. It was his view of the world around him, like when he shifted everything into a series of mirrors so he could view different memories.
As he watched, a large section of his image of the wall fell away. On the other side, Tom saw what looked like a classroom in that gray castle from earlier, in which numerous students in black robes appeared to be studying. As one of those students looked up to listen to something their professor said, Tom saw that his double was one of those students, though younger than he had yet seen him.
"Memories," Tom realized, looking down at the little boy, who was still groaning and clutching his skull.
And the scar that marked it.
"Memories are bleeding through from the soul fragment in his scar," Tom said, looking at the child in concern. "From … me." He turned back to the fracture in the world around him. "And this place is showing them."
Tom's concern grew as another section of the world around him suddenly shattered, falling away to reveal Lord Voldemort in all his horrific glory, striding down a busy street with a cadre of masked goons at his side, all of them casting spell after spell at a screaming throng of civilians or the abandoned storefronts they passed.
The sound of shattering glass and crumbling stone followed in their wake as the wizards destroyed everything around them with a wild, carefree joy … but that was nothing compared to the sounds coming from their human victims.
And he didn't just mean their screaming.
As this horrifying image revealed itself to him, the child apparently experiencing that memory gave a low, keening whine, clutching his forehead more tightly.
"Bad men," the child whimpered. "Stop. Bad bad men. Make it stop."
Unfortunately, it didn't. In fact, Tom watched in anguish as yet another section of the world around them fractured and fell away, revealing a young boy in an orphanage's uniform sitting in a room speaking to a strange-looking man with a gray beard. He couldn't make out their words because of the overlap with the sounds still coming from the Voldemort memory, but the wardrobe behind the bearded man suddenly burst into flame, so it must have been one hell of a stimulating conversation.
However, despite how relatively tame that memory seemed to be compared to the slaughter and mayhem still occurring in the Voldemort one, Harry's thrashing still grew much worse, his very young mind being utterly and agonizingly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of memories crashing through it.
"No more," the boy moaned. "Stop. Please."
Tom's heart felt heavy with guilt as yet another section of the room around him shattered to reveal a memory. Even worse, this one featured Voldemort as well, snake-face and all. Unlike the other, this didn't feature more of the strange masked men at his side. However, this didn't actually make things better. Instead, he watched as Voldemort pointed his wand as a panting, pleading woman on the ground, causing her to scream as if every single fiber of her body was being subjected to inhuman agony. All the while, the thing magically torturing her simply grinned, delighted and still unsatisfied.
"Has to stop," the child whimpered, practically seizing on the mattress as blood ran down his face from the bleeding scar on his forehead. "Needs to go away."
All around them, more and more cracks started to appear and spread, as if the entire world around them was crumbling under the immense weight of the memories pouring into the small child's mind from the horcrux. However, Tom's eyes remained locked on the child, who had started to emit a pale green glow.
The kid seemed to have magic of his own, and it looked like it was finally entering the fray.
The child thrashed and groaned as he glowed brighter and brighter, lighting up the room around them. And as he did, the steady spread of cracks ever so slowly drew to a halt.
Tom caught pinhole views of countless memories playing out through the chips in the air, a lifetime's worth of memories trying to bleed through all at once into the small boy's overtaxed mind. However, as emerald light poured from the child's skin, and from behind the fingers clutching his scar most of all, one by one, those cracks began to seal, slowly hiding those memories from view.
Like a reversed video of a shattering mirror, Tom watched as the numerous cracks retreated, the world around them ever so slowly righting as the little boy's magic fought back against the crushing tide of memories in order to preserve the child's mind.
Finally, with one final surge of light, the last of the cracks disappeared, the memories from the horcrux evidently suppressed as the boy stopped glowing.
Tom knelt down next to the unconscious child, currently motionless and, by all appearances, finally without pain. However, Tom's eyes were still concerned as they lingered on the boy's livid red scar, still bleeding and now even emitting smoke due to whatever the boy's magic had done to try and suppress the soul shard locked within it.
Worse than that, though, he watched as the boy's right hand, currently resting limply on the ratty mattress, suddenly blurred and distorted slightly, transforming just for an instant into a tiny cloud of gently swirling black dust.
"The obscurus," Tom interpreted, remembering the violent, amorphous creature he had seen this child transform into in a previous vision. "This is where it was born."
He still didn't really know what an obscurus was, but from what it seemed, the way the child's magic had attempted to suppress or maybe even reject the piece of Voldemort's soul sealed away in his scar, as well as the memories that came along with it, may have been what created the thing in the first place.
And comparing the kid's current appearance against the vision of him he had earlier, he was guessing it would only be a couple years from now before that thing grew strong enough to destroy this entire house, setting the kid on the path to all those people trying to kill him before he managed to stow away on that container ship to who knows where.
"It never rains, but it pours, huh, kid?" Tom lamented in sympathy, slowly standing.
Shaking his head sadly at the rough path ahead for this child, Tom focused on yet another hazy memory.
Once again, the world around him folded into another memory.
This time, he found himself in what looked like a courtroom of some sorts, though one that seemed to be under attack at the moment, with numerous clearly terrified civilians huddled against the walls at gunpoint from heavily armed, crimson mechanical suits that reminded him of the silver stranger from earlier.
"My apologies. The formalities must be observed," Tom heard a deep, strangely accented voice say from behind him. Turning, he was just in time to watch a long-haired man dressed in green and gold robes lightly bow with his hand pressed to his heart. "I am called the Mandarin."
Numerous details about the man immediately stood out to Tom as he straightened. For one thing, his ravenous dark eyes seemed disturbingly familiar to Voldmort's. For another, he was clearly the leader of the metal soldiers, given how each one of them seemed to be constantly watching him out the periphery of their vision, and with the obvious air of being willing and even eager to leap to obey any command he might give them.
Impressive, given how heavily armed they were and how completely unarmed the robed man seemed to be.
Of greater interest to Tom, though, was how the astral plane seemed to be reacting to him.
As he watched, with every move the man made, he left an ever so faint translucent, blue-glowing afterimage, as if the man's spirit was just slightly out of sync with his body. In addition, as the man began speaking to someone behind Tom, he watched "the Mandarin," as he apparently called himself, lightly clasp his hands in front of him. In so doing, Tom found his gaze falling to the numerous strange-looking rings adorning every one of the man's fingers. Rather than their strange design, however, Tom's attention was on how each one of them faintly glowed to his eyes, not too dissimilar from the Mandarin's subtle translucent afterimage, or his own spectral body. And given how no one else's attention seemed to be on those rings, he gathered that this effect was only visible in the astral plane.
"Curious," Tom commented as he studied the rings. However, he decided he should probably start paying more attention to everything else that was going on, too, so he turned to see who the Mandarin was speaking to.
His eyebrows rose in surprise as he spotted the goateed man, which he recognized from one of the specters he spoke to back when he first started all this nonsense in the astral plane, though he still didn't know who the man was.
However, as the goateed man engaged in some snarky and more than slightly hostile back and forth with the Mandarin, Tom's eyes fell on the teen standing next to him.
The teen seemed to injured, with heavy bandages wrapping part of his torso and one of his arms. More oddly than that, though, he glowed faintly blue to Tom's eyes. However, it didn't look like the slightly out-of-phase spiritual blue glow the Mandarin left behind when he moved. In fact, Tom suspected it had something to do with the odd metal bracers on the teen's arms, which each contained some strange blue power source in the middle, faintly reminding Tom of the silver stranger he had battled and perfectly matching the faint glow suffusing the teen's body.
As he focused on the teen's anxious face, though, Tom felt his eyes widen.
"It's you," he muttered in surprise as he caught sight of the teen's distinctive bright green eyes. "Harry."
Studying the teen's forehead, Tom even spotted the same distinctive scar on his forehead, partially hidden by the kid's messy black bangs. However, the scar didn't seem anywhere near as livid or red as it had in the last memory.
He didn't know whether that was a good or bad sign.
As the goateed man and the Mandarin continued verbally sparring with each other, however, Tom noticed a thin strand of glowing energy begin snaking through the air like a sentient curl of smoke, eventually reaching and passing into Harry's chest.
Turning, Tom saw that the strand of energy was coming from a ring on the Mandarin's left ring finger, which his other hand was lightly fiddling with.
Given the complete lack of reaction on everyone else's part, he assumed this was yet another thing that wasn't visible to anyone else.
Returning his gaze to Harry, he saw the teen start rubbing his chest where the cord of energy was passing into him, apparently feeling it on some subconscious level.
Focusing, Tom tried following the cord of energy with his eyes, trying to see what the hell that long-haired bastard was trying to do.
It was strange, but though the cord appeared to stop at Harry's chest, it seemed to be reaching through the teen to someplace … deeper.
Worse than that, it seemed to be waking up something that lived there.
The air around Tom slowly started to fill with screeching howls echoing out from that shadowy place deep inside the teen. And they were getting louder. Even if, yet again, no one else seemed to notice.
Tom recognized that sound, though. It was the obscurus. And from the sound of it, it was not happy.
In fact, as he watched, the cord of energy emanating from the Mandarin's ring suddenly grew slightly thicker and brighter, accompanied by even more deeply enraged howls coming from the creature, which seemed to be struggling even more furiously to break free from whatever had been keeping it locked away inside the teen.
The teen seemed to feel it, too, given how he hunched over clutching his chest with a confused and worried expression on his face.
"Tony?" Harry called out softly, quietly pleading for help.
However, the now named goateed man didn't respond, the still-speaking Mandarin stepping closer to the man to monopolize his attention in what Tom suspected was a very deliberate move.
After a few more rounds of their back and forth, the Mandarin even called one of his armored minions over, who seized Tony's wrist in an unrelenting metal grip.
However, as the distracted teen yelled out for the man and shifted his bracers into gauntlets, clearly preparing to fight on the man's behalf, the Mandarin suddenly drastically thickened the cord of energy quietly streaming into the teen's chest, causing the teen to nearly collapse and the obscurus climbing its way to freedom to howl with even greater rage, the Mandarin's ring clearly forcing the creature into an even more deeply berserk state than it normally was in the hopes of helping it to escape.
It seemed to be working, too. And from the look of horrified realization that suddenly flashed over Harry's face, he clearly knew what was going on, now.
Tom barely even heard the goateed man scream in pain as the armored man apparently crushed his wrist. His ears were being filled with the inhuman howls of the obscurus. Worse, as he watched, he saw the creature's swirling, amorphous body start to arrive, filling the teen's blue-glowing body like ink-drenched water filling a jug. However, it seemed to have trouble doing so, moving somewhat sluggishly, like something heavy being dragged through wet sand, or as if the blue glow somehow both resisted the obscurus' presence and, at the same time, kept nearly hypnotizing the creature and lulling it back to sleep.
Unfortunately, none of this seem to be stopping it, thanks to the stream of energy coming from the Mandarin's ring continuing to drive the beast into a frantic, berserk state.
Of course, what he assumed was the boy's magic seemed to be making its own efforts to keep the creature restrained, heavy cords of brilliant emerald light reaching out from that same dark place to try and drag the obscurus back into its prison, wrapping around and through the creature's amorphous, ink-like body.
However, just when it seemed that a stalemate was being reached between the two sides—the widlly thrashing and madly howling obscurus, and Harry's green magical power combined with the soft blue glow suffusing the boy's body thanks to his bracers—the stream of energy coming from the Mandarin's ring thickened even further, tipping the scale in the worst way.
The boy collapsed to his knees as the mindlessly enraged obscurus began not just filling the boy's body, but commandeering it, his body blurring and flickering as the obscurus fought to free itself, straining against the boy's own power.
And winning.
Tom watched as the goateed man, Tony, fell to his knees beside the boy, presumably assuring and encouraging the teen before the Mandarin's armored lackey dragged him away.
However, rather than continue to watch Harry's struggle to keep the obscurus contained, knowing how doomed it likely was, Tom instead stepped over to study the man inciting this whole event.
The Mandarin.
The man's dark eyes were ravenous as ever as they watched the struggling teen, and observed the first slivers of the obscurus' body as it started to break free. But, as Tom studied them more closely, those eyes also seemed … surprised. As if the Mandarin knew there was something inside the boy somehow, or had maybe heard stories about the creature or the things it had done when it had undoubtedly escaped in the past, but had never seen it face to face before, or known it by anything other than rumor. And as the screaming teen's voice became laced with the howling screeches of the creature, the Mandarin seemed both deeply intrigued … and cautious.
As the teen's body began to distort more fully, the creature coming closer to true freedom, Tom watched as the Mandarin gave one of his glowing rings a twist, enveloping himself in a faint glow from the ring. Then, he seemed to … step out of himself, somehow. While one faintly glowing image of the Mandarin continued to stand there smirking confidently down at the thrashing, transforming teen, an identical, also faintly glowing image of the Mandarin gently stepped back towards the entrance, his eyes never leaving the teen.
Tom studied the crowd in surprise, who, though very reasonably distracted by the transforming teen, never even reacted to the sight of the second Mandarin, leading him to assume that he wasn't visible to them, somehow.
"A fan of illusions, are we?" Tom interpreted, studying the image the Mandarin had left behind, and the true Mandarin standing near the exit, obviously prepared to leave should the obscurus prove a threat. The fact that the one standing in the entrance was the true one was something Tom never doubted, because while the one standing in front of him looked almost perfectly identical, and bore the same glow from the ring, it didn't leave the odd, slightly out-of-phase luminous echo of itself as it moved, and its rings likewise didn't have the same ethereal shimmer.
Plus, he could see the stream of energy connecting the transforming teen to the second Mandarin's glowing ring, so that helped as well.
"Interesting. A man who knows the power of appearing invulnerable," Tom commented as torrents of the creature's form, still soaked in the emerald power of the teen's magic, broke free from Harry to carve wild trenches through the floor and walls, causing the huddled masses to scream in terror, all while the Mandarin appeared to them to simply be standing there, completely calm and utterly untouchable.
As Tom turned back to the teen, however, who was almost fully transformed by now, he suddenly felt his non-existent blood run cold as he spotted the boy's eyes. Or rather, the eyes of the obscurus.
You see, where the rest of the world saw only a feral white glow in those eyes as the beast took the boy over, Tom saw something quite different.
Slitted, serpentine pupils that glowed a bloody, savage crimson.
As the creature howled using the teen's throat, continuing to unleash its power on the crumbling courtroom around it, Tom simply stared uncomprehendingly at Voldemort's eyes glowing ethereally from within Harry's transforming face.
Unlike Voldemort himself, these eyes bore none of the man's obvious intellect, or even sentience, really. They did share the beastly, cruel hunger that had so monstrously filled the man's eyes, though, only heightened to an unnatural degree, as if this beast had shed the thin veneer of humanity Voldemort had worn like a cloak, and instead bore nothing but his bloodthirsty, savage instinct, pure and unrepressed.
Tom didn't even notice how one of the wild torrents of the creature's escaped power injured a tall, red-haired woman, or how Harry's face suddenly went deathly still and quiet upon witnessing this. He also didn't register the boy's left gauntlet suddenly start lighting up with a crackling emerald glow. Instead, Tom was slowly staggering backwards, reeling from what he was seeing as his gaze rose from the ethereal red glow in the boy's eyes to the slightly faded scar on his forehead.
"The obscurus … and the horcrux … are one," Tom muttered, watching with unseeing eyes as the still transforming teen raised his searingly bright gauntlet high overhead. "So then … what am I?"
As the shouting teen brought his sparking fist down hard on the glowing power source in his second gauntlet, though, Tom was forced back to what was happening around him.
The power source in the right gauntlet began whining and flaring with light, clearly overloading, but inside the boy's body, the steady blue gleam that had filled it suddenly started glowing absolutely incandescent, while the emerald streams of magic reaching out from the core of Harry's being were likewise strengthened, glowing brighter and moving quicker.
Howling, the furiously thrashing obscurus was slowly dragged back by those unrelenting emerald chains, while the blue glow flooding the boy's body seemed to forcibly solidify his form, denying the obscurus' power over that form like an immune system rejecting a foreign presence in the body.
As the enraged, amorphous creature was forced back inside the boy's body, it continued to fight against the emerald cords struggling to reel it back to whatever depths it came from, but with the sapphire glow from the reactor flooding the boy's body, the obscurus couldn't make any headway in freeing itself, being smothered and rejected by the very body it filled.
Unfortunately, the boy's magic couldn't make any further headway against the raging, thrashing creature, either.
However, as the power source in the boy's gauntlet continued to overload, it cycled between the soft blue glow it normally bore and the brilliant emerald that was the altered energy forced into it by the teen's other gauntlet. And as this happened, the incandescent glow flooding the boy's body likewise started to change, gradually shifting from a deep blue sapphire to a clear, brilliant emerald.
A glow that almost perfectly matched the shade of the boy's own magic.
Those two forces met, and suddenly, they weren't just working together. They were combining. For brief moments, the boy's magic was supercharged, thrumming with crackling power from the overloading power source as it coursed through the teen's body, scorching it even as it empowered it. And suddenly, all the obscurus' strength amounted to nothing as the boy's oversaturated magic wrapped around the howling, amorphous creature and began to irrevocably pull it back to the boy's core, unstoppable and relentless.
But then Harry threw a forcefield around his body, and the overstressed power source detonated.
The bubble of energy filled with blinding green light, completely hiding everything happening inside from Tom's view. But he didn't really need to see it, as he heard the overlapping howls of the burning teenager and obscurus.
As this happened, the world around them once again fractured like a mirror, revealing cascading shards of memories playing in the air around the teen. Tom watched as those countless broken memories pulled together into clusters like iron shavings drawn to magnets, apparently already trying to unify themselves once more. However, with a final whine, the overclocked forcefield struggling to contain the blast from the overloading reactor finally gave out and shattered, releasing a wave of energy that struck the clusters of memories and knocked them away, all but one of those clusters rippling and vanishing as they were blasted to unknown reaches of the astral plane.
As that pulse of energy knocked down most everyone in the room, however, it also knocked something loose from the teen at its epicenter, too.
Namely, a translucent, faintly green-glowing copy of the teen, which floated limply in the air like a lifeless body gently bobbing underwater.
Tom watched as the last remaining, horribly small cluster of shadowy, incomplete memories drew towards the astral body. As it did, Tom caught glimpses of the hazy memories that formed it. He saw vicious red eyes that gleamed with sadistic delight as their owner stood over the lifeless body of the red-haired woman. He saw a burning wardrobe, and a rampaging obscurus. He watched his double speaking to a disturbed professor, and he saw the young Harry fighting to survive an onslaught of memories streaming from the fractured soul of the monster who had killed his family. And one memory, utterly black and without any image, emitted just a single spoken line, which echoed in Tom's ears in the deathly silence of the room.
"I'm Tom Riddle."
As those memories joined with the translucent image of the teen, that form blurred and shifted, as if uncertain what shape to take any longer.
Feeling numb, Tom watched the shifting green mass fluctuate between a roiling black mass of rage and hate, to the image of the teen it had come from … and to himself.
Even as that shifting green mass rippled and vanished, disappearing to another level of the astral plane, Tom simply stood there, staring sightlessly at where it had once been.
He didn't even react as the world around him started folding away, returning him to the empty city street lit by a ruby sun.
"I'm … not Tom Riddle," the being muttered, still staring blankly as he processed the revelations of the last memory.
He had thought he was the soul shard that accidentally latched onto the boy's scar when Voldemort had been destroyed. But … that soul shard seemed to have fused with the obscurus creature at some point, going by the crimson, slitted eyes the creature bore in the astral plane.
When he had first awakened in this strange realm, he had been so disoriented, dropped in a place he didn't understand for reasons he didn't know, and with his memories nothing more than foggy, broken images without context or coherence. But that name, and the simple memory of saying it, of meaning it … It had never occurred to him that it might not have been his own memory he was latching on to. Why should it?
But he wasn't Tom Riddle. He wasn't a lost fragment of the monster that had killed all those innocent people. He wasn't that hideous thing's legacy.
"I'm … Harry," he said, watching as his translucent hands and body slowly shifted, leaving behind the appearance of Tom Riddle that he had accepted as his own, and returning to the image of that teen from the courtroom.
Returning to … himself.
Hearing a grinding noise, the spectral being now calling itself Harry watched as a crumbling stone archway rose from the pavement in front of him, beckoning him on to the next leg of his journey.
He accepted its offer.
The Stark Mansion
Inside the garage of a lavish, cliffside marvel of comfort and technological engineering, a particularly high-end sports car sat idling with its door still swung wide open.
As for its former driver, he was standing in the middle of a complex assembly system that was attaching his gleaming red and gold armor to him piece by piece.
However, as impressive as this would be to most, Tony never even reacted as the various plates and mechanisms clicked into place. As his furious, focused eyes suggested, his mind was somewhere else.
"Sir. I'm afraid I really must advise against this," the smooth, British voice of Jarvis sounded from speakers in the room. "In your current condition, I am concerned that use of this suit would be most unwise."
Tony didn't reply, and the system continued to arm him.
"Use of the armor accelerates your palladium poisoning, which is already at dangerously high levels, sir," Jarvis reminded the man. "On top of which, the stress of active combat is sure to place an inordinate amount of strain on your organs that could very well overtax them, especially given how weakened they already are from the severity of your illness."
Tony didn't respond as the system started sliding the final pieces into place.
"Sir!" Jarvis shouted in alarm at Tony's continued silence. "The incident with Ivan Vanko already drastically degraded your condition, and that involved only brief exposure to the reduced version of your suit. At this point, wearing your full armament in a pitched battle could prove fatal!"
Tony's mask slid down over his face, lighting up his view with his all-encompassing HUD.
"Sir!" Jarvis yelled.
Finally, Tony spoke.
"Mute."
With a blast from his repulsors, Tony flew past the still-running car and out the exit, setting a course for the Mandarin's promised target.
That son of a bitch had hurt his son. He was going to find the man's lackeys, no matter what tech they were using, and he was going to make them tell him where to find that bastard.
And then he was going to make him pay. Whatever it took.
Elsewhere
For several minutes, the spectral being now known as Harry stood in silence, staring not at the unearthly domain he had arrived in, but at his own hands.
Still green-glowing and translucent, his hands wavered back and forth between the shorter, blunter fingers of Harry, and the longer, slender hands of Tom Riddle.
He knew who he was, now. He knew he was the lost and broken spirit of Harry, the teen who blew himself up rather than allow himself to be used as a weapon to hurt all those people. This … this was a good thing. Much better than being the fractured soul of a psychotic mass murderer. And yet … he didn't feel like Harry.
He needed more. He needed all those lost pieces of himself brought back together. He needed to be whole again.
And then he needed to get the hell out of this place. Because that anxious pit in his stomach that had been telling him time was short, and that he needed to get out of here? Well, it was now telling him that time was almost up. Whatever was going on, he needed to get back to the physical world. He could feel it in his non-existent bones.
Finally, he simply ignored his still shifting, indeterminate form and studied whatever weird place he had found himself in this time.
As if recognizing his deep-seated impatience with strange, majestic sights or other such nonsense right now, this world was deeply and eminently simple. The ground he walked seemed to be formed out of a solid piece of bright golden crystal, which stretched outwards in perfectly flat, mirror-smooth floor before rising into an utterly perfect, but still inherently simple, dome.
To his eyes, the whole thing somehow gave the impression of a barebones computer-generated environment before all the busy details were added in.
So, he decided to add some of those details. Closing his eyes, he drew deeply on his power, feeling his form light up and crackle with energy. However, unlike last time, he wasn't interested in replaying memories one by one.
He needed those clusters of memories—of his psyche—to come to him.
Opening his eyes, he pushed out with his power, feeling it race away from him like electricity coursing through a circuit.
And far, far off in the distance, he felt something connect.
Several somethings, actually.
The air in front of him rippled just as it had when he watched those clusters of memories disappear following the blast that apparently knocked him out of Harry's body. Only this time, when those fragments of his psyche appeared before him, they weren't just shapeless clusters of fractured memories any longer.
In fact, he knew them.
Standing directly in front of him was … himself, he supposed. Only young, and still wearing the tattered, oversized rags he had been wearing in the memory of fleeing from those armed men before stowing away on that cargo ship to points unknown.
As he stared into the large green eyes of his younger self, he somehow knew exactly what this was.
"You're my life's memories, my sense of self," he identified the living embodiment of his psyche. "You're my humanity."
The little boy nodded.
However, he wasn't alone, and as he turned to the next one in line, he knew what this one was as well.
"You're my connection to my heritage, and my magical power," he identified the avatar standing in front of him. "You're my hunger to know more, to be more. You're my drive, and ambition." His eyes tightened. "And you're the memories of that snake-eyed psychopath that have been scattered throughout my subconscious ever since you nearly crippled my mind as a child."
The shade of Tom Riddle smirked at him.
Turning to the next one in line, he felt a warm glow of familiar delight flow through him as he experienced flashes of memories.
"You're my passion, and my joy," he identified. "You're my love of designing, and tinkering." He gave a quiet, delighted laugh as memories of contentful working and building awoke within him. "And you don't typically get along all that well with magic, do you?" he asked, remembering his earlier battle with this avatar of technology, and how easily they had found themselves at odds.
The stranger wearing a suit of silver mechanical armor simply stood there, robotically motionless and utterly without expression.
"Good talk," he told the silver figure, moving on to the next entry in the line. As he did, however, he felt his lip curl up in disgust. He wasn't the only one to give such a reaction, either. Tom merely gazed at the being thoughtfully, but the child-version of himself glared at this last being, and the silver-armored figure half-turned to face it with a quiet hum as it armed its gauntlets.
"It's your job to keep that thing locked away, isn't it?" he asked the visibly hostile silver stranger.
It nodded without turning from the entity.
"And you," he continued, turning to the last entity, "you're my–"
"Fear," the shifting mass whispered, the red-eyed, inhuman face of Voldemort constantly taking shape and disappearing in the perpetually shifting, oily black mass of the obscurus. "Rage … hunger … pain," it continued whispering, constantly growing and shrinking in mass like the breathing of some massive beast.
"Riiiight. I was just going to call you my parasite," he bluntly replied.
With a growling screech, the creature exploded outwards in a lightning-quick blast, knocking him flying, only to land with a painful bounce on the cold, crystalline floor several meters away.
"Right," he groaned in pain. "Parasite touchy. Good to know." Wincing in pain, he slowly climbed to his feet, only to see the other avatars of his psyche standing around him calmly, while the Voldemort/obscurus entity remained where it was, slowly hovering and shifting in place.
"Foolish," the avatar shaped like Tom Riddle spoke up, standing with his hands clasped behind his back as he stared down at him in clear condescension. "In your current condition, confronting that beast would be worse than unwise. It would be outright suicidal."
"Sure, now you tell me," he groused at … well, himself, apparently.
This place was weird.
"So … I need toooo …," he prompted the being.
"Join together with the lost fragments of your psyche," Riddle told him in annoyance, gesturing at himself and the others. "Idiot."
"Right," he responded, turning uncertainly to the child-version of himself.
The boy said nothing, simply looking up at him with those large, guileless eyes as he held out a tiny hand.
Hesitantly, he accepted it.
The little boy disappeared with a flash of green light, and he reflexively clutched his head, expecting there to be pain. But there wasn't. Instead, it felt like parts of himself were waking up, as if his mind was clearing after rising from a deep sleep, groggy and confused.
Looking down, he watched as his ghostly green form, which had been cycling back and forth between Tom Riddle and Harry, finally settled, remembering and accepting who he truly was at last.
"I'm Harry Stark," he said, tasting the words as he said them.
They felt right. They were right.
"Oh, it's good to be home," Harry praised, gently tracing his ghostly body with his hands, relieved to know and feel who he was again.
"Not exactly an improvement, if you ask me," the Riddle avatar informed him, looking down at the shorter teenager with a clearly unimpressed look on his face.
"Whatever you say, Creepy McDeadEyes," he shot back at the avatar.
The avatar wearing the face of a more than slightly psychopathic teenager narrowed its soulless, expressionless eyes in irritation, but said nothing.
"I take it you're next?" Harry asked the figure wearing a silver suit of mechanical armor.
In response, the figure's entire front opened up, plates and servos disconnecting with a gentle clatter, revealing … no one inside.
"Empty all along, huh?" he asked the silent suit.
It didn't respond, unsurprisingly.
Shrugging, Harry simply stepped forward and climbed into the empty suit, watching idly as it closed around him.
And once again, he felt as if parts of himself were waking up, further restoring who he was as he fully regained his deep-seated passion for technology. Now, he wasn't simply standing there wearing the suit. He was admiring its design, and functionality. He was appreciating the intricacy of its processes, and feeling awed at the amount of ingenuity and pure, relentless dedication that would have had to go into designing this masterwork of engineering.
His tech skills felt utterly insignificant in the face of such a creation, even as he realized that it was probably based off of designs drawn from his own subconscious.
His mask slid back, joining his helmet in effortlessly unfolding down into the torso of the armor, leaving his head and face completely clear.
Once again, though, the Riddle avatar had its own two cents to give as Harry stood there admiring the suit.
"Robes are better. No proper wizard would ever wear such a disgraceful contraption."
Harry stopped admiring the mechanical wonder, and its remarkable power source in particular, to glare indignantly at Riddle. However, he was quickly distracted by the fact that he'd probably have to join with that avatar as well, and honestly, the idea didn't thrill him. Especially given all the horrific Voldemort memories that would come along with that rather unpleasant package.
Unless …
"So … I don't suppose you can tell me how to kill that thing," he asked the pompous and highly creepy teenager instead, turning to the still idly shifting mass that was the obscurus as he gently clapped Riddle on the back, distracting him.
Or … or was the shifting mass in front of them simply his mental representation of the obscurus, and not the obscurus itself? Or maybe it was just the mind of the obscurus … He really had no idea. He still didn't fully understand this place.
In response to his request, though, Riddle simply laughed at him. "It cannot be killed," he told him as if explaining to someone that the sun and moon weren't the same thing, and decidedly amused at doing so. "Nor can it be separated from you. No, you are stuck with this curse forever."
He frowned. "Why? Because it's partially that horcrux thing?" he asked, still stalling.
"Essentially," Riddle replied, turning and considering the shifting mass thoughtfully, his finger gently tapping his chin. "Two halves of the same coin … It's truly a fascinating phenomenon," the spirit declared.
"Yes. Real fascinating. But before you run off and get a room with the thing, how about telling me how to get it the hell out of me?" Harry demanded, thinking he might actually be able to get some useful answers out of this messed up piece of his mind.
"The vessel wasn't prepared," Riddle mused instead, apparently lost in thought and mostly just speaking to himself. "When the piece of my soul was torn free and latched on to you, it wasn't filling an empty vessel magically designed to house it. It was entering a living being possessing its own soul, and its own magic. And since the soul fragment wasn't properly sealed away in its vessel, its presence started bleeding throughout its new living host, infecting it with its own memories. And your magic responded accordingly, attacking that soul as a genuine foreign presence." Riddle's lips twisted into a half-grin. "But it couldn't succeed in ridding you of it, could it? It could damage the mind attached to that soul, maybe, keep it from gaining sentience and simply taking you over … but it couldn't outright banish that soul, tethered as it was to your own."
Harry stared at the teen, but didn't interrupt.
"An obscurus is typically born when a child rejects their own magic, trying to suppress or rid themselves of it," Riddle continued, seemingly mostly to himself. "The child's magic answers their subconscious call, stupidly trying to destroy itself to satisfy the child's cowardly wish. But it can't. All it can do is damage itself, its constant fruitless efforts subsequently building up an infection that becomes known as an obscurus, a dark entity typically connected to the child's own subconscious just as their magic was." Riddle slowly nodded along with his own theory. "And your magic tried to destroy a piece of another's soul that had fused to your own. And in so doing, it generated a similar obscurus-type infection." He snorted in amusement. "And just like how a standard obscurus manifests as a part of the child's own magic, so too has the obscurus bonded with the very soul fragment it was born from your magic attempting to destroy, gaining the crippled, savage mind of the horcrux rather than answering your own … and connecting to the unparalleled power of Lord Voldemort rather than the pathetic dregs of your own magic." Riddle finally turned back to him. "And the soul fragment it has bonded with is by now so deeply merged with your own, I doubt it could ever be separated from you." Chuckling, he turned back to the shifting mass. "You will never be rid of this being," it predicted. "And now that you've started to heal its mind by restoring the memories it had unleashed on you so long ago … by restoring me …"
A strange, thoughtful look came over the entity's face, and when it passed, all it left was smug resolution.
"Here we go …," Harry muttered to himself.
In a blur of violent motion, Tom spun around, lashing out his hands and releasing a burst of power that froze Harry, snapping his limbs together and forcing him stiff as a board. It was only because of the sturdiness of his suit and the smoothness of the crystalline floor that he didn't fall to the ground like a felled tree.
Paralyzed, Harry stared at the traitorous fragment of his own psyche.
"I must be going soft," Riddle self-criticized. "For a few minutes there, I actually intended to let you absorb me." He shook his head in disgust. "I guess I really am a part of your own psyche. I seem to have picked up your martyrdom streak, anyway." He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "But I am also the collective memories of the greatest wizard of all time. And the psyche of a sixteen-year-old grease monkey really just doesn't compare against something like that."
Chuckling, Riddle straightened his tie as he turned from one progenitor, who even now stood glaring at him through his paralysis … to the other.
"Like I said," the avatar formed from his and Voldemort's minds gloated, smirking at him languidly, "you'll never be rid of the obscurus … but that doesn't mean it can't be rid of you."
Still smirking at him, the fragment of his own psyche bearing the life memories of Voldemort began stepping backwards towards the shifting mass.
"Your magic crippled the fragment of my soul," the being repeated. "It couldn't kill it, but it could destroy its consciousness in an effort to preserve your worthless young mind." He sneered in contempt. "In return, all my spirit seems to have been left with is its subconscious drives and impulses, the basic framework for what once was the mind of the Dark Lord Voldemort, the greatest sorcerer to ever live." Riddle grinned. "But it was also left with his power."
His paralyzed one-man audience still at rapt attention, Riddle kept speaking.
"But then you had to go and blow yourself up," Riddle continued. "And lo and behold, all those memories gifted to you so long ago by the greatest magical mind in this or any world weren't destroyed by your magic after all. They were simply buried, locked away in that yawning chasm you call a mind. And now," Riddle breathed in and out deeply, "we're free. And we've taken a little piece of your psyche along with us in recompense." He chuckled. "Your drive and ambition, wasn't it?" He paused to groan in relish. "Oh, they're exquisite."
Harry never moved, simply standing like a statue as he continuing to stare at Tom.
"I could rejoin you," Tom mused. "I could return to you the precious gift of memories you so cruelly rejected and kept suppressed for all these years … but for what? So you could embroil yourself in a pointless battle against this?" He turned and gestured to the obscurus, still idly twisting in midair. "This beautiful, powerful thing," Tom continued, his voice near worshipful. "This curse that you will never be rid of, and never learn to appreciate?" Tom shook his head. "No. I think, instead, we'll see what happens when the last remnants of Lord Voldemort's great mind return at last to his long imprisoned soul, and the power it has gained in my absence."
Harry watched silently as Riddle gazed adoringly at the roiling dark mass.
"This beast … this force will never die," Riddle whispered, "and I did always want to be immortal."
His arms spread wide, Riddle stepped into the whirling mass of the obscurus.
And the obscurus flowed into him like water.
Immediately, the world of crystal around them rang like a struck gong, and its pure, soft golden light began to darken, roiling shadows gathering like a living storm wrapping itself around the dome, even beneath the floor under their feet, as if the entire dome was floating deep inside the stomach of the beast, and about to be digested.
However, this ominous change paled in comparison to the high, cold laughter coming from the combining dark entity in front of Harry, as before his eyes, the mind of Tom Riddle reunited with the soul of Voldemort and joined the power of the obscurus to create something new.
Something … terrible.
"And now, we walk as lions among sheep until time itself lies slain," the entity whispered to itself, its voice quietly layered with the growls and clicks of the obscurus as a manic, monstrous light gleamed like hellfire in its red, serpentine eyes. It lifted its hands, watching the whirls of darkness roil under its pale, almost translucent skin, as if even its monstrous human form was incapable of keeping so much of its true nature hidden.
However, as the new dark entity of untold power relished the terror its new form would inspire, its singular audience very thoroughly spoiled the mood.
"Ugh. Finally!" Harry exclaimed in relief, abandoning his stiff pose and shaking his limbs loose, his masterwork armor flowing with his every motion completely naturally. "I thought you'd never pull the trigger! Just yak yak yak yak yak! Seriously, are you just in love with your own voice or something? Because … blegh! I mean, the fact that I thought I was you all this time …" Harry shuddered in dramatic revulsion. "Blegh!"
The dark entity stared at him with eyes like slitted coals. After a moment, however, a smile stretched across the lips of Tom Riddle's face, the new, ungodly dark force wearing his shape like a thin suit apparently amused by Harry's response. "Bravado," it hissed in laughter. "Your mother had it, too."
"Oh, it's not bravado," the armored teen flippantly corrected the dark entity. "It's satisfaction."
By now, the inhuman force standing in front of him seemed confused. "You do not comprehend my power," it decided. "Your pathetic mind cannot fathom the sheer scale of what stands before you. In a moment, I will consume you, mind and soul, and through you, I will once again walk the land of mortals, where every being shall know me, fear me, worship me, and submit to me." Once again, a smile stretched across those thin lips, even as the being's very skin seemed to eat the remnants of the dome's golden light, leaving it shrouded in a cloak of darkness that seemed almost as alive as its true, shapeless form. "And you claim this satisfies you?"
"Well, you were right," Harry answered in reply. "I can't get rid of you. I see that now. In fact, I saw that back when I first watched that memory of me blowing myself up. That was when I realized that the obscurus and the horcrux had become practically the same thing, after all. And if the obscurus is fused with your soul, and that soul has latched on to mine, then odds are I'm not going to be getting rid of either one of you without carving into my own soul, and that was just never going to happen. I mean, I just don't have the facial structure to pull off nose slits, so no way was I going to be fracturing my own soul like you did. Add that on to my lack of any desire whatsoever to take on all your gruesome memories of torture and murder when I reabsorb you to complete my psyche, and that left me with a bunch of problems that, after a bit of thought, all seemed to share one delightful little solution."
"Surrender?" the entity suggested, stalking closer.
"No," the teen answered, pressing a button on the side of his armor's thigh. "Wiping your memory."
The beast's eyes widened as it felt something cold and metal suddenly unfold on the back of its neck, but it was too late. The device Harry had planted with his innocuous back slap activated, and with a whining hum, the dark entity was driven to its knees screaming.
The shrieking entity kept trying to shift into its likely unfathomably powerful obscurus form, only to find itself unable as Harry flooded its body with heavy streams of reactor energy from his gauntlets, having had more than a little experience in stopping someone from transforming into an obscurus. Bathed in the energy it hated, the entity was trapped in its Tom-Riddle-shaped humanoid form as the mind-wipe device did its job.
"Funny thing," Harry told the howling entity almost casually, "I designed my first mind-wiper back when I was a kid robbing banks and tech companies. And I never really did much with the tech after I quit all that. There just didn't seem much need to, you know?"
All around the dark entity, the air shattered like mirrors as it filled with images of countless scenes from the creature's memories, each one fading and being replaced by another as they were destroyed forever, one by one, by the device latched on to the base of Riddle's skull.
"And yet," Harry continued, increasing the amount of power he was saturating the thrashing entity with in order to keep it restrained, "I apparently kept fiddling with the design in the back of my head. Because here we are, the new and improved version going to town on your mind thanks to the awesome armor this place apparently crafted from designs scattered throughout my subconscious. The old version of the device would have required me to strap this clunky-looking headband down across your temples, and no way would I have been able to pull that off without you noticing." He shrugged. "Of course, even this version takes a few minutes to calibrate to the target's mind, so, sincerely, thank you for your long-winded chattering. Really. I don't know how I'd have been able to do this without you."
Riddle howled with rage and loss as the device continued to burn away all the precious memories that made him what he was. Finally, however, a single word could be understood underneath the obscurus-layered screaming.
"Power!"
Harry's eyebrow lifted as the panting being tried to speak, his inhuman eyes utterly desperate and completely terrified. "My memories … spells … secrets … power … the greatest wizard that ever lived … all my knowledge … can be yours … just stop this … and let me join with you!"
For several moments, silence followed the dark wizard's offer to share his untold magical knowledge with the teen currently in the process of destroying all of it for good.
Finally, however, Harry gave his answer.
The crackle of energy streaming from his gauntlets grew louder as he upped the voltage to their maximum.
This time, as the entity screamed, almost no trace of Riddle's voice was left. In fact, as the memory shards constantly appearing and fading in the air around them started coming more and more slowly, the entity's body began to blur. Not like it did when shifting into the amorphous obscurus form, but as if the creature's human form simply couldn't remember what Tom Marvolo Riddle looked like any longer.
As the last memories faded from the air around them, all that was left of the once handsome yet monstrously twisted form of Tom Riddle was a blank, mannequin-like body utterly devoid of recognizable features, kneeling limply on the ground held up only by the stream of energy still pouring from Harry's gauntlets.
Harry stood there, bathed in the clean, untainted golden light of the now no longer storm-enveloped dome-like astral plane, and ceased the flow of energy.
The worse than simply lifeless humanoid body disintegrated, transforming into the amorphous body of the obscurus. However, for the first time, there was no slow shifting or vicious whirling in the ink-like motes of the creature's fluid body. This time, it simply hung there, the millions of tiny fragments that made up its body floating limply in the air like lifeless dust motes in a gleam of sunlight.
In the silence that followed, a faint metal clatter could be heard as the silver mind-wiping device fell to the crystalline ground.
Harry's armored fingers gently traced the brilliant power source in his suit's chest, admiring the incredible level of power it had allowed him to unleash on the Obscurumort even as he stared at its motionless remains.
Riddle had been right. He would probably never be free of the obscurus. But that didn't mean he had to be cursed with the creature's bloodthirsty mind forever.
He had known Riddle would betray him to merge with the creature, part of his own psyche or not. It was simply who he was, even if it took Riddle himself a while to remember that. He had been born from Voldemort's memories, after all. And when Riddle fused with the creature, merging its raw, animalistic impulses with his own consciousness, he opened the door for Harry to rid himself of both in one fell stroke, destroying the horrendous memories of Voldemort and the obscurus' uncontrollable savage volition with a single push of a button.
The obscurus still lived, but it was now little more than raw power, blank and mindless.
And somewhere, mixed in with the new tabula rasa entity floating limply in front of Harry, were the final fragments of his psyche, and with them, the keys to the last remaining barriers keeping him from the physical world, and the family that needed him.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped forward.
The hospital
In an upscale, obscenely expensive Malibu hospital, one sterile white room in particular hung with a still, heavy silence, broken only by the faint, steady beep of a heart monitor, and the sporadic hiccoughing breaths coming from the sleeping, tear-stained face of a girl exhausted into an unwilling slumber as she sat practically wrapped around the bandaged left arm of the comatose teen on the bed.
As she slept on, Harry's eyes snapped open, and those green irises were swirling with power.
Author's note: Well good lord. I did not expect that whole astral journey to be anywhere near as long as it ended up becoming. Sorry about that. But you got some answers to Harry's past, and at least we're finally back to the physical world, and to the Mandarin plot that you all love so much ;)
Toodles!
