Yew

Words: 487

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. This was written for the HPFC Life Challenge by mustardgirl1128.

Warnings: It's all Riddly and EVOL

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Chapter 9: Life

"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me." Dudley Field Malone

Sensation is interesting. To feel is interesting, the touch of fabric along alabaster skin, a slim shaft of wood gliding between fingers, a breath of air, tickling just so. Yes, to feel the corporeal world with new nerves and fresh skin was an unmatchable feeling that Voldemort doubted many other than he would ever be cognizant to feel. It was glorious, that after years of being incorporeal, and then only being a bundle of skin and dead nerves, that he could feel again. The pump of blood in his head, the whisper of wind through the graveyard... this was true magic.

It was a terrible cliché, he realized suddenly, that he should be reborn at a graveyard. Well, most things he did were terrible clichés, in particular his love for monologues... well, he wasn't going to give those up. The Light were all a bunch of well-mannered idiots who couldn't take advantage of such a situation in the first place; even if they did, his Death Eaters were always on high alert when he was monologuing anyways, since that was when the crucios usually got tossed about.

The swirling of the potion that had returned him to life could be felt around his calves as he stood in the smooth bottomed cauldron. It was hot, scalding his legs and feet as a matter of fact and soaking the fresh robe he had put on. Slowly, he stepped out, feeling the cool night sir dancing along his red, raw feet as he placed them on the crisp, dewy grass. Sweet Merlin, the sensations of life!

He was hard put to remember what anything felt like when he was alive, before. The sun was hot, water was cold, he knew it, but remembering the feeling of grass between his toes... this was why he strove so hard to become immortal. Death was less than the meanest shadow of this. The dance he had undergone with the very theory of death the past thirteen and a half years was ages away as he stalked from the dance floor into something more meaningful. He would live, damn it, and no one would stop this flight from death.

Not even the boy tied to the tombstone behind him who had started the daring dance on his behalf.

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A/n: a shorter one, but this was all that this chapter needed, I think. Death should be up in the next few hours.