There were a lot of things wrong with whatever memory was playing out between Hermione and the looming Darkness (more of a metaphor for something, really, rather than an actual all-encompassing being of terror and destruction that wrought havoc onto Tom Riddle's mind), but Hermione's day seemed to be just getting worse without anyone actively even trying. It was just that easy. Making her life hell had become as easy as scoring an O in Divination with Trelawney there giving full points to whoever said that they dreamt of misfortune. For those who couldn't tell, Hermione was still a little bitter about Divination's mere existence.
Never mind that, though. Hermione found herself incapable of screaming her lungs out as the Darkness approached. She stepped away from the tall, twisty figure of shadow. It cocked its head to the side and grinned a smile full of tar. ''What a poor, unfortunate soul you've become; stranded in a mind that does not belong to anyone anymore.''
''What did you do with him?'' Hermione could not even find her mentor's sleeping form by her side. It had seeped into the ground and disappeared.
''He's escaped us both by falling asleep, gone to the depths even I do not venture into. The recesses of his mind that never interested my reach.'' The Darkness crouched down then, and placed its murky palms on its knees, giving Hermione (who had fallen to her knees in despair and wretched, retching horror) a look that was keenly interested in her thoughts. ''He has left you to my mercy.''
''No.'' Hermione's voice shifted from horrified to terrified. ''No.'' She said the word louder and louder until it felt like a blanket that could protect her. ''I do not believe he would do that. You're just twisting things against us again. How you've been doing to him for ages.''
''Dear, dear child. I am not some foreign concept that needs to be weeded out.'' The Darkness said and placed one of those hands on Hermione's shoulder, feeding her form with ice and fear until she choked on her own tears with anguish. ''I am not some sort of virus that has infiltrated this mind. This is my mind. I have always been here, but I have grown like a child does. And every child outgrows its parents one way or another. I have evolved and demanded more for myself.'' For the first time since arriving in her mentor's mind, Hermione saw the Darkness shed its shadow to reveal a man that, for only a moment, Hermione thought was her mentor. But the facial expressions were wrong. ''Can you not see, Hermione, that I am as much a part of him as anyone else? That he has given up everything and I am here, attempting to keep things work-''
''You are lying.'' Hermione said. There was no room for anything else other than what Hermione believed in. ''You are not trying to keep things working, nor are you here to help Montgomery – Tom – Vol –''
''I rather believe he goes by Tom. Trust me, I'm his brain.''
''Parasite.'' Hermione spat at the thing, irking it.
''Ohoho, don't be like that, now.'' The voice hissed, cutting through the air. Annoyed now that he was not getting anywhere with Hermione. ''Remember, you are a guest and I am the only one who can help you out.''
''I am NOT going to leave without him.'' Hermione balled her hands into tight fists and glared up at the Darkness, finding in herself bravery that would make even Godric Gryffindor in awe. ''So, you can do whatever you want to me, but I am going to find him and help him get out of here.'' She glared, even through the shakes and tremors the Darkenss' presence brought her. Hermione thought of little Tom Riddle, slightly-taller Tom Riddle, and her mentor – she looked at the Darkness and through gritted teeth said: ''Fuck you.''
The Darkness nodded. It draped itself back into shadow and stalked up to her quickly, its footsteps resounding like that of a battle General in combat boots. Sludge grabbed her neck and cut air from her airflow. ''Then I shall break you.'' Hermione tried to kick her way out of this, finding that her strength from before was diminished, but the only thing she could think of that had changed was that before, her mentor had bore the brunt of the Darkness' attention. ''Such a shame, Hermione, as I had wanted to help you leave here in one piece.'' It put more pressure on her windpipe as their surroundings shifted into a new manner of torture, ''Instead you've chosen this.''
A graveyard was a place for kindness. Anything less than that was considered a grievous, bastardized insult that no one deserved.
Lord Voldemort stood in front of a magical archway leading to a place that oozed with grief. His fingers twitched for his wand, deciding that he was under attack before any attack came for him, already feeling that his mind was not well, but that for the good of his own survival he would need to put that away and not think about.
He could not move past the archway and into the magical graveyard. A morbid pest like him had wondered, in his youth riddled with death and falling bombs, where it was that mages got buried. Not everyone could have a place for their dead how the Malfoys and the Blacks and the Lestranges did. Where were the public figures buried, where were young men and women who had never accomplished anything worthwhile put to rest? Where would his grave be? What did they do to the bodies of orphans without a knut to their name?
The ancient archway was made of sturdy, unshaken stone that preceded the Statute of Secrecy. Engraved in its stone were runes that denoted a heavy message full of history. This was done as if to remind each and every one of the mages that might be privy to this location that the world was not one to forget. That in this place rested a history they were not taught in Hogwarts. But even though it had never been taught to them, it did not mean that they could not learn it.
These stones and headstones and graves all beheld a person with a story and history just as intense, just as vivid and interesting as the story one held in their heart.
Voldemort remembered the graveyard near the Catholic Church. He'd gone there a couple of times with the orphans to pay respects to Mr. Cole. Not Mrs. Cole's Mr Cole. No, the first Mr. Cole that had loved children (some said a bit too much, but there was no evidence and Voldemort didn't enjoy ruminating over the past of old, bigoted men) and had first founded Woolwich's orphanage. Wool's for short. His daughter was Mrs. Cole and she'd made them all scrub his headstone until it sparkled. She made sure that if they dilly dallied they wouldn't be eating. Tom Riddle had yet to find a better motivation to do anything.
He'd once gone to a Protestant graveyard and found that it wasn't sinful, that it was as equally morbid as the Catholic one and that when everyone died they were the same. Nobby Leach was next to him. They were fourteen and one of them was full of glee. The other one was too scared by the sight of the graves to be gleeful.
''My grandpa's over there with grandma.'' Leach pointed with his finger, rudely because one wasn't supposed to point and Tom had thought that children with parents ought to be more polite than this, but he kept his words in between his teeth and watched Leach grow more animated as the summer sun scorched above them. ''And my da's going to be buried in that place over there with mum prolly.'' Leach said 'prolly' and Abraxas elongated the word into something obscene as he drawled out in his posh manner 'pro-ba-bly'. ''I'll prolly be buried in the same graveyard. It's only right, innit?''
Tom had nodded, his stomach twisting at the thought of death and not being conscious of the world around him. How could he die when he had only begun living three years ago when he'd gone to Hogwarts for the very first time? A thought strangled him that he would live in a world like the muggles did. He did not want to think about where he might be buried. ''Why are we here?''
''I'm trying to convert you to Protestantism, of course!'' Leach joked.
Tom mustered enough strength to smile. ''No, thank you. I'll leave you to your protestant graveyards.''
Leach pushed him to tease him. He laughed and called him a strange fellow, but his fellow nonetheless. Tom thought about girls and boys and men and women and how despicable they looked when dead. How would Leach look like when he'd die? Would his eyes bulge? Would his skin turn yellow? His insides churned and he nearly threw up over his own shoes – never Leach's – he was much too polite for a child with no parents.
Voldemort moved from under the archway and found that he begged the world for kindness that he did not feel befitted him. If ever a time came for him to find a god to pray to, this would be it. His heart screeched like a badly played violin, or a viola, really, it was hard to tell at times. Tears sprang in his eyes and he blinked them away. There was a quiet in his mind if not his chest. Sometimes this was all a man could be. Content in his discontent. Fully aware that he did not deserve anything more.
These graves weren't marked with crosses how the ones Tom was used to seeing were. They were differently shaped, giving thanks to their family and their blood, putting emphasis on the gods of their familial practise rather than some unifying god. Some did not have headstones at all. Some only had names that were tattered and worn with time and war.
Above him were shields so strong that Merlin himself could not take them down. There was something about disturbing the dead that was against all manner of sanity. Something about the disrespect one had towards Death that would paint a target on their back, how the Peverell brothers had been hunted, one by one, until they'd been slain for their disrespect. Voldemort had called them foolish to think they could be so bold against Death. That they should not have challenged Death to a duel in the first place. That it was none of their business at all to antagonize one so arcane and eldritch.
Leach had told him he'd not understood the story at all. Mandy had said that it was a silly little pagan tale to pass the time and that there wasn't any point in believing in it. Tom, Tom who believed in fairy tales and had hoped that the Fair Folk might take him and tell him he was not odd and satanic how Mrs. Cole had said, that Tom had told them that one didn't disturb the dead and Death if one wished to live long enough to become somebody.
Voldemort moved past more graves. He was wearing one of Orion's old and faded robes. Walburga had supplied him with clothes and told him that he was one of their own in this war and that she'd help him as much as she could without her stomach acid killing her. Apparently being nice wasn't quite what her stomach was used to.
He couldn't blame her. Neither could Voldemort stomach this existence, yet for the sake of some inexplicable reason he fought in a war against Dumbledore. Not Mandy, not muggleborns, not halfbloods, or creatures, or squibs. He was pitted against Dumbledore only. His allies were purebloods only in this regard. He sang to them for his supper and twisted their minds into believing he was on their side, but his heart broke apart each time he thought of how putrid they were. How this was not a war meant for him, how he had barely survived the one previous. This was too early for a war.
Gradually he halted, his footsteps slowed until they stopped altogether in front of a gravestone with a name that had made Voldemort feel like he was home. As if paralysed with the most potent petrificus totalus he stood in front of it, taking in with which care someone (his closest, his most put together) had chosen the marble, the stone, the way which to engrave the grave with a name infused by the love of thousands, with the hope of tens of thousands.
Nobby Leach had not been buried in a protestant graveyard like his family had been. They had disowned him when he'd chosen a catholic girl to wed and burn the whole world of noxious blood to the ground, to rebuild something beautiful, something wondrous with a halfblooded boy with no soul left in his heart.
His hand gently caressed the gravestone. It was the only one with a cross on it in its vicinity. Voldemort spotted doves and peacocks and cats as symbols of gods, but Leach's symbol, even in death, seemed to stick out as an eyesore.
What a coward he was, Voldemort berated himself and his weakness, to leave Mandy Leach to this planning. To leave her alone when they had been a trio of musketeers, never living long enough to add a fourth into their already confusing mix. She was wise to mistrust him, then, and especially now.
''Your wife doesn't like me very much.'' Voldemort scrounged up all the strength he had to speak to a gravestone, trying his hardest not to imagine the skeleton rotting underneath marble and feet upon feet of dirt infused with ravenous worms.
Nobby would reply along the lines of: Well, you ARE hard to like. I've had lots of practise, yaknow.''
''I lived in a swamp full of Dementors. I almost died. Walburga Black kissed me, though I cannot say for certain if this transpired or if I was out of it.''
Nobby would cry laugh at this, all of it. How hilarious, he would say finally after laughing for a painfully long time, I never knew she fancied you. Is her goose Geb still kicking? She set it on me once in the middle of the Ministry, remember!
''I've begun a war, destroying the people you campaigned alongside with, the people you fought for. They fight for you now and I am tasked with cutting them down to survive. None of it makes sense. I wish I could just disappear, but I would not be happy anywhere.''
Voldemort did not know how Nobby would reply here, too disgusted, too scared, too worried, too loving to give a proper answer.
His fingers curled around the gravestone. He looked, horribly sick to his stomach even though he hadn't eaten in days, looked and looked and looked into the letters swirling on his tended grave. ''I ruin everything I come into contact with. You are not above it. Is Heaven real? I know I will not go there, not with the things I am, nor the things I have done – but is it real? At least for you. I would want you not to suffer wherever you are. Or,'' his voice broke, ''or is there really nothingness? Is there no peace, but just an end to all of this? Did praying help you at all?''
No response came, of course. Voldemort had never thought that this was going to be a two way conversation, but he forced himself to come here and face Nobby Leach's grave. His dearest friend, his only friend.
How lonesome an existence like his was, when even Walburga Black pitied him enough to keep trying to be his friend. She held worry for her sons in her eyes and nothing but loathing for everyone beneath her. What a contradictory tale it was to see her attempt to push aside her difference with Voldemort in order to keep an eye on him and his dwindling and diminishing mental health. He had yet to come to Malfoy Manor, electing instead to room inside Grimmauld Place with a dysfunctional family that somehow, against all manner of expectation, did not exceed the abusive nature of the Malfoy home.
Lucius was so soft spoken and worried about doing anything bad and unacceptable that he only nodded his head and never spoke. Sirius, on the other hand, was a hellion that demanded to know answers to every damned question he deigned to ask. Voldemort preferred answering such questions to thinking about his life and the things that plagued his nights each night. Walburga had told him to drink dreamless sleep because her youngest son was scared. Voldemort hadn't frightened children since he was sixteen years old. Mrs. Cole was an adult and loved to terrify children. Voldemort wondered if he could really throw up three times in one day. Walburga had seemed to sense his disgust at the potion for she told him that she could move Regulus to a different room instead. ''No,'' he'd said, ''I shall drink the Dreamless Sleep.'' The very last thing he ever wanted to become was Mrs. Cole, if even to a child as privileged and coddled as Regulus Black.
In the dead of night in a public graveyard where souls were said to speak to the most unfortunate, Lord Voldemort heard rustling of fabric, a hitch in breath, and assured footsteps. He turned and aimed his wand at the intruder, putting to a test all of his intuition and paranoia, said to have festered his mind into a weapon of unseemly power.
A part of him, this one that still clung onto the fact that perhaps not everyone was out to get him, told him that it was another mourner come to say hello to their loved one. That he did not need to shoot them dead like a rabbit in winter.
''Lumos.''
This part of him couldn't be more wrong.
Albus Dumbledore's wand aimed at him.
''Hello, Tom.''