Disclaimers: See Chapter 1.

Chapter 2

Dreaming-Searching

-oo00**00oo-

Harry James Potter was dreaming.

Or at least, that was what he thought he was doing, he couldn't be entirely sure. Immediately after his nap by the flowers, he remembered floating in a sort of hazy not-quite-darkness for a time, that same sort of fuzzy cotton wool feeling he had before slowly fading to be replaced by a dull ache, which to him at least, solidified the fact that he was likely not dead. That thought gave him a bit of solace, though it rather didn't last long, as the sense of peace was swiftly replaced by a nagging sensation in the back of his metaphorical head. Now, this nagging sensation was one he had developed over the course of his somewhat eventful life as a sort of warning signal, a sign that he might soon be having a bad time, so he remained on his guard as he waited to see what was going to happen next. The experience was rather surreal for Harry, even considering the circumstances. As he floated through the open space he began to see shapes form as they sped towards him. As they passed by, they seemed to reach out to him, and as they approached, his mind comprehended, somehow, that these were memories. Some seemed innocuous enough, little moments in school, playing wizard's chess with Ron over his first winter at Hogwarts, cooking breakfast for the Dursleys when he was six, and the like. Other memories seemed more disjointed, such as vague recollections of his most early years, hazy images of his mother and father, riding on the back of a large black dog. Other memories that blended in with the mix seemed almost entirely disconnected, vague images of old cliffsides and rooms at Hogwarts he was sure he had never been to, though he rarely could make out anything from those.

Later on when describing the situation to others, he found himself unable to completely describe the feeling of experiencing pieces of his own life as shown through and odd kind of viewscreen, as though he was completely disconnected from them, but at the time, he found the whole thing rather unnerving. For a few moments (or whatever passed for time in wherever he was) Harry did express some concern that he was, in fact, deceased, and this was some odd form of afterlife. What dissuaded him from that occured not long after, when he began to have a new sensation added to the mix. At first it felt like a mild headache, combined with what could almost be described as heartburn, both of which steadily grew, along with a distinct feeling of being stretched. He reeled in pain as his body felt like it was twisting unnaturally, his head going from discomfort to outright pain, and the burning in his chest surging to match. Harry began to panic, clutching his head in his hands, and wishing for a moment that everything would just stop spinning for a moment so he could get his bearings. As if on cue, his heartburn surged for a moment, and suddenly he found himself on solid ground. Or rather that is to say he found himself suddenly going from floating in a void to attempting not to fall as level ground suddenly seemed to appear beneath his feet.

Managing to land on his feet (though barely), Harry stood to look around, and was rather surprised to find himself back at Hogwarts. In fact, he found himself in a place he was, to his shame, well familiar with; a small unused classroom off the main pathways of the school, one that at a certain point and time over a year ago held a certain mirror. This was odd to Harry for several reasons, the first being that it was impossible to be in a place like Hogwarts when he was probably about as far away from Hogwarts as he could currently be at the time, and the second being that a magical artifact that he knew to be no longer at Hogwarts, and indeed most likely destroyed, was sitting in the middle of this room, as if it had never been moved. Harry found himself, almost on reflex, walking around from the back of the mirror to the front of it, hesitant to even look at something that had such power over him in the past, even if it was simply something in his head. His feet, however, did not have the level of hesitancy that his mind did, nor did his hand as he reached up to slowly pull off the sheet that had been covering the mirror to reveal... nothing. The mirror itself was there, of course, but the reflection he saw was simply of the room behind him, with no sign of his own form anywhere to be found. Harry tilted his head, confused; shouldn't there be at least something there? Why would the mirror show an image in which he wouldn't exist?

As if it had heard his thoughts, the mirror gave a throaty, rasping laugh, and the sound immediately filled Harry with a certain dread. There was only one person he knew of that could strike that particular type of fear in his mind, and the idea that he would hear that here of all places struck more of a chord than anything else. As if putting form to his fear, from the edge of the mirror walked a man with a face Harry Potter knew all too well.

"I would think it would be obvious, boy, why the mirror wouldn't show anything. The mirror of Erised shows you your greatest desire, and to me, the strongest desire is for you, Harry Potter, the boy who lived, to simply... not exist." Harry looked up at the mirror Tom Riddle fearfully. This particular version of Riddle looked somewhat similar to the shade of Tom Riddle that Harry had seen and dealt with some weeks ago when it attempted to regain a human form using the life force of Ron's sister Ginny, however this one seemed older, a bit more learned, and with a particularly less sane look in its eyes than the one he had seen.

"What do you want, Tom?" Harry felt a surprising amount of pride in the fact that he kept any fear from his voice. The mirror image however, chuckled at this.

"Now Harry, there is no need for that. I have actually come here with an offer for you. One that I know you have heard before from my counterpart, but, I believe, one you may find more tempting after you hear me out-"

"I don't want to hear what you're selling Tom!" Harry interrupted what looked to be a long and drawn out monologue from the vain man. "I want you out of my head, and as far away from me as possible!" Riddle, clearly unamused, went from smiling to scowling in a heartbeat.

"Well, I had hoped to be able to convince you that there are more intelligent ways of going about this, but since you seem to want to play the eternal Gryffindor, I guess we have no other choice." Before Harry could react, the mirror reflection of Lord Voldemort reached out, his arm passing through the glass of the mirror and wrapped long fingers around Harry's throat, the sudden blockage of his airway causing his eyes to bulge as much in surprise as in pain. Stepping through the mirror, Tom lifted Harry off his feet and looked up at him, his eyes glowing red. "I will have this body as my own, Harry Potter. And with you in your currently weakened state, it is only a matter of time before you succumb to me, and then you will be gone, and only I will remain."

With an almost negligent toss, Riddle threw Harry's body across the room and into the wall, his body impacting against the stone much harder than should have been possible given the situation, Harry thought. He tried to heave himself up to his feet, only to find that his arms wouldn't quite support his weight. His headache had turned into a burning in his scar, and the simple heartburn had turned into a pain in his chest that made it hard to breathe. He barely had time to put up an arm when Tom lashed out with his foot, but he did manage to deflect a kick to the face into what was probably only a broken finger or two. Scrambling backwards and away from a slightly unbalanced foe, Harry used the wall to prop himself back up into a standing position. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he calmed himself a bit and then faced his nemesis standing, determined to put up a fight. As though on cue, the burning in his chest seemed to ease for a moment, before blossoming into a comforting warmth. Emboldened, he turned to face his foe with a scowl.

"You'll have to do better than that, Tom."

Tom Riddle looked surprised for a moment, before the scowl returned. "Well, it seems there is still some fight in you. No matter, all fall before me eventually. For now, why don't you take another run down memory lane." And with a wave of his hand, the shade of Riddle faded, along with the mirror and the rest of the room. Harry found himself floating through the void again, memories rushing towards him.

For some indeterminate period of time, a vicious cycle began to take shape. Harry would float through the sea of memories, each time he was passing through, the memories would become darker, more warped. He would see his friends talking to him happily one trip through, and a later trip would find him standing over their broken and bleeding bodies, knife in hand. Unnamed spectres would pass through his memories and recollections, twisting them from thoughts into nightmares, eldritch horrors instead of histories. At the end of each journey through the void, Harry would return to the room with the mirror, Tom would say a few words, Harry a few more, then they would eventually come to blows, and the whole thing would start over again. Whenever Harry felt like he was becoming tired, or worn, he would feel that warmth bloom in his chest and would renew his fight with newfound strength, but still the cycle would continue. Each time he returned to the room, Tom would seem just a touch more haggard than he was the time before, so Harry knew he was getting somewhere, and somehow, in the back of his mind, he had this feeling, like someone was watching over him, giving him the will to continue.

After what was probably the fifteenth or sixteenth iteration of this pattern (though it felt like it was near the thirtieth), Tom Riddle's mirror reflection didn't even mince words, immediately stepping out of the mirror and throwing Harry across the room, this time with enough force to crack the stone behind him. Harry fell to the ground coughing, tasting the metallic flavor of blood in his mouth. Clearly he was getting to Tom, though he wasn't sure this was the result he wanted.

"Why, boy? Why resist? No matter how much you struggle, you are nothing compared to the great Lord Voldemort! Why keep going when you know you will fail? When you know your mind will eventually fail, and your body will become my new vessel?" he reached down and again picked up Harry by the throat, holding him up on his toes. "Why do you persist in this hopeless madness?" He asked, shaking the boy.

Harry opened his mouth to retort, but paused for a moment, thinking... and then chuckled, the sound being closer to a choking noise given his position. The chuckle grew slowly to a raspy laugh, something that for a moment actually confused Riddle. He lifted his head, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth and spilling over Riddle's wrist. He gave his foe a small smile.

"Because, Tom, I just remembered something. This is my body, and that means," he continued, causing Tom's eyes to widen in surprise, "you and I... are in my head!" And with that, Harry lashed out, shoving Tom away from him towards the mirror again, trapping the shade of his enemy again behind the glass. Tom quickly recovered, and attempted to reach out to strike Harry again, but Harry raised his hand, and he found himself stopped at the edge of the mirror. Clearly blinded now by his rage, he began to strike against the mirror, his punches and kicks causing the glass to crack, only to have the cracks reseal themselves afterwards.

"POTTER! You'll never be rid of me! As long as you live, I will be here! I promise you I will prevail, I will take this body as my own, and you and all your friends will be made to suffer!" on and on the mirror image went, promising great pain and destruction to him and anyone who knew him, but Harry flicked his eyes to the right for a moment, and then just smiled.

"Tom, something tells me," he said, turning away and heading towards the exit of the room. " that I really don't have to worry about you anymore."

And with that, Harry opened the door to the room, and stepped outside, and into a comfortable darkness of a real slumber. He went into sleep with a smile on his face, because he knew the shade of Tom in his head would never be a bother, which was something that he later would realize was rather out of place for the circumstances.

Because he saw who was suddenly behind the mirror image of Riddle him in the mirror.

Because he didn't know why, but somehow he knew that the boy in the striped shirt, with the knife, and a finger to his smiling lips, was more than willing to make sure there wouldn't be any problems with Tom any more.

-oo00**00oo-

Asriel Dreemurr was searching

He had spent a rather ridiculous amount of time over the last several days searching, actually, and not always for the same thing, though it all definitely did revolve around a certain interesting human. After the initial rush to get him out of immediate danger, Asriel hunted down a way to transport his damaged form as carefully as possible, eventually using an old wheelbarrow to get him moved while jostling him as little as possible. Upon getting him into his house and into the bed in the master bedroom, he set to work getting his patient bandaged and as set on the path to healing as possible. Surprisingly, he found this both easier and more difficult than he had expected. Due to the nature of his injuries, many of the healing items he possessed at the time would be effectively useless, as they require things like chewing and being conscious to consume, so he needed to think creatively to both gather and prepare things to help keep his patient healthy. Interestingly enough though, it appeared that the human wouldn't end up needing as much help as he originally anticipated, as within the first few hours after relocating him, many of the worst physical injuries had already healed themselves. For a moment, Asriel was actually confused by this, until he reached out his senses and really observed what was going on, and got the second shock of the day: it seemed that this human, in addition to other power, simply radiated determination. In fact, the levels of power that emanated from his patient were on levels unheard of by most monsters, except for perhaps his parents (and himself, he remembered with only a slight bit of shame). Though this was an odd thing to note at the time, Asriel didn't really think much of the fact short of cataloging it, and instead took some solace in the fact that this basically meant that his recovery was almost a certainty, as long as he could keep ensuring he was well maintained, as it were. With that thought well in mind, Asriel fed his patient a bit more, settled him in bed as well as he could, then quickly left to see what more supplies he could gather.

Wandering through the gate and into the forest around Snowdin, he spared a glance at the glowing save point and noted to himself that it had faded just a bit more from where it was a week ago. He noted it in the back of his mind as he collected various leaves and things to make a potential poultice for the few still showing wounds his patient happened to have. He reflected sadly on the fact that it was likely that those glowing points of concentrated determination would eventually fade entirely, and with them, the entire idea of messing with the timeline by restoring from a save may very well be gone. So far, any research into determination outside of the underground had met with nothing more than confusion, it appeared that, like monsters themselves, magic like the power of Determination and the Soul were essentially unknown to the peoples outside. Frisk, Sans and Toriel all came to the same conclusion when faced with the facts at hand, it was likely that the barrier was keeping the determination, (a natural product of monsters, some humans, and the environment itself in some places,) contained in a concentrated area, allowing the save points to naturally manifest. With the barrier released, that determination was simply dissipating over a broader area, causing some things to naturally fade with the course of time. Asriel sighed as he continued to fill the rest of his pack with a few things from town. Though there were only a handful of people who truly understood what those little points of light represented, for good or for ill, the few who did know looked upon the event with a sort of melancholy dread; those who felt like, in one way or another they had a safety net of sorts, double edged sword it may be. The loss of that safety net meant only one chance was left, and though each one of the 'determined few' knew they wouldn't waste this last chance at a life, there was a certain feeling of foreboding to the new sense of mortality, a worry that there wouldn't be enough time to do what was needed to be done. Honestly though, Asriel thought as he walked back towards home, that sort of problem was one he currently had plenty of experience with.

His musings stopped however as he approached the house, and instead of the solace he usually felt approaching the building, he felt a strong sense of chaos, pain, and fear. This, accompanied with the sounds of a rampage inside saw him break out into a run to get into the house. He made it inside in only a moment, sprinting towards the room where his patient was, but was forced to dive out of the way of the doorway to avoid a flying book. Recovering quickly and leaning into the room, Asriel felt, for the first time in he didn't know how long, a genuine sense of fear. The entire room was a maelstrom of chaos, furniture and knick knacks flying around in a tempest, destroying anything that wasn't already flying about, and at the center of the mess was his patient, thrashing on the bed, breathing in wheezes through clenched teeth and moaning in pain. But perhaps most startling was a nearly visible wave of energy barreling away from him at a nearly constant basis. Asriel could only stand agape at the sight, and certainly couldn't help but feel intimidated. Granted this wasn't the most power he had seen, or even wielded before, but the fact that it was just emanating from the unconscious boy in waves spoke volumes of both the boys power, and the torment he must be going through. After a few more moments avoiding thrown objects from the room, Asriel heard an audible crack and an increase in the groaning; the boy had clearly cracked a tooth from clenching his jaw so hard, and at that he knew he had to act.

Grabbing a Spider Cider, he centered himself for a moment, then barreled around the corner, ducking under flying objects to reach the struggling body on the bed. Opening the bottle, Asriel forced open the jaw of his patient and poured as much of the cider down his throat as he could, alll the while getting pounded by various items still spinning around the room. Though he got almost as much on him as he did in him, the boy clearly took enough of the cider to help, as his breathing actually started to regulate, then slow, and then finally his muscles relaxed. When that happened, the power waned as well, drawing back inside the boy, and the various things around the room slowed their spinning, and eventually fell to the ground as a battered and bruised asriel collapsed against the footboard of the bed trying hard to return his heart rate to normal. As he slowly recovered, he looked to the sleeping form of his new patient turned problem, and said to his sleeping form "You aren't going to make this easy, are you?"

The next few days were spent in a kind of blur for Asriel, as he tended to his patient. The boy would go through cycles, sleeping peacefully for a time, then falling into a struggle, lashing out with what appeared to be some sort of uncontrolled telekinetic magic. When this happened Asriel would feed him some sort of recovery item, causing the chaos to settle, and the boy to fall back into a slumber. In general, it appeared that the boy was improving in health, though it was certainly touch and go when he had his attacks. His estimation of the boy's recovery was also slightly hampered by what happened during the boy's third attack, the first time Asriel had actually been in the room when the attack began.

When the boy initially went from a peaceful sleep to an uneasy one, Asriel happened to be reading one of the books he brought from the Snowdin librarby outside the room, so he was able to be present at the beginning of his attack. Curious as to the source of such rather intense internal strife, Asriel decided the only way to really be sure of exactly what was going on was to reach out to the human's SOUL. And since there was one surefire way to do that, Asriel prepared himself for battle. He figured it would be quick and easy, go in, observe the state of the human, and either assist if possible, or simply retreat if need be, as he couldn't be sure if the soul would react negatively to being observed. Steeling himself, he stepped into the room and began a battle.

And what he saw there terrified him beyond all of his comprehension. The heart of the human looked battered and broken, cracks lining the surface, and a black miasma stuck within it, pulsing and beating as it twisted itself around the heart, a tiny thing, but immensely powerful. The soul was already seemingly engaged in battle, it's heart shape shifting into rainbow hues as it swerved and moved drunkenly around, only to suddenly freeze as the miasma pulsed strongly, and then the heart itself seemed to completely lose control, flinging itself from edge to edge of the battle grid, horrible specters emanating from it, swirling around only to fly back in and strike at the heart over and over again. The soul clearly struggling to remain together despite the terrors around it. Unknowingly and almost unconsciously, Asriel retreated from the battle, screaming loud enough to be heard through the whole ruins, the echoes sounding through the hallways of the ruins, even going as far as the entry cavern, rustling the flowers he had tended for so long. Throwing himself against the back wall of the room as the human began to twitch wildly and moan, Asriel could only stare at the human in shock and an admittedly small amount of fear.

"Who Are You?"

After that, Asriel decided it was best to observe the human and tend to his injuries, but not do anything further. So they days continued to remain a routine, granted one of a different sort, punctuated by moments of panic as he staved off whatever it was that could taint and harm a SOUL like that. Anytime he wasn't spending tending to the human or to the other few things he needed to do to make sure the underground was still safe, he spent searching through any books he could find, trying to see if he could better understand what he saw. Unfortunately, even the great libraries in the castle were unable to help him after a few days of searching, except for some vague references to creatures that could attach themselves to a SOUL, living off it as a parasite would, but the tales were just that, unsubstantiated rumors and folk tales, which in truth paled in comparison to what he saw in that boy. He admitted to himself that he hoped that whoever this human was, he would be capable of fighting off that true monster.

A few days later, it appeared his hopes were answered.

-oo00**00oo-

Wow, I was so surprised by the positive response to the first chapter, I was inspired enough to turn the second chapter over super quickly (don't expect this quick of a turnaround though, normally I can only write on the bus to and from work, I just got lucky this time and had some spare hours to write) Thanks to the three of you who reviewed the first chapter, and I hope I continue to write things you can enjoy. This one was just a bit longer, and really had some details I could have written more about, but I feel like I got the point across, and too much detail would spoil some of the story.

Anyways, reviewed for grammar (mostly) but unbeta'd. Read, review whatevs.

Peace y'all

/EF/