Tom quite literally forces himself to be patient as the two of them do the chores for today, planting in the vegetable patch and watering them - something Evelynn seems familiar with. At his questioning gaze, she quietly says "My aunt just had to have the best flower bed in the neighborhood. Guess who was in charge of weeding it and making sure the flowers were healthy. The lawn, to."
Tom scowls at her, but doesn't say another word on the subject. She's far too casual about things like this, in his opinion. She readily admits her relatives hated her, and she hated them right back, but the things she's so casual about tend to horrify Slughorn - for instance, when he asked about her ingredient prep, she said her relatives had her cooking at age five to earn her keep. Among other things.
When they're finally done with the vegetable patch, thus done with their chores for the day, Tom drags her back to their room and shuts the door to get the full story from her - he's been patient all day, now he's got her cornered and he's getting some bloody answers.
Evelynn sits down on her bed, and Tom pulls the chair from the desk over. The look in Evelynn's eyes, though, its…to be honest, its starting to scare him a little. Not because it looks like she's thinking up lies to tell him, or because she wants to hurt him, though. Because it ages her, makes her seem so much older than her currently twelve-year-old body suggests. Because it says this isn't going to be a good story. Because it says she'd rather spare him the pain - an entirely foreign concept to Tom, one that does weird things in his chest like the food hidden in her trunk for them did.
Evelynn breaks the silence, quietly saying "I'm giving you one last chance, Tom. One last way out before I tell you everything. Because, once I tell you…that's it. You can't forget it, the cat cannot be put back in this bag."
Tom shakes his head, saying "Tell me, Evelynn."
She nods, then asks "If I could tell you everything, everything you do, everything you end up being remembered for…would you want me to tell you? Your greatest triumphs, your worst mistakes, how you die and what your legacy is?"
Tom nods his head at once, despite the dread that settles in his stomach at the thought of dying. He was certain the day Dumbledore came and said he was a Wizard - after he stopped thinking it was a ruse the Matron set up - would change his life forever, and he gets the feeling this conversation will do so as well. Perhaps even more than the one with Dumbledore. "Yes, tell me."
Evelynn closes her eyes for a minute, then opens them back up and meets his gaze straight on. She suddenly looks so tired, but her voice is steady when she says "I'll start with my beginning. Do you remember when I said I time-traveled on the train?"
Tom nods, impatiently wondering where she's going with this. Because that was a few days ago, not...the beginning.
"Well, I time traveled, I traveled a very long way. I was born in 1980, to Lily and James Potter. At the tail end of a Magical War that was being waged by the Dark Lord after Grindelwald."
She blinks, and he gets a cold certainty of who this Dark Lord was. "It was me, wasn't it?"
Evelynn nods, murmuring "You always were too smart for your own good, Tom. You renamed yourself Lord Voldemort, an anagram of the letters of your current name. And then you delved so deeply into the Dark Arts, into practices so evil it quite literally turned you into a monster - tore your soul and stained your magic, twisted and warped your body beyond recognition - and waged war on the Wizarding World. In the name of Blood Purity, of all things."
Tom finds a sense of sick, twisted irony in that - he's a Halfblood, for Merlin's sake, how could he actually believe in that view?!
It must be written on his face, because Evelynn murmurs "To this day, I don't know if, in your soulless insanity, you believed in it or if you were just humoring the Purebloods for the sake of bloodshed. And then, one of your minions heard a prophecy. One that said someone would come at the end of July, with parents who had defied you three times, and they'd have the power to defeat you. Everyone took it as a baby would be born with that power, rather than someone already grown coming into the country, and I was chosen as the one because we share the same blood-status."
Tom stares at her, expression completely blank as he asks "What happened next?"
"That minion told you of the prophecy, and you came to the same conclusion Dumbledore did. Yes, the same Dumbledore that hates you, the lying hypocrite. But more on him after this bit. On Halloween of 1981, you came to Godric's Hollow, intent on killing me and ending the threat I may have posed to you. But my mother, she sacrificed herself to protect me. You told her to stand aside three times, she refused each time. Because she had a choice, and chose to give her life for me, she created sacrificial wards somehow. I'm not even sure how, nobody was. They held against the Killing Curse, rebounding it and leaving me with this." She pushes her bangs up, revealing the silvery lightning-shaped scar on her forehead. "Your body turned to ash, and what was left of your soul at the time fled…after a piece broke off, due to sheer instability and the shock of suddenly losing a body. That piece attached to me, hiding in the very scar that I'd just been given."
Tom sits on the chair, completely riveted and appalled as Evelynn keeps talking, telling him how Dumbledore looked at her and saw nothing more than a pawn to be manipulated and moved around on his imaginary chessboard, how she was sent to her Muggle Aunt and Uncle. How they hated her very existence, how they were the Muggle version of Purebloods - so obsessed with being normal that it makes him want to be physically sick.
How he'd escaped death, at least temporarily, but at a terrible, damning cost to himself in almost every aspect. He lost his body, his mind, she's very sure he lost a large portion of his magic since she never saw him do Wandless magic like she has now despite how obviously powerful he was back then, and he lost his afterlife as the soul must be whole in order to move on and be reborn.
After a moment of silence, she says "There's so much more to say, Tom, that it'll just be easier to show you instead."
He's pulled into her mind then, and its like watching a full-color movie - Merlin, but seeing her like this…it tells him beyond any doubt that she lived a while before traveling back. There's a softness to her in her memories that's not there now, something moldable and innocent in the first memories as she talks with the snake in the zoo, accidentally vanishes the glass her cousin is pressing on, as she tries and fails to get her Hogwarts letter. Ignorant, moldable, and so painfully naïve that he's torn between shaking her hard enough to maybe shake some sense into her and being horrified on her behalf when she's dumped into the deep end of the Wizarding World and expected to know how to swim.
Something he's sure, after seeing memories of her relatives, that she literally didn't or still doesn't know how to do.
Seeing himself as a parasite on the back of that teacher's head, it makes him want to either scream or be sick - something tells him it'll end up being a combination of the two before this is over. Now he gets why Evelynn kept giving him a way out. Kept asking if he was sure. The sight of him, only a few years older and Evelynn the age she is now, setting the Basilisk on the small girl - smaller than she is now, dammit, small as she was when she arrived - nearly turns his body to ice from sheer terror. And again, when all she had to work with was a sword and her wits, since the school Phoenix did its part and stood guard over the Weasley girl. And learns the version of him as a sixteen-year-old was a Horcrux, half his soul and already slightly insane from the way he spoke alone. Hidden in the background as it was, he could make the instability out - its himself, for Merlin's sake, he can see the signs clear as day.
Watching himself come out of that cauldron, now he understands what Evelynn meant by his entire being, everything he is, ending up twisted and warped by such magics - he looks like he tried a Naga ritual and failed horrendously! Unicorn blood, snake venom, its little wonder he came out looking so inhuman. Still, through it all there's one other constant he can see aside from them being so tied up with one another - Dumbledore, and his bloody manipulations.
Telling Evelynn she has to go back to her 'loving' family for her own good, that her mother's wards will protect her best. Not listening when she begged the old man to let her stay, saying that even Hogwarts wouldn't be completely safe for her as they learned this year.
Setting up challenges three first years could beat - challenges that seemed designed specifically for them, at that.
Letting the rumors about Evelynn run rampant in her second year, as she's Hexed in the halls and ostracized by the school at large for - yes, exactly like she said - talking a snake down from biting a kid that had done nothing to it.
Doing nothing to protect the students from the Basilisk, as if staying in groups was the way to go! And she's very certain he knew the entire time - at least, the fifty years between the incidents - what had actually happened and how to stop it all, even if he couldn't get into the Chamber.
Not telling her anything about the supposed mass-murderer everyone thinks is out for her head.
Letting Dementors on the school grounds, for Merlin's sake! And her reaction to them is terrifying all on its own - a lifetime of horrible memories isn't washed away by two years of Hogwarts, especially when she's had to fight for her life during those two years.
Not taking her out of that damned Tournament she was ostracized yet again and terrorized because of. The list seems endless.
Watching her walk to her death, willingly sacrificing herself so everyone else would have a chance at living - because she was so tired, he could see she didn't want to fight any longer - just about has him breaking and demanding to know how she's still alive. Is that how she came here? Is that when she travelled back?
No, she kills him - something he never thought he'd be glad for, but he was more like a rabid dog than a person at that point and such animals need to be put down for everyone's sake - and goes on with her life. He can see the thoughts that she'll finally get to live her life written all over her face after the battle.
And then he sees a new memory, one of looking at the Daily Prophet and seeing a bloody wanted poster for her, since she'd decided to go to the Muggle World for a time simply to get the thoughts of spellfire and Wizards Apparating out of nowhere at one wrong word off her mind after the war before raising her Godson full-time.
A story claiming she was going Dark, and needed to be killed before it happened. With evidence from Albus I'm-Still-Dead Dumbledore being provided by Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger in the form of memories that were viewed.
Watching her go on the run - hide out in Riddle Manor, ironically, then ruined and abandoned Manors of dead or imprisoned Death Eaters. Watching as she relearns magic, entirely Wandlessly and from the ground up, since something changed and she's now having episodes of accidental magic of an intensity and regularity that's entirely new.
Watching her meet Death the next Samhain, be told she was the Master of Death as of the moment she let that Killing Curse hit her since she'd already mastered the Hallows, and that's how she got to go back rather than some blood that was used in a ritual to restore what was left of him to a body and a sacrifice that had been spit upon and defiled until it was so weak the wards produced from it couldn't stand up to a stiff breeze.
Be told she has the abilities of all three Hallows and more, but needs to learn to access and control them. Be told she's bloody immortal.
And that's when Tom's brain decides it can't handle anymore world-shattering revelations.
AN: Hey, everyone! Hope you like the chapter - a bit of a weird format at the end, I know, but still. Seeing as I'm feeling generous, having straight A's and being halfway through the semester...its a double! Enjoy your chapters, please review!
And, please, don't judge poor Tom too harshly - he's currently not Voldemort, but an actual teenager who bit off way more than he can chew with this. He wanted everything...Evelynn gave him everything. It just turns out he wasn't prepared for everything.