Harry slapped a hand over his scar as another wave of Voldemort's anger swept over him, more potent and painful than he could ever remember. It momentarily stole the breath from his lungs and he doubled over as the new scene opened up before him.

Overgrown weeds were overtaking a crumbling building that Harry took a second to recognise as the Gaunt house from the memories Dumbledore shared with him in the Pensieve. It had always been rundown, but decades of disuse had even led part of roof to cave in and plant growth to scale the walls.

That's not what angered him, though. No, Harry had to remind himself. Not him. Voldemort. The fury came from Voldemort's mind, not Harry's, but at that moment it was difficult to distinguish the two.

Beneath the anger was something else Harry almost didn't recognise. Buried under layers of anger and the fear hid something even more devastating: anguish.

He'd left the ring there to put his past behind him, to close the door on his shameful mother and father and grandfather, just as he'd discarded the names they'd given him. If he locked the past away, then it couldn't harm him anymore.

But now the ring was gone! The last remnant of her was gone. She'd had no possessions beside the single ring he'd given to her and eventually taken back. She was really, finally gone.

Repressed memories pushed to the forefront of his mind, vivid, and beautiful, and awful in their strength. It was like ripping off a bandage he didn't even know was there to reveal a wound that never healed.

Harry saw himself cradling a girl he didn't know in his arms. Blood splatter was everywhere, on his hands, on her face, in her hair, running in rivers from a vicious cut on her stomach.

White hair, white snow, white robes, and skin pale as death, all stained red with her own blood, like paint upon a canvas.

The girl, no older than he was now, blinked up at him with wary, soul-stealing eyes, and wordlessly mouthed, "I'm sorry, Tom."

He saw it over and over and over again, knowing he would not, could not, follow her to the place she was leaving to. He was going into eternity alone, to a future she'd never see.

But sometimes...

Sometimes, it feel like she never existed at all.

He found himself pulled into the vortex of misery, her nearly forgotten voice like a sickness and a cure. He wished it would stop, but couldn't get enough.

I'm sorry, Tom. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm —

"HARRY!"

Harry snapped back into the safety of his own head with a gasp, where he was laying flat on his back, being shaken violently by Hermione.

"Alright, mate?" Ron asked, crouching at his side. "You're crying."

"I'm — what?" Harry swiped at his cheeks, surprised at the moisture there.

"What'd you see?" Ron pressed anxiously. "That was You-Know-Who, right? Did he kill someone? Is it anyone we know?"

Harry, still dazed, could only stare at him blankly. "What? No, he — he didn't kill anyone, at least," he hesitated, thinking of that girl and all of that blood, "I don't think so. But he's not very pleased that the Gaunt Ring is gone."

"Oh." Ron sighed in relief. "Is that all?"

Hermione crossed her arms across her chest and sent Harry a disapproving look. "You need to protect your mind, Harry. You can't keep letting this happen."

Harry, choosing not to address that tired argument, said, "It was... bizarre. Different from what I usually see by far."

His scar still ached, attempting to draw him back into Voldemort's mind, even as he rubbed at it in tight circles. Harry squeezed his eyes shut, trying to dispel the girl's haunting eyes from his mind. The terrified eyes of someone who knew they were seconds from death and embraced it. He prayed he would be that brave in the face of his own demise, hopefully many years from now.

"Are you sure you're okay, Harry?" Hermione asked, a frown clear in her voice.

He didn't know where to begin.

"I... er... think he had a — a girlfriend... or something," he said lamely, not looking at either of them.

As expected, Ron sniggered. "Not that Bellatrix broad, is it? Can't imagine what anyone would see in him, unless having no nose and no hair is their type."

"That's rude, Ronald," Hermione chastised him, before seeming to remember whom she was defending.

"No, it wasn't Bellatrix."

Apparently intrigued about another mystery, one they actually stood a chance of solving while they ran into walls on the last Horcrux, Hermione sank down into a chair and prompted, "What do you remember?"

Harry told them everything, from her weird hair, to her strange eyes, and the fatal wound in her stomach.

"And she kept saying, 'I'm sorry, Tom'," Harry finished, looking from Hermione to Ron and back for their take on the matter.

Hermione stood up and began pacing the tent, tapping her finger against her folded arm as she went. "Well, it must have been a memory from long ago," she reasoned. "She called him by his name, his real name. I don't think any of his followers these days call him that."

Harry felt stupid for not noticing that before.

"Not if they enjoy breathing," supplied Ron.

"What about the surroundings? Did you notice any other people?"

Now that he thought about it, he hadn't .

"I didn't see anyone else. He was too focused on her," Harry said, shaking his head. "It was snowing, though."

"I wonder..." Hermione muttered, biting her lip. "I wonder..."

Ron rolled his eyes at Harry before going for the bait. "Wonder what?"

"It's just that — well, I don't know. I'm probably wrong. I wonder if my copy of..."

Her words faded beneath the sound of her rifling through her magically expanded bag, until, finally, she pulled out a book.

"Oh no!" Ron groaned. "What are you carrying around that garbage for?"

Hermione sent him a withering look as she cracked open Bathilda Bagshot's copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, courtesy of Rita Skeeter. At last, she seemed to find the page she was looking for and waved Harry over. Ron followed.

"Did she look like that?" Hermione asked, pointing to the picture of a young, handsome Dumbledore and his equally handsome friend.

"Uh, Hermione, that's a man," Ron cut in, as though perhaps she hadn't realised.

"Funny enough, Ronald, I noticed. Did the girl in your vision look like him, though?"

Harry frowned, looking closer. "You're right, actually. She did kind of look like that, like maybe they're related. How did you possibly know?"

For once, the knowledge that she was right didn't seem to please Hermione.

"I'd read in Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century and Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts about what Grindelwald looked like, and although this picture doesn't have colour, I thought it was worth a shot, based on your description. After all, silver hair and heterochromia isn't very common."

Ron wrinkled his nose. "Hetero— what?"

"Heterochromia, Ron. Keep up. It's just what you call it when a person has more than one pigment in their eyes."

"I'll take your word for it."

"But how does she relate to Grindelwald?" interjected Harry. "He didn't have any children, did he?"

"He didn't," Hermione confirmed, slamming the book shut and stuffing it back into her bag. "But Notable Magical Names of Our Time claimed he had a squib sister. Perhaps the girl was Grindelwald's niece."

Ron waved it off. "Who cares about him. I'm more interested in You-Know-Who. Weird that Dumbledore wouldn't have told you about something like that."

"Not really," Harry muttered, thinking bitterly of the majority of what he'd learned from Rita Skeeter's most recent best seller. "He didn't tell me a lot of things."

"Well," Hermione hesitated, "if it didn't have strictly to do with the Horcruxes, why would he mention it? It doesn't really help at all, does it?"

Harry couldn't quite bring himself to agree. Hermione hadn't felt the raw emotion that he, Harry, had succumbed to. She hadn't felt his hands — Voldemort's hands — trembling as he held her while she she took her last breath.

"He loved her."

Harry knew it was true, as impossible as it seemed, the moment he said it. For all Voldemort claimed to despise love, for all he claimed it was fiction, he'd still loved someone, only to watch her die.

"You don't think he was the one to do her in, do you?" Ron mused, leaning back into his cot. "It wouldn't exactly be out of character for him."

"No," Harry said quickly, before backtracking. "At least, not on purpose. Like I said, he didn't want her to die."

That was the last thing he wanted.

"Very in character for You-Know-Who to love the niece of the second most evil wizard in the last century. With genetics like that, I'm sure she was delightful," said Ron in a way that heavily implied how delightful he really thought she must have been.

"Don't be a prat, Ron," Harry replied, not sure why he was being so defensive over a person he'd never truly met.

He didn't know her, but the memory of the brutal way she'd bled to death made him think of Ginny. He thought of how he'd react if she passed away in his arms after being killed before her time, and felt a jolt of something not unlike the fear, anger, and anguish he'd felt drowning Voldemort minutes earlier.

He'd do anything to avenge her.

Not just Ginny. Hermione, Ron, Luna, Neville, or any of his friends. He'd want the person responsible to pay. The next thought came unbidden, from a part of Harry's consciousness he didn't even know existed — what if he didn't know who to blame? Who would he make pay then? Nobody? Everybody?

After stewing in his thoughts for a time, he finally voiced them to the silent tent, feeling foolish as he did so. "I wonder if her death was a catalyst. Maybe, if she hadn't died, things would be different."

Hermione turned thoughtful. "Could one death really do that to a person? I mean, Harry, you lost Sirius and you're not, well..."

"A homicidal maniac?" Ron offered helpfully.

Though Ron took it as a joke, her statement pulled Harry up short. He thought of the moments in Dumbledore's office immediately following Sirius's death, how he'd wanted to destroy everything in the room, how he'd wanted to make Dumbledore hurt, even though it really wasn't the professor's fault. It was almost exactly how Voldemort had felt in that memory. While Dumbledore talked Harry off that particular ledge —

Tom Riddle jumped, and Voldemort never looked back.

A/N

By popular demand! One of my readers gave me the idea for the golden trio finding out and I felt stupid for not thinking of it myself. Part two of the epilogue (my original epilogue) will be uploaded later this week as I avoid preparing for finals. Be warned: Part 2 takes place 16 years BEFORE part 1. Chronologically, it doesn't make sense, but my decision making isn't based on logic lol.