Chapter 9: Burn

"You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;

how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?"

Friedrich Nietzsche

~Harry~

Harry wasn't quite sure how this happened but it was getting a little ridiculous. What had happened to their peaceful summer working the elite crowd for funds? Her eyes cast over the gathering crowd of people in their cabin on the Hogwarts express and briefly thought of escaping through the window. Tom must have known what she was thinking because his hand tightened around her wrist effectively keeping her from enacting her escape plans.

Sighing she sat back into the seat and looked at the gathering crowd of Slytherins with some well hidden distaste. Abraxas Malfoy looked like a manlier looking Lucius Malfoy, which made sense as this should be Lucius' father if her calculations were right. Abraxas was a third year, a year above them, and had taken Tom's statement of proving himself 'worthy of acknowledgement' as a personal challenge. Unfortunately, Tom was aware enough from his own research into the pure bloodlines that he knew who Malfoy was and how useful the boy could become to them in the future. So Tom tolerated the blond and was moderately charming to him…resulting in the boy being almost too smug to deal with at times.

A nervous looking figure of a girl with pale skin and a slightly hooked nose stood huddled in the back of the crowd catching Harry's attention. Something about the girl was familiar, something that tickled at her faded memories of the time from before. She was a scrawny looking thing, pale and small. An older Slytherin boy stood at her elbow holding her in place with a stern unforgiving look of an older sibling. The Slytherin robes and the nervous though prim way she held herself caught her attention. She was in their year, but for the life of her Harry could not remember her name.

Harry turned her attention to the girl's older brother looking for some clue to remind her why this girl looked so familiar. The boy had a scowl on his face, a hooked nose and shiny black hair that looked like it needed a good wash. His face was sharp, his lips were thin, his stance was slightly menacing in that he seemed to loom over the smaller girl in his grip like a large bat over his prey. Suddenly Harry turned her eyes to the girl again and realized whom the girl must have been, Eileen Prince, mother to Severus Snape.

The boy at her elbow must be her brother and though he did not resemble Snape all that much in the face (besides the nose and hair of course) the attitude was eerily similar. Harry turned her attention to the girl again, a pure blood witch, obviously and so painfully timid. She held herself prim and proper though there was a skittish way about her that Harry recognized the signs of someone who was well trained to be submissive. Eileen had the look of a girl unused to having anyone value her opinion and conditioned to follow orders.

It made Harry feel something akin to sadness mixed with a strange fellowship with this downtrodden girl. Harry remembered well her hard lives, of how it feels to be so thoroughly beaten that one could hardly muster the courage to even think of standing up. Briefly Harry wondered where the girl had found the courage in another life to marry a man so horribly outside her circle. The Princes were very obviously pure blood or they would not have been so easily accepted by the Slytherins. However, judging from the state of their clothes their family was obviously in decline as they were not as well dressed as their surrounding cohorts.

She knew Snape was a half blood and that his father had been a muggle. It was how the man would have come to know her first mother, Lily Evans, before they would come to Hogwarts. However, Harry remembered little else about the history of her most hated and later respected Professor. Harry vaguely recalled that Snape's childhood had been unpleasant but for the life of her, she could not recall the details. However, Harry had not forgotten how much that man had come to influence her life as Harry Potter and she resolved to place Eileen under her protection.

Harry tried to silence the voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like Hermione that said she was just trying to protect the girl because her heroic traits were not as deadened as she would like to believe. It reminded her eerily of how she had felt when she had met Hagrid. Now that had come as a mighty shock seeing the great lug again and so soon. Harry had been sure she wouldn't have seen him for another two years since she remembered quite clearly that Hagrid had been in his third year when Riddle had framed him.

However, in her curious investigation of the boy Harry had found out some disturbing things that she hadn't quite known how to deal with in the aftermath. First off, Hagrid was an illiterate when she had found him…and that was being kind. For the children born and raised within a magical society…where there is no organized education until one reaches eleven…well it falls to the parents to teach the basics. It was either the parents or the tutors the parents hired if they were well off enough to afford such luxuries. Hagrid's father was not a bright man…and his mother was a giantess that had abandoned her half blood child as soon as she had been able. Not that said giantess had any education to speak of so it mattered very little to Hagrid's education that she had left.

His father was not well educated, one of those low brow unfortunately inbred purebloods that no one in their right minds would breed with…even below his first life's Crab and Goyle. So Hagrid's father was unsuited to teaching Hagrid how to read…or write…or do basic math…any education at all really. His father was a lovely man, the sweetest you would ever meet but he was dull and not much to look at. So when Hagrid was accepted to Hogwarts it was the first time the lug had encountered any form of education. Needless to say the boy was ill-prepared for doing anything and spent most of his time utterly confused. That was until Harry had taken him on as a 'pet' (as Tom liked to refer to Hagrid as) and gave him the tutoring he desperately needed to even begin to understand his classes/homework.

It had been an intense year for the big guy and he had barely…by the skin of his teeth managed to move on to the next grade level. Harry was sure that in another life Hagrid had been left to flounder by pretty much everyone. As a half giant Hagrid was looked on with a lot of disgust and aversion since who could help but think of his father's low act of making a baby with a low intelligence giantess when looking at the poor boy? He made people uncomfortable so they avoided thinking of him…helping him…or generally acknowledging him. This left Hagrid with no help in catching up with his already more advanced peers.

In another life, Hagrid had taken three years to barely manage to get to first year level and by the time he should have been in sixth year he was barely in third. However, in this life Harry had seen to Hagrid's education…had taught him to read and write through long torturous hours of tutoring. So Hagrid had passed his first year…barely and at the utter bottom in ranking…but he had passed. Harry wasn't too sure what they would mean for the boy, but she was sure his lot in life had only improved. If he was still framed by Tom at some point for some crime at least he would be a little further on in his education than he had been before.

Someone laughed and brought Harry back to the present. The Prince girl was still lingering at the back firmly under the thumb of her brother. Harry wasn't quite sure what she should do about that…pure bloods were very strange when it came to women. A woman's role in this society was very…blurred…while not as behind as the muggles, women in this world they were far from the equals Harry had once hoped. It had taken careful research and a few probing questions to few pure blood girls (that had been tightly controlled by magic to keep them from lying) before Harry had begun to get the whole awful picture.

Women in this magical world had a place…as a home maker and child bearer. Yes, a few could manage to get to higher positions in a career…if they were willing to debase themselves to do so. They could be teachers…if they weren't mothers…they could have careers…if they never married…they could hold high positions…if they were willing to pay for it on their backs to get into a place where they could qualify for the job. They could not inherit an estate…funds listed as a dowry yes…land and title…hell no. Marriage to a well off family was one of the only routes to success and only if they could bear an heir within a suitable timeframe.

They were encouraged to educate themselves solely on the fact that a woman of reasonable intelligence was more likely to have smarter children. (Plus she would have the time and education to tutor the children if the family she married into was too poor to afford tutors.) It was a bleak and disheartening picture. Who would want to be a woman when in being a woman your life was so limited? Harry was quite content with people believing her a boy…hopefully she could keep the ruse up long enough to matter. Tom squeezed her wrist and she acknowledged that with him at her side it would be very unlikely that she would share in the same fate as her peers. A low comfort considering she didn't usually live this long.

~Tom~

Harry was doing it again…thinking of something depressing and probably vaguely suicidal in nature. Tom wasn't sure how to go about comforting someone, it was not an inborn talent he had nor was he entirely comfortable showing open affection. However, claiming of ownership seemed to help her so Tom squeezed her wrist letting Harry know that she belonged to him at his side. Tom often wondered at the turn his life had taken, not because he doubted for a minute that anything other than total supremacy was in his future…Harry or no Harry. No, the thing Tom wondered at was what his life would look like now if Harry wasn't his…his equal…his partner in all things.

Tom was sure he could have enjoyed being at the top alone but now Tom couldn't see his life without her. All the ones that bowed and scraped at his feet were beneath him. They would not challenge him like Harry would, would not push him to greater heights and that he supposed was the difference. Tom was sure he was a lot further along in his path of conquest just by having Harry at his side. She made sure he had a stone in which to sharpen his blade; she was the one that fanned the flames and gave him new valuable perspectives.

This was why he was determined to make her tell him what was weighing on her mind. So it was a great relief to be in their dorm room at the end of the night and Tom sat Harry down on their bed and simply said, "Tell me." There was such an understanding between them that he had no need to say anything else to get his meaning across. Harry's face was a play of emotion, before finally it settled on resolved.

"If someone could tell you how you would die, what your failures and triumphs would be in your life…would you want to know?" Harry asked.

A deep chill settled in the pit of his stomach at the thought of death but his voice was firm when he replied, "Of course, tell me everything."

Harry stared at him with this look in her eye that Tom had never seen before, it aged her, it was cold and it shot right through him, "Once I tell you there is no going back, what I tell you will no longer matter because you'll know it…once you know everything there will be no peace for you, for us, once you know…once you see you can't unsee. Is this what you want?"

Fear stuttered in his heart, a fear that had dimmed to almost nonexistence when Harry had entered his life, it made his entire being cold with the certainty that what Harry was about to tell him would change his entire life. Tom smirked, "Tell me."

Harry nodded, "I'll begin with my first life, and it's the beginning of my story and the end of yours. I'll tell you it all but don't stop me…once I get started it will be too easy to stop to be distracted by questions…wait until I reach the end of my tale and then ask."

Tom pulled his chair out from their desk and sat on it eyes intent on her and nodded his head in agreement.

"My story begins before I was born, there was a prophecy, it said I had the power to defeat you the Dark Lord Voldemort," Harry raised her hand and his name was before her in flames then the letters rearranged themselves to spell out I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. "You heard this prophecy from one of your followers and decided to act on it…in this moment your condemned us both to fate for to act on Prophecy is to make it true. You came for me on Halloween, you murdered my parents and then you turned your wand onto me. But something happened and your killing curse turned back onto you. Your body turned to ash and your spirit fled."

"You had done everything in your power to escape death but…it weakened you. So even though you did not die that night…you were not alive in any real sense for a long time after that. I was just a baby but Dumbledore saw a pawn in the game he loves to play. I was heralded as the Boy Who Lived and sent to live with my muggle relatives. It was not a happy childhood, but our story does not begin again until my eleventh birthday."

Harry stopped for a moment and looked at him then nodded, "There is so much to tell you, so much to say that perhaps it would simply be better to just show you instead." Then Tom felt her mind reach for his in a way he had never felt before it was so open and so beautiful. He let her pull him into her mind and it was as if he was watching a movie. He saw her, as a boy…Tom would know those eyes anywhere…and watched her try and fail to get her letter. Tom watched with horror as she was unleashed into the wizarding world, ignorant, moldable, and so painfully naive.

"You see it don't you?" Harry asked as Tom watched her memories unfold; he inhaled sharply at the horror of seeing himself as parasite on the back of someone's head.

Tom nodded, "its Dumbledore isn't it? Manipulating everything…and you?"

Harry didn't say anything for a very long while and Tom was distracted by watching this horror show…this atrocious life that was laid out before him. How could he have been so stupid? Something was terribly wrong with him and he just didn't understand what it was. "It was Dumbledore…he is an insidious evil in this world…because he has all the appearance of being this being of light and goodness. You could tell the world of all his wrongs and still…some would not believe because he is supposed to be so good." Harry pointed.

Tom choked when he saw himself only a few years older step into view and watched with terror as he unleashed a fucking huge basilisk on his Harry. "It's called a Horcoux, you began making them in your fifth year. It's a vile thing, you ripped apart your soul and placed the pieces in items, this act was your greatest failure and most tragic triumph. You ripped yourself apart and thus ensured that as long as one of these items remained you could not die. However, in doing this you damned yourself because to rip apart your soul…Tom…to rip apart your soul is to rip apart your very being, your mind, your brilliant mind, was ripped apart as well and the more to tore yourself apart the less you became."

He felt like he was going to throw up, or faint watching Harry's memories unfold as she spoke in quiet whispers beside him. Telling him the things he could not see in her memories. When he watched the creature he had become leave that cauldron…Tom really thought he might lose his mind. He felt like everything he had ever believed about himself was breaking apart, the revulsion he felt could not be described in words. He felt filthy in his skin, vile, wrong…and it wasn't even over yet…it had barely started. He regretted asking, knowing, even as he forced himself to watch. Nothing could have prepared him for this and it was so very far from over.

Tom felt Harry hold his hand…or since this was her mind he felt something like that sensation. He watched in frozen terror as Harry's first life unfolded before him, watched her murder pieces of his very soul. Tom watched Dumbledore's artful manipulation of her with a chilling dread that was hard to describe because this man was the devil. This was the man that those nuns whispered about, satan given form, his silver tongue twisting everything around. It's not that Tom wasn't revolted by himself because he very much saw that he was the villain in this tale. It just made it so much harder to watch as this man who would forever be remembered as an angel of light do this.

As he watched Harry come to the realization that they were bound by soul together and accept that she had to die…Tom trembled. "I couldn't see it then, I was so blind…and even afterwards I couldn't see all of the threads he had weaved until much later. Not until quite a few lives of mine actually." Tom turned to her in horror. "Yes, I was sculpted, raised like a lamb for the slaughter, I was happy to go to die…I could have forgiven him all this but he condemned me in a way that you never could Tom. For that I will never, and can never forgive him."

Tom kept silent and watched Harry die…then they were in an eerie place between true death and life and Harry spoke again. "What I couldn't have known then was that Dumbledore had ensured the Hallows were mine…death gave them as a curse…it was NEVER A GIFT…. Because of his manipulations I mastered them," She scoffed, "But I thought it didn't mean anything I thought it was nothing… I threw the items away but they never really left…that taint was upon my very soul. I lived this life relatively happy…I was a broken thing after you Tom…I did my best to pretend…to be who they wanted because the lie was all I had. I married who they expected, I had children, I had the job they expected, I was everything Dumbledore ever wanted me to be…a broken mirror of himself."

"Then I died again," Harry said as the images sped up yet somehow he saw them and understood…though it gave him a blinding headache. "The first few times I was reborn…I thought I was insane…I thought it wouldn't go on…but it did. The terror never ended Tom…it just got so much worse." Tom flinched as he saw her lives play out…some so horribly short and some Tom had wished was shorter. It was…there are no words to describe the torture…because there was no illusion of peace.

"Can you see now Tom…do you see how there is something so much worse than death…to always live is a curse…to always remember…this is what it means to look into the abyss and have the abyss look back." Harry whispered as her lives were laid bare before him, every torture, every vile act committed onto her, everything…it was there. Then the images slowed and Harry showed him something that took his terror to new unimagined heights…and burned his very being.

"I don't know how many times I was reborn in this future, how many times I lived this…I try not to think about it…but you asked for everything so here it is. The muggles are so easy to overlook when we can manipulate the very fabric of existence and they can barely talk to one another. But they are the biggest threat to this world. I don't know when…I was never quite sure how…but they destroy the world Tom. The bomb, pollute and consume until there is nothing left of earth…until all I kept being reborn as was shriveled starved people. You don't know hunger until you have starved to death more times than you have lived."

Tom looked at the world that was left, this wasteland, and his entire being burned as it drowned in sheer unadulterated fucking panic. There was nothing left…only death and the one being who could not die but could not live. "I know what you're thinking Tom…" Harry smiled at him or at least the projection of her did, "we can't stop this…I've tried…there are just too many of them. Even when I kill the original creator of their greatest bomb it barely slows them down…and I learned the hard way that time is flexible and no matter how much you change some things never do. This is our end…the end of everything on earth. This is the last extinction event and it's already too late to stop this. The muggles are halfway there already."

Tom watched the rest of her lives numb…no more room for horror. He had asked her for everything and she had given him it. When this life started to play before his eyes Tom knew it was nearing the end. Harry's mind left his and left a blindingly throbbing headache. He blacked out shortly after that.

The next morning Tom was grateful that it was the weekend. He spent all of Saturday staring at Harry nearly comatose and he didn't move at all. When Sunday came Harry finally spoke again, "If you want to kill me you can…I don't think we would cross paths again…and if we did I don't think you would know me."

The words ignited something inside of him and Tom was on top of her before either of them knew what was happening. His hands were around her throat and Harry's eyes were resigned. Yet Tom didn't apply much pressure, "You are to never say anything like that again, Harry, You are mine, you will never leave my side for the rest of eternity." Harry looked at him with wide questioning eyes. "We will have eternity you and I, immortality will be OURS and once we have figured out how to ensure our bodies never die…we will work on how to bind our souls together once more. You will never be parted from me."

Harry's voice was strained and hoarse as she whispered, "and after that? What will we do when the earth crumbles around us Tom? When we starve to death and do not die? What then?" It was in this moment Tom realized that as terrified as he was about all that he had seen…he had not lived it. He had her knowledge now in his head, he knew everything she did but he had not experienced it. As horrible as it was to know, he had not lived through it and he was not broken by it in the same way that Harry was broken. She was very broken; she had such a profoundly lonely existence before this moment that what others might see as a threat. And he meant it as a threat, he would chain her to him if he had to tear her apart to do it but all Harry felt was hope.

It was a daunting thing.

"Once we are as gods…you and I…then we will fucking make our own world! Fuck everything and everyone else…you are mine…that is all you need to know." Tom said and then he crushed his mouth against hers. It wasn't a kiss, it was too brutal for that…but Harry fell into it anyways. Their magic twined against each other, fire and water, and Harry let it all go. Tom knew all she did now…she had given him all of her knowledge of magic…of everything. They were as equal as they could be at this moment and yet Harry surrendered. She was just so tired, so exhausted, she wanted Tom to control everything to control her. As Tom dominated her mouth she gave him her complete submission.

What the future would become now…Harry didn't know. Tom would decide that and she was ok with it.

Let it burn.

Let it all burn.

When Tom pulled back they both laughed. It was a hauntingly twisted laughter.

A.N.: So I am back! This is coming out a lot later than I wanted but…fuck life man. A few months back I got viral meningitis and ended up in the hospital ICU for 12 days. I honestly thought I was going to die for a bit there. Then I somehow pulled through, I looked death in the eye and said not today. Fuck. Then I was at home with nurses and physical therapy and for a while my brain was really fucked, and I lost my left eye for a while there. It was all so fucked up. Then somehow in the middle of all that I managed to get married and though my mom and my husband had to prop me up for some of it I managed. But fuck man…to be honest I'm still not 100% but I want to write again. I miss writing. But because I don't take very good notes and my brain is all fucked up from a lot of things (spinal tap and meningitis fucked with the fluid in my head hard) this means my stories stalled. I couldn't for the life of me remember where this story was going…I was thinking of giving it up for a second…but then I saw all the reviews. And you guys gave me hope and the courage to try. So here it is. The next installment will come…don't know when but it will. Please be patient with me guys. Thank you for reviewing and supporting me.