One thing Harry found himself doing over the summer was elevating the idea of his soulmate to a position of wonder. Some distant statue on the horizon, some boy, some person that had been there from day one. Enigmatic. A misty nebula that whirled with brilliant light, a boy like a dragon who could simmer like a furnace yet sear like a wild flame. And one day he'd swoop into Harry's life and whisk him away.

The other thing he stewed over during the summer was the fact that he was eleven and he had murdered Quirrell. He'd also realised, with a sinking feeling, that Quirrell's soulmate must've died too. Or be well on the way to dying.

Dudley was sent to some dastardly summer camp. Harry was shipped off with him, simply because the other two Dursley's had enough of his presence, and while the entire ordeal was brain-numbing, there had been counsellors on site - and although they'd never get the full truth from Harry, they did actually help. With the fact that Harry had murdered someone. Although, arguably, he'd also murdered Voldemort when he was an infant.

His friends did not send him letters. He practically pulled his hair out when he returned home, pacing his carpet into oblivion, watching a strange small creature destroy his house, and eventually – well – getting busted out of his prison in a flying car. (His friends hadn't abandoned him after all. It was quite heartwarming, really. But if anyone ever said he had shed a manly tear or two, he'd deny it vehemently.)

The school year started with quite the bang, Harry supposed, squirming his way out a car wreck. Just what had the little creature – Dobby – been doing?

From the very first DADA lesson, Harry realised that Lockhart was utterly incompetent. It wasn't that girls swooned over him – they had their soulmates to swoon over – it was just that people were inclined to believe and listen to charming people, so too few people called Lockhart out on his fluttery facade. All the while the school was going tits up as more and more petrified children were found in the corridors, and no one, not even Malfoy, could piece together who exactly was the 'heir of Slytherin.'

But nothing trumped the one time Harry had been in Charms, glanced at his hand, and seen his own name. "Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived…" His soulmate was thinking about him! He flung himself at the dormant bond in his mind, but as usual, it did not react. Later he'd disappointingly realised that his soulmate must've just seen his name somewhere. Or seen his famous face. Harry really despised the fame.

(He asked Hermione and Ron, later in Potions when Snape briefly disappeared into his storage room the room, why soulmates couldn't just think their own names to each other. Both of them gave him this answer about how it was utterly unromantic.

"But what if you can't find them?" he'd asked, stirring his potion.

"Mate... remember how everyone everywhere says you'll always find your match? They say it 'cause it's true. Soulmates don't ever like not find each other." Ron said, confusingly. "Like magnets."

"Actually, not always." Hermione corrected. She didn't even look up from her cauldron. "You could die before you meet them."

Harry blinked in slight surprise, and after glancing around to make sure no one overhead, said in hushed tones: "Wow. That," he pointed his ladle at her in mock accusation, "was almost a Malfoy answer. A bit more of the drawl and then you're actually one of their family."

"It's only been a year." Ron added solemnly at his side, shaking his head. "She's going to start growing white hair any second now."

Hermione looked up at them, one eyebrow raised and decidedly unamused. Then from the other side of the room, where Malfoy was standing next to Parkinson and must've seen something incriminating on his hand, a newt's tail came sailing to bounce against Ron's head.

(Malfoy had bought them matching pairs of enchanted gloves that allowed only the wearer to see through them. They were extremely pricey, but hey. The Malfoy fortune wasn't just for show.)

Harry would've laughed if the thing hadn't plopped into their cauldron, turned the entire thing a sickly green, and lost them a good fifteen housepoints.)

Throughout the year, Harry also noticed was that there was something rather strange happening with his soulmate's marks. He'd see one word curl its way across the very center of his right hand, spelling something like, "Cold…" while another word was being written at the very same time. The second writing hand seemed to be far more lucid. It'd swirl things like, "I'll spin webs and webs for you…" The words alarmed him from time to time. His soulmate seemed to be plotting something. "Tiring charades..."

Of course he'd gone straight to Hermione and then they attacked the library, researching cases where a soulmate transmitted two completely different thoughts at a time. They hadn't found anything, even vaguely similar. Sometimes Harry was beginning to wonder if the huge Hogwarts library wasn't enough.

But he still regarded his soulmate with the same attitude that most other people did. The one with the pedestal and the floodlights, with the huge red carpet and trumpets that announced true, beautiful, love, and the best person that would ever appear in his life.

(He'd asked Hermione again, redundantly, even though he'd scoured through oh-so-many books, if everybody was paired with just one other person, fated to be, and he said, "Isn't that kind of weird? I mean, it's like… too predetermined. You don't get a choice at all." It was strange, really, how the entire Wizarding World lay down to accept eon-old tradition. It wasn't that Harry had any objections. It was just that with the way the Wizarding World was always facing inner turmoil, he was surprised that they had actually agreed on something.

"Well," Hermione said slowly, "although they never outright reject each other, there are things such as platonic soulmates, too, if both of them aren't romantic people." Harry had read about them, but they weren't very common. "A soulmate is just the person carrying the other half of your soul. They'll be the most compatible for you in everything you do because in their core, you'll be the same. It technically doesn't really matter if you don't physically find them – though most people want to – as long as they're alive. But if your soulmate is killed, half your soul is gone and you go insane almost immediately. So you don't have to get in a relationship. But most people do, because no one else will ever fit them as well."

"Hey," Harry suddenly realised, blinking. "Snape lives apart from his soulmate, doesn't he?"

Ron, slumped in a chair nearby, the three of them gathered around a table in the library, groaned and said, "Blimey, can we not talk about the bat and his soulmate? That's weird, Harry. That's really weird."

"It's a bit more complicated than that." Hermione explained. "There's a whole spectrum of how close you choose to be with your soulmate. Most people are near the top, maybe ninety nine out of a hundred people, where they're very close and in a romantic relationship with. Some others choose to be more distant, like Snape. Obviously if he ever needs someone to be with as a friend or anything else, he'd go to her, but because one fundamental trait of their soul is that they're very solitary people, they're not actually in a relationship." She paused. "I think. I mean, Snape could always actually be dating on the side, but I don't think any of us want to think about that."

"Yeah." Ron agreed. "We don't. Really."

"So have people have dated outside of their soulmates?" Harry asked. The thing was, when Harry researched soulmates, he tended to look at the logistics. About how strong the bond was supposed to be, how to fix it, and things like that. He didn't tend to look up this sort of information on the romance portion of it.

Hermione and Ron both nodded. "But it's not recommended." she said. "Those relationships tend to fall apart because your soulmate is the one person who will absolutely, absolutely get you. That's what the match is about. You might not see at ends together right now," Harry had the sneaking suspicion that she was thinking about a certain blonde and the way he still scoffed sometimes at Hufflepuffs, "but at the end of the day you'll reconcile, because you're both–" she flailed a little, looking for the right words.

"–made of the same stuff." Ron finished for her. "No one questions it anymore, because it's been like thousands of years and every time whoever's writing on your hands has always been perfect after you get to know them."

"Another thing that you already know about is the strength of the bond," Hermione said with a glance at Harry's hands. "It really affects how close the soulmates choose to be. Most people are at this moderate level where they can feel strong emotions over their bond, and if they concentrate, the current mood. While the thoughts they see depend on their control over Mind Arts." She looked slightly abashed as she said, "Things like Legilimency and Occlumency are actually illegal, so don't go learning them. But anyways: the thoughts that are the clearest are normally thoughts that are directed at the soulmate. Otherwise it'll just be mundane things, maybe two random thoughts picked out of your mind every hour. Out of context, it is actually really difficult to piece together who your soulmate is. So–"

Ron cut her off, said with a grin,"–So good luck finding them, eh?")

Currently up to his ankles in sloshing water, Harry stood staring at an irritating book jammed halfway down a toilet while Myrtle complained in his ear. The things he got into. Fixing girl's toilets? He was doomed to become a janitor. Someone in distress would lure him into the bathroom and then trap him into a life of toilet-cleaning servitude.

The sad prospect of his future was pushed aside as Harry reached out and touched the book, an electric shock leaping through his body. His senses felt clear for the first time in his life, his mind raced, and it was like a window had opened in his mind. He reeled in the sudden flood. Without hesitation, the thing had gone into his bag, and although he'd tripped on a bloody dwarf and it'd gone flying alongside a jar of ink at one point, he'd snatched it back and continued on his merry way.

"Who is he? Who is he?" one of his hands read.

"Harry," Hermione later said worriedly, "Draco told me that that diary's something his father had been keeping. It might be cursed… You really should get rid of it."

"I will, Hermione," he said distractedly, not at all planning to toss it away. He felt a strange sort of need to keep the plain diary, besides the obvious 'it made him feel alive' thing. One part of his soulmate also seemed to be absolutely ecstatic: "He was there, who was he?" The other, well, simply: "Silence…"

It sat forgotten in his dorm for a hours, but when he finally flipped open the battered thing, fingertips feeling alight, and saw the name–

The name–

T. M. Riddle.

That T. He would recognise it anywhere, oh gods, this was his soulmate's diary. Harry had finally found a gaping huge clue about him, about the– the boy he'd been looking for.

And he'd also spilt an entire jar of ink onto it earlier today when he had fallen.

Panicking slightly, Harry hurriedly flipped through the first few pages and found that they were, thankfully, blank. Maybe not thankfully. Harry looked over the rest of the book, wondering why it hadn't been touched by the ink and why it was, of all things, empty. He hadn't imagined T was the type to waste a good journal like this.

Well, if it was his soulmate's unused diary, who would be a better owner? On a whim and in the safety of his dorm, he brought a quill to the page and wrote: My name is Harry Potter.

Startled, he watched as the ink faded (was the diary enchanted?) to be replaced with instead with: Hello, Harry Potter. How did you come by–

The writing stopped dead still.

Is that you? The words were slightly shakily. Harry Potter, are you… mine?

The only thing Harry noticed was how the writing was so achingly familiar. He wanted to wrap it up in a little glass case, frame it, and make sure nothing ever tarnished it. With his heart in his throat, he wrote only one word: Yeah.

I'm Tom Riddle – I'm in the diary. The words were written quickly and hurriedly, almost stumbling over each swirling stroke. Tom Marvolo Riddle. I can't believe it's you, of all people, it's really you…

Harry gaped to himself, hands stilling over the quill as he the words registered in his mind. This was his soulmate? The diary seemed to pull at him in a way nothing ever had, not like the one time Harry had been so close to swallowing Amorentia – which had been a sudden blow to the senses – but rather like a gently extended hand that curled around his. It was real; it really was. His soulmate was in this diary. His heart bloomed at the thought. His soulmate. Similar words of disbelief were repeating themselves all over his palm, almost obscuring his hand's first writer. Tom… he wrote, why're you in there?

One way to assure I'd keep living and waiting, but you're here now. Salazar– Harry, you're here, you're really here.

He soulmate seemed a little crazed, but Harry really didn't care at all in that precise moment. …You don't need to wait anymore. It's okay, Tom. I'm not going anywhere. How long have you been trapped in here? When can you get out?

Harry would have his soulmate. The thought felt foreign, but he could sense a grin sneaking onto his lips. His fingers still thrummed with the urge to keep the diary close and never quite let it go.

Longer than anybody ever should. Don't worry, Harry. I'll be out of here in no time... With you. Could you believe it?

I can't believe it either.

There was a pause. You might've noticed that my soul's been split. Tom wrote hesitantly.

So that was why. Harry had never heard of splitting souls before; he couldn't begin to imagine what would've driven Tom to those lengths. He couldn't even imagine why anyone would want to do that! It sounded painful. Why did you have to split your soul? 'Have to', because Harry didn't think someone would willingly go through that.

Another pause.

Again, the words were written slowly. I used to visit a cliff by the seaside. Harry could see it, a boy with tousled hair shifting from foot to foot as he listened to the crashing of the waves below, salty tang heavy in the air. Where the water would come as a shock. A blinding, jarring, shock that made the other children squeal. But the cold was really of no consequence. Because wallow long enough, hold your breath and dive until you cut your hands on the rocks below,

and it won't be so cold anymore.

–––

The next day the diary had vanished from his dorm and Harry had panicked until he glanced down ("...be with him soon… one last game...")

Harry hadn't divulged all the details about his soulmate to his friends. He'd tell them once he got more answers about why Tom had been in the toilets. And he'd also try drag some answers out of Malfoy later, although he doubted Malfoy would know why his father had owned the diary. He tried going to the library discreetly, looking through old records for a boy named Tom Riddle. In the last ten some years, though, he didn't see anything about a boy called Tom who had split his soul because Harry had been born too late.

So when Ron came back from detention (that he'd earned by flinging potion ingredients back at Malfoy in class, accidentally tossing ginger into Malfoy's cauldron and blowing up the entire room) mentioning a certain name and Harry heard the year that Tom had been awarded–

No one had ever lived past the age of thirteen without seeing words appear on their hands, because they were half a soul. The other half of them didn't exist. They all chose to end it before then. Tom was bloody insane. Also… Tom was that old?

Well either way, he threw himself at that sleeping dragon in his mind and repeated, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," even though it was ridiculous, really. How could he control when he was born?

Then he had no more time to worry about Tom because Hermione had been petrified.

Now Harry was hearing voices in the walls, Ginny had just disappeared alongside an ominous message, Tom hadn't returned yet, Dumbledore had been left the school, and Hermione was lying frozen in the Hospital Wing with a note clutched in her hands. It was all going down the highway of disaster and straight to hell. Malfoy was privately tearing himself apart, of course, but Harry felt a jolt when he realised what she'd meant by the pipes.

One wand mishap, an Obliviated Lockhart and a cave-in later, Harry was alone in the darkness. His breathing was too loud and he heard a drip, drip, dripping. "Ginny?" He called, fearing for the fire-haired girl. What if the basilisk had already got to her? "Ginny?"

He emerged into a high stone chamber fitted with snake statues and felt a chill run down his spine. But down the very end, a dash of red hair caught his eye. "Ginny!" He called, breaking into a run. "Are you–" There was another figure sitting by the girl. An ethereal boy who seemed to flicker, with dark hair and darker eyes and he was sitting right by a black diary on the floor. Harry's words caught in his throat and he nearly stumbled over his two feet. "Tom?"

(At least Tom wasn't actually seventy years old, right?) But his world shuddered to a halt because there was the boy, the puzzle piece, that would match into his life.

"Hello, Harry." Tom replied softly, his eyes already cataloguing his soulmate's every detail. As for Harry– if he hadn't already in love, he was now. His soul sung for the sitting boy. From his green Slytherin tie to his sharp, grey eyes to his carefully swept hair, his effortless poise and his long graceful fingers that once wrote such gorgeous words. Harry wanted to sink into those arms, just like the Mirror of Erised had shown him. But his awe held him still.

Tom seemed to be equally entranced. "It seems that my soulmate was real, after all." Tom murmured, glancing down at pale hands where Harry could see his own messy scrawl flickering.

"I'm real? How about you? You popped out of a diary!" He hadn't even realised he'd taken steps forwards and sunken to his knees in front of the other boy. Tom, his other half, the other part of his soul, was subconsciously pulling him in like a ship into a whirlpool. Inescapably. Inevitably. To reel him in and then scatter him as debris over distant shores.

He failed to realise, too, that Ginny had stirred just behind Tom. "Anyway, Tom – explanations later, like, entire diary thing – we have to get out of here. There's a basilisk coming. You know, huge snake that kills with its eyes?"

"There isn't." Tom replied calmly. "It doesn't come unless it's called." So enamoured were they, neither of them noticed Ginny, nor the fact that Tom's diary was sitting right at her fingertips.

"And it won't get called now? How're you supposed to know that?" Harry asked, fingers curling as the ink on his hands began swirling and swirling. As if, in the presence of his soulmate, it was trying to leapt right out of his skin.

"Because I know who was summoning the basilisk."

"You–" Harry said suddenly, eyes widening, his eyes darting down to his hands where a dreadful sentence spelled itself across his skin. "It–" Mouth went dry, words twitching and writhing just out of reach. "What? It was... you? It was..."

"I'm the Heir of Slytherin, Harry." Tom said awfully, awfully, gently. His words echoed in the empty chamber and maybe also in Harry's suddenly blank mind. "One little girl found a diary. My diary. She poured her heart out to me, I listened to her woe after woe, insecurity after insecurity. I possessed her, temporarily gave her the snake's tongue… and she's been setting the basilisk on the students ever since."

Harry couldn't find his words. This was his soulmate? This? "So you wanted to kill Muggleborns? You want to kill Muggles?" he asked, shock and disbelief and hurt all colouring his voice.

"The basilisk did not kill anyone." Tom's face was a smooth mask as he said, "As the heir, this was my legacy. You should understand that I took it because it was meant for me. But I've found you now, Harry, and I couldn't care less about–" But when Harry glanced at his hand all he saw was a steady, "know he hates killing." So his soulmate would lie to his face too, then?

"Your legacy? Really." Harry gritted, backing away from the boy who was supposed to complete him. The boy who even Dumbledore claimed would be perfect for him. Some part of Harry wanted to stay as close as possible and docilely curl up to Tom, but his temper was building far too rapidly for that. "If you actually believe what you're saying, grow a pair and stop listening to what your ancient great grandfather says. I can speak Parseltongue too – am I trying to make snakes kill people? And what the hell are you doing to Ginny?"

None of them looked over at the girl in question who was quietly muttering under her breath.

There was a long, prominent pause. "I'm taking her soul to regenerate mine… You don't want me to kill her?" Tom asked. The words on Harry hands, too, reflected this: "Thought he didn't care for her. Stupid. Should've known, hero as he is."

Harry felt rage surge up in him like a tidal wave – at the world for pairing him with such an insane soulmate. At Tom. At the fact that Tom sounded genuinely puzzled and that made Harry even feel guilty about his anger. Or maybe the guilt was just his stupid soulmate bond speaking.

He leapt to his feet in fury. "What the hell is wrong with you?!" His words were edged with fire and he swore he saw Tom flinch. He hoped it was at the loudness, if nothing else. The bond in his head was still stubbornly closed and Harry couldn't find himself caring why.

Then whatever part of Tom flinched was gone and those grey eyes darkened. "Perhaps what's 'wrong' is that I trapped myself in a diary for forty nine years waiting for you." Tom said coldly, still sitting passively on the stones. "So what if I kill one more person so I can have a body to be with my soulmate?"

Harry– he panicked at the reminder that this person was supposed to be his other half. He'd always expected his soulmate to be a fiery, loving girl. Recently translated into a fiery loving boy. He hadn't ever expected an obsessed psychopath that went sucking the life out of his friends. The words that came from his mouth had absolutely no filter at all. "I won't let you kill anyone. Ever." Harry said, defiance thick in his voice. "If you do, I'll kill myself to end you."

"What valiance." Tom sneered.

"Trust me," Harry said. "Even though you obviously don't give a rat's ass about everyone else's life, I do! And I'd do what it takes to save them, even if it means–"

Tom's facade slammed in so quickly that Harry was nearly blown away by the sheer intensity in his dark eyes. "I grew up in a certain type of world." He said icily. "It's only natural that the only way I know how to live is in one like it."

"Then I'm telling you now that that's no excuse! You were going to kill my friend. You were going to kill all these people because of what?"

"I don't think you understand," Tom replied, ever the statue, "that I've always done what I must."

"Yeah, like you had to go opening the chamber and trying to kill people!"

"And what would you know of killing? Of grasping onto what little you have, you child?" Tom asked scathingly, his demeanour so cold that it seemed to burn. Harry felt his words bite and– gods, even his soulmate loathed him. His chest felt like there'd been a hole blown through it. "If my heritage is the one thing that makes me a capable wizard, then I will use it relentlessly. If killing is the only way I can scrabble for power, then so be it! What a pity that I do not have the privileges of your luxurious life–"

"My luxurious life? My life? My parents are dead!" Harry shouted, his hand leaping for his wand. He was so angry, he was just– it wasn't that he hated Tom (he was supposed to love this boy, wasn't he?), but it was as though there was a fury eating him from inside out. Clawing, snarling. How dare Tom? Tom knew nothing about him. Nothing at all! "I live with Muggles who treat me like trash! They starve me and work me like a slave and lock me away in a bloody cupboard! I've never had to kill any of them, have I?"

"No, you didn't," Tom spat, fury sparking behind the cold in his eyes. "Because none of them would've killed you. None of them would've beaten you and left you out in the stones. None of them would've pushed you off the cliffside, waiting for you to smash onto the rocks below in a spectacular accident. Shut your mouth, Harry, you have no right to speak of suffering. If you wish for me to spare her life, I will. But if you choose to direct your 'righteous' anger anywhere near my actions, kindly leave."

Harry felt sympathy and anger for Tom surge in him and even more furious, he tamped it down. "Stop trying to get me to feel sorry for you!" This wasn't some sort of contest about who had the shittier childhood. Bad childhood or not, there were no excuses for cold-hearted murder.

(Quirrell.) No, he hadn't intended to… He'd felt bad about Quirrell. He'd regretted it. He was forced to do it, unlike Tom.

Tom was just playing him. Redirecting the conversation to get Harry to pity him to overlook the fact that Tom had apparently tried to murder all these students in the school just because he 'wanted power.' He must've had an ulterior motive, something he was still lying to Harry about. Harry could feel it.

"I know you won't hesitate to lie to me. I know what you've done to Ginny, I know you tried to kill all the Muggleborns–"

Then he saw it. The truth flitted across his hands. "Idiot... was never her or any of the Mudbloods it was all him." What wasn't the Mudbloods? The only thing Harry knew Tom wanted from Mudbloods were their deaths—

A hand plunged straight into his chest and tore his heart in two.

"Me?" he said numbly, and then everything on his hand was wiped away aside from the insane one-worded ramblings as Tom's Occlumency shields undoubtedly slammed into place. "Me." he repeated. The chamber stretched around him, walls seeming to warp. But it all made sense. "It was me. You wanted to kill me. The famous little Boy-Who-Lived."

"I didn't know you were my soulmate." Tom said flatly as if that would excuse anything.

"Everything you told me before was a lie." Harry couldn't feel his hands or his heart, or anything at all. Only his blood rushing in his ears. "Soulmates obviously mean nothing to you. You just met me and you're already lying as much as you can. You still just want to kill me, don't you?"

"Never." Tom said. Harry didn't believe him. "I wanted to know how you killed Voldemort – if you'd still be a threat – but my allegiances have obviously changed."

"So you're a Death Eater too, now?" Tom didn't deny it, staring resolutely at Harry, "You're on the Dark side and you're pretending to get cosy with me? I should've seen it. Gods!" Harry couldn't find the right words to express how he felt. "You know what? You–" It was clawing to get out of his chest: the fact that Tom had blatantly lied to him, that Tom was happy to kill people under the pathetic excuse of a bad childhood, that was siding with the killer of Harry's family all along– "You disgust me!"

(He refused to look at his hands, from where Tom's thoughts had slipped through the bond anyway, "...thought at least you would accept me.")

This couldn't be his soulmate. Harry wouldn't believe it. A soulmate was supposed to be made for him. They were supposed to lay their eyes on each other and fall in love. A soulmate couldn't possibly be so flippant, so cruel, so hateful…

"No," Tom denied vehemently, his eyes flickering up from where they'd glanced at his own lithe hands, the ice in his expression melting and giving way to some other foreign emotion, "It's–"

But Harry would not be deterred. "I don't believe that you're any part of me." He said, a hissing filling his ears. "You must've used some sort of magic to enchant my hands. Look at you. You're bloody psychotic!"

"No," Tom repeated. His back straightened, face shuttering over with a stoic mask. His words were clipped and intense grey eyes were locked with green. "I'm feral. Broken. Whatever you deem fit to call it. But most of all, I'm yours. I'll defer and I'll kill and I'll spare and I'll take over the world for you… I'd wait with a gaping hole in my soul for forty nine years." His ephemeral hands were fisted in his robes, fingers tight. "I'd split myself on stones and shards and turn around to see still that I'm incomplete. The laughing stock of your fucking gods. Aren't you just ashamed of meeting somebody who's given up everything for you, Harry Potter?"

The silence stretched taut between them: Harry on his feet and his hand on his wand, Tom on the ground with an expression so unreadable that it gave Harry pause. How much of it was a lie? There were two writers on his hand after all. Tom could still be a fraud. Or Tom could be a broken boy, doubted by even his soulmate.

Harry's hands read, "Thought it could never get worse."

"I see how it is," Tom said emotionlessly, finally tearing his dark eyes away from Harry to turn them towards the floor. "You may choose to leave. I will not stop you. If you are as self-sacrificing as you say, I'm sure you'd rather die than accept me as your soulmate."

"He hates you.

Give up."

At the sight of the familiar words, it was like a pair of floodgates opened inside Harry and a torrent brought him to his knees. All those times his soulmate had called out in pain. That once his soulmate had told him to give up. The way he was so drawn, so empty, so hopeless – it was Harry's doing. It wasn't Tom. It was Harry who was the horrid soulmate. It was true, Tom was really hurt, Harry had really hurt Tom, his Tom, right through his stoic mask. Oh Gods, his Tom, Tom. He felt sick.

"No. Tom," he choked, feeling this horrible guilt and a whole swath of confusing emotions wash over him, "I'm so stupid. I didn't– It's not that I don't want you to be my soulmate. It's just that–"

Then Ginny screamed "Bite the halfblood!" in parseltongue and everything fell apart.

A black book was thrown into the air, thudding against Harry's chest where he clutched at it in shock. Water exploded from all sides and he heard something whistling through the air right towards him.

"Harry! Run! Let it bite the diary!" the girl shouted.

Tom's head snapped up. "No!" he gasped, his grey eyes wide. "Stop!" he commanded in the snake's tongue, but the great beast was already half-way through its strike. Harry dove to the side, his agility of twelve years coming into play, landing hard against the stone floor.

Except the basilisk's jaw was really too wide to be dodged by a quick little dive. Ginny called for Fawkes again, desperately, as she watched Harry throw himself right in the path of the basilisk's deadliest, sharpest, fangs. They'd go right through his chest and he'd be dead. Instantly. Ribs crunched into shrapnel.

Tom's eyes met Harry's and Harry was paralyzed by the helplessness and hope that flashed in that dark grey. He saw the aftermath of their argument: pain and fear and agony so deep that he could drown, yet there was still a spark that was reserved just for Harry, like a fire during a cold night...and suddenly it clicked into place. The knowledge that despite all that Tom might've lied, he was really Harry's soulmate, and he really would give up everything–

Tom could've taken the diary from his hands and fled.

Instead, a body barrelled into his and Tom's half-solid form was tackling him to the side, the two of them rolling across the stones. Harry was facedown on the ground, head turned to the side, diary beneath him, Tom besides him yelling in his ear and gripping his hands tightly ("Harry– tell lady fate to go to hell!"). And it felt right to be held. By Tom, just as he was about to die.

"So idiotic so ignorant so foolish but worth it – always worth it–"

The longest fang speared right through Harry and out the other end. Its jagged tip screeched against the stones.

Missed the bottom of his ribcage by only hairs. Dragged him forwards across the floor like a corpse on a pike, Tom wrapped around him.

"Harry, Harry, look down. Don't look at me, look down,"

He couldn't process anything as he heard his blood splurt and felt pain burn through him. His death clawed up through his body with a razor sharp bite. A dark wave. Teeth and teeth and teeth and blood–

–just stared into grey eyes and held on.

"I did it I–"

It had skewered him and the diary he was holding. Its other teeth grated into his spine, splitting his back open and sending his blood spraying. It was like being skinned alive, like being boiled, like having your heart ripped out still-beating.

Tom's mouth was open in a gasp and Harry saw it moving, but he couldn't hear a word. ("Harry– Harry, I did it–")

"Look down look down Harry, fuck– down at your hands– I did it I killed them Harry your parents your family–"

A dark splatter exploded across Tom's stomach like spilt ink. Harry couldn't even call his name, couldn't even think, could only watch as Tom dissipated in an invisible wind, his body vanishing as the diary began to bleed something dark like blood.

"your friends your people everyone I killed them–"

The words on his hands faded and he never saw them even once.

"Harry!" Ginny called, but Harry could not hear. "Please, Fawkes!" Blood gushed from him, right below his ribcage where it had grazed bones, a little to the left, in a huge, inevitable wound. It flowed all over his fingers which now devoid of Tom's tight grasp, swirling with basilisk venom. The world distorted as though from deep underwater.

The fang pulled out, the great beast suddenly bellowing in pain, and Harry was engulfed by the unforgiving black.

a/n tom's interlude has been reworked so that it will not be read as a standalone chapter.

sat results came back and i suppose they're decent considering the avg score is like... 1500 (lol) and i took it early because i wanted to do the old one before they changed the test. but i'm a little miffed because i badly in some bits but not so badly that i'll take it again

: (