~To Kill You With A Kiss~

Chapter 19

…

Author's Note: This site appears to have been taken over by dementors. I'm going to go ahead and post this really quickly now, before the dementors come back.

…

For La Feu Eterne, who guessed right!

…

Harry stared at the familiar figure of Voldemort. Somehow, the Dark Lord seemed terribly out of place here in the headmaster's office at Hogwarts: a shard from a dark future tearing at the fragile fabric of a more innocent past.

Voldemort? Here at Hogwarts, in this time? How can this be? I am dreaming, of course I am dreaming. Or perhaps it is this sweet, unblemished past that is the dream, and the dark Voldemort and I the only real people in it.

The dark shape drew closer. His eyes are different. He has done something to them, cast some glamour perhaps, so that they appear to be grey rather than crimson. Strange, how that makes him seem more like Tom. And yet they are not quite Tom's eyes; Tom's gaze is silver, and his is a darker grey, like weathered stone or rainy skies.

"My dear child!" Voldemort's voice was strangely gentle. Harry thought his heart would stop as a dark cloak whisked around him and folded him in a sudden, unexpected embrace.

"Ah, how touching!" Professor Dippet's little chuckle seemed to come from somewhere far away. "Such paternal tenderness!"

"How good to see you, Elias." Voldemort clasped him tightly as he spoke in a warm, pleasant voice that seemed to belong to some stranger. The voice of my grey-eyed guardian. For a moment, Harry could almost imagine that the arms that were wrapped around him were not Voldemort's at all, but rather those of a long-forgotten friend and protector, an imaginary guardian from half-remembered daydreams.

But the silver voice that whispered in his ear a moment later was more familiar: "You smell like rain..." It was the voice Harry had heard in a graveyard, far away in a distant future. Voldemort. How odd, to think that I have known you long before I ever fell in love with Tom. In the beginning, there was just you and me.

"Rain? It was beginning to drizzle again, out on the Quidditch pitch," whispered Harry, trying desperately to figure out whether he was awake or dreaming.

Voldemort's cloak, pressed against Harry's face, felt rough against his cheek. Harry breathed in an unfamiliar scent of damp wool and fog and musk. It was Tom's scent, and yet not Tom's at all. Harry lifted his face, and suddenly he felt Voldemort's cheek linger against his own for a moment. The soft, unexpected caress took Harry's breath away. He could hear the rushing of blood in his ears and somewhere, very near, a gentle breathing. He sensed a pulsing beat somewhere, a heavy rhythm, but it took him a moment to understand that it was Voldemort's heart, beating against his own chest.

The embrace lasted only for a brief moment. Then the stranger - Voldemort, Harry reminded himself - turned and began to exchange a few conventional pleasantries with Professor Dippet and Slughorn, while Harry stood silently by his side. Harry was unable to look at Voldemort's face; his bewildered glance lingered on the sleeve of the dark cloak. Black. Voldemort always wore black. Harry realized that he had always vaguely thought of Voldemort's cloak as a shroud of night-black darkness that surrounded him, an absolute impenetrable blackness. But now that he saw the cloak so close, in the warm, flickering lamplight of Professor Dippet's office, Harry saw that the blackness was an abstraction; the cloak was not entirely black after all. It was only at a distance that its fabric seemed all black; up close he could see that the coarse material of the cloak had thin, almost imperceptible threads of verdigris and charcoal and silver running through it. Strange, how different things appear when they are this close. Even Voldemort's cloak. Even Voldemort.

"I know you wanted to talk to me, Elias. I apologize for not coming to see you sooner, but it took me a while to be able to... get away." Voldemort's voice had become that of a stranger again. He turned to Armando Dippet, who was regarding them with a little smile. "Headmaster, is there a place where I can speak to my ward alone? We have a great deal of catching up to do, you see, and I do not want to continue to trespass upon your hospitality by staying here in your office so late in the evening."

Professor Dippet beamed. "Yes, of course! You are more than welcome to use my sitting room; it is right through here." He waved his wand at the far wall of the headmaster's office, and a door appeared. "Make yourselves at home. I do apologize for the rather somber atmosphere of this room; it belonged to Professor Phineas Nigellus Black before me, you see. His tastes were somewhat ...ah, bleaker than my own, but try as I might to add some cheerful touches to the room, it always changes itself back again. Some sort of dark magic, I suspect. He was a powerful magician, Professor Black. Now, Elias is technically supposed to be in bed in an hour, but I have no objection to bending the rules a little on this happy occasion. I do hope you will consider staying a few days, sir; I would love to hear more about your travels in Assam."

"Thank you, Professor. I will consider you kind offer." Voldemort opened the door to Professor Dippet's sitting room. "Shall we, Elias? We have a great deal to discuss, my dear."

Harry walked hesitantly towards the door. Tom. I need to let Tom know that Voldemort is here.

"I would of course be eager to discuss my ward's academic progress with his teachers." Voldemort's voice was calm and pleasant. "Perhaps Professor... Riddle, is it, my dear? The one you have been working so closely with?... would be able to join us in a little while? But first, I really need to speak to you alone for a little while, Elias."

"Ah, yes, of course! I will send a message to Tom Riddle," chirped Dippet happily.

"Thank you, Professor." Voldemort steered Harry into the sitting room, and the door closed behind them. The vast and gloomy room lay shrouded in shadows. As they entered, pale wax candles impaled on silver wall sconces flickered to life, and a fire of an unnatural bluish hue began to glow in the black marble fireplace. As the dim light spread slowly through the room, Harry could begin to make out elegant chairs, gleaming mahogany tables and looming bookcases filled with ancient volumes bound in black morocco. Over the fireplace hung a rather dreadful amateur painting of an unnaturally sunny landscape, painted in garish hues. Others like it adorned the walls, but the other landscapes had already begun to change; the cheerful shades of yellow had deepened to a rather menacing blood-red. Apparently, Phineas Nigellus Black's sitting room would not tolerate the sunny optimism of Professor Dippet's art.

Harry half expected Voldemort to draw his wand, or to summon the dread dementors to his side, but the Dark Lord merely glanced around the dim sitting room with an air of mild curiosity, as if he really were Harry's guardian, taking an interest in his ward's school environment. Voldemort regarded the picture over the fireplace with a slight frown. "Oh, dear. Old Dippet must have painted this himself. I had no idea he had artistic pretentions. How very wise of him to keep them to himself." He smiled slightly at Harry. "I used to know him, of course, back when I was Tom Riddle. I don't think he recognizes me anymore. He never was a very observant man, Armando Dippet."

"My unknown guardian, the one who brought me to this time in the first place – it was you, all along?" whispered Harry.

But Voldemort shook his head. "I have no idea what brought you to this time, Harry. I am rather curious about that myself."

"But Slughorn… he said you were my guardian…"

"Ah, yes. A little deception on my part, I'm afraid." There was a slightly apologetic note in Voldemort's voice. "I had learned of your mysterious guardian, and assuming his identity seemed like a good way to get to speak with you alone. Horace is and always will be a rather gullible man, as you may know. Has he attempted to make you part of his collection yet?" The little glint in his eyes reminded Harry, suddenly and irresistibly, of Tom.

Harry couldn't help smiling slightly. "Yes, he has. Both in this time and in the future." He sank down into a puffy chair upholstered in black fur. "What... what are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" The familiar figure stood immovable for a moment, a silent shadow in the flickering candlelight. "I came here to find you, Harry. You sent me a message that you wanted to see me. How could I not come, now that I know that you are my horcrux? You are my soul, Harry. Oh, don't shiver like that, child! I could never harm you now that I know who you are."

"You got Draco's message, then?" Harry tried to keep his voice steady. "But how... how can you be here? In this time? How did you get here?"

"Oh..." An almost imperceptible smile brushed over Voldemort's pallid features. "You are not the only one who can travel through time, Harry." He reached under his dark cloak and pulled out a golden chain with a small mechanism attached to it.

Harry stared at the delicate golden clockwork. "A time-turner? But I thought all the remaining time-turners were destroyed at the Ministry of Magic?"

"They were." Voldemort turned his face so it was half-hidden in the shadows now. "And the magic used to create them was lost. But anything that has been invented once can be invented again, with some patience. I made myself another time-turner. They are not easy to build, time-turners, but as you may have gathered, I am quite good at magic. I am also a rather determined man, Harry. And once I realized who you were... Oh, what a fool I have been! I longed for immortality, and I was ready to murder you to achieve it. I didn't realize that you are my immortality. I almost destroyed you once to get at the philosopher's stone. How could I not have seen it? You were the true stone, not that lifeless jewel. My immortal soul is housed within your fragile body, merged with your own. We are one, you and I. You are my soul, my horcrux. Of course I had to find you, Harry."

Harry glanced at the pale, familiar figure. Tom? Now there is something in your voice that reminds me of Tom. Perhaps you are Tom after all... "You... you invented a time-turner from scratch since we met at Malfoy Manor earlier today?"

"Earlier today? Yes, I suppose it would have been earlier today, for you, Harry." Voldemort stepped closer, and Harry thought for a moment that the Dark Lord would reach out and touch him, but he didn't. He paused, almost hesitantly, a few feet away from Harry, the golden time-turner in his hand. "It took me almost ten years to build this, Harry."

"Ten years-?"

Voldemort nodded gravely. "It became the Dark Lord's new obsession: Making a time-turner. In the beginning, quite a few of my death-eaters complained about it; apparently, they had expected to be part of something grander than the conquest of time. I silenced them quickly, and the few that... remained, shall we say... learned to adjust rather rapidly to the idea that the Dark Lord would now rather vanquish time than the wizarding world."

"Bellatrix? Did she...?"

"Bellatrix?" Voldemort seemed mildly surprised at the mention of the name. "Oh, she met with an unfortunate accident almost immediately after we last saw each other, Harry. What did you expect? I couldn't let any harm come to you or... or to him..."

"Tom." Harry looked down, but he could feel Voldemort's gaze scrutinizing his face.

"Tom, yes. He is me, isn't he, Harry? My younger self? I suppose he will come and find us shortly. I wonder how he will react to seeing me here, in this time?"

Harry shook his head slowly. "Not too well, I expect."

"Perhaps not." Voldemort's silver voice seemed to flow into Harry's bloodstream somehow. It made it terribly difficult to remember clearly that Voldemort and Tom were two different beings. "I must confess that I am rather curious to meet him. I understood who he was, of course, once I saw him with you in Malfoy Manor. How could I not recognize... myself? And then I heard Abraxas Malfoy's portrait rambling on about Tom Riddle and a boy named Elias, a friend from his youth who bore such a startling resemblance to Harry Potter. Elias Black, the boy without a past, whose nameless guardian had sent him to Hogwarts… Slowly, I began to put things together, and I realized that if I wanted to find you, I would need to go back to the time when Abraxas Malfoy was a student at Hogwarts, and Tom Riddle was still a boy with dark curls and grey eyes..."

"Do you remember, then?" Harry's voice came out as a whisper. "Do you remember me? Do you remember being Tom? Do you remember us?"

Voldemort hesitated for a moment. "I… I don't know, Harry. I remember being Tom Riddle, of course, and I recall being a student here at Hogwarts. But Abraxas had this strange notion that I was once a professor here. I do not remember that, although I suppose I would rather have liked teaching at Hogwarts. I did apply for the post of Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, of course, but Dippet had the nerve to turn me down. He said I was too young, can you believe it? But you, Elias Black and Harry Potter, time traveler, my archenemy, and my soul - Do I remember you, in the past, from the time when I was Tom Riddle?" The dark grey glance lingered on Harry's face. "Not... not quite. And yet, there is something that hovers, at the very edge of my consciousness, something like the shadow of a memory. How do I explain this? I knew a girl once, when I lived in the Muggle orphanage, a very strange little girl who believed in all sorts of odd things-"

"Perdita. Yes." Harry couldn't help smiling. "You told me about her, and about all the other children at the orphanage that first night we... I mean Tom and I... spent together."

"So Abraxas Malfoy was right, then?" Voldemort's voice was a whisper. "You and... and Tom are... more than friends? You are lovers?"

Harry felt the blood rushing to his cheeks. He did not want to meet Voldemort's glance, but he nodded briefly.

"I see. I wish I could remember that…" Something in Voldemort's voice sent a shiver down Harry's spine.

You wish you could remember? Harry closed his eyes and tried to read what went through the Dark Lord's mind, but all he could sense was the image of his own face and the messiness of his own black hair.

"Sometimes," said Voldemort in a low voice, "I feel as if I am on the verge of remembering. That odd little girl, Perdita, she was always talking of things like aliens and other worlds and the reincarnation of souls. Most of it was Muggle nonsense, of course, but I do remember what she said about reincarnation. She said that recollections of past lives are always lingering on the borders of our consciousness. Most of the time, those hazy recollections are too fleeting to grasp; there is all this other life that lies like a thick grey mist over our recollections of past lives and hides them from our sight. But sometimes we sense them anyway, in brief lucid moments when we remember things that we shouldn't: Sometimes we remember, with impossible clarity, places where we have never been, lines from poems we have never read, the expressions of faces we have never seen. Sometimes we open a book in a strange ancient tongue for the first time and feel a sharp chill along the spine, a tingling of a long-lost memory: I know this ancient language, even though my ears have never heard it spoken, and my eyes have never seen these runes of old until today. You ask me if I remember you from the past, Harry. Perhaps I do... But I remember you like Perdita claimed to remember her past lives: Just a shadow of a recollection, an uncertain presence, fleeting, like an image from a dream..."

Harry swallowed. "So you remember Tom Riddle, the way he was before he became you. But when you changed, when you became Voldemort, the memories of that Tom were frozen in your memory, and they never changed when he changed."

"And yet..." Voldemort whispered. "And yet, Harry, there is something in my soul that seems to be on the verge of remembering loving you. I cannot tell you when that whisper in my soul began; I only became aware of it that day we met at Malfoy Manor. But it seems to me that it was always there, as an echo of something long forgotten that I couldn't quite recall... I don't know how to explain that." The dark grey eyes met Harry's.

"Tom… Tom wants to kill you…" Harry struggled to get the words out.

"To kill me?" Voldemort seemed to ponder this quite seriously for a moment. "Yes, I suppose he does. It cannot be easy, to learn that the person you could have been also exists. What about you, Harry? Do you wish to kill me?"

Harry looked up at the man who was neither quite Tom nor completely not Tom. "I don't know," he whispered. "There is a prophecy that says that one of us will kill the other in the end... I suppose I have always believed in that prophecy. Until now…"

"The prophecy about the Dark Lord and the Boy Who Lived." Voldemort gazed into the blue flames that flickered in the fireplace. "Yes. I am... quite familiar with that prophecy, Harry. I have always taken it rather seriously, you know, but the outcome seemed rather obvious. I am a powerful wizard, and you were a mere child; of course I was going to kill you. But you are my horcrux… That does rather complicate things, doesn't it?" He sat silently for a moment, seemingly engrossed in the blue shimmer of the fire. Then he said softly: "Of course you cannot die, Harry. You are so infinitely precious to me now. But on the other hand, I have no desire to embrace death myself either. And yet, there exists a prophecy that says that one of us must die at the hands of the other."

Harry reached out, impulsively, and touched the dark cloak hesitantly. "I don't want to kill you. I can't kill you. I love Tom, you see, and I keep asking myself if you are still Tom. Are you Tom, or are you Voldemort, another being altogether?"

"And what is you answer, child?" Voldemort's hand stroked softly through his hair.

Harry shivered. "You are... you. Just you. Beyond names, beyond appearance, beyond past or future. You are you. And so is Tom. How can I want you to die?" He swallowed. "And yet you murdered my parents and other innocent people, and caused endless grief and suffering. If you were to die, their lives could be restored. And if you were to die, Tom would be free of your shadow. How can I not want you to die? Perhaps…" He met Voldemort's glance for a long moment. Then he whispered in Parseltongue: *Perhaps I will kill you with a kiss in the end.*

Voldemort laughed. His grey eyes glittered. *Perhaps I will let you, if you promise the kiss.*

Harry felt Voldemort's lips brush through his hair. The Dark Lord whispered: *But I wouldn't be so certain that it would be the end.*