Disclaimer: Absolutely not mine.

A/N: Hello everyone. First off, please pardon the lateness of this chapter- I had to be in a very specific mood to write some parts of it and it took me some time to plan out things like dialogue, etc.

Also, it would be best to read the first chapter again before you read this one (Chapter 1: Time) so that you can see where I'm coming from with some of the stuff in this one; it's quite short.

Pretending To Live

Chapter 25: The One That Is Left Behind

My eyes slid shut, and then I felt and hurt and loved no more.

It was peaceful.

At first, I thought I was floating because I couldn't feel anything. Not the pull of gravity, not the brush of wind against my cheek. Just nothingness.

And because I could feel nothing, it was sheer bliss. I floated like this for a while, dreaming, in a state that was neither conscious nor sleeping but somewhere halfway in between.

I dreamed of color. Of blues and yellows, greens and greys. I dreamed of the color red most of all.

It was because of my dreams that when I awoke I noticed the darkness. An intangible but absolute darkness that surrounded me.

I tried to put out my hand in front of me but I could not feel where it was.

I could not see. I could not smell. I could not hear.

And then just like that, the peaceful numbness became a prison.

Fear-the first emotion I had felt since I had woken up in this place- trickled through me. If I could not experience the world around me, and it could not reach me in return, did I exist? Who was I? How did I know that I was me?

The fear sharpened.

My name is Ariadne de Lioncourt, I said and although the sound of my voice was swallowed up by the infinite black, I felt reassured in the knowledge of my own identity.

I murmured this to myself over and over in the darkness. I had lost so much already, I did not want to lose myself.

And so, in my black prison, I dreamed and reminded myself of who I was and what I had lost.

I grew tired eventually. Although I did not understand how time passed here I felt instinctively that I had been in this darkness for a while.

I decided to try asking a question, although I had no way of knowing if it would be answered.

I spoke to the darkness. Where am I?

And the darkness replied, I cannot say.

Who are you? I said.

I am Time, it said and the whole of the blackness seemed to reverberate in recognition of its being.

The Keeper, I thought.

I asked him, Did I die?

Yes, the Keeper replied.

I shied away from the darkness then but it was impossible, because it was all around me. So I retreated into myself; in the twilight of my mind, I dreamed again.

Was this death then? This loneliness and suffocating darkness...oh, how terrible it was. I thought of a boy with grey eyes and a man with red and feared for them because I knew that they had died as well and they too were all alone in their very worst fear...

I dreamed, yet I remembered. I wondered if the red-eyed man's body had been found in the dark

(always, always the darkness)

and empty corridor I had left him in. I wondered if the people had rejoiced.

This made me sad.

I turned inward and dreamed. The Keeper, in his infinite patience and Time, waited.

When I resurfaced,

(secondsdaysmonthsyearscentur ies)

later, I remembered his presence. I asked him, Will you answer my questions?

If you want me to, he replied.

I whispered, Did it work?

The syllables spiralled like moths from my lips.

You broke your wand, the Keeper said. You broke the cycle.

Even though I had no body, I began to cry.

How was this death, when everything still hurt? There was no peace here for me. I was in agony.

I will never see him again, I whispered.

I dreamed again, because pain could not touch me there. I was safe only in my memories that were as distant and fragile as butterflies alighting on the surface of my mind. The Keeper waited.

Years

(months)

passed and I did not speak. Then one day out of a perverse curiosity I said finally, What happened to the Fates?

They exist, the Keeper said simply.

So I didn't change anything, I said. A dull terror managed to reach me through all the pain. They'll find my broken Strand...find me...

Your Strand is no longer broken, he said but I was gone again, dreaming of a boy whose face I had almost forgotten...

Remember that things have to be broken in order for them to be repaired.

I awoke.

What do you mean? I said.

You broke your wand. You repaired your Strand of Time.

It was hard to remember. Bits and pieces of my memory were achingly clear but others...I could remember the color red but I did not know why it was important.

I struggled and slowly, sluggishly, the moments of my last breaths came back to me. I had broken my wand, my wand with its tempus core, the Strand that had been severed from me

(by who? I'd forgotten.)

and...I forced myself to concentrate. I must have freed the Strand when I had broken my wand.

"Even now it seeks to be rejoined."

Ah...so it had merged with my broken one. My Time was whole once more.

Too late now, though, I whispered.

The Keeper said: It's never too late.

I was afraid to dream now. I was losing myself each time I went under the tide. I wanted to stay. I wanted to remember.

(I wanted to forget.)

But the darkness frightened me and I was in pain, even though I could no longer remember why I mourned.

Tell me a story, I said to the darkness.

Once, there was a wicked king, the Keeper replied. He had a monster, which he kept hidden in a labyrinth. One day, a hero came to slay the monster and the king's daughter, who had fallen in love with him, gave him a ball of Thread that allowed the hero to find his way back out of the maze, and to her.

With her help, the hero defeated the monster. On their journey back to his home, they stopped at an island, where they spent the night.

And in the morning, the hero left the still sleeping princess on the island, forever.

You altered her Time, I said, remembering. He said nothing. Why?

I was curious, the Keeper said.

For the first time since I had discovered my prison, I was angry. These fickle gods, these false idols who used mortals in their games as if we were nothing more than pawns, who cared nothing and thought nothing of our pain.

I regretted it, the Keeper said.

I thought about what he said in this place where time was infinite. I believed him.

You helped me break the cycle, I said.

Yes, the Keeper said.

How?

I borrowed Time from another and gave it to you, at your end. A minute.

I thought about this, about my death. He had given me enough time for me to realize how to end the loop, time that my predecessors had never had...

Who did you borrow it from? I asked.

The darkness was silent.

I lay on the shore of my mind and dreams and memories washed over me like a tide until I did not know where one ended and the other began.

You can come back, if you want, said the Keeper, centuries

(minutes)

later.

I'm dead, I said.

Yes. But you have come back before.

Slowly, a picture began to form in my mind: an abandoned, grey street. I remembered the memory of pain. I remembered leaving-

(I remembered darkness)

-I remembered waking up in a room filled with faces that were familiar, yet not.

I remembered what someone had once told me in that same room,

(although it was years later, wasn't it)

that my Time and Fate had wrenched apart from one another in that moment. I had died and I had woken up following the Thread of Fate.

And when I died again, the death that had brought me here...

Where will I go? I asked.

Because you broke the cycle, your Thread of Fate is gone, the Keeper replied. But you still have Time. All of what is yours.

I could live again. I could come back.

But what was the point? He

(who?)

would not be there, and the face that I had once loved but could not remember would be lost to me...

I slipped under.

But my dreams were uneasy. I dreamed of the world above.

I had spent so long in the darkness that the thought of it frightened me. A world that had simultaneously too much light and too much dark, a world full of fear and disappointment and loss and grief. Surely this infinite, yawning darkness was better, where everything was numb and quiet and the only pain I felt now was ancient and far away...

I thought for a long time.

Millennia. Hours.

Seconds. Centuries.

The Keeper waited.

I want to come back, I said.

I had not yet forgotten who I was.

I remembered that I was brave. That was important somehow.

And this darkness was a world without aches and pains but also without life and love and I did not belong here.

The darkness seemed to sigh.

But...I have one last question. I hesitated and summoned the memories that I had been guarding, the sharpest and clearest of them. If I concentrated, I could almost remember their faces. When I arrived in their world...there were certain things that were wrong. In their timeline, I mean.

I thought of a pair of silver and gold lockets, I thought of the death of a girl named Olive, I thought of a fat lady in a melting pink dress that had not been murdered and a wandmaker that had not been kidnapped. Why is that?

If you drop a pebble into a still pond, the ripples it will cause will become progressively bigger as they radiate outward, no matter how small the stone, the Keeper said. Your presence in the past changed the future.

No, I said. Even before I arrived, there were changes...

The darkness did not reply.

A memory flitted through my mind, of a time that did not belong to me, of a man and a woman by a lake. I tried very, very hard to remember their names.

Ravenclaw and Slytherin, I said.

After you disappeared, the Keeper said, Slytherin realized that he had fallen in love with her. The idea of his Twin Lockets came to him that night.

Her magic, the magic that I was bound my blood to would have brought me to that time, I realized. A time when she was happy...

I thought that if I left, the past would adjust to my absence and nothing would have changed, I said. And then I added, although I did not remember how I knew this, Le Chatelier's principle.

You change the past, you change the future, Time said simply.

I felt a great rush of sadness.

I could have saved him after all

(who?)

if only I had stayed. He

(who?)

had been right, like he always was...the future was not concrete, it was our choices that mattered most, in the end...

As I spiralled downwards, the Keeper, sensing that I was finished, took me away.

And then the infinite darkness lightened and it was no longer the black of death but the shadow of sleep.

888

"Ari! You'll be late!"

I jumped violently at the sound of my foster-mother's voice, and glanced at the analogue clock on my nightstand.

The hell...?

Reaching for it, and turning it over in my hands, I tapped the front twice to try and get it going again. I couldn't, and the hands remained stuck at 4:43 am.

Cursing, I stumbled out of bed looking for the pair of jeans lying somewhere here on the floor that contained my mobile. Upon finding it, I shook out the tiny device from the back pocket, causing it to land unceremoniously on the floor and picked it up, flipping it open to check the time.

It read 8:50.

Dropping it again in shock and muttering a few more choice expletives, I ran for the bathroom.

Twenty minutes, a broken toothbrush, several stubbed toes and a few dozen more swear words later, I was sitting safely in the bus on my ride to school, which, the driver had so kindly informed me, I had been approximately 17 seconds away from missing.

I sighed and leaned my head back against my seat. I closed my eyes, on the verge of falling asleep once more when-

A sharp nudge in the arm closest to the empty seat beside me woke me up.

"Hi there," I muttered.

"Hey. Who shat on your sneakers?" My best and probably only friend Anna said as she collapsed in the seat next to me. I eyed her for a moment, hoping she didn't mean that literally.

I shrugged. "I had a bad dream. Hey, I finished that series, by the way..."

I waited for her to say something but she only shot me a quizzical look. "What series?"

"I..." Something flashed through my mind and was gone. I frowned. "I don't know. Forget about it."

"Still dreaming, huh?" Anna said with a grin.

"Yeah," I said weakly. "I guess I am."

(darkness)

I shivered. It must have been a pretty bad nightmare, for it to affect me like this. I tried to remember it, but it was like playing at catching shadows for all the success I had.

With an effort, I forced myself to pay attention to the still nattering girl in front of me, pushing my worries away.

"-and I was all like, 'Come at me, bro!' And then he said-"

"Wait, what?"

"Oh, pay attention will you?" She said irritably. "I was talking about this incredibly rude fellow I met at the bus stop this morning- he asked me whether I saw some girl he knew."

"Why's that rude?"

"Well, when I told him I didn't know, he looked really annoyed. So I asked him if it was his girlfriend he was looking for and then he just gave me this look and walked away." She rolled her eyes. "I mean honestly."

"Ah, well," I said. "Maybe he was in a hurry."

"Well, no wonder she left him," she grumbled.

For some reason what she said filled me with an immense and inexplicable sadness. The grin slipped from my face and I looked down at my hands.

Anna noticed and she said, "Hey, are you alright? You seem a little..."

"I'm okay," I said.

"Are you sure? I know that today is..." She trailed off and it was with a rush of shock that I remembered the date: the 23rd of August. The day my parents had died.

"No, it's fine," I said but I hid my unease. I hadn't realized it until she had brought it up. What was wrong with me? It had only been three years ago, I couldn't just forget them like this...

Yet the anguish that I expected did not come. The wound that had been torn open when I lost them felt healed and the pain no longer a keening hurt but a dull ache.

Although I missed them, I no longer grieved.

(so why did I mourn, still?)

That was good, wasn't it? And yet the unease remained. There was something, something else...something in the darkness of my mind...

Snip.

I nearly jumped out of my skin and Anna gave a yell of pain as I accidentally elbowed her in the ribs. My heart was pounding rapidly against the walls of my chest; wildly, I looked around.

"What?" Anna said, alarmed.

An unexplainable terror washed over me; it took me a minute to find my voice before I managed to get out, "That sound-"

Snip.

"Yeah, I hear it too," Anna said, frowning. I stared at her; the punch had never been felt by anyone else but me before. We scanned the seats of the bus for the source of the noise until our eyes landed on a gangly youth clipping his toenails on the seat.

Snip. Snip.

I looked quickly away and Anna wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Ugh. Well there's my appetite gone," she muttered.

I remained quiet for the rest of the ride.

School started out like any ordinary day, although that in itself was unusual. All day, I waited anxiously for the sucker punch that seemed would never come. I didn't understand it. It scared me a little how much I had come to expect it, even look forward to it-but not today.

Today was exceptionally ordinary. I went to classes, I loitered in halls and took notes. But because it was so ordinary, it felt wrong. I felt as though I were having an out of body experience every time I saw someone walk past in jeans and a t-shirt or talked about what was on the telly the night before and I didn't know why. I saw someone struggling as they tried to lift some gym equipment- with their hands- and wondered why it seemed so unusual to me.

My restlessness only intensified when I sat for my Algebra test later in the day. I stared at the paper the teacher handed out with nothing short of incomprehension. Those tiny black squiggles and symbols were as unfamiliar to me as another language.

But how was that possible? I had known there would be a test today, I had studied for it last night...

Had I?

I tried to remember. What had happened last night?

(darkness)

I dimly recalled poring over my Calculus textbook, but...the memory was faint and vague, as if it had happened a very long time ago...

But it was last night. What was the matter with me? Why couldn't I remember?

"Ten minutes left!"

In the end, I only managed to fill in the blank where it asked for my name.

888

I sat by myself at lunch.

Around me, the chatter and laughter of the other students continued. I didn't have much of an appetite, so I didn't really grab anything from what the school was serving...save for one item.

I stared at the apple in my hand.

"Ari?" I looked up and saw Anna setting her tray down in front of me.

"Hey," I said, grateful for the distraction. "How'd you go with the test?"

"God, don't even," she said rolling her eyes. "Halfway through question five I just started drawing what would happen if a moose and a chicken had a baby, I mean really..."

"This isn't good," I said, now slightly disturbed. "My teacher said it was a really easy test too."

She waved a fork knowingly at me. "Golden rule of math: if it seems easy, you're doing it wrong."

I forced a laugh and put down my apple. When I looked back up, she was staring at me with a curious expression. "What?"

"Did you get hair extensions?" She said abruptly. "Or did it just grow really long when I had my back turned?"

I touched it self consciously. It almost reached my mid back now. Had it been any other way? Now that I thought about it, though...

The unease pricked at me again.

"I dunno," I said shrugging. "Maybe it's something in the food."

"I knew there was something funky in this stuff," she said, miserably playing with today's casserole.

"You say that every day," I muttered. "For God's sake, just don't eat it."

She made a face and took a bite out of my apple instead. "It's sad, isn't it, when you're too poor to get better lunches and too lazy to make your own?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

She tossed the apple back at me and I caught it. Anna gingerly nibbled at her casserole and made retching noises. I handed her back the apple as she pushed her tray away, looking slightly green and she shot me a thankful grin as she bit into it.

"How was your dad's?" I asked her. Her parents were divorced, but she spent weekends at her father's every fortnight.

"Same old, same old," she shrugged. "It was quiet

(in the darkness)

you know?"

I didn't say anything. I traced the scars on my hand absentmindedly while Anna wondered if she would be allowed to skip soccer practice to go to her hockey club.

"...Ari?"

I looked up. Her eyes were wide, as if she was expecting an answer. Guiltily, I asked, "Sorry An, what was that?"

She looked uncomfortable and she shifted in her seat. "I asked what you thought about it."

"About what?"

It was an ominous sign that she didn't seem offended that I hadn't been listening. "About me...moving."

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I scrabbled for a way out of my thoughts so that I could focus on the present and this awful news that my one and only friend I had left was telling me. "You're..."

"It wasn't my decision," Anna said miserably. "My mum changed jobs to somewhere up north. She broke the news to me last night, I'm sorry I couldn't tell you sooner..."

Numbly, I said, "When are you going?"

"Next week," she said apologetically. When I said nothing, she rushed on, "I'm really sorry. You're my best friend, Ari, you know how much I'll miss you."

It was hard to speak past the lump in my throat.

"I'll miss you too," I muttered and she squeezed my hand.

"We'll keep in touch, right?" She said brightly.

I nodded but didn't say anything. There was a hollow ache in the center of my chest where her words had pulled at some half healed wound that I was only beginning to become aware of.

It hurt, to always be the one left behind. I had lost my parents, my best friend and...

The nameless ache throbbed.

I was used to being alone. At times, I had even sought it, because there was no one to pretend for when you were by yourself. But somehow, sitting in this crowded lunchroom with the knowledge of yet another goodbye on the horizon, I felt lonelier than I had ever been in my life.

888

"Strange, isn't it?" Anna said as we were stepping out of school at the end of the day.

"What is?" I said automatically, shifting some of the books in my bag.

"All those owls," she replied and I straightened up immediately. She pointed up at the grey sky and I saw a tawny brown bird sweep gracefully through the air followed by two more. "They're not exactly day creatures, are they?"

"Strange," I echoed but I continued to stare at the sky, as if waiting for something that would never come.

The bus arrived and she immediately joined the hustle to get on it. She glanced back and when she saw that I hadn't moved from my spot, she called out, "You're not going home?"

"I think I'll walk today." I waved halfheartedly. And then, because I did not want her to think it was her fault I added, "I'll call you tonight, okay?"

I waited until the bus had driven out of sight before I turned around and began my slow plod home.

Autumn was approaching. I could feel it in my bones. The chill was already hovering in the air.

I wrapped my arms around myself as I walked, stopping and staring occasionally at the cars that drove past and then shaking my head, forcing myself onward.

There was something different about me. I could feel it, as surely as I could feel the bite of autumn. An unfathomable, incomprehensible change that left me weary and exhausted. I was young, just a few more months shy of seventeen, but there was an incomprehensible weight on my lungs, on my thoughts and words and heart. It was the sort of weight that I always had assumed would come with age.

Was it because the pale yellow sunshine seemed too bright? Or perhaps because even the sound of the wind whistling through the grass seemed too loud? I felt very fragile, as if one bump could send me shattering into pieces to the ground. I felt like I could be hurt very easily. I felt like I had been.

Above all else, I felt tired. I wanted to sleep for a thousand years-

(and dream)

-but at the same time, I wanted to smile and laugh and cry with happiness and relief because after so long, I was here, I breathed, I walked, I was alive-

I stopped myself short. Where had that thought come from?

I closed my eyes. I fought against the wall of black, tried to remember but

my thoughts

spiralled

downwards

into

the abyss

My eyelids flew open and I had to take several deep and gasping breaths. I was covered from head to toe in a cold sweat. My heart was thundering in my chest, as if it had sensed the presence of the end and was determined to outrace it, to take flight...

Shakily, I began to walk again. I tried not to think about it. Instead I breathed in the chilly scent of change and kept my eyes focused straight ahead on the pale and featureless street before me.

Then, a flash of color in my peripheral vision caught my eye.

My gaze flickered reluctantly towards the unusual sight and abruptly my feet halted in their tracks as I stared at the source of the color.

It was a flower, caught between the iron bars of one of the gates that fronted a nearby apartment building. It was a deep, vivid red and shaped like a seven-pointed star. A poinsettia.

Something stirred in me and hesitantly, I drew closer. I stretched out a hand and stroked one of its crimson leaves. It felt like velvet against my skin. My favorite flower.

A rush of inexplicable emotion surged in me: happiness, sorrow, anger...love.

I did not know why I felt the way I did. I didn't know why my heart began to beat like a drum, impossibly fast in my chest.

Gingerly, I untwisted the flower from between the gate's bars. To my shock, I noticed that what looked like a piece of long red string was tied to its stem. Again, another surge of emotion threatened to overwhelm me and my heart pounded harder than ever, except this time from fear.

What was wrong with me? I tried to steady my shaking hands as I touched it. It felt like plain wool. Nothing to be afraid of.

Frowning, I tugged at the string and another loop of red came into sight, coiled on the ground. I saw now that the string seemed to stretch on endlessly along the sidewalk, taking a path that detoured from my usual route home.

I hesitated. I knew that to follow it would be a very stupid idea, not to mention even dangerous...and yet...

I looked down at the glowing red flower in my hands.

Then, wrapping the wool around my wrist as I walked, I began to follow the path of the string.

A quiet sort of desperation was beginning to build in me as I walked, clutching the thread as though I were a blind man clinging to his only hope of sight. It was as if I had never woken up from my nightmare last night. I was lost amidst this terrible darkness; I needed to be found.

But who would find me here?

The string that I had coiled around my wrist had become thicker; one half of a set of manacles. And still I followed it, until I found myself in an abandoned, grey street.

It was a street that was a replica of all the others I'd walked past on my way here. Rows of apartment buildings lined up on the side of the road, worn down and dilapidated, the dark gray of the bricks of which it was made only a few shades darker than the sky above. It was utterly deserted, save for the occasional stray that lurked around the edges, and the lamp posts that adorned the streets were flickering on and off.

I doubted whether anyone would willingly choose to come to such a dreary place. Yet as I followed the red thread up to one of the buildings, I stopped because I was wrong.

There was a young man there. He was sitting on the stairs that led up to the front door of the building. His head was bowed and at my distance I could only tell that he was dark haired and pale.

I wasn't following the thread anymore. Like gravity, I was being pulled towards this strange boy until I found myself directly in front of him, only a few feet away. He was wearing a plain black suit that only served to highlight the monotony of his surroundings; the only color I saw on him was the red burst of the string he held twisted between his fingers. I did not need to confirm that it was the end of the piece I had wrapped around my wrist.

He looked up then and I noticed for the first time that he was very good looking. This did not surprise me, for some reason. His eyes were a very dark grey, the color of storm clouds. They met and then held my own with an intensity that was almost ferocious. I stared back, and for a long time we both said nothing; merely looked, unsmiling, at the other.

Thunder rumbled in the distance and it was as if some spell had been broken; color flooded my cheeks and I took a step back. The boy's eyes followed the movement.

"Excuse me," I said hesitantly, "but I have, er, your string."

He said nothing for a long time but I could feel his gaze grow heavier on my face, as if it were a physical weight. Finally he said in a voice so low it was barely a murmur, "Thank you."

I should have felt relieved when he broke his silence but if anything I felt more uncomfortable. It wasn't necessary an unpleasant feeling; it felt like I was shivering, shaking in my skin.

His eyes locked with mine as he spoke again. "It's about time what was mine returned to me."

He seemed to weigh each word carefully as he said it. Yet for some reason his tone struck a wrong chord in me and I replied testily, "Maybe if you didn't leave your knitting all over the street, it'd come back to you sooner."

The young man's lips curved upwards into a slow smile. "Perhaps."

I stared at him. "Have..." I began uncertainly, "...have we met before?"

His smile vanished as though it had been wiped from his face. "Do you think so?" He said quietly.

"It's just..." I struggled with myself for a moment, "...never mind."

I forced myself to turn away; I had barely taken a few steps when the boy called out, "You're still tied to me."

It felt as though I had been struck in the chest; I whirled around and gasped, "What did you say?"

With an unreadable expression, he gestured towards the red string that still connected us both. I breathed again and a dull ache began to throb somewhere near my heart.

"Oh," I said, wishing that I didn't feel so stupidly disappointed. I made to remove it but the boy interrupted me.

"It's alright," he said. He pulled out a pair of gleaming scissors from his pocket and trapped the string between their blades, ready to sever them.

"Wait!" The cry flew from my lips before I had registered it and he looked up in surprise. My heart was beating impossibly fast in my chest, flying almost and I did not know why I was stopping this strange boy from severing the only connection I had to him, nor why I was in agony as I had never been for years and years

(in the darkness)

His expression seemed to soften and his eyes darkened as he watched the conflict play along my face. He put down the scissors.

"Don't you trust me, Ariadne?" he murmured.

Why was I not surprised that he knew my name? I stared at him desperately, seeking and beseeching for the answer to a long forgotten question, a half remembered dream. He met my gaze unflinchingly and slowly, I nodded.

His eyes never left my own, even as the scissors flashed silver in the weak sunlight-

SNIP.

-and both the thread and the darkness fell away.

A million colors. A hundred skies. A handful of faces. The fragmented pieces of my dreaming in the darkness rejoined and fused and burned so brilliantly in my mind that I staggered back.

Angerlovefearhopedesperation hatelonelinesslonginglovelov e

Where did one end and the other begin?

And then I realized that it did not matter, nothing mattered now, because I was standing in front of the only thing, the only person in the world that did.

My heart flew again.

I stared at him speechlessly and it was like the mask shifted, or my eyes cleared: the handsome, unfamiliar face of the stranger fell away and was replaced by the weary and stern features of the one that I had once loved so well.

Slowly, he stood up and descended down the stairs until he finally stopped in front of me, separated only by a few feet.

"Tom," I whispered. It was hard to speak; infinite questions threatened to spill off my tongue at any minute and I was made mute by their clamor. In the end, I could only croak, "How?"

"Time," he replied softly and I stilled as the sound seemed to reverberate in the air around us. "You were right about Daedalus' theory, Ariadne."

"I don't understand," I said.

He had expected this; he began, "When you broke your wand-"

"How did you...?" I stopped myself and Tom continued.

"-the Strand of Time that was in it rejoined with your broken one. But that wasn't all, was it?" His eyes bored into my own. "You destroyed your Fate."

"I broke the loop," I whispered.

"And so those whose Fates were entangled with your own were lost also."

I stared at him; what he was saying was barely registering. The cold wind whipped around us and I pushed my hair away from my face as I said uncertainly, "But...you're here."

He looked at me for a long time before he answered. "Yes, I am," He said softly. "It seems I am still tied to you."

His words skittered through my mind and suddenly I was reliving my long nightmare of a black prison and the mute, voiceless words that had been spoken there.

I borrowed Time from another and gave it to you, at your end. A minute.

"Time," I whispered. "It was you. It was your Time that the Keeper...borrowed..."

And then all the awful implications that followed the though crashed into me; I remembered my torture and torment and years upon years spent in the infinite nothing and black and I gasped out wildly, "The darkness-"

"I know, Ariadne," Riddle said. I stared at him and he gave me a hollow smile. "I know."

It was agony again. To know that he had suffered the same fate as I- to be alone and gone, without the blessing of knowing that it was by choice that he had ended up in the sea of perpetual and inexhaustible nothingness, like I did- it destroyed me. I wanted to erase it from his memory, bleach it out, protect him from remembering the awful fate that that been dealt to him by my doing-this hideous end that he had not deserved.

"I didn't want to hurt you," I whispered and my voice cracked with strain, "I thought I could undo it all. I am so sorry."

He said nothing; he merely looked at me. I could understand if he chose to leave me now, after all I had done to him. But I owed him the truth if nothing else and if he really were leaving again, I didn't want him to go without knowing about the poor, foolish girl that had truthfully and desperately loved him once upon a time.

"I was born in 1993," I said in a rush and a crease formed between his brows, "I attend a public school where I am a mediocre student with no special talents at all. I used to play the cello but I was so bad at it that I pulled out after a year. My mum was a pharmacist and my dad was a photographer and they were murdered three years ago by your future self. I'm not a witch!" I burst out and I hated myself for the tears that were pooling behind my eyes as I spoke the words that condemned me out loud, "I'm a Muggle, I've been a Muggle for nearly all my life and I am so, so sorry for hurting you as cruelly as I did when I left-"

"Enough," Tom said, and I fell silent, my breathing ragged. He was frowning as he looked at me and I feared that I had tested his patience too far- I half expected him to turn on the spot and vanish but he only continued to look at me with a slightly frustrated expression. Then he said quietly, "You never asked me what I saw in the Second Locket."

I was thrown off by his abrupt change of topic. I stared at him, not knowing what to say.

"You didn't want to know," Tom said shrewdly.

Still unsure, I said nothing and he sighed. He walked towards me and stopped when only a foot of space lay between us. I wanted to step back but his gaze trapped me where I was.

"I was in the darkness for so long," he said quietly. "I had a lot of time to think." His eyes bored into mine. "I thought about you."

My heart was pounding in my chest. I swallowed hard and thought, because it would have broken my heart to say the words out loud, You must hate me.

Riddle acknowledged the thought as though I had spoken it. "I was angry because I thought that you had betrayed me. And I could not come back because my Fate was gone and my Time was tied to yours." He hesitated. "You know what I fear. And I was trapped there, in my own hell. So yes, for a very long time I despised you." Tom paused again and it seemed to cost him a great effort to continue.

"I thought you were still alive, you see," he said quietly. "That you had sentenced me to death as I had heard you had once planned.

"I asked the Keeper to bring me back. When he said I could not return, I asked him why. And then...he told me that you had gone too.

"I..." He seemed to flounder for a minute as he searched for the right words, "...lost myself."

It was barely a whisper. I remembered how it was in the darkness, slipping so easily into dreams that lasted centuries...how I had forced myself to remember, and to exist. It had been difficult...so difficult...

"It was grief that brought me back," he said suddenly and his eyes took on a deadened, haunted look as if something had closed behind them. Horror washed through me and when he next spoke, it was a whisper. "I realized then that death was...it was nothing."

Wasn't that like something his elder, red eyed self had told me once? Between the one who leaves and the one that was left behind...it would always be the latter that hurt more, for him.

It was different for me. I had to appreciate how much strength it took to leave...because it was harder, infinitely harder to come back. I remembered the choice I had been given in the darkness... and how it had taken every bit of courage I had not to stay in the peace and merciful silence of the black prison.

"I knew you would come back," Tom said quietly as though he had read my mind. "Just as I knew that I would find you again."

"But why?" I croaked desperately. "Why would you want to...after all I have done...?"

"You fool," he said gently and my heart took off again, pounding against the inside of my chest, "Surely you have realized it by now."

I shut my eyes tightly and suddenly I was in a dusty, dimly lit room and I was staring into the red eyes of the man I had sentenced to death. I opened them and the grey of the boy that had found me replaced the memory.

"Please," I whispered.

He understood my unspoken request; he studied me for a long time. Then, very quietly, "I love you, Ariadne."

It was so honest, the way he said it. Honest and so devastatingly simple- as if he were stating a common truth that he had known all his life-that it made my head spin. Yet as I stared desperately into the stormy grey of his eyes I could not doubt him, not when the truth looked so plainly out of them.

A new pain bloomed in my chest and I began to cry in earnest, turning away from him.

"Why are you crying?" Tom sounded slightly alarmed and he stepped closer but I pulled away.

"Because you'll go," I moaned through my hands. "You're Lord Voldemort. You want Horcruxes and war and-"

"I want you." His voice was fierce.

I made a noise that was half laugh, half sob. "I'm tired of seeing the people I love die."

He was silent for a minute.

"My Horcruxes are gone," he said finally and a strange expression flickered over his face.

I turned back to him. "Gone?"

"You destroyed your Fate," he repeated and there was a faraway look in his eyes, "so it was if everything that we went through never happened."

My eyes widened. "So-"

He reached out and took one of the hands hanging limply at my side and pressed it to his chest, over his heart. "All me," he said quietly. "Just me."

I was mute again; I could feel his heart beating underneath my hand, almost as fast as mine. My breath caught in my throat and his gaze flickered down.

"I have hurt you more times than I could possibly atone for," he said the same, quiet tone, "I do not deny it. And I can understand if you choose not to forgive me for all I've done to you and yours." He hesitated and a rare flash of uncertainty flit across his face. All his charm seemed to have abandoned him and it was with a growing sense of wonder that I watched him struggle for his next words. "But, if you would have me..."

Perhaps we were, all of us, tied by the invisible force that connected and intertwined lives together like a multitude of tangled threads. Perhaps suffering and loss and pain were inevitable after all in this world, as were hope and happiness and love. Or perhaps it was only our decisions that really mattered in the end, the choices that could hurt and heal.

Did it matter, though?

I loved him. And so for me there was no choice; because it would always be him that I would choose, in the end.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and looked up at him. He was still watching me with a trace of uncharacteristic anxiety. "Tom," I said, "What do you see in the Second Locket?"

He stared at me. Then slowly he pulled me closer to him, closing the distance between us. Although his hands kept a firm grip over my own, they were cautious and his brows pulled together.

"Ari," he said and there was an edge of panic in his voice, "I don't know what you... if I can change. I am who I am and I'm not like you, I'm not good-" He struggled for words and I had never seen him so him so agitated, "I'm still angry. I still have so much hatred and resentment and-and rage, and it is something that cannot simply be erased overnight-"

"I know, I know," I murmured fretfully. His desperate eyes met my own and shyly I reached up to trace the jagged scar at his neck. He shivered.

"But..." I said hesitantly, "...we have Time, don't we?" I managed a small smile. "All of what is ours. And well, if you'll have me..."

Tom seemed to struggle with himself in a way that was somehow incredibly human. He tried several times to say something else but he appeared to abandon the attempt for he simply stared down at me instead with an expression that could have been frightening.

"I love you," he said again and this time it was a promise, for all the times that he had hurt me in the past and for all the times he would in the future that was as dark and unpredictable as it was measureless and blissful, because that was the best he could give me right now. No matter what happened, that would never change. A promise that would last until the end of our time...and perhaps even after.

My fickle voice had left me again and so I speechlessly squeezed the hand that was wrapped around mine, trying to convey that yes: I know, I understand you, I love you.

He appeared to comprehend my silent communication; his eyebrows drew further together in surprise. Then the tense lines around his eyes and mouth relaxed and he flashed me a hesitant, dizzying smile that I had never before seen on him; it lit up his whole face. On impulse, I threw my arms around his neck; his own closed solidly around my waist and then we were spinning like a pair of fools in the chilly air that was made electric by the oncoming storm. I was whooping, laughing loudly and with wild abandon because I could not possibly contain the joy that threatened to explode out of me any longer.

And just when I thought that I would simply die of happiness, Tom stopped, letting my feet touch the ground once more. I looked up at him quizzically; I caught the flicker of amusement in his grey eyes. Then suddenly his mouth was on mine and he was kissing me with a force that nearly swept me off my feet again.

And when at last he pulled away, I blurted out breathlessly, "This is what you saw in the Second Locket?"

He smirked at my slightly cross-eyed expression and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear.

"Third time's a charm," he muttered, and, in the knowledge that we both had tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until the end of our lives, he kissed me again.

And even though thunder clapped ominously above us and we were both freezing and I could barely breathe from how tightly he was holding me I thought this was the most perfect way to start the first day of our hard won, finite, but utterly appealing,

Time.

A/N: There is one more chapter left after this, the Epilogue. It's about as long as this chapter and it ties up a lot of loose ends of the story.

In regards to A & T's experience in the "darkness": it's not precisely death that I was trying to convey (as I tend to have a more optimistic view of that particular aspect) but a sort of limbo.

Here is a basic recap of what happened: in 1945, Ari destroyed her Fate thread by breaking the cycle and reached the end of her severed Time strand. Therefore, she died. But because the tempus strand in her broken wand rejoined with her Time (making it whole once more), she could not yet die properly as she still had this time left. So she was stuck in a sort of limbo, the "darkness".

She arrived back in 2010 because it was at that point in time that her Fate and Time split and she began to follow solely the Fate thread. But now that her Fate is gone, she follows solely the Time Strand left from this point.

For Tom, because his Fate was so entwined with hers, both his Thread and timeline was destroyed when she broke the cycle. But because the Keeper tied his Time to Ari's, he ended up in the limbo as well. But he could not come back unless Ariadne decided to come back and follow Time once more (as his Strand is entwined with hers, courtesy of the Keeper).

TL;DR: Ari and Tom's Strands of Time are entwined around one another, and they both follow this time from the point in 2010 that is mixture of Tom and Ari's present. That is, the wizarding world and the Muggle world.

Furthermore, because the wizarding world exists now in their present, and it was the timeline of Fate that Ari screwed up while the Time Strand remained untouched, they are now following the original timeline of J. K. Rowling's series- eleven to twelve years after the Battle of Hogwarts.

God, this is hard to explain. This is one of the main reasons it took me so long to plan this chapter- I had to balance the romance and explanations. In the end, I decided to lean more towards the former, haha.

I hope this ending met your expectations! I really do have to thank all of you for your support and the overwhelmingly positive response I got for the last chapter! In particular, there are some reviewers that have stuck around since the beginning:

NY GE Pyromaniac: Oh my God- you-you-God, what can I say, apart from the fact that you have to be one of the nicest and most supportive people I have ever met online and that you give the best advice regarding college and friends and whatnot…Your reviews and PMs always make me smile. Thank you, thank you so much and hopefully I'll see you in the land down under some time!

phoenixqueen15: I cannot begin to even say how much your words meant to me…it makes me incredibly, dizzyingly happy to know that enjoys both the writing and the story of my fic. Thank you so much for your continual love and support!

dogsrock101: Until now, I didn't realise that my writing could really convey the emotions and feelings that I wanted. There really is no substitute for the real thing and I always thought that my words fell a little flat when I tried to put a little more life in my characters. So thank you, thank you for letting me know that I succeeded, in this little story of mine.

FadedSunset: Haha, I'm glad that you appreciate all the planning. Honestly, when I first started I didn't think that it would take as much energy and effort as it did…But I have to thank you for continuing to read this, and your reassurances that my characters were, well, in character. This was my first fanfic it's such a relief to know that everyone at least resembled their canon counterparts.

katchile94: I'll never forget your review about the idea of someone being born evil; you were completely spot on with what I was trying to convey and you made me so glad when I read that the romance was at least somewhat realistic. That was my biggest fear, writing this story.

And finally, the people who gave me my first reviews when this story was only a short, 4000 word chapter:

adeline mcintosh

CacklingBlasphemy

KooleyAid

I haven't heard from you guys in the while, but your words inspired me to continue this and were an insane comfort to my fourteen-year old self all those years ago.

I'm sorry if I missed my other reviewers in this list: that doesn't lessen the gratitude and happiness I feel towards you guys. Especially all you lurkers- the fact that people even want to read my story is just…mind-blowing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this chapter: remember, there is still one more to go.

See you at the end, guys!