I'm the Sinner, Jared Benjamin

If I ain't clean, you're the vice, I'm the sinner

When you leave, blood is ice, it's the winter

There's no sleep, there's no dreams

When you're gone, there's no me

I ain't clean, you're the vice, I'm the sinner

Serotonin spikes the moment you walk in

Dopamine highs that I'm getting lost in

Withdrawal from your lips

I'm up through the night

But just one more hit to keep me alive

It was midday when he was released from the office that the Dark Lord had claimed. He used the map to avoid Ginny and found her waiting outside the Room of Requirement. He took to the library instead, mildly guilty, looking for Nagini. The students he encountered gave him a wide berth, whispering in his wake but otherwise not meeting his razor-sharp glare. His efforts were assisted by having an armed guard.

He didn't run across the library annex, though he wanted to. Instead, Tom kept his back straight and his stride confident as he pushed through one set of the library doors, sneering at anyone who dared look at him.

It wasn't hard to find the Dark Lord's familiar, as she was surrounded by a group of Death Eaters, just as Harry was.

Beyond the Dark Lord's followers, she had gathered a sheepish crowd of around ten students, most of them older Slytherins, though there were a handful of Ravenclaws and one young Gryffindor.

She was reading three books, spread across her lap. She grinned at him as he approached. His entourage joined hers and forced the students back as Harry sat down beside her.

"What are you reading?" Tom asked in Parseltongue.

"Everything. But this one is poetry. This one had a section on my blood curse, but it was too short. This one talks about the castle. I want to read the books in the Scriptorium."

Tom bristled. "Have you asked him?"

Nagini raised an eyebrow.

"He caught us in there. He didn't take it well," Harry told her.

She fought a smile until her face was serious, then said, "So?"

"Let it be clear that this is Nagini's idea," Tom said, more of a note for the Dark Lord when he saw the memory in Harry's head.

She stood up, dropped the books on the floor and stepped over them, barefoot. Tom followed her, grinning.

The dungeon stairs weren't far from the library, so they didn't attract too much attention, except for the group that had gathered among the shelves and hovered behind the Death Eaters who escorted them.

Once she had opened the door with a Parseltongue command, she ordered the Death Eaters to clear the Common Room of students. They shepherded the ones who had followed them, then those inside out, before sweeping the bedrooms and emptying them as well.

Tom pricked Harry's thumb on the snake's fang, whispered to open the wall, and shot down the narrow metal stairs ahead of her. She closed the way behind before their guard could follow.

Nagini trailed behind him, stepping confidently in the slippery, cramped space. Once they'd both squeezed through the statues, she approached the towering bookshelves, running her fingers along the titles.

The harp strummed beside the long couches, preventing silence while she focused on the stone shelves.

"Can you hide things in here?" She asked, tapping her temple. Tom was immediately more interested, though Harry was confused.

"Hide things?" He asked.

"Maybe," Tom said.

'Maybe?' Harry thought, 'Hide what? What do you mean maybe?'

'Keep things from him. I think we can. If you put it where… Wherever you put it.'

'Put what?'

'Harry. Your thoughts. I see them as they come, but as for where some of them go… I cannot find them. Neither can he.'

'Wait. What do you mean?'

'Your mind is a mess; I would need a direct blessing from the gods to sort through this.'

'No. No, what you're saying is I'm a better Occlumencer than you.'

'Why not? Your flagrant and repetitive self-denial has created something not unlike Occlumency, if that is what you wish to call it.'

Nagini had stopped looking at the shelves and was staring at him, eyebrows raised.

'I didn't think I was hiding anything; I don't know how to do it on command,' Harry thought.

'She wants to tell us something in private. We are going to work it out. Focus.' Though Tom feigned interest in Nagini, Harry could feel his attention like a spotlight.

'There's parts of my head you haven't seen? What happened to 'open book'?'

'I know what you would find there,' he tried to sound casual, but his heart rate was giving him away.

"What if I can't?" Harry asked Nagini, making Tom narrow his eyes.

She pursed her lips and shrugged, returning to the books and pulling one free, the dozens of gold bracelets on her wrists rattling.

'You need only attempt awareness of your own thoughts; is that so hard?' Tom persisted.

'I have genuinely no idea what you're talking about,' Harry was suddenly sweating.

'Of course you don't.'

He flinched at his tone, squinting while Nagini sat down on a black chaise and cracked the book open.

'If we understood this, we could use it.' Tom tried again.

'Use it for what?'

'You are being intentionally daft.'

'No, I'm confused.'

'On purpose.'

He scowled at the stone table that bore the Dark Lord's name, squirming at the discomfort Tom was causing him.

'I… Don't want to. I'm not ready to see whatever you're talking about. I can't. If there is… Something in there I'm not-'

Harry expected immediate resistance. Instead, Tom sat next to Nagini, eyes on his name engraved in the stone. She seemed content to ignore him while he went through his internal struggle.

'At this point, he will see that she intends to tell us something, regardless of whether she does or not. What if… You showed it to me, and I dealt with the rest. I can hide it there. You will not need to 'see' anything.'

Harry could tell he was being coerced but knew Tom wasn't wrong. Whatever Nagini wanted to tell him wasn't intended for Voldemort to know they knew. And the ability to keep things from him intentionally would be useful. At the bare minimum, it might spare him some dignity. That was assuming any of what he was saying was accurate or possible. He found himself wanting it to be neither.

'I don't know how, though,' he repeated.

'You do.'

Tom was already rifling through his thoughts, pulling at them and shoving them at him, probably hoping that Harry would work it out. He tugged on the most uncomfortable ones first, forcing him to think about how Tom made him feel while he squeezed his nails into the palms of his hands.

'Pay attention. Where is the rest of it?'

'The rest of it? What do you mean, that's all of it.' Harry's eyebrows knitted together while Tom continued to disassemble the spaghetti-like threads in his head.

'No.'

'No?'

'Harry.'

He shook his head as though he could dislodge Tom, then bit his tongue.

'This would be less fruitless if you helped.'

'I didn't even agree,' Harry crossed his arms.

'Do you need to? You know I am right.'

Harry made a valiant effort not to make a face or shake his entire body in response. Instead, he rolled his eyes closed.

'He could be down here any moment.'

He exhaled and kicked his legs out, finally helping Tom examine his thoughts, the idea of the Dark Lord walking in to ask questions finally outweighing his discomfort.

Compared to Tom's neat web, his mind was a disaster. While some of his emotions and thoughts regarding Tom were visible, he was right. There was a discrepancy. If Harry had to be honest with himself, most of his thoughts were directly or indirectly related to him. The mess he'd thrown on top was purely a self-defence mechanism. One that he wasn't keen to deconstruct. Neither, apparently, was Tom, as they both delicately handled the wreck until Harry located several tiny holes in the proverbial base of his skull—attached to fine, hair-like threads, barely visible—under mountains of unrelated thoughts, only clear when he sought them out.

'I'm not going in there.'

Tom paid him no mind and vanished within, strangely absent from his head. He felt closer to his own person than he had in a long time. Instead of relishing the sensation, it panicked him. The urge to follow and be sure he hadn't somehow fallen out entirely nearly overwhelmed him; his fear of his own mind stayed his hand.

He waited, wringing his fingers, bizarrely his own. The harp was suddenly the least relaxing sound he'd ever heard. Nagini turned pages nonchalantly, grating his ears. He tried not to breathe like he was on the verge of a panic attack. Attempted to ignore the fact that Tom was amongst the thoughts he hid from himself.

When Tom reemerged, there was a long moment of silence in his head—in which Harry tried to hide his incomprehensible and intense relief—before Tom thought:

'I can work with this.'

'How bad is it?'

He was ignored. Tom laughed instead, a strangely nervous sound. He turned to Nagini. "I can hide it," he said in Parseltongue.

She smiled and pointed at her eyes. Tom entered her mind to find no resistance. Met with a ghostly expanse filled with a familiar florescent green smoke, her thoughts dancing within it as though performing, moving to a beat he couldn't hear.

They saw the Dark Lord's Horcrux, a dark, humming, spider-like thing in her head, intertwined with her adoration for him. It reminded him of his magic: darkness swirling with a sharp-edged, snaking green mist.

A memory took shape in her mindscape.

Through Nagini's strange serpent vision, they saw Voldemort reclined in a four-poster bed on too many pillows, reading a book.

He looked frustrated; his eyes bugged as he dropped the book on his chest. "The whole point of reading is to find out. We are reading to find out. I do not know what will happen next. Shut up," he snapped, then looked at Nagini, frowning as though he'd just noticed she was there.

Tom removed them from her head as the memory ended, making sense of it faster than Harry did.

"He is talking to your Horcrux," Tom said aloud, then in his head, 'Reading to him. I have never seen him interact.'

"He admires your synchronism. He won't admit it, of course," she gave him a pointed look. "He wants the same thing. I'm sure of it."

"Just… Based on that? Are you sure he was talking to the Horcrux?" Harry asked.

"Who else would he be talking to?" Tom answered, and Nagini shrugged and nodded.

Harry could feel Tom retreating into his thoughts in response to the new information, irritating him. While he did so, he worked to jam what they'd learned and how they'd learned it into the depths of Harry's mind, annoying him further because he'd opted not to discuss what he'd found there.

'You were right. You are not ready to see it. For the time being, keep piling nonsense on top.'

'That… What? How bad is it? What does that mean?' Harry wondered.

'It is best that we leave it alone.'

'You're doing the opposite of help.'

'Did you ask for help? I am helping.'

Harry kept detecting panic, thinly veiled as Tom focused on shielding his mind.

Nagini interrupted his turmoil by abruptly standing, dropping the heavy book on the stone table. It refused to stay there, levitating back to its shelf.

"He's looking for me." She squeezed through the first statue before he could get to his feet.

"Okay, bye," he said, though she was already gone.

He left the Scriptorium almost as soon as she did, but he didn't see her in the tunnels. When he reached the Slytherin Common Room, she and her guard were nowhere to be seen, as though she'd sprinted away.

He took his own four Death Eaters back through the library annex and then the transfiguration courtyard before he thought to check the map. He found Ginny still waiting outside his door, annoyingly joined by Avalon. Eris and Cedrum were still in the classroom, metres from where he stood.

He sighed and rolled his head, then his shoulders. He took the defence tower route to his room, followed every step of the way by masked and hooded figures; their wands were drawn, forcing anyone in their path to the side under the apparent threat of violence. He found himself thinking that an entourage of Death Eaters would have been a blessing months earlier.

When he reached Ginny and Avalon, he was already frowning, unwilling to discuss what he'd done or why with either of them.

They stood up from the stones, mirroring his expression as he paced wordlessly. He summoned his room and pushed past them. They entered, though he'd been less than welcoming. Ginny closed the doors and turned on him.

"What was that? Tell me why? Where have you been all day?" She reminded him of Hermione as she forced him to sit down.

He shot a look at Avalon, which made Ginny roll her eyes and scoff.

"Don't you think she deserves an explanation, too?" she asked, sitting down sharply, her body stiff.

Avalon remained standing, looking at him for the first time as though she genuinely disliked him, her arms crossed over her chest.

"At Skulmadras, he filled the tent with dead rats to eavesdrop. He heard everything. He knows… All of it." Harry was fuming again as he spoke.

Ginny's mouth fell open. Avalon shifted but didn't look surprised.

"How much do you know?" Tom asked her.

"He told me you learned French at summer school. I knew about the rats. I suspected there was more to it. Obviously, I was right, yes?" She sat down and huffed.

"And you thought allowing him to do that was fine?" Tom asked.

She laughed, "Let him? Eris is an idiot; I cannot stop him ever. You're funny for thinking so."

"You could have told Cedrum?" Harry said.

She shrugged.

Ginny frowned at the coffee table. "You could have told Cedrum, or me," she said, directing her glare at him.

"It wasn't that simple. I didn't want anyone… The things I said to Cassiopeia, no one should know. He's lucky he didn't get himself killed. Don't look at me like that. I mean it. No one should know."

She narrowed her eyes as he spoke and looked at Avalon. "Sorry. Could you give us a minute? I'll catch up with you."

She raised her eyebrows and stood up, pursing her lips as she pushed back through the doors without saying goodbye.

"What was it? What did he hear?" Ginny asked as soon as she was gone, still frowning.

"I need a shower. I'm not doing this with you. There are things you don't need to know. Things you're safer not knowing. Would you let me do that? For once?"

"Do that by attacking Eris while he's locked in wards?"

"That part was admittedly unnecessary but warranted," Tom said, crossing his arms.

"Warranted?" She repeated.

"He is fortunate I did not kill him." His tone was less friendly.

She sat back, tearing her eyes away. "So… What happens now? What happened to him? He hasn't come out. What did You-Know-Who do?"

"He got away with it, basically. If he tells anyone, though…" Harry didn't finish.

She bounced her leg and chewed her thumbnail.

"It was the best possible outcome. For him." He wasn't sure why he felt the need to reassure her.

"I will end him if he tells you," Tom apparently didn't want to make her feel better.

"Merlin, I get it," she seemed to be fighting an eye-roll. "'No more crazy things', he says."

Harry shook his head. He could hardly tell himself. That he'd spoken about it out loud to Cassiopeia had been a drug-induced accident, and the vampire had already known too much. The thought of Ginny knowing how he felt about Tom made him nauseous. That Eris did know made his skin crawl along with it.

"I really need a shower." He repeated, standing up. She did the same and told him with her eyes that she wasn't done, again reminding him of someone else.

"Is there any word on Charlie?"

"I'll ask Cassiopeia, but they never tell me anything, Gin. I'm sorry."

She also left without saying goodbye, squinting all the while. He watched her on the map, her pace steady as she moved toward the transfiguration courtyard, then into Cedrum's classroom where Avalon had wound up and Eris still was.

He didn't open the doors again until Cassiopeia came to stand outside them after dinner had commenced. When she entered, she jammed his timetable into his hand and sat down gracefully.

"You've been busy, eh?"

"The hostages? From the raid? Are they dead?"

She held up both hands in surrender, "I know what you do, on Jesus. Never met a cagier guy than fucking Tom Riddle. But I have a theory, wanna hear it? Why are you so grumpy? No, actually, save it for after the theory: None of them are dead. That's my theory. None of them, not McGonagall, not Hummus or whatever he was called. Sorry, Hagrid. I don't even think Trelawney is dead."

"You really don't know?" Harry asked, then, "Wait, you know about Trelawney?"

"Of course, who doesn't? It's the why about Sybil that escapes me. And no, I don't know. He's more secretive than I remember—worse than you, that's for sure."

He grimaced at her insinuation but didn't comment.

"What happened in the courtyard with the world's most serious necromancer? It's all anyone in the Great Hall can talk about."

"Voldemort's been... in my head. He found out about Eris and the rats, so... I dunno. I just wanted to hit him, I guess. He didn't make him swear a Vow?" He didn't mean for it to come out as a question.

"He didn't? Huh." She clicked her long, sharp nails together on both hands as her eyes wandered away.

"Didn't Obliviate him either. Cedrum asked, and he didn't."

"He let you beat the shit out of him though?"

"I mean, I hit him once."

"Not enough, then?" She smirked at him.

He shrugged, and so did she.

"That's weird. I don't know. I'll ask, but Christ, it's like blood from a stone."

Harry knew exactly what she was talking about.

'So do I,' Tom thought.

"Why do you think they're not dead?" Harry asked, leaning into the hope she was offering.

"Just a hunch." She watched him as carefully as he watched her. "About the sparring. Are you fine with an audience? Because it would be easier for me to slot it in with your class. That he assures me you'll actually attend." She raised her sharp eyebrows. "In your head, huh? How often would you say he's poking around in there?"

Harry had all but forgotten about their deal, and Tom agreed before he could really think about it. He didn't like the tone of her question, so they both ignored it.

"Defence is on Tuesday nights now. I'm sure you'll check your schedule," she pointed at it, still on his lap, "Which is also when Skeeter is due to interview you."

She grinned as he shrivelled. "At lunchtime. Also, I don't know if Ginny told you, but Percy? Her brother, right? Incessant. Would she want to meet with him? It would be under supervision. Let's be honest, probably mine."

He wanted to gag at the thought of being interviewed by the blonde vulture but consoled himself with the few days between him and Tuesday.

Percy's weirdness seemed more like Tom's interest, but he didn't seem inclined to respond.

"I'll find out," Harry said. Then he asked, "How are the rest of them taking it?" Referring to the Weasleys.

She winced. "Not well."

"Are you going to give her her letters?" He asked.

"Should I?" She didn't seem to be asking him, instead looking sure she shouldn't.

"I believe she should decide," Tom said, and Cassiopeia sighed, standing.

"Alright, grumpy. I'll present her with the morbid opportunity. Will I tell her it was your idea?"

Harry shrugged, agreeing with Tom.

As soon as she left him alone, his thoughts wandered back to the tiny metaphorical holes in his head, where they led, what they'd hidden there, and the fact that he didn't think Harry was ready to see inside it, which, for some reason, made Tom panic.

His heart rate spiked at the few things that could mean, Tom falling silent every time he considered it. He frequently forced Harry's errant thoughts back where they came from before he unwound it all, while they both wished Nagini hadn't bothered.

'What does it really matter? If he's talking to my Horcrux?' He wondered.

Tom didn't give him an answer.