It is three hours before dawn when restlessness wakes him. The room is a pitch-black void, but his eyes do not falter in the dark. He rises shakily, weakness heavy enough for him to momentarily allow it. He inhales for a few seconds. The sensation of his magic in the air returns to him. Methodically, he strangles old memories, faded in their details yet no less haunting. As he walks, he becomes more aware of the faint onslaught of a storm beyond the manor's thick walls.
Voldemort catches the sight of his daughter by the window at the end of the corridor. The girl is a shrewd, intimate form of torture. It is akin to the kind he revelled directing at others, the kind Bellatrix also executed. Standing there is the spitting image of his late companion, except her eyes are his.
He approaches, curiosity and a need for a distraction lifting his feet. Delphi senses him without looking back.
"How did you do it, Father?" she asks in the ancient ancestral language she inherited from him. She was three years old when she began to speak to him in this way, words barely coherent yet somehow promising. He does not disapprove. After her mother, she is the only other person he chooses to occasionally confide with.
"Which action, dear one?" he replies softly, hissing syllables. He tilts his head. He almost chuckles as his transgressions come to him.
"Dealing with grandmother's death," she says without hesitation. "I was not old enough to remember Mother, but I hate that she was taken away. Did you not feel the same about your mother? What did you do?"
The mild amusement vanishes, giving way to an old rage. It slithers from his chest to his throat, painful like poison. Crimson washes over his pupils. He contemplates punishing her for the insolent question but stills when she finally turns to him.
The girl looks at him directly, almost pleadingly, face constricting a violent pain. This is the same carelessness he often warned Bellatrix of.
Until this moment, they had only spoken once about her mother. Most of their time together had been spent on training her and nothing else, no matter how much the familiarity burned him. He has no intention of becoming an irresponsible parent, dooming his child by letting another person shape her just to escape his own discomfort.
He realizes she does not actually want to hurt him either. She is only asking for a path forward and uses empathy because she thinks it will reap better answers. And he should not be surprised if the question was phrased that way. His daughter clearly learned from him within the first few years of her education. Vaguely impressed now, he decides to answer the question.
"I hated her for her weakness," Voldemort says firmly and venomously, this time in the normal tongue. "She passed on the night I was born, abandoning her duties to me. Thus, it was pointless to mourn and remember. Only her blood constituted her value."
Delphi blinks away, long black lashes attempting to hide sympathy and contain her fury at her father's revelation. She hides, too, the panic that seizes her. Perhaps mentioning her grandmother was not necessary. It only came to her in the dark and became a tempting maneuver she could not resist. His abrupt shift tells her she should have resisted it.
"Mother was not weak, was she?" comprehension finally saves her. She matches him, speech no longer unintelligible and sacred. Her voice rises a little. "If she died in battle as you said, then she had to be far from that. She did not abandon us; she was stolen! That means I can mourn her, and I must—"
"What? Do more than that?" he presses, recalling her cutting, calculated question.
She falls silent.
"Your mother's killer is dead, and no member of that woman's contemptible family still lives," he says in exasperation and bitterness.
The girl inhales deeply. She had guessed as much. Her father's clemency is rare, his wrath nuclear and thorough. In a way, she is satisfied. However, she still feels as if she has to do something. It is a cruel fever and she wants her cure.
"Father, how should I honor Mother?" she settles. She is mildly shaking now, tears warm and building.
The icy dawn air rushes through his silk black robes, piercing his ghostly skin. He withdraws a few steps from the girl. Turning away from her scorching gaze, he searches for an answer in the dense abyss outside the manor.
After Bellatrix's death, he retaliated. He raised their child by himself, despite himself. And he felt her absence... keenly. But he did not resort to spineless self-sabotage as her husband did. Rodolphus drowned himself in the same stormy waters surrounding that dreaded island-prison, the ones that had baited freedom from misery.
"Live," Voldemort answers Delphi eventually, voice gentler yet straining.
"You can live as your mother did. Better yourself and utilize the resources that I have given you. Your opportunities now exceed mine when I was your age. You are not obligated to spend decades smiling and biding your time while painstakingly manufacturing your value," he pauses, catching himself.
"And just as your mother helped me rebuild this world," he recovers, "help me keep it."
Their ancestors have always prized legacy. Predisposed to attain lasting mastery, they convinced child after child to transcend the limits of magic. He believes and imposes this philosophy not only because of tradition, though. He has his wealth of grim and disgraceful experiences, too, which he takes as undeniable evidence supporting—no, necessitating—an abundance of power, of security from poverty and wretchedness, from death.
And yet, the mother of his child died anyway. His highest-ranking general, who breathed his methods long before his ruthless guidance, was forcefully stolen by Death before him. His oldest enemy did not respect her loyalty nor her valor. Neither did it care about her blood being pure. The loss enraged him. Bellatrix was delightful, both in her vulnerability and strength. She was an investment that became a curiosity and later on ultimately morphed into a treasured aspect of his bleak existence. By her very spirit and undiluted acceptance, she alone breached him.
After their child was born, he had considered taking his companion with him through the centuries. Prodigious as she was, the woman would have undoubtedly mastered and endured the ritual. But it would have also worsened her zealousness, crystallizing it in a form he might no longer be able to control nor bear.
Their little heiress was enough. That he could not deprive her of. If he had callously ordered the child's death, as if he himself were faultless, then he would have lost her. It would have completely destroyed her recuperating morale, or worse, turned her against him in such a critical period in the last war. Prudence dictated he concede. Above all, he could not afford to commit his own parents' crimes. He would not descend that low, especially since he acquired more than they ever had. He is far from disappointing.
Delphi's arms suddenly reach him for the first time that she can remember, halting his thoughts. She stops shielding hers as she buries her face in his chest. She does not utter a word. Neither does he. He merely stands there, almost lifeless. He does not terribly need her help. Still, he prevents her from straying. He decides to return the gestures. He rests his chin on top of her head, submerges his right hand in the waves of her hair, and thinks to her, thank you.
After a minute, the embrace—both physical and mental—breaks. Voldemort returns to his chambers. His daughter stays, taking comfort in the intensity of the downpour.