Travel Log 6: Germany, Brocken

March 2000

Hedwig arrived at Burg Elend four days after Harry and his companions and actually stayed for once. Harry was glad.

It took several days for Harry to get used to life at the castle, having become unaccustomed to such stillness after all the months of travelling. And it was still – quiet, tranquil, motionless. They rarely met any of the Totengräbers, passing Inferi in the corridors more often than any other being and even that was rare. With the heavy snowfall continuing, the outside was painted a frozen landscape in which nothing moved and nothing seemed to live at all.

Sephoneia eventually sought them out in the library they so often lost themselves in – and that was only one library of several – and showed them where they could come to help with funeral preparations.

After that, things were suddenly much easier. Preparing bodies for burial was a familiar routine for Harry and Theodore. Rhea occasionally joined them, but she usually disappeared to conduct experiments. Tom resolutely kept to the library and Draco to their rooms.

It was almost freeing to finally be able to return to what Harry had begun to enjoy the most out of all the necromancy practices he had learned. It hadn't started out that way, but the steady routine had become something precious to him after an entire year of embalming the dead and eventually helping with the funerals themselves, too.

In the end, Harry couldn't say whether it was a coincidence or not that they were for once together in the library again – him, Theodore and Tom – when their peaceful days were interrupted.

As there were several libraries, Harry strongly suspected the one they were allowed entry to was the mildest, containing the least controversial books and thus the least frequented. So it was unusual to come across a Totengräber there – or a Lémure, as Harry would come to realise was the case in this instance.

"Tom?"

Harry turned around at the same time as Tom did.

A woman stood in a doorway that led to a different part of the library, seemingly in her mid-twenties though the salt-and-pepper of her hair and her undead eyes told a different story.

"Naenia," Tom breathed and Harry had to do a double take when he saw the expression on his face.

Harry had seen many unexpected expressions on Tom's face ever since he had found him in that sarcophagus in Greece, but this one … Harry couldn't begin to describe what it was.

He turned back to observe the woman standing in the doorway.

'Naenia' Tom had called her.

Naenia... Naenia...

"Rhea's grand-aunt?" Harry blurted out.

The woman arched an eyebrow at him, making Harry's face heat up in embarrassment. "Antheraea is indeed one of my grand-nieces."

"I thought you never went to Hogwarts?"

Had Sephoneia not told him her granddaughter had gone to study with the Totengräbers instead? Or was he confusing people?

"I didn't."

"Ah – I'm so sorry!" Harry squeaked, his face heating up further. "That was terribly rude of me."

"So it was," Naenia agreed calmly.

"It's just –" Harry looked at Tom. "Sephoneia told me Tom never met anyone from her family."

"We met one summer in Knockturn Alley." Naenia smiled and it almost looked fond – as fond as an undead necromancer could manage, Harry supposed, familiar with the eeriness that underlay all their smiles. "Oh, we had such a lovely time together, didn't we?"

"We did," Tom said, but it sounded hollow.

"Is this about the enquiry grandmother sent a while ago, asking about our potential involvement with the Dark Lord Voldemort?" Naenia tilted her head, eyes curiously fixed on Tom. "I admit I did not make the connection, then. Although I did not lie when I told her I never taught our secrets to anyone."

Harry looked between them – the undead necromancer with curiosity in her eyes and unsettling fondness in her smile and the undead former Dark Lord, who had averted his gaze, a stricken expression crossing his face.

"You have changed," Naenia told Tom. "But I would recognise you anywhere."

That was right. Harry had forgotten this wasn't Tom's original body – not even his second, artificial one. Having spent so much time with this version and so little with any other, it was what Harry had come to associate with Tom. But this face was handsome in different ways compared to Tom's original and his eyes were a different shape and colour. He was slightly taller now, from what Harry could tell, and also leaner (though Harry hadn't thought that possible).

Even his soul was different. Harry didn't know when Tom and Naenia had met, precisely, but Tom must have already had created at least one, if not two or three Horcruxes by then. And a broken soul repaired by Death would never compare to a soul that had never been broken at all.

But Tom still styled his hair the same way Harry had seen him wear it in the memories and when he had met the Diary's soul piece. He dressed the same way. He held his body the same way.

He smiled the same way.

"Let's give them some privacy," Theodore said quietly, tugging on Harry's hand.

Throwing one last look over his shoulder, Harry allowed himself to be dragged away, the picture of Tom and Naenia silently gazing at each other not leaving his mind for the rest of the day.

o

It was late when Tom finally returned to their quarters.

"You look pale," Harry commented, earning himself a venomous glare.

"I am always pale," Tom said, throwing himself into the last empty chair.

"Had a nice reunion?" Rhea teased.

Harry wondered how she knew about that. They hadn't actually mentioned it to her.

Tom did not reply and looked out the windows into the impenetrable darkness as he often did these days.

"I will retire for the evening, then," Theodore said into the silence. He looked at Harry.

"Go ahead," Harry told him softly. "I'll follow in a moment."

"I believe it is time for me to retire as well," Rhea said. "Come, Draco. You look like you might need some rest."

Harry very much doubted that an Inferius could rest in the same way living beings could, but he was glad for the privacy it gave him and Tom. After some consideration, he waved his hand in the direction of the bedroom door to cast some privacy spells as well.

He turned to Tom. "I had a feeling you met a necromancer before."

"I never thought I would see her again," Tom replied, still looking out the windows. He briefly glanced at Harry. "I didn't know what she was, back then."

"But you figured it out later."

"It wasn't hard. They may guard their secrets fiercely, but the Lémures' existence is well-known across our country."

That was why Voldemort had never been all that surprised by Harry's use of the art – because he had been familiar with it, after all.

"Would you like to stay here?"

Tom gave him a disbelieving look, finally turning away from the windows to fully face Harry. "What gave you such a ridiculous notion?"

"It just seems like you would really like to stay with Naenia."

That earned Harry a scoff. "Naenia doesn't even live here. And whether I wanted to stay or not, it's still impossible."

"Why?"

"Have you already forgotten?" He gestured between them. "This is my punishment."

Harry paused for a moment.

"I could end your punishment," he then said quietly.

The sheer contempt that crossed Tom's face was not at all the reaction Harry had expected to receive.

"You are a bigger fool than I took you for," Tom sneered.

Harry blinked, nonplussed. "I'm pretty sure I could manage it, being the Master of Death and all that."

"Oh, don't be so daft. That's not at all what I was talking about."

Harry didn't quite know what to say to that.

"You know," he began when the silence threatened to stretch too long, "you were wrong, before." He reached for the mokeskin pouch hanging around his neck. "I don't carry two wands. I carry three."

A hungry look crossed Tom's face when he laid eyes on the yew wand Harry now held out for him. He never moved to take it.

"I grew suspicious when we had to flee from Luxor," Harry continued, his arm still outstretched, steady, offering Tom his wand. "I know Voldemort could cast wandless magic – not as freely as wielders of the Old Magics, but enough to count – yet you never did. You cannot use magic anymore, can you, Tom?"

Slowly, ever so slowly, Tom reached out and gingerly picked up his wand.

"A little girl with burns all over her body took it from me," he whispered and, as if to prove his words, gave his wand a wave. "Lumos."

Nothing happened.

Sorrow overcame Tom's expression.

"I don't know if I could return it to you," Harry said and Tom's eyes snapped back to him. "But I could try turning you into an actual Inferius – it'd work better with your original body, but I think the homunculus you created might work as well and I certainly know where that one is buried. It might return your ability to cast magic. I know all other Inferi that were magical in life can still do it."

Draco certainly could.

"So I will be beholden to your whims while you ignore me because you cannot face what you have done?" Tom scoffed. "The poor little Malfoy is trapped with no means of escape. What makes me different from him in your eyes, Harry?"

"So many things," Harry said. "And my … reluctance to confront Draco has nothing to do with you. He isn't trapped, either. He is here out of his own free will, believe it or not. I would never make you my slave, Tom, just as I didn't make Draco my slave. You would still be your own person, hopefully with your magic intact once more."

"You would give me back my magic," Tom said, incredulity creeping into his tone. "After all I've done to you."

"Yes," Harry replied calmly, "because that's not who you are anymore, Tom."

"I am Voldemort. Don't you understand that, you fool?" Tom snarled, baring his teeth in a grimace. "I don't deserve your mercy. I am the monster that killed your parents and so many others. I started wars. I destroyed lives. I am the Dark Lord Voldemort."

"Not anymore. You were, once – there is no doubt about it. But that was before I killed you. Before Death put back together the soul you mutilated and made you whole again." Harry sighed and held up his hand to stop whatever insult Tom was about to spit in his face. "Say, Tom – I saw the orphanage you grew up in in Dumbledore's memories. How would that compare in your opinion to being raised in a cupboard for ten years, starved and neglected?"

Harry watched the way his seemingly sudden change of topic made Tom pull up short and furrow his brows in confusion.

"Because that is what you did to me when you killed my parents and marked me your equal," Harry continued. "You condemned me to a life with people who hated me for my magic, who threatened to beat me and locked me into a cupboard under the stairs and refused to give me proper meals whenever I showed any signs of being abnormal – of being a freak."

He made sure Tom looked him directly in the eyes and then told him, with complete honesty, "I will never forgive you for what you have done. None of it. But you died. I killed you, Tom. I closed that chapter in both of our lives the night I slit your throat and then prepared a burial for you the same way I did for so many dead before you. It's over and done with."

"Is it?" Tom said quietly, an indecipherable expression on his face. "Because I am still here."

"Death's punishment never had anything to do with me. It was never my decision."

"You would have left me broken. It would have been a fitting punishment in its own right."

"I didn't know how to put you back together," Harry replied earnestly, holding Tom's gaze. "I would have tried to repair your soul, had I known how."

"Why?"

"Because what you did to your own soul wasn't right. I am a necromancer, Tom. We serve the dead. We lay them to rest and do our utmost to ensure they can move on peacefully. A broken soul would never be able to do that."

"You buried my corpse," Tom said and it sounded like a realisation he had only just come to. "It wasn't even a real body."

Harry shrugged. "Artificial or not, it did house what was left of your soul."

"Where did you bury it?"

"In Naenia's graveyard."

He heard Tom's breath hitch at that and Harry thought he could see tears gathering in the corner of his eyes, but they never fell.

Harry had never wondered about it until now – why Rhea had brought them to that specific graveyard back then. He had assumed it had simply been the most convenient place to bury the corpse of the unwanted, tyrannical Dark Lord he had just killed without the owner minding overly much.

But Rhea had specifically said she had found it fitting to 'close the chapter of the Dark Lord Voldemort in that graveyard', hadn't she?

"I can take you there to visit, if you want."

A moment of silence passed between them.

Then, quietly, Tom whispered, "I would like that."

o

Harry did his best to enter the bedroom as quietly as he could, but he could see the curtains around Rhea's bed parting and her eyes briefly glinted in the dark to confirm who he was – and when he slipped under the covers, Theodore sleepily asked whether he was alright.

"Everything is fine," Harry murmured, pressing his lips against Theodore's forehead. "Go back to sleep."

Then he put Theodore's arm around his waist, buried his face in his lover's hair and let himself be lulled to sleep by the familiar scent of honey, thyme and tea.