Wet to the bone, but I feel nothing. Neither the pounding rain on my skin nor the cold Easter wind. I just dig a grave, like him – like my father. After Harper took care of the bloodstains in the shack with my wand, she's now rather pale and watching us as well as the growing hole in the ground. And she obviously doesn't quite know how to feel about that.
I, on the other hand, feel empty.
Too much has happened today. Too much of everything …
"So – tell me something about yourself!"
Against the storm of the sky and the wafting of the tides, he shouts this invitation to me, as though we were chatting over a cup of tea.
I blink a few times, then furiously shake my head. "Why would I?"
"Why? Because I care about my lost son!"
"Is that supposed to be crude ambiguity?" I yell, pausing for a moment.
"No, not at all," he shouts back so I can hear him against the rain. "What do you mean by that?"
"Tom thinks he's lost, spiritually," Harper explains with a shrug, knowing that for me, any conversation would end at that point.
"Because you killed your mad uncle?" He also pauses his shoveling for a moment, waves it off and says, "Oh, in two or three years I probably would've killed him myself because of Florence, Ophelia and Gwen …"
I look up at him. "Your daughters?"
"Yeah." He's already digging on. "They are thirteen, eleven and eight, and had he even looked at them –"
"You would've killed him," I talk over him. "Oh sure! It's easy to say."
"Killing is easy," he retorts. "Living with it afterwards … that's the issue."
"Do you speak from experience?" Harper asks.
"I was practising medicine and now I write a lot about it, Missy," he opens up. "I've heard many stories of our soldiers time and time again, and you learn a thing or two …"
"A doctor," I repeat incredulously. "A doctor wasn't able to find me? Where did you get your license, was it auctioned off?"
"Given I'm helping you get rid of Morfin," he says with a grin, "you're being really rude today."
"That's probably rooted in all the other days of the past seventeen years of my life!"
"It's fine, it's fine," he shouts against the wind, chuckling. "But you already know a lot about me and what I've done meanwhile. Only I'm left out in the rain!" He winks, clearly delighted at his pun – since it's indeed raining – just as much as William would. How strange to suddenly see my father standing opposite me and to hear bad jokes from him … "So tell me something about yourself already! Who are you?"
"None of your damn business," I reply as we finally manage to grab Morfin's body by the hands and feet and heave him into his grave.
"All right, first of all – any last words?" Riddle asks Harper and me.
"No." Harper quickly shakes her head. "Not for him …"
"I also have nothing to say. Tom?"
I let my gaze wander from Harper right beside me to him, then I can't help but stare at Morfin.
"I really wish," I whisper in Parsel, "that nail hadn't been quicker than me –"
"Tom," Harper interrupts me with a sense of urgency, white as a sheet. I can see her goosebumps, her tears are probably just hidden by the rain. A little more quietly she adds, "Please don't …"
"What?" I ask. "Harper, what is it?"
"Enough split tongue," she says, "for today …" She rubs her bite marks, lost in thought, and I just nod.
"Fascinating," Riddle finds. "What language was that?"
"Not one you would understand."
"Talks in riddles – a Riddle child, after all," he retorts with a wink.
"For Heaven's sake, stop that!" I explode. "We're complete strangers! Spare me shallow family jokes!"
He nods indifferently. "So in the ground with him?"
"One moment," I say and bend over Morfin one last time. Not to look at him – no, I take his ring.
"What's that?" Harper asks.
"A really unsightly heirloom."
She puts her hands on her hips at once. "Are you seriously stealing from a dead man now?"
"Do you think he'd like to wear it in hell?" I hand it to her. "It'll be good for something, take it."
"It's not that unsightly," she groans, putting it away so Riddle and I can finally deal with Morfin.
Out of the corner of my eye, though, I can see how she also finds Merope's two remaining vials in the grass next to the Pensieve. She lets them vanish in her coat pocket as well.
I wanted to destroy them earlier – but I'm certainly not going to start a discussion now just because Harper, in inexplicable solidarity with my mother, would never agree.
We have different problems at hand.
Morfin, for example.
He's heavier than he looks, and it's only with great effort that we dump him into his wet grave.
Clapping his hands to get rid of the dirt, Riddle stands up beside me and stares into the abyss.
"Almost done," he says, handing me the shovel again. "Earth to earth."
After we've buried Morfin and shovelled the hole up again with wet soil, Riddle takes the utensil from me and walks past us towards the shack.
"Let's go warm up for a minute, and as soon as the rain stops, we'll head home, shall we?"
"Home?" Harper asks.
"You're my guests," he replies as he walks on, "of course …"
"Of course we'll immediately leave," I correct him.
"No, no, no!" In a another surprising moment of consternation he turns around. "Please don't say that, Tom. Give me a chance to get to know you. We owe it to each other."
"I owe you absolutely nothing."
"What more do I have to do for you to give me a chance?" he asks, spreading his arms. Rain on his face, a shovel on each hand. "I just buried a man with you and I didn't ask you a single question – I didn't want to know if you murdered him, nor if it was an unfortunate accident, and I couldn't care less! I just want to make amends. For not being able to see you grow up."
I don't care about his passionate words, but I can see that Harper's shivering because of the cold by now, so I huffily walk past him and put my arm around her in an irrational attempt to keep her warm as we walk towards the cabin.
"You'll catch your death," I sigh to her, but at these words she looks at me in with concern.
"For the love of me, your jokes aren't funny today either, Tom."
Love … A joke in itself. Still, I hang on her lips whenever she says that strange word.
A ridiculously tragic circumstance, in light of my newfound destiny ….
"Of course the old roof won't keep the rain out," Riddle grumbles as he steps into the main room of the Gaunts after us. It keeps dripping from the ceiling in various spots, but at least we're no longer standing directly in the rain.
"Is that what killed him?" he asks as he points to the bloody nail on the wall.
Harper eyes the old metal apprehensively as well before stealing my wand from my inside pocket to light the shabby fireplace.
"Easy!" Riddle literally huffs and stares at her with obvious discomfort. "You … you, too?"
"This is too much for you now?" I ask as Harper taps all of our clothes with my wand until the wetness fades from the fibers of the fabrics.
"Thank you," he barely manages to whisper, forcing a wan smile, then drops into Morfin's old armchair and rubs his back, groaning.
"Are you in pain, sir?" Harper asks.
"Sciatic nerve," is all he replies. "Shoveling isn't exactly the ideal exercise for me. Not getting any younger, children …"
"I'm sorry about that," she says, "why didn't you mention it when I insisted on avoiding magic earlier?"
"Because …" He takes a deep breath and smirks. "Because I thought you were right, Missy. There's just no easy solution in some moments."
She nods, already much too trustingly, probably because his face is so much like mine, then she motions for him to turn a little.
"May I?" She's promptly standing behind him with my wand in her hand.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" he can't help but voice his nervous question as he peeks over his shoulder.
"You're about to find out," I reply in her place as she points the wand at his back.
"Lenio Dolorem!" she says a few times, and her velvety, bright voice calms me down just as it always does.
We all fall silent until, after a few moments, Riddle looks up and sighs in amazement. "That … that is fantastic. I haven't felt this young in a while. Thank you, Missy!"
"Harper," she replies, "you can call me Harper."
"Harper." He eyes her thoughtfully. "I keep talk about myself all the time – but you've also just buried a body. Tom must mean a lot to you …"
"He does," she confirms as she leans against the kitchen table to looks out the dull window into the rain.
"Mhm," Riddle goes on, "well, Harper … As long as he doesn't want to spill the beans himself, maybe you could tell me a bit about my son?"
"Don't you dare", I warn her, but she just waves it off.
"He's highly intelligent, your son," she begins, "really clever –"
"Harper!" I growl, staring at her from the wall opposite her with my arms crossed over my chest.
"What, Tom?" she asks. "Are you going to shut me up?"
"Why do you trust him?"
"He's just been complicit and buried a body with you," she sighs. "The man wants to get to know you! And you've been nothing but hostile so far, but he's really earned the benefit of the doubt I'd say."
"Give me the remaining vials."
"What? No. So you can break them? We finally hold the key to answers to so many questions and you want to throw that away? Certainly not!"
I take a deep breath and mutter, "Harper, do me a favour and –"
"See?" she calls out to my father. "He can be really stoic! And when that doesn't help, he usually proceeds with intimidating rhetoric or charming manipulation."
"Even with subtle blackmail?" Riddle suggests all amused.
"All the time!" Harper confirms. "He literally puts himself in your mind when he wants to, but in this case …" She turns to me and shrugs. "I can't let you do that Tom, I'm sure there's a reason they were kept here."
"What are we talking about?" Riddle asks. "These vials – what are they?"
"Memories," I mumble. "Of your beloved Merope."
He gulps. The mere mention of her name proves that he still hasn't quite come to terms with his past.
"What was it … A spell?" he asks after a while, unsure whether anybody will answer.
Harper just looks at me. It's my call, I get it.
"Amortentia," I say. "A love potion, if you want to put it euphemistically. If truth be told, call it a narcotic that absorbs any kind of free will."
"A love potion, that … sounds much better." Riddle takes a deep breath. "All right …" After a moment of silence he says, "Tom, we are equally affected by this. Our lives have been significantly changed by her decision and yet … you blame me?"
"You?" I ask, raising an eyebrow.
"Or the world, for that matter? Merope? You're incredibly angry, I can see it. I can feel it. But who are you so angry with?"
Possibly myself. Because I'm in a strange state between freezing and burning, neither cold enough to care about any of this, nor emotional enough to understand it all.
"You know, I …" Riddle begins again quietly, looking at me. Until tears actually well up in his eyes. "I've always wanted a son. Cecilia and I, we were about to get married then, but your mother … well, she literally got in the way. It took us a while to find our way back to each other, and when we had the girls, I was happy and proud, but still … It was as if fate was telling me that Cecilia wouldn't give me a son because I already had one. And here you are …"
The Gaunts would call him a worthless Muggle.
Merope, arguably, saw him as just the healthy blood that was needed.
Harper sees a charismatic man reaching out to me.
But what do I see?
Obviously, not the fiend I've assumed all these years. Not a man who has built a new life for himself without any doubt, not someone who doesn't seem to care about me. But that doesn't make the chaos in my head any better …
"I want to know who you are," he follows up, not taking his eyes off me.
I don't want to trust him.
I can't.
But I also can't interrupt Harper while she does it for me.
"His middle name is Marvolo, that's how we found each other," she says.
"Clever of Merope," he replies.
"Indeed." Harper nods. "Tom was born in an orphanage in London on New Year's Eve, 1926. Merope raised heaven and hell to hold him in her arms, if only for an hour. I'm also very sorry for you both, but … I cannot be angry with her. On the contrary, I'm very grateful for her son. Mr Riddle, she had wished he'd look just like you. Merope's bloodline can apparently be traced back a millennium to one of the most famous and powerful wizards in our world. He could talk to snakes, and so can Tom. That is … a rarity. And when he speaks Parsel, as he did earlier in front of the grave, it sounds a bit eerie, but also very fascinating. Not crazy, as was the case with Morfin, you know? But regardless of that, he's also one of the most gifted students you could think of. He basically achieves top grades in each and every situation, he's a Prefect and next year he will surely become Head Boy. He is the epitome of ambition and discipline. And as I mentioned, he's smart. Almost too smart if you ask me, he'd probably live better if he was just a little bit dumber. But then he wouldn't be him … and not half as much Slytherin. He remembers every detail, he reads whatever he can get his hands on and he plays the piano really well. But as you can imagine, his childhood has left its mark. It always leaves marks to be different, but Tom knew no warmth. I think we'd been seeing each other for nearly half a year when I first hugged him. And I …"
She looks up at me and smiles softly, as if to see if I'm angry with her yet. But I listen to her like in a daze – why exactly, I can't even tell.
"I think, Mr Riddle, that no one has ever held him like that before. He froze, I thought he was going to curse me out. But I guess it was in that moment that he first realised how healing it can be." She swallows. "I myself have been hugged all my life, as often as I wanted. I grew up as I'm sure your daughters do. Sheltered by loving parents. But Tom wasn't. He was alone. And if you think he's … let's say cold, shall we? If that's what you think of him, you're terribly wrong."
By saying that, our eyes meet, as if she were much more likely to tell me instead of my father. And for the life of me I don't know whether she's aware of how badly I need to hear it. And how little I can believe her despite of it. "He's just someone who needs an anchor. Something most people take for granted, but he's never had – and with that, he could make all the right decisions. He could teach the world the meaning of fear without a doubt, I tell you that … But he could also enrich it like no other. He just needs … a bit of warmth in his life."
"And you're the key to that, aren't you?" Riddle asks under his breath. "You're his anchor …"
"I try to be," she replies without taking her eyes off me. "Whenever he lets me."
"The rain has stopped," I hear myself say, even though my head is full of contradictions, desire, despair and questions. All that I can't verbalise, I can only move on. "Let's go."
"That's all you have to say in return to these words of love?" Riddle tries not to smile in awe. "Cecilia would tar and feather me."
"Inspiring indeed," Harper retorts as she heads for the door as well. "What are you searching for?" she then asks me as she follows my gaze to the shelf.
"There should be … another book here somewhere."
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard?"
I nod and she points to a large, black pot. "It was behind that, I've already gotten it for you."
As she turns around again, I follow her to the door as well.
"Where do you think you're going?" Riddle asks.
I frown. "Away."
Harper hesitates, but then she finally loses her patience with me. "Fine! Well then. Let's get out of here, now that we've finally reached our destination after months of research. It's your life, not mine. Your family. Your father." She stares at me for a few heartbeats and I know she's right. I just don't like it. We glare at each other until I finally give up.
"Fine!" I mumble and follow her outside.
"What does that mean?" Riddle asks, hurrying after us. "What does fine mean?"
"That we accept your invitation," Harper enlightens him before taking my hand with a smile.
Her hand.
Her touch …
I take a breath deep into my lungs, but the cleansed air, purified by rain, only feels like poison.
I caused a death.
Harper thinks it was an accident. But I'd have killed him myself a few moments later if it hadn't been for the nail, and she simply won't accept that reality.
She thinks I'm someone who could make all the right decisions, and yet she doesn't know that I've long since gone astray. That I cannot love, that I have no goodness in me and that I'm simply damned.
Just like she is when she's with me – isn't she?
But what I don't know, what I can't deny, is how her hand feels right in mine. Her stubborn presence despite everything fate just revealed sooths my battered mind and makes the unbearable a little better, even if I can't give her any of it back.
A circumstance I push far away for now, but for how much longer …