He doesn’t do anything except listen. Eyes closed, core engaged, shoulders back. There is a clock on a mantle in the corner of this room, ticking and ticking away. He imagines the sound waves, traveling from the clock to his eardrum, tickling the hairs, standing them on edge. He imagines this exactly three times, and then it continues in the recesses of his mind, over and over again.
He has been here, in this exact seat, in this exact corner of this exact room, for approximately 43,200 seconds. To his loyalists, he has simply retired early. To his snake sister, he is meditating. To the Potions Master, he is scheming.
He tries to answer for himself why he is doing this, but he cannot grasp an answer. Each time he tries to pin one down, there is a strange stirring in his chest. But he cannot feel, can he? He is simply a shell, a husk of what once was but can never be again.
So he banishes the uncomfortable feeling, for now. Tucks it away, into the clock in his mind, behind the cogs. And he sits, and he listens, and he waits.
There - the air shifts, making room for a new being. Another presence. He is no longer alone in his own mind.
The stirring of another soul, a haphazard and powerful energy that arrives as strikingly as a bullet, and with the heat of one, too. Footsteps on hardwood, ambling nearer and nearer. Then silence. The boy is waiting for an invitation, it seems.
Lord Voldemort waits 420 seconds. And then he opens his eyes.