Intoxication

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter 14: Within and Without

The girl…

She is infuriating. Manipulative. Cunning and impossible to navigate.

She'd be a Slytherin in another life.

She thinks I don't see past her honey dew-dropped eyes. She is too naïve to see that she is but a pawn in my schemes. If I didn't need her, she'd have already been hung from the ceiling next to her friends, just an ornament in mediocrity.

I hate that I need her. That it has to be her.

Fate, you are but the most cruel mistress.

I didn't see her coming. Of all the prophecies, all the seers, all the stars I have studied, I never saw the figure of her – curved and soft, arched against the backdrop of inevitability.

Her blood. It has to be the thing that is making me more attuned to her.

It has to be the reason why I notice the way her eyes alight with fire when she's being stubbornly obtuse. That twinge in my chest when the soft bow of her lips turn down when she's upset. Which is all the time.

I am at a loss with myself. Both within, and without - the passion of greed and desire that makes me burn for her.

The way she calls me Tom…

I hate it.

I hate the way it sounds so natural out of her lips and the way that I innately respond to it. But I have not corrected her. It would almost feel wrong to do so.

As I look in the mirror now, I am Tom as much as I am Voldemort.

I don't feel the same as I once did.

I don't think the same or feel the chaotic energy that flowed in me. I feel calm.

A sailboat floating on a sea of clarity.

Perhaps it is my newfound youth?

Perhaps parts of my soul being returned to me.

I realize now that the more I splintered myself, the more I lost my sanity. How could I not have?

The soul was not meant to be fractured seven times over. Well, six intended…

I am unsure when sanity left me. If I had to think, it was when the seer warned be against turning the diadem into a horcrux, but I didn't listen. Couldn't listen.

I was hellbent. My way or no way. I would not compromise – and that was my downfall.

My ego was my greatest fault. I overestimated myself and didn't think I could fail.

And failed I did.

Spectacularly.

But not without taking the world with me.

It is alarming. The calm before the storm that is surging its way through me. I am but a vessel for the destruction and rebirth of the New World.

I am past collecting trinkets of Hogwart's founders.

My efforts were in vain. I can see it now. What I did before, child's play.

I always knew, from a young age, that I was destined for a greatness that not everyone would agree with. People. They lack vision. They lack conviction.

I sacrificed myself for what I thought was my end goal. My final victory.

But as I sit here now… I can see how foolish that was. That wasn't the beginning to the end. That was the prequel to the beginning.

The more I find the pieces I need, I know now I was never meant to be apart.  I was meant to take in.

Take in the power of all I want because who better to harness all of the power of the world, but I?

And she will just have to understand.

She is intelligent. Brilliant, I might say.

She holds a power that I so rarely have seen in my life, and I want to keep it.

Not for myself, but in conjunction. Could it be imagined how powerful I would not only be with someone so adept at raw magic beside me?

Is my magic flowing in her like hers is in myself? She could learn Dark Magic. She could learn the Dark Arts.

She could be magnificent. The need for power and knowledge is brimming under her skin, I can see it.

The part of myself that remembers being connected to her remembers how closed off and isolated she feels. She is alone. An island in the middle of my sea of clarity begging to have me as her only inhabitant.

I will wash upon her shores and cast my will like thunder clouds ravaging the lands that is her sorrow.

I will use her despair and melancholy to my advantage. Not because I relish in her misery, but because that is when people are the most reasonable.

And she will see my way. She will see my vision.

And when I take in all of the power of our magical ancestors, she will understand.

Understand that I am the force of a hurricane, and she is my rain.