You think you know someone

He wasn't sure how long he’d been here.

 There was no sunrise. No ticking clock. No nightfall. Just an endless stretch of soft, dissonant light filtering through a sky that looked like bruised glass. The landscape was vast but featureless—dead trees that never rotted, still rivers that didn't reflect anything, and a distant wind that whistled without ever touching skin.

 Magic didn’t behave properly here. Spells fizzled, fizzled again, and then did something else entirely. Sometimes the earth pulsed beneath his boots like a second heartbeat. Sometimes, it simply stopped existing for a moment, then returned as though embarrassed.

 He hadn’t spoken at first.

 Harry thought he preferred it that way. Silence was easier to carry when you didn’t have to share it with a monster.

 But solitude—like so many things in his life—was proving to be more complicated when it lasted too long. And when shared with someone who shouldn't be here at all.

 He could hear him walking behind him. Not steps, exactly. Just presence. Like a ripple in a pond after something drops.

 They hadn't fought. There had been nothing to fight with.

 They hadn't planned. There was nothing to plan for.

 They hadn't screamed, or begged, or tried to kill each other again.

 At some point, it had simply become routine.

 Breathing the same strange air. Seeing the same twisted stars. Existing in a cycle without truly acknowledging one another.

 Until now.

 “What do you think then?” said the last person he ever expected or wished to correspond with.

 Harry turned toward the voice, brow furrowed.

 “I’m starting to think,” he said impulsively, “that there might not be such a thing as a Veil of Death.”

 Voldemort stood still, hands clasped behind his back like a disappointed schoolmaster surveying an unremarkable horizon.

 “Foolish,” he said flatly.

 “You keep saying that,” Harry said, kicking a blackened pebble and watching it bounce once before vanishing into the ground. “And yet here we are. Two dead men, breathing. Walking. Thinking. Still arguing.”

 Voldemort’s gaze slid toward him. “If this is not death, then it is something worse.”

 “Worse?” Harry raised an eyebrow. “You, of all people, terrified of a place where you can’t dominate everyone in it?”

 “I do not fear this place,” Voldemort snapped, though his tone was too quick, too defensive.

 Harry tilted his head. “No?”

 The Dark lord said nothing, jaw tight.

 Harry turned his back to him and walked slowly toward a row of twisted trees. Their limbs bent unnaturally, casting long, warped shadows in the groundless light.

 “You spent your whole life terrified of death. Of being powerless. So you tore yourself apart to avoid it.” Harry’s voice was calm now, too tired for venom. “But what if this—this—is the price? Not hell, not judgment. Just. . . aimless existence.”

 He turned back to face him. “What if this place is your immortality?”

 Voldemort’s lips curled. “Your moralizing attempt is tedious, Potter.”

 Harry shrugged. “Perhaps. But you’ve had years of silence to stew in your regrets. Whereas I don’t understand why I’m being punished. I’ve a family you know.”

 He glared openly at Voldemort. Truly, Harry thought he’d be dead by now. Or maybe he was, and this was his hell for supposedly abandoning his family—which he wouldn’t have done it had the universes themselves not insist on hinting at his so-called imminent death. What a joke!

 “You tried to become something untouchable,” he added. “But maybe all you did was make yourself unwelcome to the natural order. So now we’re stuck here. Because you couldn’t accept your final fate like a normal person would.”

 The silence that followed was longer this time. He expected another sharp remark from the man who nearly took everything from him.

 Instead, Voldemort said in a  low and bitter tone: “You speak of natural order like it ever did you any favors.”

 Harry didn’t have a good answer for that.

 Instead, he walked.

 They wandered in the directionless way this place seemed to demand, past what might have been a hill, past a cluster of objects that looked like abandoned cloaks frozen in midair. For a while, there was no sound but their footsteps. Even that seemed reluctant, like the ground didn’t appreciate being noticed.

 Then Harry stopped.

 So did his unintentional companion. He, too, was instantly alert.

 There was a figure ahead—dark, hunched, motionless. Half-swallowed by a lopsided tree that seemed to lean over it like a parent trying to shield a child from rain.

 Harry drew his wand out of habit, though it felt. . . dull in his hand, like holding a memory.

 They approached slowly, each step echoing louder than it should have.

 The figure wasn’t a hallucination. It was real. Breathing.

 Curled against the base of the tree, in tattered, time-stained robes, sat a man. Gaunt. Bearded. His skin stretched too tightly over his cheekbones, like parchment left in the rain.

 But Harry recognized him instantly.

 “Dumbledore,” he gasped.

 Voldemort stiffened beside him.

 The figure stirred. A cough. A sharp intake of breath. Then, slowly, he lifted his head.

 Eyes. Clear, pale blue, rimmed with years, no longer twinkling. And yet, unmistakably his.

“Is that what you see me as?” It did not sound like Dumbledore. . . whoever that was. “Interesting.”

 Then, Harry noticed something shifting beneath the surface of this. . . mask. As though whatever this was had been wearing the skin of a dead man. Not-Dumbledore closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Harry and Voldemort were met with dark abyss for eyes. The Dumbledore skin melted off to. . . but it could not be. . .

 Staring back at Harry was his own green eyes.

 “Albus?” He dared breath the name out, his hands longing to reach for the boy before him.

 But even as he said it, he knew it was not true. It could not be true.

 “That thing is not your son.” He heard Voldemort hissing near him.

 As much as Harry hated to agree with that monster on anything, he was right.

 Harry took a cautionary step back.

 “Wise man.” The figure that wore his son’s skin rasped. “Tell me, have either of you figured out why I brought you here yet?”