With Grindelwald staging attacks all over Europe, it is easy to become anonymous. He has gone by so many names already that it is a simple thing, simple like the unconscious act of slipping on a well worn cloak, to take up a new one.
Peverell, an old wizarding name, and there’s nobody left of that family to hear his claim and call him a liar (not that they would dare to, when his blood and his Magic and the shadows clinging to his Core all speak the truth of his lineage for anyone who cares to listen).
To those who know - who draw connecting lines and listen to the whispers passed in dead of night; who discern truth from lie with ease but keep their secrets behind sealed lips and formidable Mind Magic barriers - it is no surprise that a Peverell would flee the continent.
(Necromancer, they mutter softly when there is no-one there to hear, no-one to betray their traitorous knowledge, it’s in his Magic; deeper than blood in his veins. The Dark Lord would raze the countryside to find him if only he knew.)
He goes to Peverell Castle in France briefly, packs up text after priceless text, freezes portraits in their frames with spells uttered in Parseltongue for fear of what secrets they might have a mind to share.
It is almost a shame to leave, but leave he does. He cannot stay here, not when there is such fun to be had on the Isles. The wardstone in the center of the property croons at him, sweet promises caressing his mind and Magic like the whispers from beyond the Veil in the Death Chamber and twice as enticing.
He smirks at it, the comforting chill of Family Magic a living thing around his shoulders; beneath his ribs pulsing in unison with the too-slow beat of his heart.
He’ll be back; this striking monochromatic Castle resonates too deeply within him for it to be otherwise.
It’s 1936 and Harry (Hadrian now, he mustn't forget) is pretending to be young once more. It is not the first time and it will not be the last, though it is a tedious thing, to pretend at youth. To pretend at helplessness and at ignorance. Tedious, and yet...
Echoes of war play again and again in his mind like a choppy, broken record with static fraying its edges. War - it is the constant. A world at peace is a world without life, without change: a dead world. (He has seen this, too. Has seen it like he has seen trials and burnings and children murdered gladly by their parents for a quirk of metaphysical nature. Has seen the End of all and has welcomed it with open arms and weeped with relief at the prospect except that when all was said and done it would not take him-)
It is 1936 and somewhere in the universe, Death is laughing themself to tears, he just knows it. He does not even begrudge them that, now; the futility of holding such a thing against his eternal companion is a bitter thing on his tongue, but he has long acclimated himself to the antics of Universal Aspects playing merry hell with his life.
He looks young; this body is just about Hogwarts age, though less scrawny than his original had ever been. (For this, at least, he is thankful. It would not do to be a malnourished seventeen-year-old for all of forever.) His eyes are pale; not the curse-bright green of his first life or the quiksilver of his second. The outer ring is dark - gunmetal and pulsing with living shadows - while the rest is diamond sharp and colourless.
Peverell eyes, he supposes.
It is not as much of a surprise as it should be when an achingly familiar letter reaches him at his new residence - Mortimer Manor; Harry will never regret the amount of work he has put into cultivating a good relationship with the Goblin Nation, wizards are absolute fools. The parchment specifies the Master Suite of the manor, but there is no broader address. Harry is not surprised; the wards on this place would make the most paranoid Black proud.
He considers, for a moment, not going. It is 1936 and in two years' time, Tom Riddle will be attending Hogwarts. He has considered this - has mulled it over both from the bottom of a bottle and sharp-eyed and sober. He does not know what to do about Tom Riddle. Tom Riddle is not his fight; has not been since Harry James Potter died from an agonizing, terrible grief that he could not comprehend and took an entire village with him.
(Horcruxes are tricky things, or, really, Souls are the tricky ones. They connect and fuse and break leaving sharp, serrated blades of sanity in their wake. A living Horcrux, made up of too much Soul for so long and then all at once not enough… it's hardly a surprise it would leave marks.)
Tom Riddle is not his responsibility, but that doesn’t stop the gnawing feeling like a thousand thousand ants are crawling through his stomach, intent on making him as uncomfortable as possible as warped and twisted memories from lifetimes ago flash before his eyes.
In any case, he cannot do anything for Riddle while at school.
He sends his acceptance letter the next day.
Albus Dumbledore is watching him. He can feel too-twinkley blue eyes boring into his back as he takes his seat at the Slytherin table. Static electricity dances against his skin, cumbersome probing magic that will become sharper, subtler, honed to a fine point in these coming years. Not quite Legilimency, but something like it.
Harry almost laughs at the audacity, at the absolute gall. He supposes the man was not a Gryffindor for nothing. It is exhilarating, this feeling, and against his will he feels his lips turn in a positively devilish smirk. He has not had a good hunt for some time; it seems only right that the one who set all of this in motion is the one to feel his wrath.
(He'd almost forgotten what it was to be properly vengeful. The fire of adrenaline licking at his veins, just on the outer edge of painful but not. It is… glorious.)
The other children part for him like the red sea; some part of them, intrinsic and primal, warning them away from the stench of Death that is as much a part of him as any of their twisting and turning Magical Cores. He catches them staring at him in the common room as he works on a set of Runic Arrays that has been nagging his mind to the exclusion of all else this past week, catches the awe on their faces. Awe that they do not - cannot - understand.
It's not every day that an Eldritch monster saves you from blowing yourself up on accident by adding the hollyhawk one anti-clockwise stir too soon in potions class, after all.
He drifts among them, is personable but distant. Slytherin House is a different animal than the others, though, and as he watches power-play after failed power-play among the upper years, something within him - long since dead and buried - stirs. Is this what want feels like? He thinks it might be; a niggling yearning which has him orbiting the House Politics like the Earth to the Sun (ever drawn in but never quite reaching). How strange. The war in his head quiets as he plots and schemes behind pilfered texts from Slytherin's Library and for the first time in a very long time, Harry almost feels alive.
He finds that he rather likes it.
Dumbledore doesn't stop watching him. He is not subtle in his suspicion, either, and others are beginning to catch on, their curiosity thickening the air of the Transfiguration classroom so much he hopes the old goat chokes on it.
Harry is perfectly polite in response to the obvious scrutiny, smiling sunnily at the twinkley bastard.
It makes blue eyes twitch behind half moon spectacles. Harry is very good and does not cackle. Not even once.
The attention irks him, but only in that nobody else seems to pay any mind to the way the Deputy Headmaster keeps him back after class or seems a little too interested in the esoteric Family Magics Harry might've been taught. This lack of interference bothers him on principle, because Dumbledore is belligerent and unreasonable; he presses and manipulates and calls him dear boy in that appallingly grating tone and nobody seems to care.
It is harassment. It is unacceptable. It is...
If he were anyone else, Harry suspects he'd have become paranoid of the way the professor's web of influence winds its way through every aspect of his way of life in this accursed building. It is a quiet sort of influence, like a shadow among dancing flames, soft and ever-present and growing longer as time goes by.
It is the golden thread in the power imbalance between Gryffindor and Slytherin. (It took him time to see this, time and distance and days spent choking on the emptiness left behind by a mutilated, twisted, sadistic Soul Shard that was the only friend he could rely upon; who never left him, for years. He had lived It, once. Lived the gossip and vile words of children high up in a tower who see but do not see; who know but do not know how insidious their vitriol really is. It took dying to see the way that there are never more than two former Slytherin teachers on staff. The way authority sneers at green and silver.) It was not always like this, he knows. He has seen the time when the Founders Four gathered to weave this beautiful place which all magicians could call home.
He remembers that; aches for it something fierce. For the fact that these young wix will never know it; will only know deceit and golden power twined into a hangman's noose pulled tight about their throats.
The year passes and he remains in obscurity. Revels in it, really. He has lived too many lives in the spotlight. The Master of Death is meant for shadows and fairy tales passed down from parent to child in the dead of dark and moonless night, not for life as a focal point. Perhaps it is childish, the way he flirts with darkness and light like a moth frightened of flame but drawn to it nonetheless, but he cannot help it.
He steals the Elder Wand back from Grindelwald that summer on a whim - he does not need it, not in truth, but the feel of the unvarnished wood in his hand is so right after a year of making due with his spare that he cannot regret it. Serves the man right, really.
Harry is not a good person. He knows this about himself, knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on. But then- what is a good person? Is there a quantifiable scale of goodness to measure oneself against? Or is it this intangible, unachievable ideal used as propaganda fodder to excuse a powerful person's atrocities under the banner of some 'greater good'?
People are not good and they are not evil; if there is one thing his many lifetimes on this Earth have taught him it is this: people are fundamentally selfish. A mother may stand between her child and certain death, but that is not a selfless sacrifice- it is instinct and desperation and the chilling agony of the thought of living in a world where her child died and she could've stopped it but chose not to.
He takes the wand because… because he does. Because it is his, slotting into his hand like an old friend and humming with contentment at his every flick. He covets it, covets all the Hallows, really; they remain unchanging as the world lives and breathes and dies and lives again and him with it.
Red blood drips in the dark. In the absence of light. Red blood, thick and smothering and sliding down his throat like liquid iron. Blood- or is it?
[What is]
He doesn't… doesn't…
Rat-a-tat-ta-
It drips, copper and diamond at once within the circle-
Red (the colour of love, of blood or wine or compassion; the colour of rust, of decay, of the darkening days and cherry juice spilling over the floor; the colour of slitted eyes staring at him, hateful and gleeful and empty; red like desperate fear, like blind terror, at the very end when there is no more red-red blood left to bleed-).
-rat-a-tat-ta...
[happening?]
Runes glint with unearthly light and he can't- he can't breathe…
Harry wakes with tears on his face and a pit in his stomach, gasping out a shuddering, agonizing breath made of pins and needles and jagged memories ripping his lungs apart. It hurts- hurts like dying of a Blood-Boiling Curse; curling agony - white hot and searing - ripping veins and arteries to charred-black shreds so that when he comes back to himself, clammy and shaking, he can recall nothing of his dreams but for a vague sort of loss; aching and blunted behind his ribs.
He doesn't sleep after that. Doesn't have to, really, as Master of Death, but he has always enjoyed indulging in this one mortal thing. He doesn't even have that anymore; every time he closes his eyes there is a buzzing in his ears - pitchy and inescapable - and images of his first life (of blood and war and violence, of red hands and pale skin and hollow eyes that will never close, never blink, never live again) flood his mind.
Why is he here? He asks the basilisk this, because asking himself a question like that is just begging for time to slip away from him once more.
She looks at him, deadly gaze boring into him (into the same broken Soul which held her when she was an infant snakeling and again and again and again over a thousand years, never changing, stalwart and strong and now so very tired) and coils tighter around him in a scaly approximation of an embrace. :Does it matter, Hatchling?:
Harry ponders that. Ponders his first life, standing in front of an enchanted mirror and the smiling faces of parents he'd never before seen; ponders dozens of lives since staring into the same mirror - into the nothingness that glares back like an accusation written in blood. He finds that does not know how to answer her.
All too soon it is 1938 and Dumbledore is reading out the list of incoming First Years, eyes calculating and wary on a certain small boy with nervous gray eyes and second-hand robes.
It is 1938 and Tom Riddle is nothing like he's supposed to be.
The Lord Voldemort of Harry's memories is tall and hard and untouchable. He is obsidian; cold and gleaming with dark wants and darker magic swirling about him in serrated waves.
The Lord Voldemort he remembers (less than one percent of a Soul inhabiting a body built on slipshod Necromancy; he can't imagine existence like that, cannot fathom it, does not want to-) is immaculate, always. Is larger than life, is cruelty made man twirling bone-white yew in too-long fingers. Is the softly sibilant hiss of a serpent whispering the promises of a liar into his ear.
But Tom Riddle is not Lord Voldemort. Not yet, anyways; maybe not ever (and even then--). This Tom Riddle is not obsidian, but glass; brittle and sharp and about set to shatter. This Tom Riddle has a look about him that Harry recognizes quite clearly - the look of one thoroughly overwhelmed and trying desperately to hide it. This Tom Riddle is young and battered but not yet broken and-
He looks so small under the Sorting Hat.
-Harry feels sick.
He doesn't do anything. He's frozen, paralysed watching the boy who will become the man who will one day murder Harry Potter's parents as he is ridiculed by his Slytherin yearmates for his lack of money or lack of father or his family name. Watching those steel eyes darken. Watching Dumbledore's caution turn to paranoid fixation.
He watches until he can stand to watch no longer
It is a Monday. Samhain, in fact (of course it is, he has forever been cursed to some calamity befalling him on 31 October). He doesn't go to the feast, choosing instead to lounge about in the dungeons. The Death Magic on the air tonight is intoxicating and heady as it rolls through his bones; the common room is thick with it.
The First Years stumble in last- yes, stumble. They are a writhing mass of awkward limbs and lanky bodies surrounding something, their jeering voices overlapping in some terrible facsimile of a musical round with flats blaring out left and right. Their Magic is restless, shivering and fighting for dominance between them.
It is perhaps the most uncouth thing he's seen Slytherins engage in this lifetime.
He doesn't like it.
Even the murmurs of the Dead quiet for a moment, hushing one another hurriedly so that silence - when it comes, falling over them all as sharp and unforgiving as a guillotine's strike - is absolute.
Then, like sharks smelling blood in the water, chaos descends.
He doesn't know how it started - in truth it may have started months ago when a batty old enchanted Hat tore open its seam and sent this child with bloody hands and a far bloodier path to walk into the viper's nest. Perhaps it was earlier: on a train of new beginnings and dreams not yet to come to pass (or even earlier when a man with twinkling blue eyes set a wardrobe ablaze and gave a child of war something to prove).
Harry doesn't know how it started, cannot know, may never know, but-
(All monsters come from somewhere)
-this is how it ends.
Dolohov, one of Harry's yearmates, strolls over to the mass of First Years, his younger brother among them; his stride is languid like a panther circling prey. He looks ridiculous, really. Or maybe that's just Harry (maybe he does not know how to be anything other than amused or appalled or apathetic anymore, maybe he is too practiced at distance to be considered human, for whatever that's worth when all is said and done). But whether it's just Harry or not, there must be something feral (something sadistic and sharp-edged) on Dolohov's face because the children part before him with wide, frightened eyes.
They part, scuttling away like spiders before a basilisk (and that thought is almost ironic enough to leave him breathless as he coughs out a dry laugh), leaving only Riddle, standing on the step just within the Common Room, wandless but with such defiance on his face and crackling magic poised to strike like knives in the air around him that Harry thinks the others must be blind not to see it. Not to see power where it blooms even in the most stifling winter. Then again, when have magicians been anything other than fools?
"Kneel." The older boy commands casually, dark-black wand too-big in his clumsy hand; white-knuckled fingers giving away the tension he can't quite erase.
Riddle scoffs with a mean little smile below his bruise-blackened eye; it twists his whole face up into something demonic and cold. "To you? Never." There's Magic in his words, a Promise sealed; dripping with spiteful intent which shines bold and bright in his chipped glass countenance.
The Third Year must sense it too, because Dolohov snarls; calls out a Curse a shade - or five, but who's counting - Darker than any they teach at this school. If this were a different Tom Riddle (an older, more twisted version of this man who is nothing more than a boy; with crimson eyes and an eight-part-Soul) he'd laugh. Laugh and bat the violet light aside easily like some faintly irritating fly buzzing in his ear.
It wouldn't be a nice sound; cold and cruel, high and malicious, and with an edge of violence to it sharp enough to draw blood. Harry would take the mad laughter over the scream that comes in its place. Tom Riddle is a proud child; if there was any doubting that then the way he refuses to fall to the floor even at the creaking crack of bones splintering horrifically is enough to clear it up nicely. He is proud and powerful but he is also untrained. Unrefined in a way that spells the outcome of this fight clear for all to see even as it has barely begun.
"Come on, little Mudblood," Dolohov croons, his voice nearly cruel in its kindness. "It's not so hard… I can make it stop… all you have to do... is kneel..."
They spar with words wielded as weapons but Harry isn't listening anymore. Instead he is observing Atticus Avery: Slytherin King, Seventh Year, and all-around tyrannical bastard with a vindictive streak a mile wide, who is currently watching the unfolding drama with a glint in his eye and a smirk on his lips.
Incidentally, Tom Riddle had humiliated the King about a week ago with a well placed incontinence jinx in the Great Hall during breakfast.
Now Avery is apparently out for blood in recompense.
Petty bastard.
His cherry wand is out, too, tip bright with the silver-white gleam of a vicious paralysis jinx that Harry recalls as a distant cousin of the Imperious Curse. Something flares within him, dangerous and vital, setting his teeth on edge and darkening his eyes.
He breaks then- he feels himself break. Though smoke and shadows don't have solid form, so maybe that's the wrong word for it; the fracturing something that writhes through his veins like splintered ice. He feels it though, right down to his very essence as his too-bright eyes cloud over with red and the looming Otherness of his companion that crackles over his shoulder purrs in satisfaction.
His feet are light; silent on the richly carpeted floor. It's maybe three strides (a lifetime, a heartbeat, a freeze frame filled with static-) and his arm - the left arm, with runes tattooed in glittering red - is wrapped about Dolohov's throat; gentle with the threat of violence. The boy freezes in his hold, snapping into stillness so quickly it is as though he's been petrified - the thought makes Harry grin; a wide, manic thing as he tilts Dolohov's head around to meet his eyes.
They're a flat brown with the occasional red speck around the pupil. How very unfortunate for this poor sod; the Dolohov family are known for their shifting eye colour, a sort of hypnotic, passive version of Legilimency or the Confondus charm. The lack of bloodline trait is slightly jarring, actually, because more of their line are born with it than without.
"Picking on firsties, eh Dolohov?" Harry breathes, but the Dead - wild and restless as the Veil thins - carry the sound like whispers in the night to every ear in the common room. They shiver with it; the watchers. Flinch with the prickle of their skin and chill down their spines. Harry doesn't notice. He's still smiling, wide and reckless and more than a bit unhinged. "Compensating for something, are you?"
"Why you little-"
"Ah ah ah, none of that now." The Elder Wand presses into the vulnerable flesh of Dolohov's neck even as a flick of Harry's spare in his other hand has Avery bound in cord, cherry wand skittering away from him and Riddle's bones realigning themselves. It's such a simple thing for him to twine his Magic around his once-nemesis to send him - briefly, ever so briefly; Tom Riddle would not appreciate what he is about to do - into unconsciousness. The flavor of his Magic is sweet and rich; yes, even this young Tom Riddle is a force to be reckoned with.
The common room is frozen, the snakes too practiced at scenting for threats to interrupt in this moment. It would be funny if Harry weren't too busy forcing back the bloodlust thrumming in his bones; in the twitch of his fingers around his wands. He could kill him- kill Dolohov right here and now. It wouldn't even be difficult, just a green-green Curse; two simple words and he'd be dead, gone, limp as a ragdoll in his arms-
He wonders whether they can see it in him; what his face and roiling magic are broadcasting to the room at large. Can they see the monster with its hundred heads and hundred-hundred unblinking eyes that have seen too much and aren't closing any time soon? The watchers are watching, like they are always watching (like they watched Riddle's bones snap and shatter and did not lift a single finger to help) but what are they really seeing? What does he look like in this moment?
Whatever he looks like it must be frightful indeed if the way the air is charged with the snapping tension of a dozen magicians holding their breaths is anything to go by. Harry chuckles from deep in his throat, a low, rasping thing he picked up from his companion some six lifetimes ago. Dolohov whimpers, frightened brown eyes squeezing closed at the sound.
“You know,” Harry murmurs, casual and calm in stark opposition to the way he’s still holding his wand to his yearmate’s throat. “I’ve been patient with you lot - truly I have. This is just a step too far for my tastes. Really Dolohov, Avery; I thought you were better than this.” A snort. “Actually, that’s a lie. Attacking an unarmed First Year is exactly the kind of pathetic posturing that would satisfy your bruised egos, isn’t it?
“Well since you idiots seem to need it spelled out for you maybe this’ll get the message through your evidently thick skulls. Consider this my official warning: Tom Riddle is under my protection. Try anything like this again - any of you - and I’ll take the throne just to show you exactly why it is that the Peverells are so very feared on the Continent.”
He retracts his wand, stepping back from Dolohov’s shaking form with nothing more than a pat to his cheek; a mockery of tenderness. Turning to the onlookers, he asks, "Am I understood?"
It's not a question, really. It would take a fool to figure there was more than one acceptable answer. So he shouldn't be surprised when Lestrange - the Fourth Year, not the First; Corvus Lestrange apparently inherited all the sense in the family - spits, "Who the blazes do you think you are!?" vine wood wand lighting up curse-bright indigo.
Harry smiles benignly, doesn't even do her the courtesy of feigning concern. It takes nary a thought to have that pale wand snapping in her hand, dragon heartstring giving one final, desperate roar that echoes oddly in the room before dying off into tense silence. Just that one flex of his magic and this magician is all but helpless before him.
The weakness of it has him scoffing, mind a million miles away; caught in the snap snap snapping of another wand another time in another place. He smiles, slow and sly and vicious. Tera Lestrange stares at him, wide eyed and scared and it is like all the wind has gone out of her sails. Like toeing a cliff's edge and that weightless moment where the line between life and death blurs into oblivion; the rush of adrenaline vital in your veins before gravity and sense come crashing down, and you with them.
He reaches out, achingly gentle like one might hold spun glass or a lover knocking at death's door. This only serves to have her trembling, breaths coming in spiking gasps and heart fluttering wildly in her wrist when he takes hold of it.
One long-fingered hand bruising-burning-branding until the lines of it are etched into her bony wrist, tan skin blackening with the mark of necrosis. Cell death- it really is funny how these people think to underestimate a true-born Necromancer. As though the worst of his weapons is truly coarse, unrefined reanimation. As though a master of the Black Arts needs legions of dead to topple a kingdom. But then, he's certainly in no hurry to correct them.
Lestrange screams; even as he lets go she is still screaming, the sound of it grating and harsh; ricocheting around the room like a harpsichord, out of tune, blaring in a concert hall. She tumbles to the floor gripping tightly at the wound with her other arm, hazel eyes wild and glazed; nearly feral in her distress. Somewhere in the common room, someone retches. Harry watches it all curiously, easily spelling away the mess of dead skin and pus on his hand as red runes flare white then bleed red once more.
Harry blinks around the room, head canted to the side. The snakes stare back at him, pale and drawn, hiding hands in pockets to mask their shaking - their weakness - and Harry is reminded all at once that - whatever else they may be - these are children. Still young and hopeful and not yet breathless, bleeding to death with the sickness of their world.
All things end in their turn.
“Am I understood?” he asks again, hard and hollow and ancient. He feels exhaustion sweeping through him once more; lead filling his bones and dragging him back down to earth where mortals tread and he is nothing more or less than living legend. The soft green glow cast through the large window plays oddly, eerily, on their skin; catches, stark, on sharp edges and shocked eyes.
They nod almost as one, not quite trembling but neither are they steady. Harry cannot find it in himself to blame them. Death is on the air, is the lifeblood in his veins; it dances in his eyes. They can see it - can sense it; the darkness holding them fast. The room smells of decay, of leaves rotting on cobblestone pathways, of the brush of endings against frazzled nerves.
He smiles. It is not a nice smile; pulls oddly at his face and doesn’t reach his eyes at all. “Lovely. Glad we had this talk.”