Nostalgia
Harry didn’t know how long he watched him.
It could have been minutes, could have been days, since he’d sat down on the hospital chair to watch Tom sleep, unable to do much else than sit as the shadow chased after fading sunlight.
Harry didn’t feel time pass, never when he watched Tom’s chest rise and fall steadily; the man’s body drowned in the endless white sheets billowing around him. They swallowed him, consumed him. They almost resembled angel wings with the way the sheets fanned around him, as odd as it was.
It was...beautiful.
Tom looked peaceful like this. And Harry couldn’t help but feel that way too, lulled by the calm aura radiating from Tom’s slumbering form. Observing, as he often did, how Tom slept his immortality away.
It gave Harry a glimpse of the man he had never seen before. A fragility, a weakness, that Harry never thought Tom was capable of expressing. Convinced, after watching memory after memory of the boy’s unruffled smile, that Tom had been incapable of softness.
Tom had always been strong. Never a wrinkle on his mask, never a showing of weakness, even as an eleven-year old boy. He had been cold, curious and cherubic in the ways children often were, but he was never soft. That had been lost to him long before Dumbledore had met him.
So it was strange to see him this way because how did someone so strong, a man that spat at the mere showing of weakness, look so relaxed in slumber? There was no explanation for it. There were no “whys” and “hows”. It simply was.
Harry didn’t question it. He’d long since accepted these rare moments for what they were. It was an enigma, a mystery, with no discernible answer, and he had long since given up trying to decipher it.
Even monsters could sleep. Even monsters were capable of humanity. If this wasn’t a clear indication of this fact, Harry didn’t know what was.
He knew this now. Understood that Tom Riddle too could show a hint of humanity, even if only in sleep. Caught between life and death, unable to escape the artificial realm of dreams his wardens had forced him into.
It was inhumane that this was how they dealt with this fragment of the Dark Lord. That, rather than give this man a sense of individuality, even if he was the last living piece of a monster; a boogeyman that refused to die; they silenced his mind. Losing one’s sense of self was horrid, and Harry wasn’t sure even Voldemort deserved this.
This was Tom’s awareness. This was Tom’s mind. Nothing was more precious than that. How were they to make him feel remorse, teach him that what he’d done was wrong if he wasn’t even awake to experience it?
Harry had nearly lost himself once before, the strength of Voldemort’s will overwhelming his own back in the Ministry. It was decades ago, but still, he remembered his fear. The weight of Voldemort’s mind crushing his would never be forgotten, even after years after the fact. There was nothing more frightening than losing one’s sense of self, and Tom had lost his.
At least, with Tom awake and aware, they could teach him something. They could show him how he’d been wrong. There was no teaching an empty man remorse.
But then again...Harry thought, lips pursed into a stubborn line. The original healers never cared to show him remorse in the first place.
They’d decided almost immediately that there was no other option but this. That in order to contain this threat, this was necessary. A means of protecting themselves from a danger they saw no reason to unleash upon the world.
Or so they said, but Harry knew the true reason. Even if he hadn’t wanted to know, to feel even a smidge of compassion for a piece of the Dark Lord.
The Ministry didn’t want to retribution for the lives lost in the war. No, they wanted to know how Riddle was alive. They wanted to study him, to pick apart his secrets without risking their lives, without awakening a monster they could not contain. No one was foolish enough to consider waking him nor willing to sacrifice this opportunity for research either.
It was opportunistic. It was barbaric. It went contrary to everything Harry believed in, but he had been complicit in all this. Even if he hadn’t known, at first. Even if he’d believed Voldemort had deserved all of it when he’d been drowning in his own grief years after learning of this.
And then, he found out about the experiments. If he had been hesitant before, then now he was outright revolted. This went beyond even his own vindictive feelings, surpassed any sort of animosity he felt for Tom. It was appalling what they did, what the healers were permitted to do in the name of immortality. They were no better than Tom.
Yet, Harry did nothing to change this fact despite all of his reservations, his misgivings of how Tom was treated. Eternal sleep, he'd justified to himself to an extent, but the experiments? The fact that the healers were poking into Tom’s mind without the man being aware? Harry could not stomach it.
Harry knew that Voldemort, should he have been presented with a similar situation, would have done the same. This fact didn’t stop him from feeling sick to his stomach, however.
The healers wanted to understand the lengths Voldemort had gone to ensure his survival, and so, Tom Riddle would asleep, dream and flit about his imagination until they, one day, cracked the code.
All with Harry sitting idly by. Allowing it to go on, permitting this unethical behavior; if only to uncover, along with the secret to immortality, a way to undo it as well.
All they had was time. An untenable thing that felt more and more ominous with each passing day.
Because Tom was not aging, and neither was Harry.
Harry would live so long as Tom lived—or was it the other way around? Harry had long since given up explaining this to himself. All he knew was that he was bound, even now, to the monster. It didn’t matter that he’d torn what little remained of Voldemort’s tattered soul from his chest at the clearing.
No, none of that mattered.
They were still intertwined. By prophecy or by blood, Harry did not know. Connected in ways that no healer could explain.
Nothing could erase this fact. Not the efforts he’d made to exorcise Voldemort’s soul from his body nor the lengths he’d taken to prove to the world that he was nothing like Voldemort.
Harry could not die, he could not age; just as Tom Riddle could not.
When he'd discovered this fact, the knowledge had driven him mad with fury. It’d twisted his insides, made fear like he’d never experienced before consume him. He'd believed it was over, thought himself free of Voldemort’s control, of his putrid soul.
Sure, one of his horcruxes had remained alive, asleep in St. Mungo’s for the unforeseeable future, but to learn that they were still tied by something no one had the means of explaining? Harry had gone ballistic. He’d shouted his lungs out, demanded that the healers, that someone, undid this magic that refused to let him die.
And for a time, Harry had hoped that one day they would succeed. Their assurances had seemed earnest enough.
But now, Harry knew just how stupid a hope it was. The days had turned to years, and the years had turned to decades, and still, there was no solution to this bizarre problem.
His friends had faded into dust. His wife and children had all passed on. All of them had gone without him. He still had his great grandchildren, which he had visited for a time when he’d been crippled with loneliness. But those visits had grown more sparse as the days continued to trickled by. He was unable to stomach features that looked both too much and too little like Ginny’s.
Like small hands that reached for a fluttering bird, but only ever brushed against its feathered tail.
It was in that state of grief that Harry had decided to visit Tom Riddle for the first time. Stricken with a sudden desire to see the monster that had damned him to this fate.
It’d been two decades since he’d seen the man, and surely enough, when he went, Harry realized just how much things had changed. Voldemort’s name had become a mere whisper of a memory in the minds of the new healers milling about the hospital. After all, the person laying on that bed was not the Dark Lord. It was only a slumbering man. A person that would never wake. Not in their lifetime, at least.
Harry hadn’t known why he'd come then. He still couldn’t precisely explain the reason, even now. If someone asked him, he wouldn’t be able to give them a decent enough answer. Something had drawn him to the hospital, had drawn him back to the man, and now he spent most days seeing him.
Though, that hadn’t stopped him from coming up with reasons.
In the beginning, he’d thought it was to see for himself what avarice could turn a person into. To derive some sort of amusement at Voldemort’s expense, to witness for himself just how far the name of “Lord Voldemort” could go. It was a selfish thought. Enough to elicit a feeling of guilt now, but at that time, he’d believed that to be his reason. He’d been driven so mad by his anger and sorrow that it only made sense that he’d latch onto this explanation.
Because why shouldn’t he have? Why shouldn’t he see for himself what had become of Voldemort, despite his reservations with the man’s imprisonment in that hospital? He had all the reason to go, to rub it in the man’s face that even his name was lost to time.
After all, no one knew who this man was. The name Voldemort was overshadowed by the peaceful age that followed his fall. All that they knew, that everyone understood, was that there was a dangerous man imprisoned in St. Mungos. They only knew him as immortal; as a creature with beautiful features that slept his days away in a room bathed in white.
The name “Voldemort” had melted into the sands of time, forgotten. As most things often did when life continued on.
Time waited for no one and nothing. No one could go against it, could leave permanent lines across the sand. Not even Voldemort, who worked endlessly to leave his mark.
But then the first visit became a second, and that second visit became a third, until Harry eventually lost count of how many visits he’d paid Tom. The anger and sorrow dissipated with each trip; with each time he sat beside the man’s side, waiting for something he could not explain.
Harry didn’t know how many visits it took before all he felt was bitter emptiness. Was it the tenth or the thirtieth visit? Harry didn’t know for certain.
That hardly mattered now, however.
Harry couldn’t stop seeing him even if he’d wanted to. The emptiness was a living, breathing thing. It was a cloud that seeped into his bones, that wedged itself between the gaps between skin and muscle. It was a noxious feeling in the pit of his stomach that refused to go away—a writhing mass that danced along the back of his thoughts with Tom Riddle’s face reflected in that abyss.
You’re alone...The man would say behind Harry’s eyelids, would echo into his eardrums endlessly.
The name Voldemort was dead, but Tom Riddle still remained, sleeping peacefully on that bed. The shadow of the monster, the angel before the demon had erased milky skin and handsome features.
It was as if time had not passed at all for him. As if the man had not murdered Harry’s parents all those years ago, as if he hadn’t performed the darkest of rituals and crawled out of that cauldron. He was the only thing that remained unchanged, the only constant in Harry’s life.
Everyone Harry knew, everyone he loved, had died of old age. But Tom Riddle was there. As he always was. In his head, in his dreams, and sleeping on that bed until the day the healers found a way to reverse whatever it was he’d done.
It should have disturbed him how often he found his thoughts traveling back to this man, how often he saw him—heard him—whispering into his mind. He was asleep, but he had never seemed more alive. This should have been cause for concern, but Harry only felt resigned to it. Only felt peace as wrong as that was.
Because what else was there for him to feel? What else was there for him now? He couldn’t die, and to live was to watch every new acquaintance he made pass away. They would all eventually leave him, just as his friends had. He couldn’t follow, couldn’t claim the death he’d desired since Ginny exhaled her last breath, grey hair and pale, wrinkly skin slackening in death.
Tom Riddle was the only one that stayed, and although it was wrong to feel relieved by this fact, to feel even an iota of peace sitting beside a mass murderer, it was better than being on his own.
The irony of it, the hilarity of this fact, had nearly driven him to tears one too many times in the past, but now, he barely registered the twinge of guilt each time he greeted the receptionist. This was his life now, this was the price he paid for housing Tom Riddle’s soul for as long as he had. It was his burden to bear, his sin to carry on his shoulders.
Voldemort is your past, present, and future.
It was absurd that this was what it’d come to. That this was his fate, after all he had sacrificed, after all that he had done for everyone. Everything had amounted to nothing, and he only had himself to blame.
Voldemort was still alive, even if a mere shadow of himself. Even if no one knew that this man, this Lucifer, was not in the shape of Satan. He was there, sleeping his days away, unaware of what he had done to both of them.
It was in these visits, in his grief and loneliness, that Harry wished Voldemort would one day wake, as stupid as that was. He wished that Voldemort, somehow, could speak to him from outside of the false memories in his head, that Voldemort too would carry this burden; the weight of immortality that Harry had had to live through for almost 150 years. Immortality was what Voldemort had wanted, and it was unfair for Harry to have that stupid dream forced onto him.
Immortality was nothing when everyone that you loved and all of your dreams crumbled before your very eyes. What did it matter when you could never rest, when you had to constantly live through acquaintances fading into the night in what seemed like a blink of an eye? He was alone. Always alone. The least Voldemort could do was be awake to fill the emptiness wrapped around his soul, to undo whatever it was that he’d done so that Harry could finally die in peace.
It had taken him a long time to understand why he had gone to see him on that first day, but now Harry knew why. It wasn’t in some misguided need to gloat. It wasn’t to see Voldemort at his lowest, to see him blessed with his immortality and cursed with slumber. It wasn’t to keep an eye on the experiments conducted and to ensure that Voldemort was treated humanely.
No. It was for none of these reasons.
Harry was alone, and it was that loneliness that forced him to go. Waiting for the day that maybe Voldemort would finally wake and strike him down. Whenever that was, if that day would ever come at all.
"Harry?”
A surprised jolt curled up his spine at the sound of his name. It was whispered lowly, a soothing tenor. Harry hadn’t expected it. He was often left alone with Tom. The healers only ever addressed him if the hospital was closing or they needed to take Tom down to the Unspeakables—
Clearing his throat, Harry ripped his attention away from the slumbering Dark Lord to address the witch. His cheeks felt warmer than usual, embarrassed that he’d once again lost track of time and caught by surprise while boring a hole into Tom’s face.
How long have I been here?
“Is it time for me to leave?” He asked, needing confirmation that yes, he killed more time than permitted at Tom’s side.
The witch looked apologetic, her lips turning into a soft, understanding smile that told him that that was exactly the case. Harry had come in early that morning, minutes after the doors opened to the public. He hadn’t planned to sit beside Tom for more than an hour, that was the goal he had set for himself at the time, but it seemed that a whole day had passed without his awareness.
A flush spread along his cheeks, ashamed. He’d done it again. It’d been happening too much lately.
“Yes, dear. But you know, if you want to stay a little longer, it isn’t trouble at all. You’ve been visiting this young man for years now, just watching. I don’t think anyone would really mind if you stay overnight just this once.”
Harry wanted to protest, wanted to say that he didn’t want to stay overnight, but before he could say just that, the healer had turned away and left down the way she’d come. The door closed with a click behind her, and Harry found himself at a loss of what to do then, mouth hanging open with words he didn’t have the chance to speak.
He should leave, he knew. Tom would remain where he was. He’d been sleeping for so long; it wouldn’t make a difference whether Harry stayed there overnight or not.
Still, he found himself tempted by the idea. The witches had never allowed him to stay overnight before. They always kicked him out promptly at 8 o’clock sharp. It was the routine. It was policy.
Why the mediwitch—Delphini, she said her name was—allowed him today of all days to do so was a mystery.
Though it didn’t stop him from dragging his seat closer to where the man slept. He didn’t know why he did it, but something inside him urged him to. It whispered into his head, murmured into his brain that he needed to get closer. It was a susurration, like the flash of a memory long forgotten coaxing him to bridge the space between them.
So he did, all without tearing his eyes away from Tom’s serene face. Watching, always watching, how Tom’s eyelids fluttered as if seeing something unfold behind them—a vivid dream, perhaps, that Harry could not witness for himself.
It made Tom look vulnerable, almost human in a way, to see him like this. To see that, even Tom, despite the poison that swirled in his heart, was capable of dreaming things too.
I wonder what he dreams about...Harry wondered, unconsciously leaning closer to take in more of Tom’s face, as if doing so would yield him an answer to his silent question. He could see each individual eyelash, the way they curled beneath his eyes, adding a touch of femininity that Harry hadn’t noticed before when he’d seen memories of Tom Riddle in the Pensieve, when he’d met him for the first time in the Chamber of Secrets, nor the previous times he’d visited.
His eyes followed the curve of Tom’s eyes, the way they slanted just slightly at the ends and how they fit proportionally to the rest of his face. His jaw was sharp and angular, neither too strong nor square, a perfect balance that Harry couldn’t help but stare at.
A fallen angel before sin had robbed him of his beauty.
Was this how he tricked his victims? Did he seduce them with carefully whispered words, did he flutter his lashes at them before twisting his lips into a charming smile? Did he ever show the world this face, dreaming and chasing after realities that would never exist in the world Harry lived?
These thoughts came without sign of it stopping. They blossomed behind Harry’s head, just as intrusive as he felt while lingering in the silent hospital.
Still, none of that registered.
Harry stared at the curve of Tom’s nose, followed the shape of his brow bones, traced the swell of his lips and how red they looked on his pale skin. Harry took it all in as if he could divine these secrets from sight alone.
There was no way to tell how long he remained that way, drinking his fill, but it had to be longer than ever before. When he blinked, the light from the hallway was off—the room bathed in shadows that hadn’t been there before. An absolute silence bled from the walls. No sound save for his and Tom’s breaths could be heard—the isolation almost unsettling.
You shouldn’t be here...A voice said in his head, but Harry did not move. He couldn’t. Somehow, in the middle of his staring, he’d leaned in so far that he was centimeters from Tom’s face, practically breathing the same air.
No alarm came with that realization. Harry was only strangely fascinated with the quivering of the man’s lips, and how, in his sleep, a tongue poked from his mouth as if chasing after a drop of moisture that trickled down from the seam of his mouth.
I wonder how they would—
Harry reared back as if burned, a warm flush creeping up his face. He didn’t know where that thought had come from. It was unacceptable, it was strange that he could have such thoughts about a person that he had hated and envied for so long.
Hated because Tom had forced him to live beyond what a wizard was permitted to live, without aging at all; envied because he was sleeping eternity away, completely free of the nightmares that ruined all thought of rest for Harry.
Harry decided right then that he needed to leave. He’d overstayed his welcome.
And then, just as he was about to take a step back, to leave and forget just what he’d considered doing to his enemy, something latched onto his wrist to stop him in his tracks. It was hot. The sensation burned him him from the inside out, the heat spreading from that single point outward. It suddenly felt difficult to breathe.
Sshhhh.
It took him seconds to realize that it was Tom’s hand, that the warmth and the grip on his left wrist were five fingers and a palm digging into his wrist.
“W-what?”
A powerful wave of shock overtook him, and Harry yanked his arm back as if he’d been bitten, but the hand refused to let him go, surprisingly strong despite the man remaining inanimate for so many years.
“Harry...” A baritone voice murmured, still heavy with sleep.
Everything around him stilled. His heart and his breathing all came to a stop, his eyes snapping away from where Tom’s hand had caught his wrist to the face Harry had been gazing into almost all evening. A face he’d seen too often in his dreams, that he looked upon with growing fascination each time he paid Tom a visit.
Red stared back at him. The brilliant crimson equal parts bleary and confused.
Harry was speechless.
“Potter...” Tom said, as if weighing each syllable on his tongue.
Harry did not speak nor move. He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to. His shock kept him rooted in place, the grip on his wrist forgotten by the sudden realization that Tom was awake.
“Harry...Potter...”
The man breathed, practically crooning his name out before tugging Harry closer than before, until Harry’s chest was flush against Tom’s, their lips only a centimeter from touching. Nothing registered except the gleam of crimson in those eyes, than the life that suddenly rippled across that face.
His chest constricted with fear.
This isn’t supposed to happen...A thought whispered into his head, the voice alarmed even if the rest of him wasn’t. His emotions were oddly disconnected from reality, as if there were some of lag between the real world and how he perceived it. His body was relaxed, but his mind--
It screamed for him to move.
“Finally...I can touch you…”