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Chapter Text

Tom Marvolo Riddle was born with a star on his skin.

It sat over his heart, small and pale and almost shy. When he was very young (four, maybe), he discovered it by accident, scratching at his chest because the wool of his shirt was irritating. His fingers brushed the slightly smoother skin, the shape of the star, and he froze.

He tugged his shirt up and stared.

It was not big or dramatic. Not golden or glowing like the storybooks said some marks could be. It was slightly lighter than his skin, faintly defined, its five points crisp and neat. No eyes, no mouth, no expression. Just a star.

He touched it carefully with one finger.

"Hello," he whispered, because no one else was in the room and the word burned on his tongue. "Are you real?"

The star did nothing. No twitch. No glow. No sign from the universe.

But Tom knew. Some instinct deeper than reason told him: this is not just a blemish. This is someone.

His someone.

He pulled his shirt back down, hugging his knees to his chest.

The other children boasted about their marks sometimes. Lucy had a little flower on her wrist that giggled and glowed soft pink when her soulmate was happy. Daniel had a shield on his shoulder that warmed and had a smug look on its face whenever his soulmate was proud. These were the ones the nurses cooed over, laughing about how adorable it was when they reacted. How sweet it would be when the children finally met the other halves of their marks.

Nobody ever asked about Tom's.

They forgot about it as soon as they saw his eyes.

Too cold, they said. Too clever. Strange.

ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

"Have you been born yet?" he whispered one winter night, breath fogging faintly in the air. The window rattled with the wind, and the mattress springs complained when he shifted. "Are you a baby? A child? Are you... nothing yet?"

The star stayed blank. Tom chewed his lip.

He had heard the stories. Some marks remained faceless because the soulmate died very young, before the bond could truly awaken. Some because the other soul had not yet been born.

"You exist," he told the star one night, voice firm in the dark. "You have to. I won't accept anything else."

No one argued with him, so he took that as agreement.

ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

By the time the star on his chest finally changed, Tom Riddle was no longer Tom Riddle.

The newspapers called him other names now.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
You-Know-Who.
The Dark Lord.

He had followers. An army. A symbol feared across Britain. His name was spoken in desperate whispers and frantic orders. People bowed, bled, and died in his name.

And through it all, the star over his heart remained the same: blank. Faceless. Silent.

For years, that had been his only real disappointment.

He had conquered death in theory, made strides toward it in ritual and research. He had charmed, terrified, and reshaped the world around him. And yet the closest thing he had to a promise of love lay stubbornly empty over his heart, as if the universe itself refused him that one thing.

If his soulmate was gone, he would survive it. He had survived worse.

He was not a child in an orphanage anymore, clutching a thin blanket and whispering into the dark.

He was Lord Voldemort.

He did not need anyone.

But one day, he was in a small, filthy cottage, standing over a broken man on the floor.

The raid had been simple: a suspected blood traitor, once loosely associated with the Order. His Death Eaters had dragged the man from under the floorboards, tossed him at Voldemort's feet like a gift laid before a king.

The man babbled. They usually did.

Voldemort listened with half an ear. The information was useful, but his attention had drifted long before the man started sobbing.

Pathetic.

He lifted his wand lazily.

"Crucio."

The man's screams tore the air apart.

Voldemort watched, detached. The pain of others no longer shocked him. Magic behaved as it should. He controlled it. Directed it. Shaped it to his will.

Then, abruptly, something punched through him like a spike of lightning.

A violent, lurching pain. Not in his wand hand, not in his head, but from his chest.

From his star.

He staggered. The curse dropped with his focus, the man collapsing into shuddering gasps of air. Around him, Death Eaters cried out in confusion.

"My Lord?"

"Master?"

He barely heard them.

A burning sensation clawed its way across his ribs, sharp and bright. It wasn't like any physical wound; it was inside him, in the magic, in the soul, like something had suddenly been tied to him.

His hand flew to his chest. The star was hot.

Voldemort hissed, grabbing at the front of his robes, tearing them open with a savage rip. The Death Eaters flinched back, more afraid of that loss of composure than any curse.

His shirt went next, buttons popping, fabric dropping to the floor.

And there, over his heart...

The star was glowing. Blazing, actually. Fierce white-gold light poured from the small, once-blank shape, the skin around it flushed with heat.

For the first time in his life, it was moving.

Tiny lines writhed on its surface, carving themselves into existence. A circle here, a curve there, the faintest suggestions of features battling their way out of emptiness.

"My Lord—"

"Leave," Voldemort snarled.

The word cracked like a whip. They didn't hesitate.

In less than ten seconds, the cottage was empty of everyone but him and the groaning wreck of a man on the ground, who might as well have been furniture for all Voldemort noticed him.

His breathing came too fast, too ragged. He watched, transfixed, unable to look away as the mark on his skin shifted and solidified.

Two small circles formed in the center.
Eyes.

A tiny line appeared beneath, then trembled.
A mouth.

For a heartbeat, the new little face on his skin just... stared. Blankly. As if stunned by its own existence.

Then its tiny, drawn-on eyes widened.

The mouth opened in a silent, soundless wail.

The star began to cry.

It scrunched up, its tiny eyebrows drawing together, its tiny mouth wobbling, and little shining shapes like tears shimmered at the edges of each point, as if dripping down his chest.

Voldemort's breath caught.

Magic surged along the bond, sharp and raw. It wasn't his pain. Not exactly. It was something else. He knew what it was.

Birth.

His soulmate was being born.

He pressed his hand over the star, suddenly terrified it might shatter or burn out if he didn't hold it together.

The new little face on his skin squeezed its eyes tighter, like it was overwhelmed, confused, frightened by the world it had just been dragged into. Its tiny mouth opened wider in that mute, desperate scream.

"Hush," Voldemort rasped, voice coming out rougher than he intended. "Be still. You're all right."

The star did not appear to agree.

"I am here," he said slowly. "I have been waiting a long time."

The star's face scrunched tighter, then slowly, slowly began to relax. Its eyes stayed wet, but the lines of its tiny mouth softened from a scream to a wobbling frown.

"You are mine," he told the new, crying soul on the other end of the bond. "And I am yours."

ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

Chapter Text

The night he heard the prophecy, the star was on his elbow.

It had migrated there sometime that afternoon, slipping away from his chest without so much as a twinge of warning. One moment it had been over his heart, faint and warm under his robes. The next, his sleeve had tickled, and when he rolled the fabric up, there it was. Perched just above the bend of his arm like an ink stain that had decided to come to life.

It looked… smug.

Tiny curved eyes, a small upturned mouth, the barest hint of contentment in the lines of its cartoonish face. Whatever his soulmate was doing. Probably eating, playing, being coddled like the small, soft creature they still were. It was making them quietly pleased with the world.

Voldemort studied the little star with narrowed eyes.

“You are very pleased with yourself, it seems,” he remarked.

The mark did nothing, of course. It didn’t hear him. It didn’t respond to his words or touch. It wasn’t a separate mind. Just a projection, an echo of someone else’s emotions scribbled across his skin.

He’d tested this many times.

Poking it, prodding it, threatening it, murmuring nonsense to it. None of it changed its expression. Only changes within his soulmate’s own heart could do that.

Which made its current mood mildly irritating.

⊂⁠(⁠(⁠・⁠▽⁠・⁠)⁠)⁠⊃

He lowered his sleeve and went to meet Severus Snape.

By the time the younger wizard was ushered in, hood pulled low, the star had slid again, an oddly cool tingling as it traveled over his skin. When he sat down, Voldemort felt it resettle somewhere along his ribs, like a cat changing positions.

He ignored it.

“My Lord,” Snape said, dropping to one knee. “I have information.”

The room was dim, lit by hovering candles and a low fire in the grate. Shadows dragged long shapes along the flagstones. Voldemort’s presence filled the space more completely than the light did.

“Rise,” he said softly. “Speak.”

Snape stood, head bowed, and did.

“A prophecy,” he began. “From the Hogwarts Divination professor. It was delivered in Dumbledore’s presence. I overheard… part of it, my Lord.”

Voldemort’s fingers stilled on the armrest of his chair.

A prophecy. Concerning him.

“How fortunate,” he murmured. “Go on.”

Snape recited it, the words he remembered, strained and imperfect, but clear enough.

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches…

Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…

The air in the room grew colder with each line.

Approaches.

Power to vanquish.

Born, seventh month dies.

Snape’s voice wavered by the end. He fell silent, waiting for the explosion.

It did not come.

Voldemort said nothing at all.

He questioned Snape further who had spoken, who had heard, where the meeting had taken place, how soon Dumbledore might act on the information. When he was satisfied, he dismissed the man with a small tilt of his head.

“Serve me well, Severus,” he said. “And you will be rewarded.”

Snape fled, grateful to be alive and for their agreement to spare the one he loves

The door shut. Silence settled.

He stood, pacing to the dark window. Outside, the night pressed against the glass. Inside, his thoughts sharpened.

He knew of two wizarding couples who had defied him three times. Two possible candidates for this so-called “vanquisher.” Two babies who had come into the world at the end of July.

All he had to do was choose.

He curled his fingers into his palm, nails biting skin.

He could end this before it began. Kill the child. Kill the prophecy. Kill whatever “power he knows not” before it ever had the chance to take shape.

The star twitched again, an unpleasant, jumpy motion against his side. He glanced down, annoyed by the distraction, then finally undid his outer robe with a flick of his fingers.

He opened his shirt and looked.

The mark had traveled back toward his chest without him noticing, settling just over his heart again. Its tiny face was clearly visible, brows drawn tight, mouth a small, uncertain line. It looked… unsettled. Not wailing, not sobbing.... just uneasy, as if something in its world had shifted in a way it didn’t like.

Voldemort huffed a quiet breath, somewhere between a laugh and a scoff.

“You don’t even understand what you’re afraid of,” he said. “You are still too young.”

He closed his shirt again, not out of modesty, but because the sight made something tight in his chest.

He had never been sentimental.

But he had been waiting a long time.

He remembered the orphanage nights, the cold bed, the blanket that never kept the frost from his fingers. The way he had whispered into the dark: You exist. I won’t accept anything else.

He had not clawed his way to immortality, split his soul and defied death, simply to be killed.

He was not going to die.

Not now.

Not ever.

“I will not be vanquished,” he said, tone flat, more a statement of law than of intention. “There is no ‘power’ I do not know. If there is, I will learn it. If it is human, I will break it."

His fingers rested lightly over the fabric, over the skin, over the star.

“I told you once,” he murmured, more softly than he intended, “I will not die before I meet you.”

That promise was not made to the mark. It had been made to himself.

He kept his promises.

To others? Rarely. To himself? Always.

He would not die.

And his soulmate, wherever they were, would not be left alone in a world without him.

⊂⁠(⁠(⁠・⁠▽⁠・⁠)⁠)⁠⊃

Chapter Text

The star was in a good mood.

Voldemort noticed it as he sat in his chair, going through reports. It zipped across his forearm in a sudden, bright flicker, then skated up to his shoulder, then slid down his ribs. Every time it settled long enough for him to look at it, its tiny face was different.

On his wrist, it wore a curious, tilted expression, eyes narrowed slightly, mouth pursed as if saying oh?

On his elbow, it brightened, eyes wide, mouth turned up in a delighted little grin.

When it reached his knee, it wobbled, cheeks puffing as if it were giggling at some private joke.

Voldemort let the parchment in his hand lower, just enough to watch.

His followers would have fainted if they could see him now: the Dark Lord, robes immaculate, features sharp and cold… staring and smiling fondly at a little cartoon star as it gleefully sprinted laps around his limbs.

Today, his soulmate was… happy.

Not the soft, settled happiness of sleep or being held. This was livelier. Something was happening. Probably some new toy, some new game, some new discovery that had sent the tiny heart on the other end of the bond into delighted overdrive.

The star zipped from his calf back to his wrist, leaving a faint tingling trail along his skin. Voldemort caught his own sleeve and rolled it up, watching as it came to rest, like a sticker that had decided this was the best spot.

Its little eyes sparkled. Its mouth curled into a playful, crooked smile.

Voldemort huffed, the ghost of something like a laugh.

“You’re energetic today,” he murmured.

The star’s face creased briefly in the shape of a pout, then snapped back into a grin. It zipped from his wrist to the inside of his palm, pausing there, the tiny expression now one of pure, uncomplicated joy.

He closed his hand, not tightly enough to cover it completely, but enough to feel the faint warmth of the magic beneath his skin.

Enough.

He had other things to do tonight.

He rolled his sleeve back down, composed his features, and banished every trace of softness from his posture as he stepped away from the chair.

By the time he reached the room where his map and notes were laid out, the Dark Lord was fully back in place.

.⁠·⁠´⁠¯⁠`⁠(⁠>⁠▂⁠<⁠)⁠´⁠¯⁠`⁠·⁠.

Two families. Two children.

He stood before the table, gaze sweeping over the neat parchment covered in information gathered by Death Eaters and informants.

Frank and Alice Longbottom.

James and Lily Potter.

There were many children who were born at the end of July but only two have parents who had defied him three times. Both had fought him. Both were under Order protection. 

Either boy could be the one.

The candlelight cast tall, jagged shadows across the parchment.

He weighed each option.

He tapped the parchment again.

“Born as the seventh month dies,” he quoted softly. “Born to those who have thrice defied him.”

He drew a neat circle around one name.

Harry Potter.

The star chose that moment to skim up under his ribs, settling somewhere on the left side of his chest.

Its tiny face was still bright with whatever simple joy his soulmate was currently feeling, but as his magic twisted around his decision, the expression began to flicker. The smile wobbled. The drawn-on eyebrows pulled together in a small crease of uncertainty.

Voldemort frowns and tries to ignore it.

“I choose Potter,” he said as he remembers the address that Peter had told him.

He stepped toward the door. The star’s anxious little frown deepened on his skin. He adjusted his robes and left.

.⁠·⁠´⁠¯⁠`⁠(⁠>⁠▂⁠<⁠)⁠´⁠¯⁠`⁠·⁠.

Godric’s Hollow was quiet.

The small village lay under the cover of night, warm yellow lights peeking from drawn curtains, a handful of chimneys puffing thin streams of smoke into the cold air. Ordinary people slept, unaware that their world was about to tilt.

Voldemort appeared at the edge of the wards with a whisper-soft crack, the sort of Apparition sound that only trained ears could catch. His wand was already in his hand.

The star jolted.

Voldemort decides to ignore it again. He has something else he needed to take care of first.

His fingers flexed around the wand. He stepped forward. The wards recognized him too late.

Inside, he could feel movement. A rush of magic. Shouts. A woman’s voice, sharp with fear. A man’s, desperate and hoarse.

He was calm.

James Potter appeared first, wand raised, hair rumpled, eyes wide with the sort of terror that came only from fear for someone else.

“Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run, I’ll hold him off—”

Voldemort didn’t bother to let him finish.

“Avada Kedavra.”

Green.

The man dropped like a cut puppet, glasses askew, fingers still curled as if reaching for a wand that wouldn’t save him. 

He ascended. Each step up the stairs was quiet. Precise.

By the time he reached the nursery, the star was almost vibrating on his skin.

He pushed the door open.

Lily Potter stood between him and the crib, wandless, green eyes blazing with a desperate, doomed fury.

“Not Harry,” she whispered. “Please. Not Harry. Take me instead.”

“Stand aside,” he said, almost bored.

She didn’t.

“Stand aside, you silly girl… stand aside now.”

She didn’t.

He could have spared her. Severus begged him. He could have pushed her aside, stunned her, stepped past. 

But he has no patience with her stubbornness.

Her choice, then.

“Avada Kedavra.”

Green again.

Her body fell. She was another obstacle removed.

His gaze moved to the crib.

He stepped forward.

The boy was small, dark hair already hopelessly messy. Wide awake. Lily’s green eyes stared up at Voldemort, clear and unblinking, too young to understand death, but old enough to feel that something was very, very wrong.

He made no sound.

No cry. No wail. Just a small, tense stillness, fingers curled in the blanket, chest rising in quick, shallow breaths.

The room seemed to hold its breath.

He raised his wand.

There was a strange, tiny tightness in his chest for a moment. Something to do with the bond. With the star. 

He ignored it yet again.

The prophecy had chosen this boy.

He would not let the boy grow into the man it promised. He will not die. For himself. For his soulmate.

“Avada Kedavra.”

The words left his lips softly, almost gently.

The green light surged from his wand.

And the world broke.

It was not like other kills.

The spell struck, but instead of sinking into fragile life like a knife into soft flesh, it rebounded.

The curse came back at him.

White-hot, blinding.

His body exploded into nothingness. His soul, already fractured, tore free, ripped from vessel and scattered like ash in a storm.

Pain.

Cold.

Void.

Harry Potter lived.

Voldemort did not.

.⁠·⁠´⁠¯⁠`⁠(⁠>⁠▂⁠<⁠)⁠´⁠¯⁠`⁠·⁠.

Chapter Text

For a long time, there was nothing.

No body. No breath. No heartbeat. No hands to hold a wand, no mouth to form a spell.

Just pain stretched so thin it almost stopped being pain at all.

Lord Voldemort existed as a smear of consciousness, a ragged scrap of soul clinging to the world by stubbornness and horror alone. Thought came slowly, like light seeping through cracks in a wall that refused to fully open.

He did not know where he was.

He did not know what he was.

He only knew two things.

First: he had failed.

Second: something was still holding on to him.

His star

The mark fought to exist when the thing it marked had become something neither alive nor dead.

⋋⁠✿⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠✿⁠⋌

Harry Potter was born with a moon on his skin.

It curled on his upper arm when he was born, a soft crescent, neat and pale. At first the healers had cooed over it.

“Oh, look, his soulmate’s already alive.”

When he was very small, his mother had traced it with one gentle finger and giggled when the little cartoon face yawned on his skin.

“Look at that, Harry,” she’d whispered once. “Someone’s already waiting for you. Isn’t that amazing?”

Harry hadn’t understood the words, but he’d understood the warmth in her voice. The way the moon’s tiny face had gone from sleepy to content, eyes closing in a quiet smile as he drifted off on her chest.

The mark had always been solid. Present. Bright.

It didn’t do anything dramatic, but it reacted: a grumpy face when his soulmate was upset, a little smug smile when they were pleased and many more. His parents had laughed about it sometimes.

“Looks like your soulmate’s more temperamental than you are,” James had joked once, ruffling his hair. “Good luck, kiddo.”

Then Godric’s Hollow burned.

Lily’s body fell and did not rise. James lay downstairs, eyes glazed.

The Killing Curse hit him and rebounded.

The curse took its original caster instead.

And the moon on his palm starts glitching.

⋋⁠✿⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠✿⁠⋌

Harry grew in a house that did not want him, under hands that shoved and voices that snapped, in a world that told him he was burden, excess, freak.

Through it all, the moon stayed.

But it was not… normal.

Most people’s marks, from what little Harry overheard at school, were steady things. A heart that smiled when their person was happy. A flower that wilted and cry when they were sad. A sword that scowled, a quill that pouted. They might move, they might sulk, but they were solid. Present. 

Harry’s wasn’t.

The moon on his skin behaved like a broken television signal.

Sometimes it was fine. A small curve, pale and clear, perched on his forearm or his ribs, a sleepy little face snoozing while Harry scrubbed pans or tried to dodge Dudley’s gang. On those rare days, it almost looked like the marks he glimpsed on other kids in changing rooms: simple, calm, quietly alive.

But most of the time, it glitched.

It would flare bright and sharp, then drain of color so fast it made his eyes ache to watch. One second the moon looked solid and real, the next it was so faint it seemed like it had been half-erased. The face would flicker too, appearing and disappearing in jerky jumps, expressions stuttering between extremes.

Panic.

Grief.

Numbness.

A flash of anger.

Back to panic again.

Almost never calm. Almost never asleep.

It was as if whoever was on the other end of the bond couldn’t settle. As if they were being yanked back and forth across a line Harry couldn’t see, dragged between “here” and “gone,” between “alive” and something that wasn’t quite dead.

On the worst days, the magic under his skin felt… wrong. The moon would jitter in place, its edges blurring, the little cartoon mouth pulled tight in a soundless scream that lasted only a blink before cutting out completely. 

Harry never knew what any of it meant. He didn’t know that soulmate marks weren’t supposed to behave like that.

All Harry knew was that his moon was strange and unstable and full of bad emotions that didn’t belong to him.

And that somewhere behind all that panic and fury and emptiness, there was still a person.

Someone who was supposed to be his.

On the nights when the cupboard was too small and the house was too quiet and the world felt like it had decided, that it didn’t want him, Harry would touch the mark and pretend he could feel a faint, steady pulse beneath it.

“Whoever you are,” he’d think, not quite brave enough to say it out loud, “please don’t give up. You’re the only thing that proves I’m not completely alone.”

The moon never answered.

It just flickered, caught between existence and nothing, clinging on as stubbornly as he did.

⋋⁠✿⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠✿⁠⋌

If Harry had to pick one word for his life, “ordinary” wasn’t it.

“Awful” fit better.

He woke up in a cupboard, wore Dudley’s cast-off clothes, and learned very early to make himself small and quiet and useful. The Dursleys liked him best when they could pretend he didn’t exist.

There were two things that didn’t fit the pattern.

One was the strange things that happened around him when he was scared or angry.

The other was the moon.

It curled on his skin that morning, a little crescent tucked against the inside of his forearm where the sleeve of Dudley’s old T-shirt didn’t quite reach. Harry watched it flicker in the dusty light coming through the cupboard’s ventilation grate.

Today, it was restless.

The tiny cartoon face shimmered in and out of focus, stuttering between a sour, pinched frown and wide-eyed unease. The moon itself faded and brightened so fast it almost buzzed.

“Yeah, yeah,” Harry whispered under his breath, rubbing at it gently with his thumb. “I don’t like today much either.”

“Up!” Aunt Petunia shrieked from the kitchen. “Get up, boy!”

Harry flinched, yanked his sleeve down, and scrambled out.

The moon glitched under the fabric, a weird, tingling buzz skittering up his arm.

The thing about having a soulmate mark when your guardians hated anything “unnatural” was that you learned to keep it secret.

Other kids showed theirs off on the playground, rolling up sleeves and giggling as little hearts giggled back, as flowers drooped when their soulmate was tired, as marks puffed up proudly.

Harry had watched once, eyes wide, as a boy in his class showed off a tiny dragon head on his shoulder. It blew a silent puff of smoke when his soulmate was excited.

“Where’s yours, Potter?” someone had asked.

“Don’t have one,” Harry had lied, shrugging. “Must be defective.”

They’d laughed at him, of course.

That evening, the moon on his arm had glitched so violently it made his fingers tingle. The little face had twisted into a furious scowl.

“Right,” Harry had muttered to it later, in the safety of his cupboard. “Whatever you're going through right now, I hope it's not as worse as mine. Well, maybe it is, but we'll make it through... together.”

Half-alive.

Half-dead.

And Harry is worried about his other half.

⋋⁠✿⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠⁰⁠ ⁠✿⁠⋌

The letters had come.

“Mr. H. Potter,

The Cupboard under the Stairs…”

The moon flared when the first one arrived.

He’d been reaching for it when Uncle Vernon snatched it away. The moon jumped to the back of his hand, face scrunched in outrage, mirroring Harry's frustration even though its not, cheeks puffed adorably, still glitching.

Then the letters came in waves.

Vernon burned them. Boarded the letterbox. Dragged them to a miserable little hut on a rock in the sea.

They didn’t stop.

On the night before Harry’s eleventh birthday, he lay on the dusty floorboards of the hut, counting down the seconds until he officially turned eleven. The moon was on his chest now, just over his heart, flickering between a steady glow and a faint, static-y vibration.

Something was coming.

He could feel it.

The wind howled outside.

The watch Dudley had thrown at his head once, now cracked, but still functional, ticked down the last seconds to midnight.

Three… two… one…

BOOM.

The door rattled on its hinges.

Another massive thud.

“Who’s there?” Vernon shouted, voice shaking.

Harry clutched at his shirt where the mark buzzed under his palm.

The door crashed inward.

And a giant stepped through.

Huge, wild-haired, filling the doorway like a walking mountain. Rain dripped off his coat. He scowled at the storm, then at Uncle Vernon’s gun.

The next minute was chaos: bent gun, Dudley squealing, Vernon sputtering.

“There you are,” the giant said quietly. “Harry Potter.”

It was the way he said it.

Like the name was important. Like Harry wasn’t just the boy in the cupboard.

Harry’s throat went dry. “You… know me?”

“Know you?” The giant huffed. “Of Course I do. Everyone in our world does.”

Our world.

The moon twitched, expression spasming into a flicker of sharp, electric emotion Harry couldn’t name. 

“Who are you?” Harry managed.

“Rubeus Hagrid,” the giant said. “Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts. And I’ve come to tell you—”

He paused, looking almost pleased with himself.

“You’re a wizard, Harry.”

Silence.

Then, faintly “A… what?”

Chapter Text

The boat ride back was quiet.

Hagrid rowed. Harry watched the water. Under his shirt, the moon gave small, restless flickers, like it couldn’t sit still.

“Hey, Hagrid?” Harry asked after a while. “About soulmate marks…”

“Yeah?” Hagrid said.

“They show what the other one feels, Right?”

“That’s right,” Hagrid nodded. “Your mark shows them. Their moods. Their pain. Their happiness. And their mark shows you.”

Harry looked down at his chest.

“So if mine is… weird,” he said, “it’s because they’re not okay?”

“Weird how?” Hagrid asked.

“It kind of… stutters,” Harry said. “Sometimes the face looks like it’s panicking, or really angry, or… empty. And the glow flickers all the time. It never just looks calm. It glitches. A lot”

Hagrid frowned. “Most marks don’t do that. Sounds like your soulmate’s been through something’ bad. Maybe hurt. Maybe wrapped up in dark magic. But the bond’s still there, so they’re still hanging on.”

Harry went quiet at that.

His fingers pressed over the moon, feeling the small buzz of magic beneath his skin. The expression was a tired little frown, but the mark was warm. Present. Glitching 

Somewhere out there, his soulmate was real.

Someone meant for him.

And as broken and strange as the emotions felt, the thought made his chest ache in a good way.

Please don’t give up, he thought, not quite daring to say it. You’re all I’ve got.

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

Diagon Alley was like stepping into another world.

Shops, owls, cauldrons, spellbooks, wizards in robes. Everything Harry had never been allowed to imagine all at once. He spun slowly, taking it in with wide eyes.

They went to Gringotts. They rode the cart. They saw his vault full of gold. Harry’s own feelings tangled into shock, disbelief, a painful kind of gratitude.

When Harry held his new wand for the first time and felt the magic spark between them, his heart leapt.

They ended up at a corner table in the Leaky Cauldron for lunch.

Harry watched people drift by. Witches, wizards, some with visible soulmate marks: a tiny flame that flickered when its pair laughed nearby, a cloud on someone’s wrist gently raining when their soulmate was sad.

“How come theirs look so… normal?” Harry whispered to himself bitterly, but Hagrid heard him.

“Most do,” Hagrid said. “They follow the other one’s moods, sure, but it’s steady. They’re alive, they’re whole, they’re not being ripped at by anything they shouldn’t. Your soulmate—” He hesitated. “Well. With how you described it, they’re not living an easy life, that’s for sure.”

Harry traced his finger over his hidden moon.

“We’re both not,” he said, half-joking, half not.

“Difference is,” Hagrid said gently, “yours is gonna get better now, yeah? Hogwarts and everything. Maybe theirs will too.”

Harry didn’t know if he believed that.

But he wanted to.

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

“P–P–P–Potter? H–Harry P–Potter?”

Harry looked up.

A thin man in a turban stood nearby, clutching the edge of the table. He looked jumpy, his eyes darting around the room.

“Harry, this is Professor Quirrell,” Hagrid said. “Teaches Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts.”

Harry straightened. “Hello, sir.”

He reached out to shake Quirrell’s hand.

The instant their skin touched, pain stabbed his scar.

Harry gasped, grabbing his forehead.

At the same time, his soulmate mark spiked.

The moon on his wrist jerked. The tiny face twisted into a look of wild, panicked rage, the glow flaring hard and stuttering. The emotions slamming through the mark were sudden and violent: hatred, terror, fury.

Harry snatched his hand back.

“Sorry,” he blurted. “Headache.”

Quirrell flinched. “O–oh, n–no w–worries, m–my boy, v–very—very common, very c–common, h–headaches—”

He retreated quickly, almost tripping over a chair on his way out.

Hagrid frowned. “You all right, Harry?”

“Yeah,” Harry lied. The pain in his scar was fading, but the mark on his wrist still trembled, the little moon’s expression stuck somewhere between furious and shaken.

Harry stared at his wrist.

The moon still trembled faintly, like it had just been jolted. Its tiny mouth was pressed into the thinnest, angriest line Harry had ever seen on it. The glow around it was sharp and uneven, bright, dim, bright again, like it couldn’t quite settle as it glitches.

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

He remembered dying.

Not the way other people did. There was no soft fading, no gentle dark.

He remembered the way his body tore apart like paper.

He had prepared too well for that.

The Horcruxes kept him tethered to the world, gave him enough to survive. 

What was left of him clung to existence.

He drifted. He had no eyes anymore. No hands. No voice. No heartbeat. No skin.

No star over his heart.

He had worn that mark all his life. He could remember its shape, its color, the way its tiny face had cried when his soulmate was born. But now there was no chest for it to sit on.

Gone with his ribs, his skin, his heart.

He missed it. He longed for it. He ached for it. 

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

Time blurred.

He possessed small creatures when he could. Snakes, rats, weak things that could hold him for hours or days. Their minds were crude, their bodies fragile, but they gave him senses again for a while.

He burned through them.

Still, he clung on.

Years later, in a forest far from Britain, he found a man.

Quirinus Quirrell was clever in the petty way that frightened people sometimes were. Ambitious, uncertain, craving power he did not fully understand.

Voldemort understood enough for both of them.

He slid into Quirrell’s mind like smoke under a door, then like a hook digging in. The man stuttered, argued, tried to resist, and then yielded. All cowards yielded eventually.

Quirrell’s body shuddered under the weight of him, but it held.

With the parasitic half-life he was living, it was the best he could get: a skull to sit in, and eyes to see through.

No flesh of his own.

No heartbeat of his own.

No mark of his own.

He truly missed his star shaped mark. He missed knowing what his soulmate is currently feeling. He missed the smiles and playful energy.

But he discovered that soulmate marks had always been a by-product of something deeper. Skin was just where the magic showed through.

The bond itself lived in the soul.

And his soul, however mutilated, still existed so, the bond was still there, anchored to his core. He can feel it.

There was nothing he could do about it though. He is currently half-alive and riding a stuttering coward of a professor, and that infuriated him more.

Someday, he'll get his body back, along with his mark. And find his soulmate. 

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

Voldemort’s focus was on plans.

On the Stone. On regaining a real body.

Then a name cut through the noise.

“P–P–P–Potter? H–Harry P–Potter?”

Quirrell’s eyes found a boy at a nearby table.

Small. Thin. Hair like a messy black halo. A thin, pale line in the shape of lightning on his forehead.

Voldemort went very, very still.

You.

Magic snarled inside him.

Everything he had lost, everything he had become, traced itself back to that child in a crib and the night the curse had rebounded. The sight of the scar felt like a slap.

Hatred surged, hot and instinctive.

You lived when I did not.

Quirrell’s hand reached out, trembling. Voldemort wanted to fling it back, to curse the boy, to tear him apart. He did not. Not yet. He had no wand of his own, no body of his own, no guarantee of victory his current situation.

He bared his metaphorical teeth and watched instead.

Their hands met.

And then everything happened at once.

Quirrell flinched.

Harry grabbed his scar.

And Voldemort is full of hatred.

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

He let Quirrell scuttle back toward Hogwarts, the man’s mind buzzing with fear and schemes and stuttered half-thoughts.

Voldemort ignored him.

The boy with the scar still lingered in his awareness like a bruise. Harry Potter. The child who had undone him. The reminder of that night in Godric’s Hollow when everything had shattered.

But once the echo of that night faded, something else rose up in the quiet that followed.

An absence.

He had grown used to many losses: his original body, his old wand, his sanity? He had even accepted the wild mutilation of his own soul as the necessary cost of not dying.

But there was one thing he had never learned how to be without.

The star.

For as long as he could remember, it had been there. A small, pale mark over his heart, a constant, silent presence. When it gained its face, when it cried at his soulmate’s birth, it had been the closest thing he’d ever had to proof that he was meant for more than being alone.

Now, there was… nothing.

No skin. No chest. No place for the mark to live on his body.

He knew the bond was still there

He just couldn’t reach it.

No glow under his palm when he pressed his hand to his chest.

No tiny cartoon face peeking from beneath his collar.

No star curling sleepily at the edge of his ribs when he lay down at night.

He could not even feel their emotions now. Without flesh and mark to translate the bond, it might as well have been a line drawn through fog.

He had wanted power. He had it, once.

He had wanted immortality. He had taken it.

He had wanted love. Real, unconditional love from at least one person in the world.

That last part had always felt… possible, in a way nothing else did.

Because the star said so.

Because the universe itself had stamped it on him at birth like a promise.

“I have not forgotten you” he thought, suddenly furious at the shape of his own longing.

The idea that his soulmate could possibly believe themselves abandoned made something sharp twist in him.

“I am not finished. I will come back.”

(⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

Chapter Text

Harry’s first year at Hogwarts passed in a blur of things he’d never had before.

Friends.

Warmth.

Through all of it, the moon stayed. Still glitchy and full of negative emotions but at least it's still there.

Sometimes, during late-night talks with Ron, when Harry felt light and content for once in his life, meanwhile the moon's tiny face would be sharp, pinched, almost scowling, as if somewhere out there his soulmate was irritated or plotting or simply in a foul mood.

Majority of the time, it look bored, unimpressed, or faintly annoyed as it glitch it's way into another part of his body.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

When Harry made the Quidditch team and soared into the sky on his broom for the first time, he felt like he could burst from sheer joy.

That night, the common room was full of laughter and celebration. 

Ron clapped him on the shoulder. Fred and George ruffled his hair. 

For once, Harry felt like he had done something that was his, not just “the Boy Who Lived.”

Lying in bed afterward, staring at the canopy above him, Harry finally pushed up his sleeve.

The moon wasn’t smiling.

Its tiny eyes were soft, half-lidded, its mouth pulled into a small, wobbly curve that wasn’t quite a frown but definitely wasn’t happiness either. 

It looked… distant. Its glow flickering on and off as usual. Like someone staring at something they wanted very badly but couldn’t reach.

There was a tiny, unmistakable ache in the lines of its expression.

Longing.

Harry’s own chest squeezed.

“Yeah,” he whispered into the quiet dorm, “I get that.”

He thought of the team downstairs, of families in the stands, of parents cheering from the crowd. He thought of never having had that. 

Of never having had anyone who was his.

Somewhere out there, his soulmate wanted something too. Maybe warmth, maybe freedom, maybe a life that wasn’t whatever mess made their mark to look like that.

Harry brushed his thumb gently over the moon.

“For what it’s worth,” he murmured with affection, “I’m rooting for you. Wherever you are.”

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

He knew enough from overheard conversations and Madam Pomfrey’s lectures to know that soulmate bonds could span nations, age gaps, language barriers. People often didn’t meet until their twenties, thirties, later. 

Sometimes never.

Harry didn’t know where his soulmate was.

He didn’t know how old they were.

He only knew they weren’t having a peaceful life.

Sometimes the moon went flat and wary, like someone bracing for a blow. Sometimes it beamed with an almost cruel satisfaction, as if something had just gone very right for them and Harry had absolutely no idea what.

Once, near Christmas, as Hogwarts glowed with warmth and decorations and Harry sat by the fire staring at his first-ever pile of presents, the moon wore a faint, small expression Harry struggled to name.

Not joy. Not exactly.

Something closer to an unfamiliar softness.

Harry touched it with a fingertip.

“You’re feeling weird things too, huh?” he murmured. “Join the club.”

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

That first year ended with the Stone.

As danger crept closer. A jinxed broom, a terrifying troll, whispers about what was hidden beneath the trapdoor.

The little moon's moods did not line up with his own fear this time. If anything, it often seemed… energized.

On the day he went through the trapdoor with Ron and Hermione, his hands shook, his throat dry, his heart pounding.

The moon glowed faintly, flickering and glitching against his skin.

Its face looked cool. Controlled. The expression of someone walking into something dangerous and feeling almost… eager.

“You’re insane,” Harry whispered to the tiny moon. “You do realize that, yeah?”

Still, when he stopped to think about it as they dropped past Devil’s Snare and giant chess pieces, it was almost comforting to know that somewhere, someone else lived in a world where walking straight toward danger was perfectly ordinary.

Maybe they’d understand him one day better than anyone else could.

Not that he expected to ever meet them.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

By the time Harry stepped into the last chamber, his throat was dry and his heart was battering his ribs.

He’d expected Snape.

Instead, Professor Quirrell turned from the Mirror of Erised.

“You!” Harry blurted, stopping dead.

Quirrell smiled.

It was wrong. The nervous stutter, the twitching, the hunched shoulders.

All gone. 

He stood straighter now, his eyes sharp and cold, his voice smooth when he spoke.

“Yes,” Quirrell said softly. “Me.”

Harry’s mind scrambled, trying to rearrange everything he thought he knew.

“But Snape—” he started.

Quirrell laughed. A real laugh this time. Light and amused and completely unfamiliar.

“Severus Snape?” he asked. “Yes, he does seem the type, doesn’t he? But he was trying to stop me, Potter. Not help me.”

Harry’s scar gave a faint throb, like a warning.

Under his sleeve, his mark flared hot, the crescent’s little face twisting into a sharper, uglier expression he couldn’t see, tiny mouth curling in hate, eyes narrowed with rage .

Quirrell talked. About trolls and jinxes, about Snape muttering counter-curses while everyone thought he was causing harm. 

About how easy it was to fool people when they thought you were weak.

Harry barely heard half of it.

The room felt colder now. He could feel something else lurking here, something worse than Quirrell.

Quirrell turned back to the Mirror.

“I see myself…” he murmured. “I am presenting the Stone to him… but how do I get it?”

Him.

Harry swallowed.

Dumbledore’s words about the Mirror flickered through his mind. Only someone who wanted to find the Stone but not use it could get it.

He took a breath and stepped closer.

Quirrell didn’t stop him.

Harry stood before the Mirror and stared.

His reflection looked back. Pale, scraped, shaking a little.

And then it wasn’t just his reflection.

The glass shivered, as if someone had rippled water across the surface. 

A second figure slid into view beside him. 

Tall, elegant, the edges of their form slightly smudged, like a painting someone had run their thumb over.

He was blurry.

Harry’s breath caught.

The man was older, it was hard to tell his age with how unfocused the details were. Dark hair. Straight shoulders. A composed, confident way of standing that Harry could feel even if he couldn’t make out the lines of his face clearly.

He didn’t recognize him.

But something deep and instinctive inside him still knew.

That’s… mine.

The stranger slipped a hand into the pocket of Harry’s reflected robes.

Harry felt real fabric shift.

A second later, something small and solid dropped into his actual pocket.

The Stone.

In the Mirror, the blurred man leaned in and pressed a light, almost playful kiss to Harry’s cheek. 

It was quick, familiar, like this was something he’d done a hundred times before in another life Harry hadn’t lived yet.

Harry’s real cheek tingled, heat rushing there as if he’d actually been kissed.

He didn’t understand it. He just knew it.

That’s my soulmate.

The man blurred further, his outline smearing into the reflection like fog until only Harry remained, small and alone in front of the Mirror.

Behind him, Quirrell’s voice snapped, sharp and suspicious. "What did you see?”

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Chapter Text

Harry dragged his eyes away from the Mirror, heartbeat thudding so hard he felt a bit sick. The weight of the Stone sat heavy and real in his pocket.

The memory of that blurred man’s kiss on his cheek still tingled like a ghost.

“I saw him" Harry said softly. Quirrell stared at him, eyes narrowed, trying to see through him.

"I saw my soulmate"

Behind the man, from the back of his head, that high, cold voice cut in.

“He lies.”

Harry scowled. He wasn't lying.

His scar suddenly flared, hot and vicious. He pressed his hand to his forehead, teeth gritted.

On his chest, the moon mark tightened in expression, the tiny unseen face reflecting a spike of fury.

“Let… me speak to him… face… to face…” the cold voice hissed.

Quirrell stiffened. “Master, you are not strong enough—”

“I have strength… enough… for this…”

Slowly, Harry watched the Defence professor turn his back to him and reach for his turban.

And everything started to go very, very wrong.

Where the back of his skull should have been smooth and bare, there was a face.

With slitted nostrils and red eyes that burned like coals.

Harry’s scar exploded. He staggered, gasping, hand flying to his forehead.

“Harry Potter…” the thing hissed.

Voldemort.

He knew the name even before the creature introduced himself.

｡⁠:ﾟ⁠(⁠;⁠´⁠∩⁠`⁠;⁠)ﾟ⁠:⁠｡

Some things were burned into him so deeply that even as smoke and shadow and leeching spirit, he still remembered the feeling.

The night in Godric’s Hollow.

The flash of green.

The rebound.

The way his body had come apart.

Now, from the back of Quirrell’s skull, he watched the boy he had failed to kill.

Harry Potter.

Even without a proper body of his own, hatred sat heavy and familiar where his heart would have been.

“Harry Potter…” he hissed aloud, tasting the name like poison on a borrowed tongue.

He studied the boy.

Smaller than he had imagined. Skinny. Rough about the edges, second-hand clothes, a wariness in the way he held himself.

Like someone who had learned too early to brace for hurt. 

Not the pampered, adored saviour he had pictured.

But those eyes…

They watched him with fear, yes, but also stubbornness. The same bone-deep refusal he had once felt in himself as a boy in an orphanage, staring down adults who thought they could decide his fate for him.

It made Voldemort hate him more.

He talked then, because words were still a weapon he knew how to wield even without a wand in his own hand. 

He let the boy know what he had become. A shadow, vapour, parasite. 

He spoke of life and death.

Of the Stone.

Of what power could do. 

"Join me."

He dangled temptation like a hook dipped in honey. 

"I can bring them back… all you have lost… your parents."

He didn’t mean it.

If he had the Stone and his body back, he would not waste his strength on resurrecting Potter’s dead parents ha!

Sentimentality is a great weapon. He said the words because children broke easier when you pressed on their softest spots.

But the boy said no.

“I’ll never join you.”

The refusal stung.

Never?

As if he were something to be refused. As if this undersized, trembling eleven-year-old had the right to deny him.

It made his temper flare white-hot.

Oh, he's angry.

“SEIZE HIM!” he screamed.

Quirrell jerked forward, reaching.

The boy dodged clumsily, hand snapping out to shove him away.

Their skin met.

Pain.

Not the slow ache of sharing a weak body. Not the drag of possessing an unwilling host.

This was pure, a violent, searing burn that ripped along Quirrell’s nerves and straight into Voldemort’s consciousness.

Quirrell shrieked.

Voldemort almost did.

He yanked viciously at the man’s nerves, trying to pull them back, trying to stop the contact, but it was already too late. The flesh where the boy’s hand had touched blackened and cracked, as if something holy and venomous had sunk its teeth in at once.

“WHAT IS THIS?” Voldemort roared, disbelief and outrage tangled in the words.

Lily’s old magic, Dumbledore would later name it as Love. Wrought into armour.

To Voldemort, in that moment, it was an insult.

Quirrell backed away, gasping, cradling his burned arm.

Harry stumbled too, clutching at his forehead, teeth gritted against the pain.

Voldemort saw the sleeve on the boy’s arm rise up for half a second.

And saw it.

A moon, pale against the boy’s skin. 

He couldn’t quite read it, glitching too rapidly to see clearly.

He had felt an absence like a phantom limb.

Still half-expecting to look down and see pale skin and a tiny star over his heart, only to remember, again and again.

There was no body. No chest. No mark. No proof the universe had ever promised him someone at all.

Now he stared at the boy with the lightning scar and the blazing moon on his wrist.

Why should he have one, Voldemort thought, angrily, when mine has been taken from me?

He did not recognize the shape, did not understand that the jagged, unstable emotions twisting that little cartoon face were his own being mirrored back. 

The glitching was too fast, too distorted, half-lost in pain.

All he saw was this.

The child he hated wore the comfort he had been denied.

The thought festered.

“Kill him! KILL HIM!” he shrieked, rage redoubling.

Quirrell, half-ruined already, lurched for the boy again.

This time, the child grabbed his face.

The agony that followed made the last surge feel like a pinprick.

Quirrell’s flesh seemed to melt beneath the boy’s touch. Nerves burned out, muscle seared, skin crumbled to ash. 

Voldemort felt every instant of it through their shared connection, his awareness rattling in a body that could no longer hold him.

He raged.

At Lily. At Dumbledore. At fate. At the prophecy. At this boy and his scar and his bright little moon mark and the way the world kept bending itself around him.

He felt the vessel fail.

When the body finally collapsed, he tore himself free with a scream no one but ghosts and shadows could have heard.

He fled.

Again.

｡⁠:ﾟ⁠(⁠;⁠´⁠∩⁠`⁠;⁠)ﾟ⁠:⁠｡

Harry woke to the sound of quiet.

No screaming. No burning.

Just the soft rustle of sheets and the faint clink of glass somewhere nearby. Sunlight filtered warm and hazy through the tall windows, turning the dust in the air into slow-moving sparks.

He blinked.

The hospital wing.

For a moment, his mind scrambled.

Quirrell, the Mirror, Voldemort’s face, the Stone, the screaming, the pain.

His scar throbbed faintly, like a leftover echo. He winced and touched his forehead. The skin there was tender, but not burning anymore.

“Ah,” a voice said gently. “We meet again, Mr. Potter.”

Harry twisted his head. Dumbledore sat beside the bed.

The conversation blurred. He heard about the Stone being destroyed, about Nicholas Flamel, about why Voldemort had wanted it. About how love, his mother’s love, had wrapped around him like armor that Voldemort’s borrowed body couldn’t bear to touch.

He listened. He nodded. He asked questions he thought he should ask.

But beneath all of that, something tugged at him. A quiet, insistent itch under his skin.

His wrist.

When Dumbledore finally left with a gentle pat to the blankets and a fond “You will find that help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it,” the room fell silent again.

Harry lay still for a long moment, listening to Madam Pomfrey fuss at the far end of the ward. 

Then, slowly, he pushed himself up on his elbows.

Everything ached.

He ignored it.

Very carefully, he pulled his sleeve back.

The moon sat there, as always, just above his wrist bone.

Its tiny expression looked… tired.

The little eyebrows dipped in a soft, downward curve, not quite anger this time, more like someone who’d been crying for a long time and run out of tears. The mouth was a small, wobbly line, turned just enough to say sad without being dramatic about it.

Every now and then, the face would flicker.

As usual, it still glitches. 

｡⁠:ﾟ⁠(⁠;⁠´⁠∩⁠`⁠;⁠)ﾟ⁠:⁠｡

Chapter Text

Harry’s second year at Hogwarts began with a warning.

Not from a professor, or a book, or a scar twinging in the night but from a house-elf with big eyes and shaking hands who appeared in his bedroom and told him he must not go back to school.

Harry went back anyway.

He always would have. 

Hogwarts was the first place that had ever felt like home. He’d made friends there. Learned magic. Slept in a bed that wasn’t a cupboard. 

No amount of frantic pleading from a creature he’d just met could outweigh that.

After bars on his window, a midnight rescue in a flying car, and nearly getting expelled because of the Whomping Willow, finally standing in the Great Hall again felt like breathing properly for the first time all summer.

The moon seemed to be more calm this time. 

Like it's planning something. 

Some mornings its tiny face was tight and scowling, other nights soft and oddly wistful.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～ (This is supposed to be an emoticon of a snake?)

The Chamber of Secrets changed everything.

The message on the wall. Mrs Norris. The whispers. The way people turned to stare at him just a bit too long.

Things got worse: Colin, Justin, Hermione.

The castle pulled in on itself. Doors locked. Students hurried in packs. 

Harry slipped into the habit of checking his moon only every now and then. 

Sometimes it looked furious, sometimes horribly tired, sometimes almost grimly pleased, as if some invisible fight on the other end of the bond had gone a certain way.

He never knew what it meant. 

It was just… someone else’s bad year, ticking along beside his.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

Harry found the diary in a toilet.

Which, given it was Moaning Myrtle’s toilet, somehow made it even more suspicious.

It was a thin, battered little book, no title on the cover. 

“What's that?” Ron asked, wringing out his sleeve.

“Dunno.” Harry turned it over. “Found it in there.”

He wiped the cover with his sleeve. The leather was worn but not torn, the way old library books sometimes looked. When he opened it, empty pages stared back at him.

Just… blank.

On the inside cover, in small, tidy ink, was a name.

T. M. Riddle.

Harry frowned.

“Riddle,” he muttered. “Sounds familiar.”

Ron peered over his shoulder. “Maybe he nicked it from someone and chucked it down the loo. Can’t be that important.”

“Maybe,” Harry said.

He turned a few more pages. All empty.

On his shoulder, his crescent moon gave a faint, strange tingle.

Harry tucked the diary into his robe pocket.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

That night, long after curfew, when the dorm was quiet and the fire in the common room had burned low, Harry pulled the diary back out.

He sat on his bed with the curtains half-drawn, wand lit on the pillow beside him.

He opened it again.

Blank.

He flipped through every page. Nothing.

On impulse, he grabbed his ink bottle and quill from his trunk and sat back down.

He hesitated only a second, then wrote.

My name is Harry Potter.

The ink shone wet on the paper.

Harry waited.

One second.

Two.

Three.

He sighed. “Brilliant. Talking to stationary now. That’s normal.”

The words started to fade.

Harry jerked back.

The ink vanished

His heart climbed into his throat.

Then, slowly, new words began to appear.

Hello, Harry Potter.

My name is Tom Riddle.

Harry stared.

He swallowed, then wrote, hand a little shaky.

Are you… a person?

The answer came quickly this time, neat and precise.

I was. Once. I am a memory now, preserved in this diary.

Harry licked his lips.

How?

Magic, Tom wrote. Old, intricate magic. I imagine you have questions that trouble you more, though, or you would not be writing in a strange book in the middle of the night.

Harry hesitated.

The dorm was quiet around him. The castle felt darker every day. People were being attacked. He was hearing voices in the walls. And here, suddenly, was someone who said they’d been at Hogwarts fifty years ago, the last time the Chamber of Secrets had been opened.

He dipped his quill again.

There’s a monster in the school, he wrote. Someone’s opened the Chamber again. People are getting Petrified. Everyone thinks I might have something to do with it because I’m a Parselmouth.

The ink dissolved, then re-formed.

So it’s happening again?. I hoped I was wrong when I first felt the pattern in what you wrote. Tell me, has anyone been killed?

Not yet, Harry wrote quickly.

Good, came the answer.

You are correct. In my fifth year, the Chamber was opened. There were attacks. One girl died. I tried to stop it, but the school needed someone to blame.

Harry’s mind snagged on that.

You said you tried to stop it. How?

I found someone I suspected, Tom replied. A boy with secrets the others did not understand. He spoke to snakes. He had dangerous pets. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The school believed me when I said he was responsible.

Harry’s quill dug into the paper.

Hagrid, he wrote. You framed Hagrid.

There was a short pause.

Framed, Tom repeated. An interesting word. Tell me, Harry. Do you know he is innocent? Or do you simply want him to be?

I know him. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.

The diary drank the words.

Then you are fortunate, Tom answered. I did not have many people I knew like that when I was at Hogwarts. It changes how you see the world, having… attachments.

Harry glanced down at his palm.

The moon was glitching again, its edges shimmering faintly. Its face pinched into a quick flash of sharp anger, then sagged into a tiny, exhausted scowl.

His soulmate was upset. Again.

I don’t have many either, Harry wrote. Just Ron. Hermione. Hagrid. And…

He stopped himself.

Then, on impulse, added,

My soulmate, I suppose. Whoever they are.

The ink vanished.

You have a mark, then? Tom wrote. Of course. Most do. What is it?

A moon, Harry wrote. 

Hmmm. Interesting. I have a star, Tom wrote back.

Have you ever met yours? Harry asked.

A longer pause.

No

Harry blinked.

Me too.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

Time skip

A lot had happened.

For a second, Harry didn’t know where he was. The air felt heavy and damp, thick with age. Then he saw Ginny. 

Small, pale, unmoving on the floor and it all slammed back into place.

The Chamber. 

The diary. 

Tom Riddle.

Tall and composed, school robes spotless despite the grime and slime of the Chamber.

He looked so normal, that was the worst part. 

Dark hair, prefect’s badge, calm face. But his eyes were too bright, too amused, like he was watching a game he’d already won.

“You’re alive,” Harry croaked, forcing himself upright. His head spun. “Ginny…”

“She won’t be for long,” Riddle said pleasantly.

Harry staggered over to Ginny, dropping to his knees beside her. 

She was icy cold. 

Too cold. 

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

Tom Riddle watched him for a moment.

Then he turned away and looked down at his chest.

The star there was small and faint, barely more than a shape. Its five points pale and washed-out, as if someone had sketched it in weak ink and then tried to erase it. No bright lines. No animated face.

Just a ghost.

His lips curved in a private, quiet smile.

“Still with me,” he murmured.

Of course it wasn’t the real thing. He knew that. 

This body was a memory made solid, a preserved sliver of who he’d once been. A diary fed on a girl’s soul until it could pull itself into the world again.

The true Lord Voldemort’s mark, the real star was somewhere else.

What Riddle had was only a reflection of a reflection, magic echoing along a connection that led back to a man who did not yet truly exist again.

Still, some things carried over.

The star, even like this, felt… right. 

Familiar. A fragment that still knew where it belonged.

He pressed his fingertips lightly over it, careful not to push too hard, as if it might tear or fade if he was rough.

Riddle glanced once more at the faint, weak star on his chest, smoothing his palm over it as if fixing a collar before a performance.

“Wait a little longer,” he murmured under his breath.

“When I am whole again, I will find you.”

Sounds like a threat. But it's not.

The mark did not flare or move. It couldn’t, not in this half-made body.

But he took comfort in it anyway.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

A lot had happened. Again.

The diary screamed.

The ink bled out of it in a violent rush, spilling like liquid shadow across the floor as the basilisk fang sank deeper and deeper into its pages.

Tom Riddle staggered.

He jerked as if struck, going from sharp and solid to flickering around the edges. His outline blurred. Light shone through him in thin, sickly lines.

“No—”

Harry yanked the fang free and stabbed again.

The diary convulsed in his hands. Another gush of ink. Another wrench in the air.

Tom glared at him, rage roaring up hotter than the pain.

"You little—"

His time was over.

Because of this boy.

Because of Harry Potter. Again.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

Riddle doubled over, clutching at his chest.

For the first time since Harry had seen him, he looked young, not smooth and composed, but shocked, almost panicked, like a boy in pain instead of a lord in control.

His fingers scrabbled at the front of his borrowed school robes, at the place over his heart.

Harry saw it then, just for a moment.

A tiny, pale star on his chest, so washed-out it was almost invisible, its edges flickering in and out like a bad reflection on water. 

No face. No movement. Just a faint, desperate glow.

Harry doesn't recognize what it is and what it meant to his moon. 

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

Riddle lifted his head fully, forcing his gaze to steady on the boy who had undone him not once, but twice.

His hand twitched.

And then he saw it.

A flickering and glitching moon that has found its way and settled on Harry's right cheek. 

Tom froze.

He already knew that Harry has a moon shaped soulmate mark. 

Harry told him in the diary. 

But seeing the real thing in person felt different.

The moon’s tiny features twisted and spasmed, the expression flickering too quickly to follow. 

For a heartbeat it was wide-eyed horror, then sharp, snarling fury, then raw, aching betrayal. 

Every surge of pain in him, every piece of rage, every strand of despair seemed to be mirrored there in miniature.

This fragment of Voldemort's soul is a smart one.

Realization sliced through him.

Finally.

～⁠>°)⁠～⁠～⁠～

Chapter Text

Watching that little moon glitch and contort, Tom suddenly understood why it's like that.

He stared at Harry, ink-stained and shaking, basilisk fang still clutched in his hand.

His soulmate was Harry Potter.

“I see,” Tom whispered.

Harry shifted his grip on the fang, misunderstanding the tone completely.

“Stay back,” Harry snapped, trying to sound braver than he felt.

The moon's expression glitched wildly.

Fear

Pain

Rage

Then settled, for the briefest moment, into something simple and clear.

Longing.

Again.

Tom felt it echo in him.

There was no time.

He could feel himself unraveling now.

The diary’s destruction chewing through him like acid. His edges were thinning, his outline flickering, the cracks spreading from his feet upward. 

His projection was dying.

His soulmate was standing three feet from him, breathing hard, ready to kill him again if he had to, and had no idea.

Typical, Tom thought, hysteria bubbling up under the fury. 

Of course this is how it happens. 

Of course I finally see you when I’m about to be destroyed.

He could lash out. He could spend his last seconds hurling curses and spite.

Instead, something stranger slipped loose. 

Something that felt an awful lot like that stupid, pathetic yearning he’d once had as a child in a cold bed, clutching at a thin blanket and whispering to a blank star on his chest.

Begging the universe to give him someone.

He stepped forward again.

“Harry Potter,” he said and heard how different his voice was. It was soft. “Put the fang down.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed. “Why would I—”

“Because,” Tom interject, and for the first time since he’d pulled himself out of a diary, he let his composure crack, “I’m about to disappear. And I don’t...”

His throat closed.

He glanced once more at the moon on Harry's cheek, at the way its tiny eyebrows quivered, the mouth wobbled like someone on the verge of tears, glitching between rage and grief.

He looked at Harry.

His star.

Then, he opened his arms..

It felt ridiculous. Childish. Humiliating. 

Lord Voldemort, even as a fragment, should not be asking for comfort.

But the words came out anyway.

“Do me a favor,” Tom said quietly. “Before I go.”

Harry stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

“What?” he said, voice hoarse.

Tom held his arms a fraction wider.

“Come here,” he said. 

“Just....” His lips twisted in a bitter, self-directed smile. 

“Just embrace me.”

Harry’s eyes darted from Tom’s open arms to his face, to the diary leaking ink on the floor, to Ginny’s unconscious form.

“This is a trick,” Harry said. “You’re trying something.”

“Everything I’ve tried, you’ve already ruined.” Tom said, laugh sharp and broken, "There’s nothing left to trick you with.”

His outline flickered hard on the last word.

The moon spasmed again, its little mouth tugging down in a plea.

Tom swallowed.

“I might hate you for the rest of my existence,” he said honestly. “I might spend every breath I have left plotting how to destroy you.” His eyes softened in a way he hated himself for. “But.... just once.... before this piece of me goes, I would like to know what it feels like to be held..."

By you.

“Just… a hug?” Harry said, disbelief and warning tangled together.

Tom laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “Just that.”

Harry hesitated.

Every instinct screamed at him to refuse. To stab the diary again for good measure, to drag Ginny out, to run, to never think about this again.

But there was something in Tom’s face.

Beneath the arrogance and the cruel amusement and the sharp intelligence, that Harry recognized without wanting to.

Loneliness.

He knew what it was to ask for contact like it was a crime.

He’d gone years without anyone reaching for him kindly. 

No hugs at Privet Drive. No arms around him when the cupboard door closed. 

No hand on his shoulder, no comfort, just orders and shoves and disdain.

He knew how much it cost to ask.

He took a small, shaky step forward.

Then another.

Harry stopped an arm’s length away. He can't believe he is actually about to do this.

Up close, Tom could see the tiny details. 

The way green eyes searched his face like they were trying to decide whether to believe in monsters or mercy.

He glanced at the lightning scar on Harry's forehead. Understanding flickered on his face for a moment.

The moon stared at Tom like it already knew the answer.

Tom exhaled and very reached out.

Their bodies didn’t really touch. His form wasn’t solid enough anymore. But Harry stepped in, stiffly, awkwardly, and wrapped his arms around where Tom’s shoulders should be.

It was like stepping into warmth he hadn’t felt in years.

The pain didn’t stop. The cracks didn’t slow. But something else slipped into the mix, something small and vicious and unbearably sweet.

Tom pressed his fading face into Harry’s shoulder for half a second and let himself memorize the shape of him.

“Thank you,” he murmured, so low Harry might not have heard.

The crescent moon flared once, bright and steady, its sad little face going very, very still... like it's holding its breath.

Tom wanted to tell Harry the truth. About what they are to each other.

But he didn't.

He couldn’t do that to him. Not like this.

He didn’t want his soulmate’s first clear knowledge of their bond to be followed immediately by loss.

He didn't want to hurt his little star.

To tell the truth, and then proceeds to die would be cruel.

Tom knows that he is nothing but a fragment of the main soul.

Despite that, he knew Harry would still be sad.

He remembered being a child yearning for his soulmate. And now, he has him in his arms.

Even if it's only for a moment.

A single tear slid down Tom’s fading cheek. He almost laughed at the indignity of it. 

He hadn’t cried since he was small enough that no one was watching.

Tom closed his eyes and savor his soulmate's presence.

He spoke, one last time.

"As long as you're alive, I will be part of you."

Then Tom’s form shattered.

Harry froze on the spot.

He didn't even tried to think on what those words could be and what it could have meant.

The moon twitched. 

Its tiny face drawn in sorrow, eyes half lidded as if mourning something lost far away then glitched back to a neutral expression. 

A sign. 

A part of his soulmate's soul is now gone.

Forever.

Harry didn’t notice. 

He only knew that the chamber was quiet now, the shadows empty, and that whatever Tom Riddle had been…

It had truly, finally, ended.

(⁠｡⁠•́⁠︿⁠•̀⁠｡⁠)

Chapter Text

Third year began.

Harry’s life at the Dursleys somehow manages to get worse. 

Aunt Marge comes, insults his parents, and Harry finally snaps, accidentally blowing her up like a big, furious balloon. 

Terrified he’s about to be expelled, he runs away from Privet Drive, only to be picked up by the Knight Bus and dropped at the Leaky Cauldron, where the Minister of Magic oddly lets him off with no punishment. 

Harry spends the rest of the holidays in Diagon Alley, doing homework, people watching, and quietly enjoying the first taste of freedom he’s ever had, all while hearing whispers about Sirius Black. 

Thre escaped prisoner who, apparently, is after him.

The moon was currently hanging around his knee, peeking just below the hem of his shorts when he sat cross legged on his bed.

It's face keep on shifting between uneasiness and anger.

Whatever his soulmate was dealing with, it wasn’t escaped convicts.

At least, Harry hoped not. 

ಠ⁠◡⁠ಠ

The dementors were worse 

The first time one boarded the Hogwarts Express, the world went cold and empty. The air turned to ice in his lungs. His memories flipped inside out and he heard his mother scream.

When he came back to himself, shaking and humiliated, he looked down at his wrist.

The moon’s tiny eyes were wide, looking shocked and upset at the same time.

“Yeah,” he muttered under his breath, tugging his sleeve down again. “Bad night for both of us, I guess.”

ಠ⁠◡⁠ಠ

Harry hadn’t expected his heart to be pounding this hard over a wardrobe.

The whole class was gathered around, wands out, desks pushed back to make room. The boggart rattled inside the wardrobe, making the door tremble. 

Dean was whispering bets about what shapes it would take. Ron kept glancing nervously at the hinges.

Professor Lupin stood nearby, calm and steady, like he’d faced down worse than a shapeshifting creature in a shabby old classroom.

“Now,” Lupin said, warm and patient, “remember, a boggart is a shapeshifter. It becomes what you fear most. The spell to defeat it is?”

“Riddikulus!” the class chorused.

Harry swallowed.

He knew what he feared most. He’d seen it, heard it every time a Dementor came too close. 

His mother’s scream, his father’s voice, green light, the feeling of his insides being scraped out. 

And worse of all, that thing can shape shift into Voldemort 

He gripped his wand a little tighter.

“Neville first,” Lupin said kindly. “And we’ll go from there.”

Neville stepped forward, nervous and shaking. The boggart came out and transformed into Severus Snape.

"Riddikulus "

Snape was suddenly wearing Neville's grandmother’s clothes, the class laughing, the tension easing. 

Then it was one classmate after another.

Spiders in roller skates, blood-soaked hands turned to rubber chickens, whatever they feared made ridiculous.

The boggart spun from form to form, growing more confused, more frantic with each shout of “Riddikulus!”

Harry tried to steady his breathing.

When his turn came, it would be either Voldemort or Dementors. It had to be. He’d fail, probably. Pass out in front of everyone. 

“Harry.”

He blinked.

Lupin was looking at him, expression gentle. “Would you like a turn?”

Harry opened his mouth.

“Yes,” he said.

The boggart spun and twisted, trying to decide whose fear to land on next. 

Then it looked at Harry.

He braced for the worse.

The air blurred.

The creature stretched, lengthened, and pulled itself into the shape of a person. 

Not quite solid, like smoke trying to remember what a body was. Tall. And older than Harry. 

Harry first thought, it might be a dementor but it's not.

A familiar outline, softened at the edges, like someone he’d seen only in fogged glass. A blurry person

Harry’s breath caught.

It was the figure from the Mirror of Erised.

My Soulmate.

The knowledge punched through him, clear and brutal.

The person on the other end of the glitching moon on his skin. The one whose emotions he’d felt for years without a name.

The boggart tilted its blurry head.

For a second, there was only silence.

Then it stepped toward him.

It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to. Something in the shape of it promised everything and nothing all at once.

Comfort he’d never had, a home that had never existed, a future that might never come.

This was what he feared most?

The idea that his soulmate would always be blurry and out of reach, always just beyond understanding. 

Someone whose feelings he felt, whose pain throbbed under his skin through the moon, but who would never truly be there.

His hand shook.

The mark on his chest tingled beneath his clothes.

The blurred figure stretched its arms out, not like a monster, but like someone offering an embrace he could never quite reach.

“Harry!” Lupin’s voice cut through the fog. “The spell!”

Right. Right.

He had to make it ridiculous.

Harry swallowed hard, tried to wrench his thoughts away from the ache in his chest.

Riddikulus, he told himself. Make it less terrifying. 

Make it something you can laugh at.

He forced his wand up, fingers slick with sweat.

“Riddikulus!”

For a beat, nothing happened.

Then the blurred figure jerked, like an invisible hand had grabbed its collar and shaken hard. The tall, half-shaped form shrank, its arms flapping, features collapsing into something exaggerated and wrong.

It dropped onto the floor with a squeaky bounce.

A moment later, a cartoonish, chibi version of the same blurry figure stood there instead. 

Half Harry’s size, head too big for its body, still faceless but now wobbly on its feet. It stumbled forward and tripped over nothing, landing flat on its face.

The class laughed.

The sound cracked the tension. Ron snorted loudest. Someone clapped. 

Harry let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

The fear didn’t vanish, exactly. The hole stayed, the longing, the dizzy ache of knowing that somewhere out there was a person the universe had handed him, and that person felt so far away he could barely stand it.

“Excellent, Harry,” Lupin said, stepping closer, his eyes thoughtful. “Very well done.”

Harry nodded, trying to look like he agreed.

He did not tell Lupin that what he’d seen had not been a blurry Dementor. It had been an almost person, half shaped by memory and want.

He did not say that, for a second, the thing he feared most was being given a soulmate he could never truly reach.

Later, lying in bed with the curtains drawn, he moved his hand towards his face.

The moon shone faintly in the dim light, resting at the back of his hand.

Its tiny face was… soft. 

Calm. 

ಠ⁠◡⁠ಠ

Chapter Text

A lot had happened.

Third year settled into a rhythm of classes, and dread.

There was Hermione’s impossible timetable. 

Hagrid’s disastrous hippogriff lesson. 

Lupin’s warm, steady presence and gentle defense against the things in the dark.

Even trying to teach him the Patronus spell after fainting a couple of times due to the presence of the dementors that are lurking around the castle .

Quidditch in storms, homework in front of the fire, Honeydukes for those who could leave the castle.

Harry got very good at pretending he wasn’t scared. He also got very good at pretending he wasn’t rattled every time someone mentioned Sirius Black and fell silent when he walked into a room.

And he certainly didn’t mean to find it.

He’d been digging through his trunk, looking for a spare bit of parchment, when his fingers brushed something stiff, warped, and oddly familiar at the very bottom.

For a second he thought it was just another old textbook he’d forgotten about, but when he pulled it out, his breath caught.

The diary.

Riddle’s diary.

The cover was torn and stained, the once black leather scarred by the jagged puncture where the basilisk fang had gone through. 

Pages inside were fused together, warped from ink and venom. It looked dead. 

It was dead.

Harry sat back on his heels on the dormitory floor, the noises from the common room.

He turned the diary over in his hands.

He remembered his first message.

Hello. My name is Harry Potter.

The ink had faded and reformed, and Tom Riddle had written back like he’d been waiting for someone to talk to him for a very long time.

Harry swallowed.

After he gave it to Lucius Malfoy to free Dobby, he sees the blonde throwing it away. 

Harry couldn't help but picked it up again. Had the urge to take it with him.

He hadn’t thrown it away ever since, even after second year. He’d meant to. He’d even had a moment, back at Privet Drive, where he’d knelt by the bin with it in his hands.

But he’d kept seeing Tom’s face when he vanished.

As long as you're alive, I will be part of you.

Harry put the diary down and, without meaning to, glanced at his palm.

The little moon was there, of course. But its expression had shifted.

Normally today, it had been in its usual sort of unsettled neutral, tiny brows slightly drawn, mouth a faint, restless line. 

Now, as he held the dead diary, its eyes looked… heavier. Sadder. 

The corners of its mouth pulled down just a touch more, like whoever was on the other side of the bond had been hit by a sudden wave of emotion they didn’t quite understand.

Like something old and unpleasant had stirred.

“You don’t know him,” he muttered quietly, looking between the warped diary and the mournful little moon. 

The soulmate marks doesn't react to words, he knew that. It only echoed feelings from someone else. 

Maybe his soulmate had just had a rubbish day. Maybe they were remembering something awful of their own.

But the timing made his skin crawl a bit.

He laid the diary flat on his bed and stared at the ruined cover.

“He was… complicated,” Harry said under his breath, which felt stupid, talking to a destroyed book and a mute piece of skin. “Tom Riddle. Evil, yeah. Dangerous. But… not just that. Not all the time.”

He’d called Harry by his full name.

He’d asked for a hug.

He’d said thank you.

If Tom had been nothing but a monster, it would have been easier.

Harry dragged a hand through his hair.

The moon flickered once, a little glitch along its outline, like a heart stuttering in a chest.

When it settled again, its tiny eyes were half lidded, mouth drawn into a small, wounded line.

“You too, huh?” Harry whispered. “Got ghosts you can’t get rid of?”

He didn’t know why it felt like his soulmate’s sadness matched his own in that moment.

But sitting there with a destroyed diary on the bed beside him and a glitched, miserable moon in his skin, Harry felt like somewhere out there, someone else also couldn’t let go of something that was long gone.

Maybe they’d lost someone too.

Maybe they’d done something they couldn’t take back.

Maybe they were just… lonely.

He sighed and, after a long hesitation, slid the diary back into the bottom of his trunk, under spare robes and old socks, like he was tucking away a secret he wasn’t ready to examine too closely.

The latch clicked shut.

Harry flopped back on his bed and stared at the canopy.

He needs to sleep.

ಠ⁠◡⁠ಠ

A lot had happened 

Harry learned the truth in bits and pieces.

Sirius Black had been his parents’ friend.

They’d thought he was their betrayer.

Everyone had. 

Suddenly, the world turned itself inside out in a single night.

The Shrieking Shack. Lupin and Sirius and Snape and the truth laid bare.

Peter Pettigrew.

Not Sirius.

Not the friend.

The rat.

And Lupin turns out to be a werewolf.

Harry’s world, which had always been split neatly into “good people” and “Voldemort and the rest,” suddenly felt more complicated. 

There were traitors masquerading as pets. There were innocent men in prison. There were monsters who turned out to be mentors, and mentors who turned out to be monsters.

The dementors came again. 

By the lake, everything went wrong.

Sirius collapsing.

Harry’s Patronus failing.

The cold rushing in, deeper and worse than before.

He heard his mother’s voice, his father’s, everything that had ever hurt pressed into one sharp edge.

And then.... the stag.

Brilliant light. Hooves pounding. 

Dementors scattered like smoke. Harry, half conscious on the ground, certain he’d seen his father standing across the water.

Time-travel.

Buckbeak’s wild escape. 

Sirius riding away into the night.

It all blurred together into a dizzy mess of relief and almost loss.

Later, he sat in his bed in the hospital wing, the ward quiet and dim around him.

Sirius was free. That fact sat warm and strange in his chest. He had a godfather. Someone who wanted him. Someone who had looked at him and said I’d have taken you in and meant it.

Harry pulled his sleeve up.

The moon on his arm stared back at him.

Its tiny eyes were open, the expression somewhere between focus and a tired sort of relief, like whoever was on the other end had survived something unpleasant and was now… waiting.

Watching.

Holding themselves very still.

Harry let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

He remembered his fear. The one that the boggart showed him. Out of reach.

“We made it through another year,” he muttered under his breath, thumb brushing the edge of the mark. “You and me. Somehow.”

ಠ⁠◡⁠ಠ

At the end of term, as the train rattled back and Ron and Hermione debated which sweets to buy from the trolley.

Harry leaned his head against the window and watched the countryside go by.

Ron was halfway through insisting that Chocolate Frogs were obviously the best when Hermione sighed and reached for a box anyway.

“Fine,” she said. “But you’re not using the cards as an excuse to ignore your holiday homework.”

“I don’t need an excuse to ignore homework,” Ron muttered.

As she took the box from him, her sleeve shifted just enough for Harry to see the edge of her mark. 

A small square of parchment on her forearm. 

The tiny face in the middle was scrunched into a familiar look. Exasperated, little eyebrows lifted like it was saying, Honestly? Again?

Ron flailed a bit with the sweet wrappers, nearly knocking his pumpkin pasty to the floor. 

His sleeve rode up, and Harry caught sight of the mark on his wrist. A tiny quill.

The quill’s feather was puffed up, it looks to be slightly annoyed but with fondness.

Harry blinked.

He glanced at Hermione, now in full lecture mode about study schedules.

He glanced at Ron, who was pretending not to care while hanging on every word.

Then he looked back at the parchment and quill. Mirroring each other's emotions.

Harry had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

He turned his head back to the window, hiding his grin in the glass.

Of course they were soulmates. And they haven't realized it too.

He was happy for them

But it also hurt a little.

Under his shirt, the moon rested against his chest, its tiny face set in some distant, unreadable mood then proceeds to glitch into a malicious grin. Harry pressed his thumb lightly over it. He's already used to the scary smiles his moon would sometimes show from time to time.

“Where are you?” he wondered, not for the first time. “And when are you going to show up?”

ಠ⁠◡⁠ಠ

Chapter Text

Fourth year started with a nightmare.

An old house.

Shadows.

A chair with something in it that wasn’t quite a man.

Wormtail.

A stranger.

Murder.

Harry woke in Privet Drive with his scar burning and the impression of cold, high laughter still ringing in his ears. 

His heart pounded. Sweat stuck his shirt to his skin.

For a moment he stared at the ceiling, listening to the house’s familiar creaks and snores.

Then habit tugged at him.

He looks around his body.

Looking for it.

The moon on his shoulder was scrunched tight in pain, its tiny eyes squeezed shut, mouth twisted in a silent grimace. 

The expression looked sharp and dark and wrong, like someone somewhere had just gone through something horrible and wasn’t done yet.

Harry swallowed.

“Bad night for you again, huh,” he whispered.

He didn’t know if it meant anything, if it was connected to his dream, to his scar, to Voldemort, or if his soulmate was simply having their own private nightmare. 

But seeing that pained little face made his chest ache in a different way.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

The Quidditch World Cup should have rinsed the bad feeling out of him.

It mostly did, at first.

Being with the Weasleys again, traveling by Portkey, and camping with wizards from all over the world.

He laughed. He cheered. He forgot.

For a while.

Later that night, the Dark Mark burned across the sky, and the world tilted.

People screamed. Tents burned. 

Masked figures cast curses into the crowd. 

Harry stumbled through smoke and confusion with Ron and Hermione, his heart in his throat. 

He was shoved, tripped, lost his wand at some point and didn’t even notice until it was too late.

When things finally calmed and they stood in the trampled, ashy wreckage of the campsite, Harry felt cold all over.

He checked his arm on the walk back up to the tent.

The moon wasn’t afraid.

Its tiny face was lit with a flickering sharp, bright satisfaction, eyes narrowed in a pleased squint, mouth curled into a small, smug little smile. It looked like someone whose plans had just taken a neat step forward.

“Glad someone’s happy" he muttered softly. Trying to find comfort from his moon.

Around them, people were still crying, shouting, arguing about the Dark Mark in the sky. 

Harry’s skin crawled. Whatever had happened tonight, whoever had done it, had enjoyed themselves.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

Back at Hogwarts, things didn’t slow down.

The Triwizard Tournament.

Durmstrang. Beauxbatons.

The Goblet of Fire.

Harry fully expected to watch from the stands, eat snacks, and make fun of whoever got singed by a dragon.

Instead, his name came out of the Goblet.

The world narrowed to one point as he stood there, feeling every stare in the Great Hall land on him. A fourth champion.

He had not put his name in.

No one believed him, except for Ron (eventually) and Hermione (immediately).

Later, alone in his dorm, he sat on his bed and stared at the curtains, listening to the muffled sounds of the castle.

His moon tingled.

He pushed his sleeve up.

The moon's glitchy face was sharp and intent, eyes narrowed, mouth tipped in a focused little smirk. 

Not mocking... just certain. Confident.

Though it would sometimes glitch into an uneasy or calm expression, majority of the time, it has that malicious smile.

Harry stared at it curiously.

“Bet you’ve got everything under control wherever you are,” Harry said quietly, thumb fondly brushing the curve of the mark. “Must be nice.”

The whole school thought he’d cheated. Adults were arguing behind closed doors. Even he wasn’t sure if this was bad luck, dark magic, or some cosmic joke aimed directly at his head.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

The day of the first task, Harry's hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

He’d seen the dragons in the forest, smelled the smoke on the air, felt that instinctive, urge to run and not stop until he was on another continent. 

Knowing what was coming didn’t make it better. 

It just gave his imagination time to rehearse all the ways this could go horribly wrong.

“Just stick to the plan,” Hermione kept saying, pacing beside him in the tent. “Summon the Firebolt, fly, grab the egg, get out. You can do this, Harry.”

Ron, looking pale but stubbornly steady, clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ve seen you dodge Bludgers. A dragon’s just… a really big, flaming, flying one, right?”

“Helpful,” Harry muttered, but his mouth twitched.

They both left when Bagman shooed them out. Harry was alone with his heartbeat and the sound of the crowd roaring outside the tent.

His palm tingled.

He looks at it.

The moon wasn’t scared.

Its tiny eyes were wide and bright, mouth curved into an eager little grin.

Not cruel exactly, but intensely interested.

Like someone watching a dangerous game they were certain would be entertaining.

Harry stared, trying to think its meaning.

The mark glitched again.

Bagman’s voice boomed outside the tent. “Harry Potter!”

The crowd roared.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

The dragon was worse up close.

The Hungarian Horntail crouched over its clutch of eggs, scales black and ridged, eyes like burning coals. 

Its tail scraped the ground, barbs glinting. When it exhaled, smoke and fire licked through the air.

Harry’s mouth went dry.

He raised his wand.

“Accio Firebolt!”

For a terrible second, nothing happened.

Then, he was blessed by the sight of his broom cutting through the sky toward him like a streak of salvation.

Harry swung onto it and kicked off the ground just as the Horntail lunged.

Flying helped.

Up here, with the wind in his face and the dragon snapping at his heels, he could think. 

Not calmly, exactly, but clearly enough to circle, swerve, dive out of the way of flame and claws.

The stands blurred past in streaks of colour and screams. The dragon roared, chains clanging, enormous wings beating hard enough to rattle his bones.

Somewhere under his glove, his soulmate mark buzzed hot against his skin.

He didn’t look at it.

Couldn’t.

But it felt like a second pulse. Wild, exhilarated, hooked on the danger.

He did what he always did when the world tried to kill him.

He trusted his instincts. He flew.

He ducked flame, heard it roar past so close it seared the edges of his robes, and snatched the golden egg on a swooping pass.

The stadium exploded in sound.

He pulled up, heart hammering, barely believing he hadn’t died.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

The weeks between the first and second task blurred into classes, homework, Rita Skeeter, and Harry repeatedly opening the golden egg only to get screamed at and slamming it shut again.

Cedric’s bath hint, the prefects’ bathroom, the mer song clue, all of that led to one awful realization: they were going to take someone he’d “sorely miss” and dump them at the bottom of the Black Lake.

The second task was cold, terrifying, and exhausting.

Gillyweed, murky water, the merpeople’s city, Ron bound and floating.

It all ended with him dragging Ron to the surface and being scolded and praised in the same breath.

Wrapped in towels afterward, away from the crowd, he checked his mark again that is now currently moving around his leg.

The moon's face was calm and intent.

Expression settled into that same assessing look like someone checking off a major step in a plan and quietly approving the result. 

It would even glitch into those malicious smiles again.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

In the weeks after the second task, life at Hogwarts slipped back into its usual mess. 

Homework, Quidditch talk, gossip about who was asking whom to the Yule Ball.

Harry tried not to think about the Black Lake too much. 

Or about how close he’d come to running out of time. 

Or about how wrong it had felt, seeing his friends tied there like they were nothing but props in a test.

His scar prickled every now and then. Funny dreams came and went. Sometimes he woke up with his heart pounding.

Whenever those nights happened, he’d eventually look down at his moon.

It also looked rattled.

Most days, its tiny face was set in that same focused, controlled expression.

Eyes narrowed just a little, mouth resting in a thin line. 

Sometimes it tipped toward quiet satisfaction, like someone who’d just heard good news and was already thinking about the next step. 

“Who are you?” Harry whispered, “And what are you so pleased about?”

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

The maze looked wrong.

Up close, it was a wall.

Hedges taller than Hagrid, dense and dark, rustling even when there was no wind but the air near the maze felt different, colder somehow.

Bagman’s voice boomed over the stands, cheerful and oblivious.

“Champions, are you ready?”

Cedric stood on Harry’s left, jaw set, fingers flexing around his wand. Krum and Fleur on the other side, faces determined in different ways. 

Krum scowling, Fleur visibly anxious but trying not to show it.

Harry rolled his wand in his hand, sweaty palms making it hard to get a proper grip.

Under his sleeve, the moon was practically vibrating.

It had been weird all day, more so than usual. It kept slipping between jittery excitement and something that felt like cold, sharp focus. 

Every few minutes it would glitch, its tiny face snapping through expressions too fast for Harry to read.

“On my whistle!” Bagman shouted.

Harry swallowed.

He tugged his sleeve back a little for one last look.

The moon sat on his forearm, edges faintly blurred like its lines couldn’t quite decide how solid they wanted to be. 

The whistle shrieked.

The hedges opened.

They stepped inside.

The noise of the stands vanished like someone had shut a door on the world.

Silence swallowed him whole.

Harry walked forward, wand raised. The grass underfoot was damp.

 The air smelled of dirt and something… stale. Old magic. The kind that didn’t care who you were.

He took the first left.

The maze twisted around him, paths branching and circling back. Shadows clung to the corners. Spells and creatures lunged at him.

A blast ended skrewt. He dodged.

A Boggart. He hit it with “Riddikulus” before it finished forming, not in the mood to see blurred soulmate shapes today.

Enchanted mist that turned the world upside down, he staggered, forced himself to think, step, breathe.

Halfway through the maze, he ducked around a hedge and pressed his back against it, panting.

He lifted his sleeve.

The moon was glowing faintly now, like someone was feeding power into it from the other side of the world.

Its tiny face was almost manic, eyes wide, mouth curved in a grin that tipped just a little too sharp at the edges. Glitch, glitch. Joy, rage, triumph, then back to that eager look.

“Right,” Harry smiled at how expressive his soulmate is today. “You’re having fun. I’m thrilled for you.”

He pushed his sleeve down again and kept going.

Time splintered into spells and panting breaths and the feeling that the maze was trying to press in from all sides.

He found Fleur’s scream and the place she’d fallen.

He found Krum, eyes blank, wand raised, and realized with a sick drop in his stomach that the champion who’d been admired by half the school was under the Imperius Curse, using Cruciatus on Cedric.

He stunned Krum.

He and Cedric kept going.

They argued about who should take the Cup.

You take it, no, you, you saved me, you saved me too.

In the end, it was tired laughter and something like camaraderie that made them say it.

“On three,” Cedric said.

Harry nodded.

“One…”

“Two…”

The cup gleamed in front of them, sitting innocently in the center of the clearing.

“Three!”

They grabbed it together.

The sensation yanked the air out of his lungs.

The world spun, colors smearing into darkness. 

Portkey.

They hit the ground hard.

His hand was still locked around the Cup.

Cedric’s fingers were too.

They were in a graveyard.

The one in his nightmares.

(⁠ノ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ⁠)⁠ノ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

Chapter Text

A chill slid into his bones that had nothing to do with wind.

Harry’s fingers spasmed, letting go of the cup.

“Where are we?” Cedric whispered.

Harry’s heart pounded.

The mark on his wrist went absolutely insane.

The moon glowed white hot, its tiny features contorting, glitching so fast he couldn’t see the individual expressions anymore. 

Terror. Joy. Hunger. Relief. 

They flickered over that miniature face in dizzying succession, all layered on top of each other like overlapping ghosts.

“Cedric,” Harry said quietly, dread curling heavy in his stomach, “get your wand out.”

Something moved near the nearest gravestone.

A shape separated from the shadows, shuffling into view. It held something small and limp in its arms,

A bundle.

No. A creature.

Pale, hairless, twisted like a half-formed baby with a snake’s face.

Harry’s scar exploded with pain.

He staggered, knees buckling, one hand flying up to his forehead. It felt like a hot poker being driven straight through his skull, like someone was trying to split his head open from the inside. 

“Harry?” Cedric said sharply. “Harry?”

“Kill the spare,” a high, cold voice hissed.

Green light.

Cedric dropped.

It was so fast Harry’s brain almost refused to process it, one second Cedric was standing, wand half raised, mouth parting in confusion. 

The next he was just gone, eyes still open, lying sprawled across the grass.

Like a broken doll.

There was no scream. There was no drama. Just a brilliant flare of light and then Cedric was now a dead body on the ground.

“Cedric!” Harry yelled, but his voice came out raw and useless.

He couldn’t move. The pain in his scar had his body locked.

A wand pressed into his neck.

“Don’t move,” Wormtail’s voice trembled. “Don’t… don’t struggle…”

Harry wanted to say a hundred things. 

Wanted to lunge for Cedric. Wanted to scream until his throat tore. Wanted to wrench free, to do something, anything.

Instead, his body was dragged against a tombstone and bound.

The name on the stone swam in his vision.

TOM RIDDLE.

Of course.

That half life thing bundle was then lowered into a cauldron.

Liquid steamed inside, the surface shifting and hissing like it was alive.

Harry’s scar burned so hard he thought his skull would crack.

Harry barely had time to see it before Wormtail grabbed his arm.

“Blood of the enemy,” the trembling voice said, “forcibly taken…”

A knife slashed.

Pain flared bright and hot as the blade cut into his skin. His own cry sounded distant to his ears, like someone else was shouting.

His blood hit the potion.

Something vast and ancient rolled through the graveyard. The magic shuddered, hungry and triumphant.

“Flesh of the servant… bone of the father…”

Words became a distant hum. Harry’s heart hammered against his ribs like it was trying to escape. He wanted to look away.

God, he wanted to look away but he couldn’t. His eyes were glued to the cauldron.

The liquid roared.

The cauldron flared, flames licking up around the metal, bright and blinding. The thing that had been a twisted child rose from the steam, stretching, lengthening, and reshaping itself.

Bones knitting. Limbs extending. Skin smoothing into that terrible, too-white pallor.

A tall, skeletal figure emerged, steam clinging to him like a cloak. White skin. Red eyes, glowing like coals in a dead hearth. Slit flat nose. Long fingers that moved with languid, familiar arrogance.

Lord Voldemort stood, whole again.

“Harry Potter,” Voldemort said softly, turning toward him. “The boy who lived.”

He called the Death Eaters.

They appeared in cracks, circling like vultures, dark robes fanning around their feet, masks gleaming in the moonlight. 

They filled the graveyard with their presence, with their whispers and mutters and fearful silence.

Harry watched them through a haze of pain and horror. People who had chosen to be here. People who had chosen him.

Voldemort talked and talked.

He made them crawl. He punished them for leaving him. He toyed with them, words dripping with injury and sarcasm, a wounded god sulking over their abandonment even as he promised pain.

He boasted. He bragged. He recited history as if the world existed only to mirror his own importance.

Harry’s eyes drifted toward Cedric’s body again.

A boy lay dead like discarded rubbish.

No one looked at him.

No one cared.

୧⁠(⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠ ⁠Д⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠ ⁠)⁠୨

After a while, Voldemort turns to look at Harry 

The death eaters untied him and returned his wand.

It was absurd. It was obscene.

They were giving him a chance, but not really. Not a real one. It was a performance, a game with the ending already written.

“Crucio,” Voldemort said with a smirk.

Harry didn’t even have time to lift his wand.

Pain hit him like a wall.

His body fell to the ground, every nerve on fire, skin too tight, bones too small for the agony trying to tear its way out of him. 

Harry screamed.

The sound ripped out of him, high and raw, echoing off the gravestones.

Somewhere under all that pain, something else flared.

His palm burned.

The mark.

Harry collapsed, chest heaving, dirt in his mouth.

“Get up,” Voldemort whispered. “We’re not finished.”

Harry’s hand twitched. He dragged it closer, fingers shaking, and looked at his palm.

The moon on his skin was alight, glitching so fast its outline buzzed and yet, through the flicker, he saw it.

Not just pain.

Not just rage.

The same expression Voldemort was wearing.

This was a slow, razor thin smile, lips curling at one corner. The moon's eyes narrowed, tilting with amusement. There was a sharpness to the expression, something cruel and delighted, like it was enjoying someone else’s pain.

His stomach lurched.

He lifted his head.

Across from him, Voldemort stood tall in the graveyard’s dark. His wand hung loose at his side, casual, like Harry’s agony was nothing but a pleasant distraction. 

His mouth was curled in that same awful, hungry smile. Red eyes bright, glittering with a heady mix of triumph and pleasure.

Harry’s gaze flicked between him and the moon.

Voldemort’s face.

The moon’s tiny face.

Glitching, but matching. Echoing. Mirroring.

Harry blinked, heart pounding so hard it hurt.

His brain was processing everything and rejecting it at the same time.

No. No. No!

It finally made sense in the most horrible way.

The constant anger. 

The bursts of triumph. 

The bone deep hatred that rolled through the bond at times so strong it made Harry’s skin crawl. 

The realization slid into place with a sickening click.

The moon had always been reacting to him. 

To the shadow in his scar. 

To the wraith that drank unicorns and possessed a professor. 

To the piece that had slithered out of Quirrell and into something else. 

He almost started laughing. A crazed, hysterical sound climbed up his throat, and he bit it back hard enough to taste blood. Because somehow, somehow, this was the stupidest, most horrifying thing his life had produced yet.

Of course it was him. 

Of course it was the man trying to kill him. 

Of course it was the one person he could never, ever afford to trust.

A soulmate that will always be out of reach.

He had learned that from the boggart.

Harry’s eyes burned. He tried his best not to cry. He would not cry here, in front of them, in front of him. 

He wouldn’t give Voldemort the satisfaction of seeing tears that belonged more to heartbreak than fear.

His soulmate is Lord Voldemort.

୧⁠(⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠ ⁠Д⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠ ⁠)⁠୨

Voldemort’s laughter echoed off the gravestones, bright and awful, full of delighted cruelty.

“Crucio.”

Harry hit the ground, muscles seizing, throat raw. The pain was worse now. Every second of agony came with the knowledge that the hand holding the wand, the voice speaking the curse, belonged to him. His moon.

Knowing his soulmate was the one aiming the curse didn’t soften it. If anything, it made it worse. 

The moon mark burned in time with the curse, echoing Voldemort’s thrill back into his skin.

He didn’t want to fight back.

For a few awful seconds, he didn’t see the point. What was the point of resisting a universe that had thought this was funny?

What was he supposed to do?

Kill him? Kill his soulmate? 

Or let himself die so Voldemort could win?

The curse lifted. Harry lay gasping, chest heaving, fingers clawing at the dirt.

“Stand up,” Voldemort hissed. “We duel, Harry Potter. Bow to death like a proper wizard.”

Harry didn’t move.

He thought about the little moon on his skin, glitching with Voldemort’s ecstasy. 

The little moon that he had adored, loved, and waited. Checking everyday to see what his soulmate would be feeling.

He then remembered about Diary Tom asking to be embraced. About the blurred man on the mirror of Erised.

About the fact that the universe, in its great, cosmic wisdom, had taken one abused orphan and one power obsessed monster and tied them together.

“Stand,” Voldemort snarled, and the edge in his voice sent a shiver through Harry. “Or I will make you.”

Hands grabbed him. Fingers dug into his arms, his shoulders, dragging him upright. His legs shook violently, knees threatening to give out. Death Eaters shoved him forward until he wobbled to his feet, swaying.

Somewhere very far away, a part of him thought,

If I don’t fight, I die here.

If I fight and win… I kill my soulmate.

It felt like a lose lose problem only fate could be cruel enough to design.

His fingers closed around his wand anyway.

Survive first. Collapse about it later.

They bowed.

“On my count,” Voldemort spoke. “One… two…”

Three

“Expelliarmus!” Harry shouted on instinct.

“Avada Kedavra!” Voldemort screamed at the same time.

୧⁠(⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠ ⁠Д⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠ ⁠)⁠୨

Chapter Text

The spells met in the middle.

The collision was like a thunderclap. A jet of green and a flash of red connected, then melted into a thick golden thread of light that shivered between their wands.

Harry’s feet slid backward. He dug his heels into the earth.

The world vanished into the glowing line between them.

The golden light began to slide toward him. Harry gritted his teeth, pushed back with everything he had, and watched it drag itself, inch by inch, toward Voldemort’s wand instead.

Somewhere in the middle of that impossible tug of war, his scar exploded.

Harry screamed.

The pain was… different this time. Not just outside, not just inside. 

It was like something in the scar had been yanked awake. A pressure, a cracking sensation. Like a door blown open from the inside.

The world tilted.

/⁠ᐠ⁠｡⁠ꞈ⁠｡⁠ᐟ⁠\

Silence.

For a second, he wasn’t just in the graveyard.

He was in a narrow, dark corridor that smelled like smoke and something burnt. 

And standing right in front of him.

Was Tom Riddle.

Not Diary Tom. Not quite.

He was older than the sixteen year old in the Chamber.

Looked more human than the man in the graveyard. 

His edges flickered slightly, but his face was unmistakable. And he looked...

Terrified and worried.

“Harry,” Tom said, voice shaking. “You have to listen to me.”

Harry stared, breath catching. “You...what?”

His body was still in the graveyard. He could feel it, vaguely, hands locked on his wand, muscles straining, Voldemort roaring something in the distance. 

But here, in this strange mental space, time felt stretched thin and strange.

“I don’t have long,” Tom said, glancing around them, as if afraid something else might come through. “It took everything I had just to push through when the connection between our wands happened.”

“You’re...” Harry's eyes narrowed. “You’re like the diary!.”

“A fragment. From your scar,” Tom said, nodding quietly. “Like the diary. Like the others.”

“The… others?” Harry repeated numbly.

Scar Tom grimaced. “Of him. Of us. Of me.”

Harry’s head spun. “You...Voldemort....you’re my...?” 

“Yes,” Tom cut in, almost desperate. “We don’t have time to go through your shock, Harry, I’m sorry.”

He stepped closer. 

“You want to know why your mark is like that?” Tom said. “Why it glitches? Why it's so different than what a typical Mark is supposed to be?”

Harry swallowed and glared at him, hard. “Because you're a bloody homicidal maniac with mood swings?”

A hysterical noise that might have been a laugh caught in Tom’s throat. “Partly. But not just that.”

He lifted his hand as if to touch Harry’s wrist, but his fingers passed through the image of Harry’s arm like smoke. Tom frowned.

“All marks,” Tom explained, “was meant to carry one soul. One emotional pattern. One whole person. It wasn’t built for what I did to myself.”

“What?”

“Seven,” Tom said, voice tightening. “I split my soul into seven pieces."

A bitter smile flickered on his handsome face. “Seven anchors. Seven bits pulling in seven directions.”

He lifted a hand toward Harry’s scar, not quite touching it.

“To rip off a fragment of a soul and hide it in an object,” he said softly, “It’s called a Horcrux. It keeps a person tethered to life. As long as the Horcrux remains, one can’t truly die.”

His gaze flicked up to Harry’s.

“But that night in Godric’s Hollow, when the curse backfired, my soul was already mutilated. Unstable. Instead of simply tearing free, a shard broke off and latched onto the nearest thing it could cling to.” His eyes dropped again to the scar. “You.”

Harry’s stomach turned over. “If you came from my scar then I'm...”

“A Horcrux,” Tom finished. “Yes. Because I have been living inside of you. Haven't you noticed how the moon mark sometimes mirrors your own emotion? It's because I have been influencing your emotions from time to time."

Harry thought about the moon. How it looked so sad whenever harry suddenly felt upset. Just like when he found the diary again in his trunk.

“Your mark started to glitch,” Tom went on, “when I accidentally made the seventh.”

Harry’s voice shook. “The night you tried to kill me.”

Tom nodded once. “It had already reached its limit when I had six. The bond tried to adjust to it but the seventh triggered the whole glitching thing because it tried to stretch across all the pieces at once. The main soul, the fragments… all of us. So your mark sees everything at the same time. Every emotion, from every splinter. It’s not meant to work that way."

Harry frowned, and muttered. “You're an idiot for making six in the first place.”

“Yes,” Tom said, laughing. He didn't argued. Instead, his eyes softened.

“Why are you telling me this?” Harry demanded, because if he didn’t focus on the facts he was going to collapse.

“You tried to kill me in the Chamber. You tortured me just minutes ago!"

“I’m not those pieces!” Tom explained, exasperated, then closed his eyes. “And besides, the diary fragment didn't proceeded in his plan to kill you because he discovered what you are to us....to me.”

He opened his eyes again and looked straight at Harry, expression raw.

"We're soulmates." Harry said.

Tom nodded.

The golden light of the spell flickered behind him, like a heartbeat.

“I am asking you,” Tom said, and Harry realized with a shock that he was begging, “Please.... Save me.”

Harry blinked. “What?”

“Gather the fragments,” Tom said, words tumbling out now. “Find the Horcruxes..."

He hesitated.

“And then what?” Harry whispered.

“Put us back,” Tom said, voice suddenly thin. “All of us. In him. In the main soul."

Harry shook his head, bewildered. “You want me to save Voldemort.”

"The one out there had already gone mad. Splitting the soul grants immortality but in exchange for sanity." Tom explained, exasperated. "Basically, He had already lost his mind."

Harry blinked, his brain processing everything.

The corridor around them shuddered. The gold light pulsed.

“I can’t hold this,” Tom said through his teeth. “The connection, the spell, it’s pulling us back.”

Harry reached out without thinking. His fingers brushed Tom’s arm, and for a second, it felt real until his fingers ran passed his form.

“Harry,” Tom said, eyes burning. " I swear to you, I'm not the evil man that you think I am. Once I'm whole again. Once I'm sane. I will show you who I really am.”

Harry hesitated.

“I don’t even know how to start looking for those Horcruxes...”

“You will,” Tom said. “Or someone will tell you. Dumbledore. Snape. Someone. Or maybe even me!” He exhaled. “You’re infuriatingly lucky, remember?”

"You being my soulmate is considered lucky?" Harry retorted.

"Of course." Tom grinned, cheekily.

The graveyard suddenly roared into focus around them, sound rushing back like a wave.

"Don't worry, I'll try to find another way for us to communicate again. We'll help each other out." Tom said as his form flickered hard, half disappearing. 

“Wait!” Harry said. “What if I can’t. what if...”

Tom’s gaze lingered on Harry. 

“I've waited such a long time for you, Harry,” He said softly. "I'm the only fragment that had managed to spend more time with you.... I have watched you grow. And I do not care if I need your permission or not to do this...."

Tom stepped forward, leaned in and kissed Harry's cheek.

"I love you so much. Take good care of yourself."

Tom's outline starts to fade.

“I'll make it up to you, I promise..."

Then he was gone.

/⁠ᐠ⁠｡⁠ꞈ⁠｡⁠ᐟ⁠\

Chapter Text

Harry returned to reality.

The world slammed back into place all at once

His wand nearly ripped out of his hand as a golden beam locked his spell to Voldemort’s, forcing them together, holding them there. 

He couldn’t let go. If he let go, he knew without knowing how that it would all be over.

The Priori Incantatem sang between them.

It was sound and light and pressure all at once, the magic vibrating down his bones. The line of golden light trembled and hummed, buzzing like a living thing caught between two impossible choices.

Voldemort snarled, teeth bared, red eyes blazing.

He pressed harder.

Harry felt it when Voldemort shoved more intent into the spell, like being hit by a wave made out of hate. The light where their magic collided shuddered and began to slide, inch by stubborn inch, toward Harry’s wand.

Harry refused to let go.

He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Not here, not like this, not in front of Cedric’s body cooling on the ground behind him.

He thought of Cedric’s eyes, open and shocked. Of the way the mark on his wrist smiled maliciously, when Voldemort was reborn. 

Of how alone he had felt every second since.

But then he remembered Scarcrux Tom. On how different that piece of soul is. On what they could have been.

The beam of light slid toward his wand, sluggish and relentless.

“No,” Harry hissed through his teeth.

He forced it back.

Magic poured out of him, wild and desperate and raw. He shoved everything he had into that one thin connection, that single point where their spells collided. His arm burned, muscles shaking with strain. 

The light shuddered.

Then, slowly, agonizingly, it moved.

Back toward Voldemort.

Harry clung to it with everything he had. 

The dead emerged one by one.

Shapes rose from Voldemort’s wand in shimmering, ghostly forms, the light spilling from them pale and soft. They were tender and terrifying all at once.

Cedric.

The old man.

Bertha.

His parents.

His breath hitched so hard it hurt. There they were, right in front of him, faces lit by the golden glow. His mother’s eyes were exactly the same shade as his own, soft and fierce at the same time. His father’s hair stuck up in the back, as if it refused to lie flat even in death.

They crowded around him, forming a thin, glowing barrier between him and the circle of Death Eaters. Their voices reached him through the crackle of magic and the pounding of his own heart.

They told him what to do.

He listened. Of course he listened. 

How could he not? His parents were suddenly here, and they were helping him.

Let go. Run. Get to the cup.

The golden cage of light around him and Voldemort closed in, tighter and tighter, as if the world was narrowing to one single moment, one single choice.

As his parents’ echoes moved toward Voldemort, as Cedric’s ghost whispered a plea

Take my body back, will you? Please?

Harry’s lungs seized.

“Now!” his father shouted.

Harry broke the connection.

He ran. Spells screamed past him.

He tripped, rolled, flung himself at the cup with Cedric’s body under his arm.

And then the world twisted.

Portkey.

The graveyard vanished.

…⁠ᘛ⁠⁐̤⁠ᕐ⁠ᐷ

Harry hit the ground hard.

Then the noise resolved into actual sound.

The stands. The crowd. People shouting, then panicking, scrambling to their feet.

Beside him, Cedric’s body lay limp and heavy, eyes open, staring at nothing.

“Harry! Harry!”

Voices crashed over him.

He tightened his grip on Cedric’s sleeve. 

“He’s dead,” Harry choked, barely hearing himself over the roar. “He’s back. Voldemort’s back."

“Harry.”

Dumbledore’s voice cut through the haze, low and steady.

He met Dumbledore’s eyes and tried not to fall apart.

“He’s back,” Harry whispered again, throat raw. “Voldemort’s back. He killed Cedric. I saw him.”

Dumbledore’s eyes lost its sparkle.

“I believe you,” he said.

Harry sagged.

For a moment, he let himself lean into the grip on his shoulder, let himself be guided away from the pitch, through the blur of faces and cries and flashes of panicked movement.

His scar burned.

His mark burned.

On his wrist, the moon was almost blinding.

Its little face glitched and jerk. It looks to be in raged. Probably because of his escape.

His soulmate’s feelings.

Lord Voldemort’s feelings.

Oh.

Cold spread through him that had nothing to do with Dementors.

For a suspended, endless moment, noise dropped away. There was only the echo of laughter in his head, the taste of graveyard dirt in his mouth, and the tiny, gloating crescent on his skin, glowing with victory.

You.

You’re him.

He didn’t say it aloud.

He just stared, heart pounding so hard it hurt.

The moon flickered, distorting at the edges again and the expression changed.

A new face snapped into place.

Worried.

The tiny brows pulled together, not in cruel satisfaction but in something sharp and anxious. The mouth tugged down, not in a cruel smirk but in a tight, strained line.

Scarcrux Tom's emotion

Harry’s fingers trembled as he brushed his thumb over the mark.

The moon twitched again.

For a split second, its expression flickered through panic, guilt, something like horror and then steadied back into that same drawn, miserable worry.

Harry’s breath hitched.

The Horcrux in his scar.

The one who had explained things he can't understand. 

The one who had begged him to save him.

The one who kissed his cheek.

Just like what happened in the mirror of Erised.

You’re him, he thought again, but the words came out… changed. 

You’re them. 

All of them. 

The one who tortured me. 

The one who asked me to save him. 

The one who tried to kill me. 

The one who asked for my embrace.

…⁠ᘛ⁠⁐̤⁠ᕐ⁠ᐷ

Harry’s head still hurt.

The hospital wing had emptied, the Ministry had slithered away in denial, and the year ended under a sky that felt too heavy for a school full of children.

Cedric was dead. Voldemort was back. The world had tilted, and everyone was pretending it hadn’t.

On the train, Harry tried to act normal. He sat with Ron and Hermione, fed Hedwig an owl treat, spoke when spoken to. 

He laughed once, even, when Ron nearly choked on a Fizzing Whizbee.

It sounded wrong in his own ears.

The memories of the graveyard coiled behind his eyes. Green light, cold laughter, the way his moon had twisted in agony on his skin.

Later, when the train pulled into King’s Cross and trunks were being hauled down, goodbyes shouted over the noise, Harry turned to the twins.

Fred and George were joking about something.

Permanent canary creams, or a line of Skiving Snackboxes so perfect they’d never have to sit another class.

Harry reached into his robes.

The bag heavy. Wrong. Full of gold that didn’t feel like a prize, only proof that he’d walked out of that graveyard when someone else hadn’t.

“Here,” he said, thrusting it at them.

Fred blinked. “What’s this?”

“Your future empire,” Harry said dryly. “Take it.”

George stared. “Harry, this is... this is the Triwizard....”

“I don’t want it,” Harry cut in, harsher than he meant to. He swallowed, forced his voice down. “Cedric died. Voldemort came back. I don’t want money for that.”

The twins went quiet in a way they almost never did.

“I want something good to come out of it,” Harry said, looking between them. “Use it for your joke shop. You were going to do it anyway. Just… do it sooner. Do it properly.”

Their expressions shifted. Shock, protest, then something fierce and determined.

“We’ll make you proud, Harry,” George said softly.

Fred slung an arm around his shoulders for a brief, tight squeeze. “We’ll name a product after you. Something incredibly dramatic and needlessly explosive.”

Harry huffed out something that was almost a laugh.

They took the money.

People began to drift toward the barrier, parents calling, trolleys rattling. Ron’s mum hugged him, Hermione squeezed his arm, Sirius’s letter and permission form were tucked safely away.

Harry walked with the Dursleys, a step or two behind them, trolley rolling quietly. Uncle Vernon grumbled about traffic. Dudley muttered about telly. Aunt Petunia kept glancing around like being seen near anything remotely magical might stain her.

Harry barely heard any of it.

They passed a pillar, then a waiting area, then a wide glass panel that doubled as a mirror along the wall. 

He glanced at it without thinking.

He did not see himself.

The world narrowed to a single, shuddering breath.

The reflection staring back wasn’t Harry’s.

It was a man standing where Harry should’ve been. Tall, with dark hair falling neatly, not messy. Features sharp, elegant, almost aristocratic, cheekbones sharper than Harry’s, jaw more defined, eyes deep and too knowing.

Scarcrux Tom.

Standing in the station with him, except not. Just in the glass. Just in the place where Harry’s reflection should have been.

Staring back at him. In the mirror.

Harry’s heart hammered against his ribs.

The moon at the back of his hand flared, bright, glitchy, warping for a second like static on a screen. 

Its tiny face scrunched, torn between triumph, rage, fear and relief.

Tom’s expression softened.

His lips shaped one word.

Harry.

…⁠ᘛ⁠⁐̤⁠ᕐ⁠ᐷ

Chapter Text

5th Year.

The heat was suffocating, Dudley was bigger and meaner, and the whole world, thanks to the Daily Prophet seemed to think Harry was either a liar or mad. 

He spent long evenings on the playground swings, watching the sky for owls and trying not to think about Cedric dying. 

The moon on his skin would often hang around his chest that summer, hovering over his heart, its face flickering between numb, anger and a deep, restless unease that never quite settled.

Harry already understood that all the random emotions are from different fragments of his soulmate's soul.

He still can't believe that his soulmate is Voldemort himself.

I swear to you, I'm not the evil man that you think I am. Once I'm whole again. Once I'm sane. I will show you who I really am.

Harry really hopes that his soulmate is more than that power hungry maniac.

┌⁠(⁠★⁠ｏ⁠☆⁠)⁠┘

Then the Dementors came.

One minute Harry and Dudley were in the alley. Trading insults.

The next, the world dropped into freezing black. His breath turned to mist. The air grew thick and rotten. Every happy thought was scraped clean away.

His scar burned. His knees nearly buckled.

He heard his mother scream again.

He cast a Patronus in blind desperation, driving them away, saving himself and Dudley both.

Afterward, shaking and furious, he was dragged back to Privet Drive, shouted at by the Dursleys, and then hit with a Ministry letter threatening expulsion for underage magic. 

Harry barely heard them.

He slammed his bedroom door shut and pressed his back against it, breathing hard. Then he pushed away, crossed the room, and stopped in front of the small cracked mirror over his chest of drawers.

Nothing.

Just his own pale, drawn reflection staring back at him.

“Tom?” he whispered before he could stop himself.

Still Nothing. 

┌⁠(⁠★⁠ｏ⁠☆⁠)⁠┘

A lot had happened.

Days blurred. Howlers, Order members, Sirius, Grimmauld Place, The trial. And Hogwarts finally came like a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

The first weeks back were a mess of whispers and stares and Umbridge’s sugar coated reign as the new headmistress. 

Detentions that carved words into his hand. Lessons that pretended Voldemort didn’t exist.

Harry stopped expecting Tom to show up.

Which was why, one evening after a particularly awful day of being called a liar and watching Umbridge made everyone's life miserable with rules, the sight of Tom nearly made Harry drop his books.

He was alone in a dim side corridor, heading back from the library with an armful of parchment and a headache. 

An old, slightly tarnished mirror hung between two portraits, reflecting the flickering torchlight.

Harry walked past it. Then froze.

Backed up a step.

Tom looked back at him from the glass.

Not Voldemort. Just Tom. A fragment.

His expression was soft at the edges in a way Harry wasn’t used to. Relieved, worried, and then quickly smoothed over into something more composed, like he didn’t want to look too desperate.

Harry’s breath caught. “You’re back,” he whispered.

Tom’s mouth moved in the mirror, forming words Harry couldn’t hear. The glass stayed utterly silent. No whisper, no echo.

Harry stared. 

“You can’t speak through mirrors,” he realized. “You’re just… visual.”

Tom huffed silently, angry that he won't be able to communicate properly with his precious star.

He glanced sharply left, then right. 

He's checking, Harry realized, not just for himself, but for Harry too, like he didn’t want anyone catching them. Only when the corridor stayed empty did his shoulders loosen slightly.

Then he focused on Harry again and lifted both hands, starting to mime.

First, he pointed directly at Harry.

You.

Then he made an upside down peace sign and have it walk like a person.

"Walking?" Harry starts guessing.

"Running?"

"Going somewhere?”

Tom nodded quickly.

“Where?”

Tom exhaled, trying to think on how to explain where.

He then, pointed down, wiggling his fingers in a dripping motion, like falling water.

"Rain?"

"Water?"

"Faucet?"

“Bathroom?” Harry guessed.

Tom nodded, eyes lighting just a little in approval. Then he made a circle in the air and pulled a dramatic, sulky face, shoulders slumping, mimed wiping tears.

Harry blinked. “…Myrtle?”

He nodded, smiling fondly. Giving Harry a thumbs up.

Unexpectedly, footsteps suddenly echoed at the far end of the corridor. Heavy. Irritated.

Filch.

Tom’s eyes went sharp. In a split second, his whole form blurred and bled backward, vanishing into the dark edges of the glass until the mirror showed only Harry again, pale and wide eyed.

Filch limped into view, squinting suspiciously. His gaze flicked from Harry to the mirror, to the empty stretch of corridor.

“What are you loitering here for, Potter?” he asked, voice oily with suspicion. “Plotting more rule breaking, are you?”

Harry tightened his grip on his books. “Just heading back from the library,” he said, trying very hard to sound bored instead of like he’d just been caught talking to his own reflection.

Filch sniffed, clearly unconvinced, but after a long, narrow eyed look at Harry and one last glare at the unhelpfully ordinary mirror, he shuffled on down the corridor, muttering under his breath about “troublemaking brats” and “filthy fingerprints on the glass.”

The moment his footsteps faded, Tom slid back into view in the mirror, expression tight with annoyance. His eyes darted after Filch, then back to Harry, as if checking he was unharmed.

Harry watched until Filch is of sight, then turned to Tom. “You need hide every time someone walks past.”

Tom nodded once, jaw clenched. Then he made an emphatic see? gesture toward where Filch had gone, before pointing down again in that dripping water motion for the bathroom.

He lifted his hands again, palms out, and pushed them as if shoving people away.

No one.

And jabbed his finger down once more in that dripping motion.

“No one goes into Myrtle’s bathroom,” Harry murmured. “So no one’ll see me talking to you there.”

Tom’s mouth curved in the smallest almost smile. He gave Harry a tiny, proud nod.

Harry glanced over his shoulder at the empty corridor, then back at the mirror. “You want me to go now?”

Tom nodded, softened by an almost pleading look. Then he pointed one last time toward the second floor girls' bathroom. Please.

The moon on Harry’s chest tingled, a faint, urgent buzz. He clutched his books tighter.

“Fine,” he muttered, trying not to look like he was talking to a wall. “Myrtle’s bathroom it is.”

He took one step, then paused and darted a quick look back.

Tom was still there, watching him go with an intensity that made Harry’s throat feel oddly tight. When Harry met his gaze, Tom smirked and mouthed two words.

Good Boy.

Harry rolled his eyes, rounded the corner, out of sight.

┌⁠(⁠★⁠ｏ⁠☆⁠)⁠┘

Riddle Manor was quiet around him. The room was high ceilinged and dim, heavy curtains pulled against the night. Magic thrummed faintly in the old bones of the house, recognizing him and bending to his will.

He sat in a high backed chair near the cold hearth, pale fingers curled loosely over the armrest, wand balanced between them.

Nagini slept coiled nearby.

The fire had long since gone out, but he didn’t bother to relight it. The cold didn’t touch him. 

His hand twitched.

A faint glow caught his eye.

He looked down.

The star was there. On the back of his hand, just below the knuckles. 

It came back, now that he has a body again.

It was small and tired looking.

The five pointed little thing was still bright but faintly pale. Its tiny face was set in an expression of determination and exhaustion.

The star’s little brows were drawn in a tight line, mouth pressed firm, not in anger, not in terror, but in stubborn endurance.

He glanced at it for a second.

His soulmate.

Somewhere, on the other end of that bond, someone breathed. Someone thought. Someone felt.

Once, that thought had been something.

Once, he’d made promises to it.

Once, it had fascinated him.

Once, he truly loves his star.

Back then, as a boy in a cold orphanage bed, the little mark had been the only thing that felt truly his. He had traced it with careful fingers, waiting for his soulmate.

But that was before.

Now, Voldemort barely spared it a glance.

The soulmate mark meant nothing to him anymore. 

Something had rotted through inside him. Whatever part of him that could care had been carved out and fed to the dark.

All his thoughts were of killing. Murder. Domination. Power.

He laughed suddenly, a high, sharp, ugly sound that bounced off the walls of Riddle Manor.

Madness.

Insanity.

He could feel it crawling through his mind like cracks through glass. His thoughts did not run in straight anymore, they snarled, tangled, looped back on themselves in circles of rage and hate. 

He could no longer think clearly, not the way he once had. 

The star flared once on the back of his hand.

He didn’t look.

Rage had eaten the space where tenderness used to live.

There was no room left for love. Only victory.

┌⁠(⁠★⁠ｏ⁠☆⁠)⁠┘

Chapter Text

Harry checked twice that the bathroom was empty before he slipped inside.

The pipes gurgled. One of the faucets dripped. The smell of damp stone and old cleaning potions hung heavy in the air.

“Hello?” he called, just in case. “Myrtle?”

No answer.

Thank Merlin.

He stepped up to the cracked, spotted mirror over the sinks and stared at his own face. 

Tired eyes, messy hair, faint shadows under his cheekbones. The faint shape of his scar under his fringe prickled.

“Tom?” Harry muttered under his breath. “You there?”

For a second, there was only his reflection.

Then his scar burned, sharp and hot.

His reflection shifted.

Tom stared back at him.

"Hey," Harry’s started. “How do you even do that? The mirror thing?” 

Tom’s mouth moved. Too fast, no sound. Like a silent film on fast forward as he tries to explain it to Harry.

Harry frowned. “I still can’t hear you.”

Tom stops and face palmed. He's been talking for nothing. He then gestured for Harry to pay attention.

“All right, I’m watching,” Harry muttered, amused. “Go on then, Mister Mime.”

Tom grinned at the nickname and then proceeds to held up something invisible in his hands and flipped it open, exaggerating the movement.

"A box?"

Tom flips it again, and again.

"Open close?"

Tom pretends to write on it.

"Parchment?"

“Book?"

Tom nodded, pleased, then jabbed a finger downward like here.

“In Hogwarts?” Harry guessed. “In the castle?”

Tom pointed sideways, then made a rectangular shape and tapped the air, like he was stamping something.

Harry squinted. “Library?”

Tom snapped his fingers and gave him a thumbs up.

“Okay, book in the library,” Harry said. “That narrows it down to… a billion.”

Tom took a deep breath, thinking for a moment and then exaggeratedly tucked the invisible book under his arm and pretended to sneak, tiptoeing, looking around suspiciously.

"Thief?"

Tom shook his head. He pretends to hide under the frame then points at the invisible book.

“Hidden book?” Harry tried.

Tom nodded. Then he put the invisible book down, mimed blowing dust off it, and reached up high toward the top.

“Old, hidden book on a high shelf,” Harry translated. “All right. What kind?”

Tom brightened. He made a stabbing motion at his own chest, then jerked his hand away with a violent rip, fingers curled like he was holding something invisible and squirming.

Harry instinctively winced. “That’s… horrifying.”

Tom rolled his eyes again, then repeated the gesture: stab, yank, hold.

Harry guesses multiple times until. “Soul?”

Tom smiled, nodding hard.

“A book about souls?” Harry guessed slowly. “About...”

Tom curled one hand into a heart-ish shape, then broke it apart with his other hand into pieces, flinging the fragments aside.

Harry stared. “Breaking souls. A book about breaking souls.”

Tom pressed his hands together in a dramatic prayer gesture, eyes wide, begging.

“Dark magic,” Harry muttered. “So… a book about Horcruxes.”

Tom’s expression said finally, thank you.

Harry’s mouth went dry. “They’ve got a Horcrux book in the library?”

Tom lifted one hand and tipped it palm down, wobbling it. Sort of. Then he mimed locking something with an invisible key.

“Not exactly out on the shelves,” Harry said. “Locked away. Restricted Section?”

Tom snapped his fingers again and pointed, like yes.

Harry swallowed. “Okay."

Tom’s expression shifted. He held his hands out, palm up, like he was weighing two things.

In one hand, he mimed holding a smaller book, obvious now that Harry knew the movement. He then stabbed the invisible book with an invisible knife? Or weapon? and let it flop limp.

Harry’s chest tightened as he realized what it could be. “Riddle’s diary?”

Tom nodded.

Then, in his other hand, he pointed at his own chest. 

“Diary Tom,” Harry translated quietly. “And… you.”

Tom pointed to his own forehead, Harry’s scar, then traced a line from it down his own chest, then across to the invisible diary in his other hand. 

"Huh?" Harry is confused. Tom repeats it again.

“Transfer,” Harry said, eventually, after many wrong guesses. “You want to move from my scar and into the diary.”

Tom’s shoulders sagged with relieved approval, like yes, finally, well done.

Harry’s head spun. “Can you even do that?”

Tom spread his hands, then mimed back to book and Horcrux again. 

He mimed reading, flipping pages, then jabbing at a particular line with his finger. Instructions.

“So the book explains how.....” Harry muttered. “....how to move you into the diary...."

A pause.

Then, Harry's eyes widened.

"Wait. Wait. Wait... The diary fragment is alive?!" Harry's brain finally processed that fact. He remembered Diary Tom dying.

The words echoed off the tiles.

He stared at the mirror, memories crashing into him. The chamber, Ginny on the floor, ink pouring out like blood, the embrace, and Tom shattering into nothing.

Harry shook his head hard. “I watched him die. How come?”

Scarcrux Tom sighed silently.

He held up one finger. Wait. Then launched into another mime.

First, he drew a tall, human shape in the air. Diary Tom, full sized.

He tapped that invisible chest and then pointed down, sketching a flat rectangle in the air. Then he pointed back at the Tom shape and shook his head.

“Not real?” Harry said, after many wrong guesses again. “The body was temporary?”

Tom smiled and shot him a finger gun of approval.

Then he acted out Harry stabbing with a fang, one hand gripping, then jabbing downward viciously. 

He then, clutched his own chest and staggered back in an exaggerated, overdramatic death flop.

Harry winced. “Yeah. I remember that part.”

Tom froze mid dying, then very deliberately let the body sink down, his hands sliding from his chest into the flat book shape on the floor.

He patted the imaginary diary.

“So when the body died, he went back into the diary,” Harry translated slowly. 

Tom nodded, pleased.

Then he slumped over the invisible book, cheek pressed to it, eyes squeezed shut and tongue lolling out in an overly dramatic I’m dead pose.

Harry frowned. “So he’s dead?”

Tom cracked one eye open and sighed.

He sat up again, rearranged himself over the imaginary diary, and this time folded his hands under his cheek like a sleeping child. He breathed slowly, exaggeratedly. Zzz.

Harry watched, heart thudding. "Asleep.”

Tom nodded.

Harry swallowed. “So he’s not gone. Just asleep. Waiting.”

Tom mimed knocking on the diary cover, then cupped a hand to his ear.

He then shrugged. Can’t wake.

“That’s why you want the Horcrux book,” Harry said slowly. “You want me to move you…” 

He pointed to his scar. “…into the diary. To wake him up. Fuse together?"

Tom clapped, proud of himself for being able to communicate with Harry.

Harry stared at him, feeling the weight of it sink in. “So you’ve just been sitting in my head, knowing diary you was still down there in my trunk, and didn’t mention it?”

Tom raised his brows and gestured pointedly to his silent mouth, then to the mirror.

Harry sighed. “Fair.”

Tom rolled his eyes fondly.

“So let me get this straight,” Harry said quietly. “You want me to break into the Restricted Section, find a banned book on Horcruxes, use it to unplug you from my scar, then shove you into a cursed diary and wake up a second version of you so you can fuse together and....."

Tom nodded. He raised seven fingers.

“Seven Horcruxes,” Harry said, already knowing. “You want to pull them back together.” 

Tom nodded and smiled.

"That's why you need my help. To gather all pieces of yourself to save you."

Harry stared at Tom.

Tom stared at Harry

Then he lifted his hands again, ready for the next round of wordless charades.

Harry huffed out a weak, disbelieving laugh. “You know, if anyone walks in and sees me playing silent guessing games with my own reflection, I’m blaming you.”

Tom smirked, smug, then proceeds to blow a kiss at him.

Harry turns around to hide his blush.

He coughed and turns back to Tom who is grinning happily. “All right, then. I guess it's time to break into the Restricted Section.”

(⁠?⁠・⁠・⁠)⁠σ

Chapter Text

Harry waited until the castle felt properly asleep.

Then he grabbed his wand and reached into his trunk and pulled out the Invisibility Cloak.

He slipped the Cloak around his shoulders. He eased his bed curtains open and slid out.

He moved quickly but carefully, keeping close to walls, avoiding the torch lights on instinct. The Cloak brushed his ankles as he turned corners and slipped down staircases.

He dodged Nearly Headless Nick by flattening himself into a doorway as the ghost drifted past, humming tunelessly. 

He held his breath when Filch’s distant grumbling echoed from below.

“Students. Out of bed. Think the rules are suggestions, do they…”

Mrs Norris’s soft paws clicked somewhere near the Entrance Hall. Harry detoured hard away from that.

The castle at night always felt like it was watching him.

He finally reached the familiar tall double doors of the library.

He checked both ends of the corridor. Empty.

He pulled one door open just enough to slip through sideways, then let it shut behind him with the softest click he could manage.

Inside, the library was a cathedral of silence.

He kept the Cloak on.

Even if Madam Pince wasn’t here, Harry didn’t trust the books not to snitch.

He navigated between the tables, feet silent on the stone, heading straight for the back where the rope marked off the Restricted Section.

The little “RESTRICTED” sign glowered at him in the dark.

He ducked under the rope, the Cloak pooling around him like liquid shadow.

He swallowed and focused.

Back left corner. Third shelf from the top. No title. A circle, split in two.

Tom’s frantic miming in Myrtle’s bathroom replayed in his head.

He glanced around, then carefully climbed onto the lowest shelf, balancing on the solid thick books with one hand braced against the side.

From under the Cloak, it probably looked like nothing at all was disturbing the shelves, which was a strange comfort.

He squinted at the spines on the third shelf.

On the Bleeding of the Soul.

The Art of Fragmented Immortality.

He did not touch those.

Then he saw it.

A slim, nearly featureless book. No title, no gilding. Just a faint, scorched symbol on the spine. A circle with a jagged crack through it.

His fingers tingled before he even reached it.

Harry slowly slid it free.

The instant the book left its place, he heard a faint scritch scritch from the front desk.

He froze.

Still half standing on the lower shelf, he turned his head, heart hammering.

Across the room, near Madam Pince’s usual spot, a quill had risen from its ink pot and was writing all by itself on a piece of parchment. It scratched in quick, sharp movements, like someone annoyed and in a hurry.

He squinted.

After hours activity detected – Restricted Section ward notice.

Brilliant.

Clutching the book tightly to his chest under the Cloak, Harry dropped silently back to the floor and edged away from the shelves.

The quill paused. Hovered. Wrote a bit more.

He didn’t wait to see what it could be.

He ducked back under the rope and headed toward the doors as quickly as he dared. His footsteps made almost no sound, but everything in him felt loud, heartbeat, breath, the rustle of Cloak fabric.

He pulled the door open just enough to slide through...

“Who is there?” Madam Pince’s voice snapped from down the corridor.

Harry’s stomach lurched.

He shut the door behind him and pressed his back flat against the nearest wall, pulling the Cloak tighter around himself. He tried to make himself smaller, thinner, nothing.

Madam Pince swept past, tight bun and tighter mouth, wand raised, nightgown swishing around her ankles.

Her eyes were sharp behind her glasses as she glared at the doors and yanked one open.

“Students,” she hissed under her breath. “Vermin. Leaving their greasy hands on my books."

She disappeared inside.

Harry didn’t move for a solid five seconds.

Then he slipped away from the door, hugging the wall, and headed back the way he’d come.

乁⁠|⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠〰⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠|ㄏ

The dorm was still.

He drew the curtains closed, lit the tiniest Lumos under the blanket, and finally pulled the book out into view.

Up close, it looked ordinary. Very ordinary. That, somehow, made it worse.

The moon on his arm was glitching between upset and proud.

“Okay,” Harry whispered to the moon, to all the fragments he could feel tugging at his life. “Let’s learn how to fix you.”

乁⁠|⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠〰⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠|ㄏ

Harry tried.

He really tried reading the book.

He only lasted five minutes.

After the second line of dense soul theory, his eyes were glazing. By the third, he was pretty sure the book was personally offended that he’d already passed 4 years of Hogwarts.

“Onto… ontolog...” He squinted. “Ontological… rupture of… anchor states… okay, you know what? No. Absolutely not.”

He snapped the book shut.

“This is above my brain level,” he complained. “I am a fifteen year old who almost failed Potions.”

Harry scrubbed a hand through his hair, grabbed the Cloak and the book both, and headed for the bathroom.

乁⁠|⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠〰⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠|ㄏ

Myrtle’s bathroom was still as miserable as ever.

Water dripped somewhere in the background. One of the cubicle doors creaked faintly. The high, cracked windows let in cold light that made everything look slightly ghostly.

Harry shrugged off the Cloak and went straight to the mirror over the sinks.

Tom appeared almost immediately, sliding into place over Harry’s reflection like he’d just been waiting.

Harry held up the book. “I nicked the thing you wanted, but I can't understand anything,"

Tom smiled and pointed at the book. Then at Harry. He made the flipping motion again. 

"Open?" Harry's first guess is correct as he proceeds to flip open the book. 

Suddenly, Myrtle’s head popped halfway through a stall door behind him. “Oh, Harry. Back again? To brood. In my bathroom.”

Harry jumped, startled. Tom immediately disappeared from the mirror. “Hi, Myrtle,” he said quickly. “Just homework.”

She squinted at the open book. “That doesn’t look like homework. That looks like forbidden—”

“Myrtle,” Harry cut in kindly, “Can we… maybe have this breakdown later? I'm kinda busy.”

She eyed him, then the mirror, then the book, then let out a long, wobbly sigh. “No one ever tells me anything,” she wailed, and slowly drifted backward into a cubicle, sniffling louder and louder until she vanished entirely.

The door swung shut with a half hearted creak.

Silence again.

Harry exhaled and looked back at the mirror.

Tom reappeared.

“Right,” Harry said. “So. What now?”

Tom mimed the shape of a rectangle with both hands, a book sized rectangle. Then proceeds to stab it. 

“The diary,” Harry winced. "I forgot to bring the diary. Be right back."

Tom rolled his eyes fondly and nodded. He glanced at the moon, now on Harry's forehead, beside the scar.

It's glitching between different negative emotions. Tom stared worryingly at it.

Meanwhile, Harry dragged the Cloak back over himself and slipped out.

乁⁠|⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠〰⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠|ㄏ

Chapter Text

By the time Harry crept back under the Cloak, diary tucked carefully in his hands, Myrtle was hovering by the ceiling, sniffling into a stall partition and muttering darkly about boys and secrets.

Harry set the diary gently beside the Horcrux book on the sink.

It looked as dead as ever. Torn leather, the clean puncture of the basilisk fang scar, pages warped and glued together by old ink and venom.

“You sure about this?” Harry asked the mirror quietly.

Tom’s reflection looked at the diary. His face went complicated.

He reached out, fingertips brushing the inner surface of the glass, perfectly aligned with where the diary lay beyond.

Then he nodded.

He pointed sharply at the pages of the horcrux book, then mimed flipping through, faster, faster, his hand turning the invisible sheets in quick, impatient flips.

Harry stared until realization hits him.

“Flip until you say stop, got it.” He muttered. 

He opened the book. The first page was all dense theory. He turned it.

Tom shook his head.

Turned another.

No.

Another. Another. Harry starts turning the pages faster, diagrams and cramped Latin blurring past. Tom’s gaze moved with the turning like he was reading at breakneck speed.

“Any time today would be lovely,” Harry said under his breath as he keeps flipping into the next pages.

Suddenly, Tom jabbed his finger downward.

There.

Harry froze halfway through turning. The right hand page was mostly drawing, but the left was different.

The text there was arranged like a verse. Short lines. Broken stanzas. No diagram, no footnotes. 

Just a block of poetry in a language that looked like a twisted cousin of Latin.

Harry squinted. “That’s a spell?”

Tom nodded.

He pointed at the poem, then at Harry’s scar.

Then at the diary. Then at Harry’s mouth.

“You want me to read it aloud,” Harry said slowly.

Tom nodded and instructed Harry to hold the diary. 

Harry swallowed. “Is this going to hurt?”

Tom’s smile tilted, apology written all over his face. His eyes softened, something warm and aching.

He nodded.

Harry sighed. “Of course it is.”

The moon had relocated to his wrist, as if it wanted the best possible view of the disaster that was about to happen. Its tiny brows were scrunched in fierce determination, mouth a small, stubborn line. 

“Alright,” Harry whispered. “Let’s do this.”

Tom inhaled in the mirror, a sharp, quick breath like he wanted to speak but couldn’t. 

Then, after a moment, he lifted his hand and gave Harry a thumbs up.

Harry took a breath and began to read.

The first line left his mouth awkwardly, the syllables strange, heavy on his tongue. As soon as he spoke them, the air in the bathroom changed. The lights flickered. The water in the nearest faucet rattled in its pipes.

His scar burned.

In the mirror, Tom flinched like he felt it too.

He stepped closer to the glass, eyes wide with worry, hands pressed firmly against his side of the mirror.

Harry’s breath trembled. “I’m fine,” he lied.

He stumbled on the next line, almost mispronouncing the second word, but forced it out. 

The pain in his scar sharpened with it, a hot thread needling deeper into his skull.

Harry gritted his teeth and kept going.

The spell didn’t feel like other spells. It wasn’t a neat push of magic out through his wand. 

It was a pulling, a coaxing, like he was reaching inside himself with every line and unhooking something that had been latched there for years.

By the third stanza, Tom was shaking from the pain as well while Harry's vision blurred at the edges. The lights above the mirrors flickered wildly, stuttering off, then on, then off again. The moon on his wrist spasmed in place, glitching so fast it was almost a smear of light and expression, fear, panic, grief, determination, flickering in a dizzying loop.

His scar hurt so much.

This was molten, dragging heat, like someone had grabbed whatever was lodged beneath his skin and was trying, very slowly, to pull it out.

Harry gasped on a word, fingers digging into porcelain. He tasted blood where he bit his tongue, but he forced the next line past his teeth anyway.

The poem’s rhythm carried him, relentless.

Verse after verse, each phrase landing like a small hammer blow against the inside of his skull.

Halfway through the final stanza, his knees buckled.

He caught himself on the sink with both hands, shoulders shaking, vision white hot around the edges. The pain in his scar had turned into a continuous tearing, like something was screaming without sound right behind his eyes.

He looked at the mirror. Tom is gone. He can only see his own reflection.

Harry forced the last four lines out, voice rough and cracked.

As the final syllable left his lips, the bathroom went wild.

Every light in the room blew at once with a sharp pop. The sinks shuddered. One of the stalls banged open, Myrtle shrieking from somewhere near the ceiling.

Harry’s scar erupted.

He screamed, dropping to one knee, both hands clutching his forehead now, the book thudding closed beside him. It felt like something inside his skull was being peeled away, layer by layer, nerves tearing loose from where they’d grown around it.

Heat raced down from his scar, pouring through his veins, gathering at his chest, then jerking sideways like it had been hooked and yanked.

He dimly felt himself hit the tile with his shoulder.

He kept his eyes squeezed shut, because opening them felt like it would kill him.

He embraced the diary towards his chest. It was shaking. Harry feels dizzy.

Then the flare suddenly collapsed.

The pain cut off.

Leaving Harry panting on the cold bathroom floor, sweat cooling on his skin, scar throbbing like a bruise instead of an open wound.

Silence fell hard.

No flickering lights, no pipes shuddering. 

Harry lay there for a long moment, listening to his heartbeat slam against his ribs.

Then, slowly, he pushed himself up on shaking arms.

His head felt light. Empty in a way that made him weirdly unsteady, like someone had rearranged his balance inside his brain.

He swallowed, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

He turned, hand fumbling for the edge of the sink to haul himself upright and forced himself to look up at the mirror.

It showed only him again.

Just Harry.

Pale, wide eyed, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, but alone.

No dark haired man layered over his features.

No Scarcrux.

“Tom?” Harry croaked.

His chest clenched.

The Horcrux book lay exactly where he’d dropped it, cover half closed, pages ruffled.

Harry grabbed the diary. 

Dead.

Harry stared at it, breath caught somewhere in his throat.

“Come on,” he whispered, voice raw. “You said this would work, right?”

The diary did not twitch.

The moon on Harry’s wrist jittered once, a small, sharp glitch like a skipped heartbeat, then went utterly, eerily calm.

Harry’s fingers tightened on the sink edge.

“Tom?” he tried again.

Nothing.

The ruined diary waited.

And Harry, scar aching and magic still humming under his skin, could only stand there and stare.

Wondering whether he had just freed his soulmate’s fragment or destroyed him completely.

༼⁠;⁠´⁠༎ຶ⁠ o ⁠༎ຶ⁠༽     (This emoticon looks funny >⁠.⁠<)

Chapter Text

The Gryffindor common room was warm unlike the coldness in Harry's heart.

He climbed through the portrait hole like a shadow wearing skin, clutching the ruined diary to his chest so tightly his knuckles were white.

Ron and Hermione were mid argument over homework when they finally looked up.

“Mate, what happened to you?” Ron asked, voice cracking at the sight of him.

Harry’s throat worked, but only a rasp came out.

“I… I think I killed him.”

Hermione shot to her feet so quickly her chair toppled over.

“Killed who?”

And that was it.

Something inside Harry splintered.

He sank onto the nearest armchair like gravity had doubled and poured out the truth.

Horcruxes.

Voldemort.

Scarcrux Tom in the graveyard.

The diary, the mirror, the magic between them.

The ritual.

Every moment.

He told them everything.

Hermione went through at least seventeen facial expressions, shock, disgust, horror, awe, concern, frustration, pity.

Ron mirrored half of them but louder and with more hand flailing.

“So, wait hold on.” Ron sputtered, “you were flirting with a piece of Voldemort’s soul?!”

Harry didn’t even defend himself. He just closed his eyes and let his head fall back.

Hermione dragged her hands down her face. “Harry, you were bonding with a dark artifact.”

“Not on purpose!” Harry snapped, but it broke halfway through like a frayed rope. 

“He was not what I thought he was. Not evil, well kinda, but also not. God, I don’t know.”

The diary felt heavier in his lap, like guilt in physical form.

Hermione swallowed. Her voice softened in the way that meant she was scared for him.

“Harry, maybe you should write in it. See if he can respond. Maybe he’s not...”

He didn’t wait for her to finish.

He pulled the diary open with trembling fingers. The pages were warped, torn, stabbed. The ruined slit from the basilisk fang was still dark and jagged.

Harry dipped the quill and wrote something in whatever space in the page that wasn't damaged.

Tom?

Are you there?

Please. Please answer me.

The words sank into the page.

Nothing.

A tight, sick panic twisted in his chest.

He wrote again.

Come back. Please.

Silence.

He pressed harder, hard enough to splinter the quill’s tip. Ink smeared across his hand.

Ron whispered, “Harry… mate…”

Harry bowed his head over the diary, shoulders shaking as the tears spilled faster than he could stop them.

They fell onto the paper, hot, messy, heartbroken.

Each drop hit the ruined parchment and sank deep, sliding into the torn wound in the page like the diary was drinking them.

He doesn't understand his emotions. Why? Why did he got attached to soon to that piece of fragment so quickly?

He chopped his soul to multiple pieces that led to insanity.

Why?

Harry blinked.

He knows the answer himself.

Because he's my soulmate.

The one I've been waiting for.

The one I've been longing for.

He sobbed. Tears continue to fall.

One drop.

Two.

Three.

And then....

The diary twitched.

Hermione was the first to noticed and gasped, hand flying to her mouth.

Ron yelped and fell backwards off the sofa.

The diary trembled in Harry’s hands, first a shiver, then a violent, unnatural shake like something trapped inside had woken up starving.

The covers strained outward, bending as if pushed from the inside.

The torn pages fluttered wildly, slapping against each other with a frantic, birdlike flutter.

“Harry! Drop it!” Hermione shrieked.

He couldn’t.

His fingers wouldn’t let go.

His moon mark pulsed sharply under his sleeve, on his arm, tightening, pulling, glowing faintly through the fabric like it recognized something rising from nothingness. 

Harry can't see what expression it currently has. 

The shaking intensified.

The ink bled upward from the pages, swirling like smoke.

Magic crackled through the air, raising the hair on Harry’s arms.

Then...

POP!!

A blinding pillar of white light shot upward from the diary, swallowing the entire room.

Hermione cried out.

Ron threw his robes over his head.

Books flew off tables.

Cards scattered like startled birds.

Harry held the diary to his chest, eyes squeezed shut against the burning brightness.

The light grew brighter.

More brighter.

POP!!

Silence dropped like a hammer.

The light vanished instantly, leaving echoes dancing behind everyone’s eyes.

Harry blinked, disoriented.

His ears rang.

The room smelled faintly of ozone and old ink.

He looked down.

The diary was gone.

In its place was a small, warm weight.

Harry froze.

Hermione stared.

Ron made a choking noise.

Sitting in Harry’s lap, legs dangling over his thigh.

A tiny.

Four inch.

Human.

And he looks exactly like Tom Riddle from the Diary.

Except. He's tiny. A chibi.

Who lifted his teeny hands, inspected them like they offended him, and wobbled unsteadily to his feet, using Harry’s shirt for balance like a feral kitten.

He blinked wide, glossy dark eyes.

Harry blinked.

Hermione blinked.

Ron screamed first.

“WHAT THE HECK IS THAT?!”

Tom flinched at the volume, then, with the dignity of a fallen deity trapped in the body of a toddler, placed his hands on his tiny hips.

He glared up at Ron.

And in the smallest, most offended squeaky voice ever recorded in Gryffindor history, he declared,

“Do not scream. I am smol. Not scary.”..

The tiny voice carried the full arrogance of a Dark Lord condensed into one squeaky syllable.

Harry made a strangled sound that could have been a laugh, a sob, or the beginning of cardiac arrest.

His heart was trying very hard to escape his ribcage.

Because the tiny thing glaring from his lap, the one barely four inches tall, was unmistakably Tom.

Tom’s expression softened the moment he looked up at Harry.

It wasn’t smug.

It wasn’t dangerous.

It was… relieved.

His glossy, dark eyes flicked over Harry’s face with tiny, frantic precision, scanning for injuries.

Hermione whispered, “Oh my God, he’s….”

Ron whispered, “He’s adorable, I hate it.”

Harry blinked and finally found his voice.

“Tom?” he croaked.

The tiny creature straightened up proudly, chest puffed out like a pompous bird.

Harry swallowed hard. Then, very gently, like touching something fragile, he reached out and poked Tom’s cheek with one finger.

It was the softest cheek he had ever touched.

Unreasonably soft. Ridiculously soft.

The kind of soft that suggested the universe had gone out of its way to make him cute against his will.

Tom let out a tiny surprised squeak.

Then he froze.

Then blinked.

Then melted into the poke like a cat leaning into a pet.

Harry felt something in his chest crack open.

He poked him again.

Tom made a tiny, breathy hum. Almost content. Almost embarrassed.

He leaned forward, pressing his small cheek into Harry’s fingertip as if imprinting the shape, savoring the contact he clearly hadn’t expected to survive long enough to feel again.

"You don't know how much I waited to be touched by you." Chibi Tom purred as he clung into Harry's hand. "I am no longer stuck as a reflection in a mirror. I am now physical!!" He yelled proudly.

Harry's heart melted at how cute this little guy is. 

“Did it… work?" He asked. "Are you both?”

Tom stared up at him. He nodded once.

Firmly.

Proudly.

Harry laughed, real, breathless, relieved laughter because of course Tom Riddle, newly born, four inches tall, and barely strong enough to stand, would still find a way to enter his heart.

He was still Tom.

Harry’s Tom.

His soulmate.

Even if he was currently smol.

[>⁠▽⁠<]

Chapter Text

Harry woke to something small walking along his leg, then to his abdomen.

“Harry. Wake up. I’ve got intel,” a tiny voice said.

Harry cracked one eye open. “Tom… it’s too early…”

Tom marched across his chest like a four inch general.

“I remembered something important and I refuse to sit on it all morning.”

Harry groaned and slowly open his eyes, and came face to face with the chibi version of two parts of his soulmate's soul. 

“Good morning.” Harry greeted as he stretched his arms up, the moon mark glitching wildly in his palm. But the dominant expression that it has is pure adoration.

Tom stared at him for a few seconds, eyes wide, and cheeks going slightly pink. 

He was surprised at how gorgeous Harry is in the morning, especially with those bright green eyes, looking at him.

“Hey...” He tried to sound cool, scratching the back of his neck.

Harry smiled. “What’s the important thing?”

Tom eventually snapped out of it and straightened up, and goes back to serious mode. “I remember where the diadem is.”

Harry stares, confused. "Diadem?"

"It's one of my Horcruxes" Tom answered.

Harry blinked and sat up fast. “Where?” 

Tom rolls down from the sudden movement but luckily, Harry managed to catch him.

“Room of Hidden Things,” Tom said, waving his hands dramatically as he settled in Harry's hand. “I believe it's a hidden room here in Hogwarts that looks lot like a giant trash pit of random items.”

Harry blinked. “and where's that?"

“Yeah, that’s the issue.” Tom rubbed his tiny face. “My memory’s… ugh. Patchy. I know it’s there, but I don't know the location.”

Harry sighed. That's gonna be hard considering how huge this castle is. And the fact that it's hidden, makes it more harder.

Tom patted his nose.

“Hey. Don’t worry. We’ll find it,” Tom said softly.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Classes were a new experience.

Tom insisted on staying in Harry’s left pocket, his tiny head popping out to look around the classroom with curiosity.

Charms.

Students raised their wands.

And Tom began his judgemental commentary.

“That wand movement is a crime.” he hissed, his voice dripping with disdain as he watch Neville try to do a spell.

Harry covered his pocket discreetly. “Tom...."

Tom craned his neck farther out.

“Harry, don’t you dare copy that,” he snapped, currently glaring at Seamus’s wand flourish. “It’s wrong. Is he trying to blow himself up?”

Then Ron tried a charm. His wand wobbled.

Tom slapped a tiny hand over his eyes.

“Are you guys trying to cast or just waving sticks around like wet noodles?”

Ron groaned loudly into his hands, having heard the tiny terror in Harry's pocket

“Merlin, he’s worse than Hermione.” he complained.

Hermione whipped toward Ron, scandalized.

“Excuse me?!”

Tom leaned out further, pointing a tiny finger at her.

“No, no, she’s fine. You, on the other hand, are holding your wand like you’re about to butter a piece of toast.”

Ron sputtered.

“It’s how I always hold it!”

“And that explains everything.” Tom declared grandly.

Ron groaned.

Hermione and Harry laughed.

Flitwick raised an eyebrow, suspicious.

Tom ducked back into the pocket to hide.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Tom sat in Harry’s pocket, absolutely vibrating with fury.

His rants were very impressive.

“This woman is committing crimes against magic," he hissed, tiny hands gripping the pocket edge.

Harry pretended to cough to hide a snort.

“Wizards do not need to perform magic in a classroom to understand it…” Umbridge explained, looking like a very proud toad.

Tom clenched his tiny fists.

Harry whispered, “Tom. Calm down.” 

The chibi pouts and starts ranting silently, mouth moving, no sound coming out. 

He's obviously used to not having a voice due to his time being reflected in a mirror.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠/⁠¯

They are now at the Great Hall, eating dinner.

“You have to teach them yourself.”

Tom’s voice drifted up from Harry’s pocket, muffled only slightly by cotton and the clink of cutlery around them. He is currently picking at a crumb of bread the size of his head. 

He didn’t need to eat because this body wasn’t technically a body. It was a temporary physical shell, the book transfigured into something alive. Or semi alive.

He didn’t know how it worked.

And the fact that he didn’t know made him scowl every time he thought about it.

His only theory was Harry.

A magic he couldn’t identify. A magic he didn’t understand.

The power the Dark Lord knows not.

“What?”

Harry blinks and looks down at his pocket.

Tom looks up and smiles. “Teach them,” he repeated.

“You’ve fought me multiple times already... well the other me,” he waved a tiny dismissive hand. “But the point stands. I’ve seen you. You’re good at defense. Ridiculously good. And half these students don’t even know how to block a Stinging Hex.”

Harry looked around the Great Hall automatically.

Students laughing.

Eating.

Complaining about homework.

Completely unaware.

Harry swallowed.

“But I’m not a teacher.”

Tom’s head whipped up, little eyebrows arching with distaste.

“Better than her,” he hissed, dripping venom on every syllable of Umbridge’s name without actually saying it.

Harry choked on his pumpkin juice, trying not to laugh at how cute Tom looks when he's angry.

But that was when Hermione’s head snapped around, having to hear their conversation.

Followed by Ron’s.

“You’re right. He should.” Hermione whispered as she leaned in.

Ron blinked. “What?”

Hermione’s voice grew fierce, eyebrows knitting.

“Tom’s right. Umbridge isn’t teaching us anything."

Chibi Tom nodded in agreement.

“We can’t rely on the Ministry’s curriculum.” Hermione pushed her meal aside, lowering her voice further. “Harry, you’ve actually faced dark magic. Real battles. Real spells. You’re the only one who knows what it’s actually like.”

Ron nodded slowly as he understood her. “And you’re the only one we’d listen to.” he added and proceeds to continue eating.

Harry stared at all three of them.

Hermione’s sharp intelligence.

Ron’s earnest loyalty.

Tom’s tiny thumbs up of encouragement.

He wasn’t a teacher. He didn’t feel like a leader.

But they all looked at him like he was.

And something warmed inside his chest.

Something terrifying.

Something powerful.

Something inevitable.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Night settled over Gryffindor Tower, the dorm quiet except for soft snoring and the occasional rustle of a blanket. 

Harry lay curled on his back, breathing slow and steady, exhaustion finally dragging him under.

Tom, on the other hand, was very much awake.

He sat perched on Harry’s chest, tiny knees hugged to his chest, bare feet sinking slightly into the fabric of Harry’s shirt. 

The rise and fall beneath him was gentle, rhythmic. Each breath rocked him like a boat on calm water.

Harry’s heartbeat thumped steadily under him.

Thump.Thump.

So warm. So alive.

Tom’s eyes drifted upward to the moon mark on Harry’s cheek.

It pulsed faintly, still glitching, its expression twisted into that infuriating mix of smugness and simmering anger. 

Whatever the main soul was plotting, Tom didn’t like it. At all. His tiny fists clenched.

“What have I done to myself?” Tom whispered bitterly to the mark.

The mark smirked. Of course it did.

Tom tore his gaze away, his chest tightening with something painfully old.

He remembered.

He remembered the Chamber, how Harry stood in the darkness, trembling but stubborn, and how Tom felt something inside him snap into place the moment realization hits him.

His.

His soulmate.

Right there, shining like a star in his dark world.

Then came the graveyard, meeting the same boy, yearning the same way.

And the miming, the flirting, the stupid little moments where he found himself tripping over emotions he wasn’t supposed to have.

But the oldest memory hit the hardest.

The nights in Wool’s Orphanage, a scrawny child whispering to the bright star on his chest, the one he didn’t understand yet.

That warm little glow he talked to through the dark.

The promises he made.

“I’ll find you.”

“I’ll be better for you.”

“Just wait for me.”

He remembered longing without knowing the shape of what he was longing for.

And then Harry.... 

Harry of all people, agreed to grant his wish and embraced him in the Chamber of Secrets. A first real affection he had ever felt.

Gentle. Too much. Too kind. Completely undeserved.

Tom swallowed hard as his eyes stung.

He hated crying.

Despised it.

Weak. Pointless. Childish.

But as tears pricked and spilled, dropping onto Harry’s shirt like tiny diamonds, Tom forced himself to breathe.

“Only for you,” he whispered, voice cracking tinier than his current body.

"You're the only one who can make me cry."

He curled forward, letting his forehead rest over Harry’s heart. The warmth seeped into him, steady, grounding, unbearably soft. 

Something inside him loosened, something that had been bound tight for years, decades, lifetimes.

For once, he didn’t fight it.

Tom curled on himself, small body forming a tiny ball on top of Harry’s chest.

He closed his eyes.

Let the heartbeat lull him.

Let the safety sink in.

And slowly, very slowly…

He slept.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Chapter Text

The castle was quiet, the sort of suspicious quiet Hogwarts only managed when students were plotting something mildly illegal. 

Which, as far as Tom was concerned, was a perfect time to explore.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione were currently getting ready for their Hogsmead visit when Tom decided to climbed up, and poked his tiny head out.

“I will be going on a search for the room where the diadem is while you three have your little revolution.” he declared with great importance.

“Right now?” Harry asked as he helped him get out of his pocket.

“Yes, right now,” Tom said as he was placed gently on top of a table, dusted himself off dramatically, and made a tiny shooing gesture with both hands. "Now, go!"

Harry sighed and couldn’t help but smile at how adorable Chibi Tom looks. “Alright, just take care, okay?” he said.

Tom paused for a fraction of a second, just long enough for something soft to flicker in his expression.

The moon on Harry's wrist did the same, before going static again.

“Yes. Of course" he answered, fidgeting.

“Come back before curfew,” Harry said, adjusting his scarf.

Tom stood at the edge of the table, hands on his tiny hips, staring up at Harry like a four inch general giving his final orders.

“I always come back to you,” he said simply, too honest, too casual, and then looked away as if he hadn’t just lit a fire in Harry’s heart.

He took a step back.

Paused.

Looks back at Harry, with determined eyes and says, "And don’t let anyone else put their hands in your pocket. That is my residence.”

The trio nearly choked, laughing, at how cute that was.

Harry shook his head fondly and helped him get down from the table and can only watch as Tom skittered toward the corridor, a tiny silhouette running along against the castle stone.

“Stay safe,” Harry called quietly.

Tom didn’t turn, but his voice drifted back, just loud enough for Harry to hear.

“For you? Always!!"

And he disappeared.

(⁠｢⁠`⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠｢

Hogsmeade was cold that weekend, wind scraping down the streets like a warning. The Hog’s Head stood crouched at the end of a narrow lane, looking exactly the sort of place respectable students should avoid. 

Dusty windows. Rust stains. A smell like old broomsticks and goats. Perfect for secrecy.

Harry stepped inside with Ron and Hermione close behind him. 

The pub was dim, thick with shadows and suspicious glances from old wizards hunched over cloudy drinks. Harry expected maybe five people or ten at most.

Instead, students kept arriving.

Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, even a couple of younger Gryffindors who definitely shouldn’t have been trusted with the word 'secret'.

Harry blinked. 

Ron stared. “Hermione, how many people did you talk to?”

“Just a few,” she whispered, looking far too pleased with herself.

They crammed into a corner, whispering at first. Then Hermione cleared her throat and, in a voice that somehow demanded absolute silence, explained why they were there. 

Umbridge wasn’t teaching them anything real. They were unprepared. They needed someone who actually knew magic beyond reading out of a book.

Every eye turned to Harry.

Questions came fast and blunt.

“Is it true you fought Voldemort?” 

“You really killed the basilisk?” 

“You escaped Death Eaters?”

Harry’s face burned, and he muttered answers, trying not to sound like he was boasting. 

He wasn’t proud of any of it; he just survived.

Hermione stepped forward again. “Harry should teach us.”

Harry nearly choked. “I... I’m not...” he stammered.

But no one cared about his protests. The students leaned forward, eyes full of fierce hope and absolutely no doubt. 

And in that moment, Harry finally agreed. 

And they eventually came up with a name for their group. 

Dumbledore's Army

A ripple of delighted laughter spread through the room. Even Harry smiled at the sight.

They all agreed, right there, in that dusty pub that smelled faintly of goat hair and rebellion. 

Hermione pulled out a piece of parchment and passed it around, everyone signing their names with quiet determination.

They will meet secretly. 

They will learn real magic. 

And they wouldn’t let Umbridge control them.

(⁠｢⁠`⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠｢

“Finding a hidden room…” Tom muttered under his breath, stalking along the edge of the corridor. “How hard can it be?”

Turns out, it was disastrously hard.

First problem, he's not alone.

He took two steps, proud and confident, and then something shifted in the darkness, a low, lazy movement followed by two large, golden eyes blinking at him from beneath a bench.

Crookshanks.

Tom froze mid step, one foot hovering dramatically in the air like an action figure someone forgot to pose properly.

Crookshanks stared at him with the slow, methodical patience of a predator who had suddenly discovered a gourmet snack.

Tom swallowed. “No,” he whispered. “No, you don’t. We are not doing this.”

The cat’s whiskers quivered.

Then Crookshanks’ pupils dilated like he’d just sniffed tuna.

“Oh no no no no.... DON’T YOU DARE!!”

Crookshanks lunged.

Tom launched himself backward with a shriek that would have embarrassed every fragment of himself.

He sprinted down the corridor, tiny feet hammering against stone.

He darted under a suit of armor, barely avoiding being decapitated by the swinging metal skirt, then shot past a tapestry so fast the woven unicorn whipped around dramatically.

He dashed down the stairs, practically tumbling, arms windmilling like a very determined beetle.

He then, skidded across another hallway.

Silence....

Chibi Tom managed to outrun the cat. He sighed in relief.

Until another pair of glowing eyes ignited ahead of him like headlights on a highway.

Mrs. Norris.

“Oh, come on!” Tom shrieked. “Why is every living thing trying to eat me?!”

Mrs. Norris replied with a sinister hiss that suggested she believed that to be a ridiculous question.

Tom spun on his heels and bolted again, nearly tripping over his own tiny robes that Hermione had conjured up for him. 

He shot up another staircase, almost rolled back down it like a pebble, scrambled around a corner, and smacked full body into a stone wall that happened to be a door he hadn’t intended to open at all.

The wall yawned open with a groan.

Tom stumbled through, panting, indignant, and absolutely certain he was never forgiving Hogwarts for this humiliation.

He slammed the heavy wooden door shut behind him and sighed in relief as he wasn't being chased anymore.

But, unfortunately, he realized immediately that he had entered the owlery.

Dozens of owls rotated their heads, eerie and synchronized, staring straight at him.

Tom froze.

“Oh, marvelous...”

(⁠｢⁠`⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠｢

Numerous enormous eyes, like glowing coins glinting down at him. Even for Tom Riddle, this felt ominous.

He tried diplomacy. He really did.

Tom lifted both hands in what he hoped was a universal gesture of peace. “Be reasonable,” he said, voice cracking just a bit. “I’m exceedingly small. There’s hardly a mouthful of me.”

One owl screeched.

Then another.

Then the entire owlery exploded into a chorus of furious and loud hoots.

Beaks snapped. Wings thundered. Feathers blurred into a storm. Tom ducked, scrambled, dove between talons, and flung himself under a perch, clinging to the stone floor.

A massive brown owl swooped from above, talons extended like hooked knives, and something white and furious slammed into it mid air in a brilliant flash of feathers.

Hedwig.

She hit the larger owl with enough force to send it spiraling off course, then circled back, wings fanned wide, haloed by moonlight. Her golden eyes gleamed murder.

Tom was panting, hair frazzled, dignity shredded. He stared up at her, tiny chest heaving. “Thank you?”

Suddenly, a deafening chorus of screeches erupted around them, wings beating the air like a hurricane made of feathers and murderous intent.

The owls did not back down.

In fact, several rather massive ones seemed to take Hedwig’s defense of Tom as a personal declaration of war.

“Oh come on!" Tom yelped. "What did I ever do to birds??”

(⁠｢⁠`⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠｢

Chapter Text

Hedwig shoved Tom backward with her beak, trying to tuck him behind her, but three owls barreled in, completely ignoring Hedwig because apparently they all wanted to eat Tom first.

“Are you all insane?! I am very unappetizing!”

Tom's voice cracked into a squeak as he sprinted, tiny legs slapping against the stone floor.

Hedwig launched herself forward, wings flaring wide enough to knock two owls aside. She snapped her beak in a warning crack, but the attackers didn’t care. 

Feathers whirled everywhere, a chaotic cyclone of wings, claws, and furious hoots.

Suddenly, Tom tripped.

"Ow."

An enormous owl saw it and dove for him, talons outstretched.

Tom froze, looking up with an expression that would have sent Death Eaters running.

Pure, cold, murderous intent.

If only his current temporary body has magic, he would have killed every single owl in this castle. 

Well, aside from Hedwig, of course.

Who immediately shot downward, grabbed the back of his tiny conjured robes in her beak, and yanked him upward, tossing Tom into the air and he landed safely on her back.

He clung to her feathers as she shot forward into the sky, wings slicing the air.

Behind them, at least six furious owls rushed out of the tower openings, screeching like banshees that had just lost a prize snack.

Tom clung to Hedwig’s feathers, eyes glancing back at the owls that are chasing them, wind ripping at his tiny hair. 

Hedwig hooted sharply over the wind, sharp, and commanding.

Tom could swear it meant hold on.

Owls chased them into the open sky, swooping dangerously close. 

Hedwig twisted mid air, ducking right between two towers, barely clearing the stone. 

A brown owl managed to catch up. 

Fast, silent, murderous, and snapped its beak around Tom’s ankle.

Tom squeaked.

He kicked the owl square in the face with his tiny foot, which hurt him more than the owl, but it did make the creature reel back in offended outrage.

Hedwig shrieked, furious.

Then she dove.

One moment they were gliding.

The next they were plummeting straight down like a falling comet of white feathers.

Tom plastered himself flat against her back, screaming internally.

The chasing owls overshot by a mile, momentum carrying them forward as Hedwig dropped out from under them.

They screeched, spinning in the air in confused spirals as they tried to correct their course.

Too slow.

Hedwig snapped her wings open at the last second, pulling up so sharply Tom nearly flew off her back again.

She blasted upward, slicing cleanly through the air into higher, calmer wind currents.

Tom clung to her, panting, heart rattling like a tiny hummingbird trapped in his chest.

Only when the sky around them fell quiet, no talons, no screeching, no homicidal birds, did he finally start to breathe properly.

His fingers loosened their death grip on Hedwig’s feathers, just a little.

The wind tore past them as she carried him even higher, the cold air sharp against his cheeks.

He hugged her feathers tightly, the castle shrinking beneath them.

He should have felt awed.

He should have felt relieved.

Instead, He still felt furious.

A hot, helpless kind of fury that simmered beneath his tiny ribs.

He glared down at his little hands, fingers barely long enough to wrap around Hedwig’s neck feathers.

Pathetic.

Useless.

Defenseless.

He couldn’t cast a shield.

He couldn’t hex those deranged owls into dust.

He couldn’t even conjure a spark.

Just run and hide.

Avoid getting eaten alive by household pets.

His jaw tightened.

Hedwig hooted at him firmly.

“Oh, don’t you start,” Tom muttered darkly. “I could’ve handled them if I had my magic.”

Another hoot.

Tom narrowed his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know. Tiny body, no wand, very adorable, blah blah. Still humiliating.”

Hedwig angled her wings, catching a thermal and carrying them effortlessly higher.

Tom swallowed, closing his eyes against the sting of frustration.

“What good am I like this?” he whispered. “I can’t even protect myself... How will I be able to protect Harry?”

Hedwig shifted beneath him, her posture changing, still firmer but almost comforting.

She let out a quiet hoot, softer than before.

A reassurance.

He gripped a feather, shaky. “Thank you... I mean it.”

And Hedwig hooted.

ᕦ⁠ʕ⁠ ⁠•⁠ᴥ⁠•⁠ʔ⁠ᕤ

Harry practically sprinted through the halls, eyes darting around corners as if expecting miniature Tom to pop out from behind a suit of armor.

Nothing.

He checked under tables, peeked behind portraits, even stuck his head into an alcove where two first years were snogging.

 “Sorry! carry on...”

But there was no sign of his Chibi Lord anywhere.

Ron and Hermione exchanged worried looks, but Harry was already moving, searching corridor after corridor.

Tom should have been back in Gryffindor Tower the moment they returned from Hogsmeade.

But his dormitory had been empty. No Tom on the pillow.

Just absence.

And Harry hated absence more than anything.

He checked the common room twice. 

He checked the fireplace. 

He checked his own pockets again as if Tom might have magically appeared back inside them.

Nothing.

He glanced at the moon mark on his forearm. 

It looks furious and upset. 

Harry doesn't even know if that emotion belongs to the tiny Tom or to another fragment.

“Where is he?” Harry muttered under his breath, trying to keep his voice steady and completely failing. 

He wasn’t just irritated. He was genuinely worried.

Negative thoughts wandered in his mind. 

What if Tom got stuck somewhere? 

What if something happened?  

What if he's hurt?

What if....

Suddenly, a gust of cold air swept through the corridor. Harry turned just as a snowy white shape shot through the nearest window, wings flaring wide.

“Hedwig?”

She swooped low, landing with surprising grace, considering she was carrying a very rumpled looking tiny thing on her back.

Tom looks scary with that malicious look on his face but it completely changed once he he looks up and sees Harry.

“Hi,” Tom croaked, mood changing, and suddenly clinging onto Hedwig like he’d survived ten natural disasters in a row.

Harry stared. “Where? What? Why? How?"

Tom slid off Hedwig and immediately collapsed to his knees, dramatically gasping.

“Cats and birds are trying to murder me!” he complained, sobbing, and reaching for his soulmate.

Harry scooped him up on instinct, relief flooding his face. “Are you okay?! What happened?"

Tom pointed at Hedwig like she was both his savior and the cause of his psychological trauma. 

“She threw me. She literally threw me at the sky!" He exclaimed while making exaggerated movements.

Hedwig preened proudly, absolutely unapologetic.

Harry’s expression softened, thumb gently brushing Tom’s tiny cheek. “You scared me…” he said, softly.

Tom blinked, regret flooding his face. “I… I wasn’t trying to.” he mumbled, shyly.

Harry held him close, protective and warm. “Next time, you stay with me, okay?”

Tom, exhausted, nodded into his chest. “Okay.”

Hedwig hooted as if proclaiming: I return this small gremlin to you intact. You’re welcome.

And Harry couldn’t help smiling, relief finally melting the worry from his eyes as he cradled tiny Tom against his heart.

And Tom melting into his warmth.

ᕦ⁠ʕ⁠ ⁠•⁠ᴥ⁠•⁠ʔ⁠ᕤ