Reprieve

Warning: chan

Note: A little Christmas ficlet for Bellonablack, with some serious love and thanks for all the help!

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It doesn't look at all like a memory.

Not like a Pensieve, nor like the clear-cut vision of Hogwarts Harry has seen in Riddle's memories. It looks... unfinished, like a foggy white cell more than anything. The walls... well, whatever goes for walls seems to mirror the squared lines of the exercise book's pages; the corners and the ceiling shine in the same dull red as its cover.

It takes him two seconds to even notice the figure huddled on the ground. No, not quite huddled - more like sitting at the banks of a pond of white mist, dipping toes inside with an air of complete self-absorption. Bare feet are peering out from under the hem of a black robe.

Harry takes a few steps closer, trying to ignore the way misty tendrils flee the soles of his boots as if their solidity was conjuring the floor into being. His footfalls are muffled, but audible in the eerie silence. The boy raises his head.

Harry has expected nothing else, yet something freezes in the pit of his stomach at this last face of Tom Riddle. Young. Very young, a fourth-year at most. His hair is longer than either in the Riddle diary or on the boy in the orphanage in Dumbledore's Pensieve. A vague roundness of the cheeks, or perhaps just a matter of Hogwarts' food having remedied the rail-thinness of the child, and his face not yet having grown into the angularity of adulthood.

He eyes Harry with a cocked head and the tiniest of frowns as if he expects him to disappear again right away. When Harry takes a few more steps, he rises, mist curling around the hem of his robe like stolen hope around a Dementor.

"Who are you?" he asks warily.

The sound of a voice amidst all the silence cuts Harry's ears and makes him shiver.

"I'm Harry Potter."

"Tom Riddle." The boy's lower lip wobbles as if he's considering sticking out his hand, but ultimately decides against it.

"I know," Harry says coldly. Perhaps it is something in his voice, or face, that makes the boy recoil a step.

"You've met my... Him."

"Lord Voldemort," Harry finishes. "I killed him."

Shock flits across the boy's features, followed - faster than Harry could have hoped to imitate at the same age - by understanding. "Have you come to kill me, too?"

He should have tossed the tattered exercise book with its ghost child inside into the nearest fireplace without once looking back, Harry thinks. The prototype of the diary; the work of a younger Tom. Fourteen!

"It's the last fragment left of him," Harry says. He's not quite cruel enough to reply with an outright yes.

The boy stares up at him, and Harry realises how strange it feels to be taller than Tom Riddle, or Lord Voldemort.

"So the crazy woman didn't send you," he states, biting the side of his bottom lip with sharp white teeth as if he hadn't heard Harry's words - or was trying hard to forget them. "She looked through sometimes, but never came in. It... it gets rather lonely."

Harry, who picked up the little exercise book among the scattered remains of Bellatrix Lestrange's lair, isn't surprised.

He could swear he hadn't seen the boy moving, and yet suddenly a small hand brushes his groin; barely there, and yet zinging through Harry's entire frame like a current.

"He taught me this," the boy says, now cupping the outline of Harry's prick through his trousers rather than brushing against it. "Don't worry - I'm not allowed to harm you."

The thought steals Harry's breath, even as it makes sense; Tom Riddle, incapable of love, would not trust anyone with intimacy - except himself.

Slowly, Tom slides to his knees, one hand still on Harry's groin, the other sliding down his hip, a warm trickle through the fabric of his trousers.

"He sent his friends in to me, sometimes," the boy confides to Harry's zip, before rubbing his face over the front of Harry's trousers like a kitten. Harry recoils with a shocked little noise, but a pale hand twists in the folds of his cloak, holding him close. "It's all right... Harry." A smooth face peers up at him with the slightest mischievous curl of the mouth. "My own choice."

So wrong, Harry's mind gibbers at him as his clothes are being tugged out of the way, and soft lips touch him near-reverently right before there's wet and heat and suction that threatens to reach up, engulf and devour his very brain. So wrong because the small ghost is really only doing it to stay alive, but then, Harry thinks (and moans, and thrusts) it was this one (kneading, sucking, whimpering around him) who has taken everyone from him, his lover, his best friend, and Harry deserves to get something back from Tom Marvolo Riddle.

And oh, he does, in a black roar, hands tangled in hair just as black, until even his mind darkens and every drop of rage spills out into that demure receptacle at his feet.

The boy wipes his face on a too-long robe sleeve, hair mussed into a tangled mop, his mouth crimson and shiny while Harry struggles for breath.

"I'm glad that you've come to tell me," Tom says softly. "I think I would have hated just... fading, without knowing why."

There's a hot sting in Harry's eyes as he stumbles backwards, away from the child siren kneeling on the floor with such an un-Voldemort air of peace.

He still trembles long after he's slammed shut the booklet and after the whirl of pages filled with Tom's boyish scrawl has stopped spinning around him. He carries the red-bound thing like a snake about to bite, then stuffs it behind the dusty nine-volume edition of An Exhaustive Account of the Goblin Wars, with Biographical Supplement at the very back of the highest shelf of Number 12 Grimmauld Place's library.

He'll keep it for now, hidden away where it can do no harm to anyone, but he'll never open its pages again. He promises himself that - never again.

And between battered covers, Lord Voldemort kneels and smiles while the echo of his voice and the imprint of his lips coil in the shady nooks of his nemesis' brain.

~ finis ~