Chapter Text
Tom had visited the Black townhouse twice already in his own timeline, invited by Orion to use the library - and in neither those memories, nor any of those sifted out from Voldemort’s faded future, had the house ever been like this.
The weight of Dark energy pressed down upon him, so dense it nearly had a physical weight; shivers ran up his spine the moment he set foot inside. Even sound was muffled as Harry led him through the Floo parlor and up the stairs, Vanishing the dust from the banister with offhand elf-magic as he went; their footfalls were absorbed into the walls, the floors, Tom’s very breath swallowed by the air until it seemed distant to his own ears.
Part of him thrilled in it: in how secret this place must be from the world, to let it get so heavy. In how generous Harry was to share this, the seat of his power, on what seemed to be a whim. Another part of Tom, a pure instinct echoing out from the last years of Voldemort’s memories, was warning him to leave - as a younger Voldemort had once felt the need to flee those pyramids whose honored dead remained entombed inside.
That instinct only grew stronger as they ascended the stairs, but Tom chose not to heed it. He wanted to know what it meant - wanted Harry to tell him, as the man planned to tell him more of his forays into the Dark Arts. He wanted Harry’s arms around him as he relayed his honest reasons for Albus Potter, wanted the brush of lips against the shell of his ear, the nape of his neck - the press of him lower the way it had been that very first night, in Harry’s bed, and the day after, lain atop him in his office.
He wanted-
“Through here,” Harry’s voice cut through his meandering thoughts. They had stopped before a door Tom vaguely recalled being sealed off the last time he’d visited: now, it opened soundlessly beneath Harry’s hand. “Follow me,” he said again, “and carefully. Don’t touch anything.”
Tom did so, though he saw little need for such precautions in the plain-looking parlor beyond the door. Harry led onward, however, up to a second door with peeling black paint around the knob-
And when he opened it, it was clearer what Harry meant.
Far larger than he had expected the second room to be, nearly of a size with the outbuilding Tom had been preparing for his research, it was a library of Dark texts and artifacts at a scale incomparable to anything Tom had ever seen - and rivalling the greatest of those that Voldemort had. Books and scrolls, pristine on shelves of polished wood and chiselled stone; display cases half the length of the room, instruments and relics enshrined in glass; cabinets of curiosity that all but shimmered with the latent magic of the things inside, some so potent that the doors were tied shut with glittering rope. A dozen skulls resided on individual pedestals carved from marble; and a crystal case not much further along the wall appeared to contain the very same skull hookah once used in divinations by Gellert Grindelwald - broken cleanly in half, but each eye still glowed.
There was still more. Tom recognized with a start that the second half of the room had been lifted wholesale from Voldemort’s collections: skeletons of animals, fish and snakes and small mammals and birds, each in their own glass jars, and articulated skeletons of larger game on raised platforms like museum specimens. Shelves set into those walls held urns, which Voldemort had used for the so-called essential saltes that, in accordance with a particular tradition, could be used to call back the souls of the dead they had been rendered from. Coffins lay in alcoves on the furthest wall, sealed with ropes or bolts of silk, whose occupants’ names drifted to the surface of Voldemort’s memories as soon as Tom laid eyes upon them.
(Recovering Voldemort’s research materials, it seemed, would take less time than Tom had planned.)
What a beautiful collection, Tom thought, reveling in how the evidence of necromancy was everywhere before him, enough he could almost taste it in the air like smoke. This place must have been what pinged Voldemort’s instincts, he thought, taking half a step forward toward a mummified hand sealed under a thick glass dome-
A hand closed around his wrist. “Follow me, I said,” Harry snapped, breaking him from the trance of what Tom realized was a sublimely subtle compulsion by the mummified hand in question. He let himself be guided forward through the room again, blinking out of his reverie, until they stopped again under the arch of a plain stone passage, the way forward blocked by a heavy curtain, and turned to face each other.
“You must know by now,” Harry began, softer, “that I was obsessed with Voldemort after the war.”
“Apparently,” Tom drawled, “everyone knows.”
The corner of Harry’s mouth curved up ever-so-slightly, at that. “I suppose you’ve spoken to Celestine, then,” he smiled. Slid his grasp down from Tom’s wrist to his hand, and brought it up to his lips to brush a kiss over the knuckles.
Tom’s breath hitched. Years of time around purebloods had numbed him to their niceties; but with Harry, the gesture suddenly seemed so lewd.
“Necromancy… is not my born talent, Tom,” Harry went on, breath warm on the back of Tom’s hand. “But I wanted it, and so, the effort was made. What I will show you beyond this curtain,” he raised his free hand to drag fingers down the black brocade, “is the product of long years of yearning.”
He released Tom’s hand then, at last, stepping closer. It was impossible not to meet Harry’s eyes now: not when the gaze fixed upon him was so arresting, so dark. Tom swallowed, throat suddenly gone dry, at the gleam of something else there, an emotion he did not yet know how to name.
“It may frighten you,” Harry warned him. “You know I do not say that lightly.”
Tom did know. The creeping unease he had dismissed earlier had come back as soon as Harry’d disturbed the curtain, carried on the cold air that escape from the next room beneath its hem. Were he alone, he would have heeded his instincts’ warning - but he was not alone.
“I trust you,” he said aloud, and it was true. “I want to see.”
Harry slung his arm about Tom’s waist, and reached forward to part the veil, and bring him inside.
Magical societies worldwide had known since antiquity that, in the way that settlements of magical people slowly became magical themselves - the way that houses became magical, over generations of occupancy - any place lived in by a mage for long enough would see their magic embedded into the very floor and walls, a steady accumulation of energy attuned to the mage’s signature and the work they did there. This principle of magic was why landholdings in agrarian societies so rarely changed owners; why agriculture and forestry tended to be done by the same families for centuries; why so often, a lineage would fight to the very last to hold onto their homeland, and the loss of that bloodline would blight the earth it stood upon for long years afterward.
(Why Voldemort had, subconsciously, chosen the Gaunt shack to house the horcrux set into the Gaunt Ring, and why he had chosen Riddle House to recuperate in, in those years he had been so busy with his resurrection: the blood shed in both places had inexorably called to his own.)
A mage’s ritual space - moreso even than other workspace of magical arts - followed this principle of settling to an exponentially greater degree. In Tom’s time, ritual spaces were the most hidden of all places, the most personal; and there was no indication that that had changed in the intervening decades. So a part of him was honored, really, that Harry had chosen to share it with him.
The greater part of him had frozen as soon as he laid eyes on what the room contained.
“Is that,” Tom couldn’t get the words out, seized in the vice-grip of an emotion he couldn’t name.
Beneath a high domed ceiling of black stone, inscribed upon a floor of white marble so stained with old bloodshed as to be reddish-brown in the center - the knowledge of such slaughter enough to make Tom’s hair stand on end - was a great triangle. Within it, a circle. Within that, a seven-pointed star. Through it, bisecting the inscription perfectly, a line.
The near point of the triangle was before them, and empty. The far points touched on two columns of dark crystal, glittering in the room’s faint light, nearly enough to obscure what lay within, but only nearly.
Harry guided Tom around the circle, clockwise, and made him see: suspended in the stone like a fossil in amber was a sinewy skeleton, fragmented and darkened by time.
“She was buried in a potter’s field, outside London,” the man said quietly. “One of thousands of nameless bodies, but I knew.”
As Tom knew. As he had once thought he knew, one night at Wool’s, struck by certainty like lightning - and lain awake til dawn, too young, too indecisive, to go and see what the earth held for him.
He spared a glance for the other column, for the skeleton there - the top half of its skull crumbled away - and did not need to ask who that was, either.
So he turned his gaze to the center of the circle instead. To the raised dais, arranged along the line; and the shape that lay upon it, draped in fabric so black it resembled a hole in space. A shape closer to living than either skeleton before it - but still, so far.
“Don’t touch it,” Harry warned again, and Tom realized he had raised a hand as if to reach out; Harry’s fingers curled around his wrist, as much a grounding as a brand. “I don’t know what would happen if you did.”
With magic, instead, the man plucked at the edge of the fabric and lifted it: only enough for Tom to see that ageless, fine-wrought face, which he did not need the screaming of instinct in fragmented memories to recognize.
The second body of Lord Voldemort lay as pristine as the day he’d died.
“There are so very many rituals,” murmured Harry, “of resurrection. And every one of them,” he released the drape, “I found… so incomplete.” He led Tom by the hand the rest of the way around the circle, until they were back by the door, as far from the dead as they could be; only then did Tom relax, or realize he had been shaking in the first place.
“So I created one more.”
“Albus,” Tom hissed, goosebumps rising up his arms. “You created him - for this?”
Harry stepped closer, now; loomed over him, chest pressed to Tom’s back. He had not let go of Tom’s wrist again; his thumb traced circles over Tom’s pulse now, surely feeling how it raced.
“He would have lived,” the man reassured him, the promise murmured sweet into his ear. “He is our son.”
Tom heard the heavy breath that passed his lips as though someone else had produced it. “Harry-”
The lights in the ritual room, already so dim, abruptly flickered out.
Harry began his second confession.