Chapter Text
The estate is on the western edge of the island, cliffside, warded against everything imaginable.
Harry found it four years after the war. A Potter solicitor had tracked him down, a short man with thin hair and a thin voice, who had sat across from Harry in a sterile office and informed him that there was an estate, and a vault, and a title, and would he like to know about any of it. Harry had sat in that office and felt something that took him a while to identify as grief.
He had not known the Potters had left him anything beyond the cloak, the destroyed house in Godrick's Hallow, and the vault. The solicitor had apologized for the delay. The records had been misfiled. The previous solicitor had died. The war had made everything complicated. Harry had nodded and signed and taken the coordinates, and he had not visited the estate for months. He had not been ready, until, one day, he had to be.
Now he walked through the front door for the first time, the second time in his life.
The manor had been built sometime in the seventeenth century, added to and modified by generations of Potters who could not agree on what a house should be. The front hall was dark oak and high ceilings, the stairs curved up to a gallery that ran the length of the building. A chandelier hung in the center of the hall, its crystals dull with dust, and the portraits on the walls were covered in cloth. Harry had not uncovered them. He did not want to meet the eyes of ancestors who would look at him and see a stranger.
He knew the wards from the future. He had spent years in this house during the worst of the fighting, hiding, planning, bleeding out on the kitchen floor while Draco held pressure on a wound that would not stop seeping. The house had kept them safe. The house had hidden them. The house had accepted Harry as its own, recognizing the blood in his veins and the magic in his bones, and it had never once asked for anything in return.
He walked through the wards now and felt them part for him like curtains. The manor opened. Old stone. Older magic. The dust shifted in the air as he passed, disturbed for the first time in years, and the floors creaked under his feet as if testing his weight.
He stood in the center of the front hall and let the silence settle around him.
Home, sweet home…
He spent the first day preparing the ritual space.
The ballroom was at the back of the house, a long rectangular room with windows that faced the sea. The floor was black and white marble, checkered like a chessboard, and the walls were paneled in dark wood that reflected the light from the chandeliers. Harry had never seen this room used for dancing. In the other timeline, it had been a hospital ward, then a storage room, then a morgue when the fighting got bad and the bodies had nowhere else to go before the burning.
He cleared the room. Removed the sheets from the furniture, levitated the chairs and tables into the hallway, pulled the rugs back and rolled them against the walls. The marble floor was cold and smooth under his bare feet. He knelt in the center and began to draw.
The chalk was ground from unicorn bones. Jacob had taught him how to make it, grinding the bones in a mortar while reciting a chant that Harry had memorized and would never understand. The words were old, older than English, older than the Latin that wizards used for their spells. They felt strange in Harry's mouth when he practiced them alone. They tasted like iron and ash.
He drew the outer circle first, working outward from the center, the chalk leaving a pale grey line on the black marble. The circle was twelve feet in diameter. The lines had to be continuous, unbroken, a single circuit of protection and containment. Harry crawled on his knees, the chalk held between his fingers, and he did not stop until the circle was complete.
The inner circle came next. Smaller, eight feet across, concentric with the outer ring. The space between the two was for the text, the Parseltongue inscriptions that would bind the ritual and hold it stable. Harry had practiced the symbols on parchment for months, had made Jacob check every curve and every line, had rewritten them until his hand cramped and his eyes blurred. The symbols were not meant to be written by human hands. They were meant to be hissed, spoken, shaped by a forked tongue and a throat that could form sounds no human larynx was designed to make.
Harry wrote them anyway. Slowly. Carefully. Each symbol took him several minutes, his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth, his mind reaching for the shape of the sound that went with the shape of the mark.
The inner ring was for the Horcruxes. Three cardinal points. The ring at the north. The locket at the east. The diadem at the west. Harry placed them on the marble, still in their lead boxes, still sealed. They would come out of the boxes when the ritual began. Not before.
He finished the circle as the sun set. The light through the windows turned from gold to orange to a deep, bruised purple, and Harry sat back on his heels and looked at what he had made. The chalk lines glowed faintly in the dark, a soft white light that pulsed once, twice, and then subsided.
The room was ready.
He spent the second day preparing the bedroom.
The master suite was on the second floor, at the end of the gallery, with windows that faced the sea and a fireplace that had not been lit in decades. Harry cleaned it. He stripped the old linens from the bed, burned them in the backyard, and made the bed with fresh sheets he had bought in a Muggle shop in Portree. The sheets were white, high-thread-count, the kind of thing Petunia would have approved of, and Vernon would have complained was a waste of money. He did not know why he had chosen white. It seemed appropriate somehow.
Clean. Neutral. A blank slate.
He removed everything that could be used as a weapon. The fireplace poker went into the hallway. The letter opener on the desk went into the drawer, and then he thought better of it and took it downstairs to the kitchen. The scissors in the bathroom. The loose nail he found on the windowsill, small and rusty, so insignificant that he almost left it. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
The magic-dampening shackles were in his pocket. He had taken them from Grimmauld Place before he left, lifting them from Moody's collection of Dark Detectors and confiscated artifacts. Moody would not miss them. He had a dozen more.
Harry attached the shackles to the headboard. The metal was cold and dark, inscribed with runes that suppressed magic and left the wearer as powerless as a Muggle. He had worn shackles like these once. The Clarity Coalition had put them on him after a raid went wrong, and he had spent three days in a cell while they decided what to do with him. The shackles had not held him. He had learned to work around them, to find the gaps in their suppression.
The shackles on the headboard would hold Tom. They had to. The ritual would leave him weak, disoriented, his magic scattered and slow to respond.
He set the wards around the room. Detection wards, like the ones at the Gaunt shack, but stronger. Wards that would alert him the moment something living moved in that space. Wards that would seal the room if anyone tried to enter without his permission. Wards that would scream if Tom managed to break free of the shackles.
When he was done, he stood in the doorway and looked at the room.
The windows reflected the sky, grey and overcast, and the sea beyond was a darker grey, choppy, whitecaps forming in the distance. The room was silent.
Tomorrow, he thought.
On the third morning, Harry woke before dawn.
He lay in the bed he had made for himself in one of the smaller guest rooms, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle around him. The sea was loud today, the waves crashing against the cliffs below, and the wind rattled the windows in their frames. He had not slept well. He had not expected to.
He rose. Showered. Dressed in black: black trousers, black shirt. He did not know why he had chosen black. It was not a funeral. Not exactly.
He ate breakfast standing at the kitchen counter: a piece of toast, a cup of tea, both of which tasted like nothing. He washed the dishes, dried his hands and then walked to the ballroom.
The circle was still there, glowing faintly in the dim morning light. The Horcruxes were in their places, humming. Harry stood at the edge of the outer circle and looked at it for a long time.
If this goes wrong, Jacob had said, the circle will collapse. The energy will have nowhere to go. It will tear through the room, through you and through anyone else within a hundred meters. There will be nothing left to bury.
Harry had nodded. He had understood what was at stake.
He stepped into the circle anyway.
The chalk lines flared as he crossed them, a brief flash of white light that faded as quickly as it came. He walked to the center. Turned to face the north and knelt.
He opened the first box. The ring. He placed it on the marble at the northern point of the inner circle. The metal was cold, the stone dark, and the moment it touched the floor, the glow in the chalk lines intensified. The ring pulsed once, twice, three times.
The second box. The locket. East. It hit the marble and the circle shuddered, a vibration that Harry felt in his teeth. The whispers tried to surface, but the circle drowned them out, the Parseltongue text burning bright.
The third box. The diadem. West. It lay on the marble and the circle went silent. The glow held steady. The room held its breath.
Harry raised his hands. The ritual required blood. His blood. He made a small cut on his palm and let the blood well up and pool in his cupped hand. He tipped it forward and let the blood drip onto the marble at the center of the circle.
The circle pulsed once, a deep thrum that Harry felt in his chest. The Horcruxes began to glow, each one emitting a light that matched the color of the chalk lines. The ring burned red. The locket burned green. The diadem burned blue.
Harry opened his mouth and began to chant.
The language was older than Latin. He had learned it from Jacob's transcription, had memorized it over three days in the forest, repeating the syllables until they lost all meaning and became just sounds, just shapes in his mouth. His tongue moved in ways that felt unnatural, his throat constricted around vowels that did not belong to any language he had ever spoken, but the words came anyway.
The circle responded.
The chalk lines blazed white, then gold, then a color Harry did not have a name for. The Horcruxes pulsed in time with his voice, their lights brightening and dimming in a rhythm that matched his heartbeat. The air in the room grew heavy, thick with magic that pressed against Harry's skin like a living thing.
He did not stop.
The text on the outer ring began to lift off the floor. The symbols rose into the air, glowing, rotating, arranging themselves into patterns that Harry had never seen before. They circled the room, faster and faster, and the Horcruxes screamed.
Not aloud. The sound was in Harry's head, in his bones, in the scar on his forehead that had begun to burn with a pain he had not felt since the night Voldemort died.
Harry kept chanting.
The air above the circle began to crack.
A fissure opened in the space above the Horcruxes, a wound in the world, and through it came a pressure that made Harry's ears pop and his vision blur. The fissure widened. The pressure grew. And then, with a sound like tearing silk, the fissure tore open and a body fell through.
Tom Riddle appeared in the circle screaming.
Not in pain, though there was pain in it, a ragged edge that spoke of something being ripped out of him. The scream was fury. Pure, incandescent fury.
His body was the one Harry remembered from the final battle. The snake-faced thing Voldemort had become after decades of Horcruxes and dark magic. Pale, hairless, his features flattened and distorted, his nose reduced to two slits, his fingers long and white and spider-like. He wore dark robes that hung loosely on his thin frame, and his eyes were red, slitted, the eyes of a predator who had forgotten what it meant to be human.
Harry did not stop chanting.
Tom spoke. His voice was high and cold, a hiss that was almost Parseltongue but not quite. He demanded to know where he was. He demanded to know who had dared. He demanded to know what magic this was, because he did not recognize it and that made him afraid and his fear came out as rage.
Harry kept his mind on the text he had memorized, his voice level, his hands moving through the gestures Jacob had taught him. The gestures were important. They shaped the magic, guided it, kept it from tearing the summoner apart along with the summoned. Harry's arms ached. His throat burned. The scar on his forehead was a line of fire.
Tom promised him things. Terrible things. Things that would turn a weaker person's blood to water. He promised pain that would last for years. He promised death that would take decades to arrive. He promised that Harry would beg, would scream, would weep for mercy that would never come.
Harry heard the promises and kept chanting.
The magic built. The circle tightened. The Horcruxes burned brighter and brighter until Harry could barely look at them, and Tom's voice rose to match them, fury and fear and something else, something that might have been wonder. He was feeling it. The pull. The restoration. The pieces of his soul that he had scattered across the country were being drawn back into him, forced back into him, knitted into the fabric of his being whether he wanted them or not.
Then, the screaming stopped.
Tom collapsed. His body hit the marble floor with a sound that made Harry flinch, a heavy, boneless thud. The Horcruxes went dark, their lights extinguishing all at once, and the circle dissolved. The chalk lines faded. The floating symbols dropped to the floor and lay still.
The room was silent.
Harry stood in the center of it with his heart pounding and looked at the man on the floor.
The change had already begun.
Even as Harry watched, the pale, hairless skull of Voldemort was shifting. The skin darkened, took on color. Hair sprouted from the scalp, dark and thick, curling against the marble. The features rearranged themselves; a nose formed where there had been only slits, lips softened, the structure of the face becoming angular and handsome rather than flat and serpentine. The transformation was not instantaneous. It rippled across Tom's body in waves, the flesh remembering a shape it had not worn in decades.
When it stopped, the man on the floor looked younger than Voldemort but older than the memory in the diary. That was the first thing Harry noticed. The snake-faced creature had been ageless in the worst way, neither young nor old, just wrong. This man looked to be in his late thirties, early forties.
He looked, Harry thought with something twisting in his chest, like a darker version of the photograph in the trophy room. The one of Tom Riddle, Head Boy, 1945, had captured a boy of eighteen, all charm and ambition and carefully hidden cruelty.
This man was that boy aged twenty years, worn down by war and power and the slow erosion of a soul that had been split too many times. The bones of the face were the same; the jaw, the cheekbones, the shape of the mouth. But there were lines at the corners of his eyes now, and a hardness to his expression even in sleep, and something about the set of his shoulders that spoke of a life spent looking for threats.
Harry knelt beside him. Pressed two fingers to his throat. A pulse. Strong and steady and human.
He levitated him carefully. Tom's body floated up from the floor, limp and heavy, his dark hair falling across his forehead, his robes pooling around him like water. Harry guided him out of the ballroom, up the stairs, down the gallery to the master suite.
The wards welcomed them. The door opened and the bed waited.
Harry lowered Tom onto the white sheets. He arranged him carefully, straightened his limbs, turned his head to the side so he would not choke if he vomited. Jacob had warned him about that.
The body rejects the soul at first. It does not remember how to hold it. There will be convulsions, possibly vomiting, possibly worse. Keep him on his side until the shaking stops.
Tom was not shaking. He was completely still, his chest rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm. His face in sleep was younger than it had any right to be. Unlined. Peaceful, almost. He looked like a man who had never ordered a murder, never split his soul, never become the darkest wizard of his age.
Harry took the shackles from the headboard. The metal was cold in his hands. He wrapped the first shackle around Tom's left wrist and fastened it. The runes glowed once, briefly, and then went dark. The magic-dampening took hold.
The second shackle went around the right. Harry fastened it and stepped back.
He looked at Tom Riddle, chained to a bed, and felt nothing that he could name.
It is done, he thought.
He is here.
He turned and walked out of the room, the door closing behind him.
He walked down to the kitchen and put the kettle on. His hands were not entirely steady as he measured the tea leaves into the pot. He allowed them that. He allowed himself to lean against the counter while the water boiled, to close his eyes, to breathe in and out in slow, measured rhythms.
The kettle clicked off. He poured the water, waited three minutes, poured the tea into a mug and carried it to the window that faced the sea.
The waves were still crashing, the gulls still crying. The sky was still grey and overcast and indifferent.
Harry drank his tea and waited for Tom Riddle to wake up.
The alert wards fired at four in the morning.
Harry was in the library when they went off, stretched out on a leather sofa that had belonged to some Potter ancestor who had loved books and naps in equal measure. He had been staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster, thinking about nothing and everything, feeing too wired to sleep. The wards screamed into his mind, sharp and insistent, and he was on his feet before the echo faded.
He is awake.
Harry climbed the stairs slowly. His heart was steady, his breathing calm. He had prepared for this, had been preparing for this for longer than he cared to remember, but there was a difference between preparation and the moment itself. Harry felt that difference now as a tightness in his chest that he refused to name.
The master suite was at the end of the gallery. The wards parted for him as he approached, recognizing him as the one who had set them. The door was closed. Harry stopped outside it, placed his palm flat against the wood, and breathed.
Here we go.
He opened the door.
Tom was awake, sitting against the headboard with his back straight and his wrists in the shackles. The chains had enough slack to let him move within a limited range: enough to sit up, to adjust his position, to reach the glass of water Harry had left on the nightstand before he went downstairs, but not enough to reach the door or the windows or anything that could be used as a weapon.
He was examining the room coolly, his jaw tight, his eyes moving methodically across the space as he catalogued and assessed. He was looking for exits, for vulnerabilities, for anything that could be turned to his advantage, Harry realized.
Harry watched him watch the room and felt a small, grudging respect. He had expected rage, shouting, curses and threats and the kind of explosive fury that had made Voldemort so dangerous and so predictable in the past. But he did none of those things.
His eyes were still red, Harry noticed. He had half-hoped the restoration would change that. He had read somewhere, in one of Jacob's books, that the physical transformations wrought by dark magic sometimes reversed themselves when the magic was removed, but the books had been speculative, full of phrases like it is theorized and in rare cases. Harry had known, even as he hoped, that it was unlikely. Tom had been using dark magic for decades. He had split his soul into pieces. He had done things to his body that went beyond simple curses. Some changes could not be undone, not by any ritual Jacob had ever heard of.
Tom's eyes found Harry in the doorway and stayed there.
The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy as smoke. The sea crashed against the cliffs below, a distant, rhythmic roar, and the wind rattled the windows in their frames. Somewhere in the house, a pipe creaked, settling into the morning cold. Harry counted his own heartbeats: one, two, three, four, five.
Tom spoke first. His voice was low and smooth. "You have approximately thirty seconds to explain why I am chained to a bed before I stop caring about the answers and start focusing entirely on how I will make you regret this, Potter."
Harry did not move. He kept his arms crossed and his posture relaxed, even though every nerve in his body was screaming at him to run, fight, do something other than stand here and let Tom Riddle look at him like he was already dead.
"Thirty seconds is not enough," Harry said.
"Then you should have started talking before I finished the sentence." Tom shifted his weight against the headboard, and the chains clinked softly. His red eyes never left Harry's face. "You have twenty seconds now."
Harry pushed off from the doorframe and walked into the room. He walked to the dresser where the lead boxes sat in a neat row, picked up the one containing the locket, and turned it over in his hands. The metal was cold and the runes on its surface glowed faintly, responding to the proximity of the soul they had recently held.
"Do you know what these are?" Harry asked.
Tom's eyes flicked to the box, then back to Harry's face. "I am not playing guessing games with you."
"Horcruxes." Harry set the box back down with a soft click. "Three of them. The ring, the locket, and the diadem. I retrieved them from their hiding places and used them in a ritual that pulled you into the circle and restored you to this body."
The silence that followed was different from before.
Tom's expression did not change, but something in his posture shifted. The tension in his shoulders tightened as he glanced to the three boxes before looking back at Harry.
"You are lying," Tom said. "My Horcruxes are not something a child can just retrieve. The protections alone would have killed you before you could touch them."
"Ah… but, you see, I am not a child," Harry said. He met Tom's red eyes and held them. "I am thirty-one years old. I have fought in two wars. I have killed more people than I can count. And I have already destroyed every single one of your Horcruxes once before, including the one living inside my own skull."
He touched his forehead, where the scar lay hidden beneath his fringe. Tom's eyes tracked the movement, and for the first time, Harry saw something crack in that cold, controlled exterior. A flicker of recognition. A flash of something that might have been understanding.
"A Horcrux," Tom said slowly, voice soft, a whisper.
"The one you marked as your equal," Harry agreed. "The one who killed you in the Great Hall while the entire school watched, about three years from now."
Tom's jaw tightened. His hands curled into fists against the sheets, the chains pulling taut for a moment before he forced them to relax. The red eyes burned brighter, and Harry realized that this was the most dangerous moment. Not when Tom was screaming and threatening. This. The quiet before the storm. The moment when he was deciding whether to listen or to lash out.
"You expect me to believe that you have travelled back in time to retrieve my Horcruxes and restore me to a body I have not worn in decades?" Tom's voice was flat, disbelieving, but there was something underneath it now. Something that sounded almost like hope, though Tom Riddle would never have called it that. "What is your angle, Potter? What do you want?"
"I want you to help me stop a war that has not started yet." Harry crossed the room and sat down in the chair by the window, positioning himself so that he could see Tom's face and the door at the same time. Old habits.
"The war you started, the one that ended with your death, that was not the end. It was the beginning of something much worse. The Statute of Secrecy was taken down. The Muggles came for us, and they did not come with wands. They came with laws and registrations and laboratories, and they took us apart piece by piece."
Tom laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. It was sharp and cold and utterly without humour.
"The Muggles," he repeated. "You brought me back because you are afraid of Muggles?"
"I brought you back because I watched an eleven-year-old boy die in my arms after a Muggle militant shot him in the chest with a bullet enchanted to dissolve magic." Harry's voice did not rise. It did not need to. The words landed like stones dropped into still water. "I brought you back because I watched them strap wizards to tables and drain their magic out of them until they were nothing. I brought you back because the world you wanted to conquer, the world you thought you could rule, is going to be destroyed by people who do not even know magic exists, yet. And I brought you back because you are the only person alive who is smart enough and ruthless enough to help me stop it."
The laughter died in Tom's throat. His red eyes searched Harry's face, looking for the lie, the exaggeration, the crack in the story that would reveal everything as a trick. Harry let him look. He had nothing to hide. His grief was real. His rage was real. His desperation was real.
"You actually believe this," Tom said. It was not a question.
"I do not believe it. I lived it." Harry leaned forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees. "I can show you. I brought a Pensieve. It is in the other room. You can watch every memory; from the moment I was born to the moment I stepped into that circle. You can see your own death. You can see what came after. And then you can decide whether I am lying."
Tom was silent for a long moment. The red eyes never left Harry's face. The chains hung slack between his wrists, the wind rattled the windows, the sea crashed against the cliffs, and Harry waited.
"If I agree to watch your memories," Tom said finally, "you will release these shackles."
"No."
"No?" Tom's voice was soft, dangerous. "You expect me to sit here, chained like an animal, while you pour your memories into my head?"
"I expect you to sit there and watch, yes." Harry did not flinch. "The shackles stay on until I am certain you are not going to kill me the moment I let my guard down. You can hate me for it. You can plan your revenge, and your torture. But the shackles stay on."
"And if I refuse?"
Harry shrugged. "Then I put you back to sleep and we try again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. I have waited years for this moment, Tom. I can wait a few more days."
Tom's lips curved. It was not a pretty smile. Harry’s stomach flipped at the sight. He ignored it.
"You are not what I expected, Harry Potter."
"I rarely am."
Harry stood up from the chair and raised his wand, a summoning charm falling from his lips. As the Pensieve zoomed into the room, he caught it and then looked at Tom.
"I will extract the memories now. I am warning you, you will see things that will make you angry, and you will see things that will make you want to hurt me. I am asking you to wait until the end before you decide what to do about any of it."
"And if I cannot wait?"
Harry met his eyes and did not look away. "Then I will put you down. If you are going to act like a rabid dog, Tom, I will treat you as such. I have done it once, and I can do it again."
The silence stretched between them. The silver light of dawn filtered through the windows, casting long shadows across the floor. The sea crashed. The wind rattled. Tom Riddle, the darkest wizard of his age, chained to a bed, inclined his head, his eyes glinting.
"Show me," he said.
Harry did.