To Kill You With a Kiss

Chapter 19

Harry stared at the familiar figure of Voldemort. Somehow, the Dark Lord seemed terribly out of place here in the headmaster's office at Hogwarts: a shard from a dark future tearing at the fragile fabric of a more innocent past.

Voldemort? Here at Hogwarts, in this time? How can this be? I am dreaming, of course I am dreaming. Or perhaps it is this sweet, unblemished past that is the dream, and the dark Voldemort and I the only real people in it.

The dark shape drew closer. His eyes are different. He has done something to them, cast some glamour perhaps, so that they appear to be grey rather than crimson. Strange, how that makes him seem more like Tom. And yet they are not quite Tom's eyes; Tom's gaze is silver, and his is a darker grey, like weathered stone or rainy skies.

"My dear child!" Voldemort's voice was strangely gentle. Harry thought his heart would stop as a dark cloak whisked around him and folded him in a sudden, unexpected embrace.

"Ah, how touching!" Professor Dippet's little chuckle seemed to come from somewhere far away. "Such paternal tenderness!"

"How good to see you, Elias." Voldemort clasped him tightly as he spoke in a warm, pleasant voice that seemed to belong to some stranger. The voice of my grey-eyed guardian. For a moment, Harry could almost imagine that the arms that were wrapped around him were not Voldemort's at all, but rather those of a long-forgotten friend and protector, an imaginary guardian from half-remembered daydreams.

But the silver voice that whispered in his ear a moment later was more familiar: "You smell like rain..." It was the voice Harry had heard in a graveyard, far away in a distant future. Voldemort. How odd, to think that I have known you long before I ever fell in love with Tom. In the beginning, there was just you and me.

"Rain? It was beginning to drizzle again, out on the Quidditch pitch," whispered Harry, trying desperately to figure out whether he was awake or dreaming.

Voldemort's cloak, pressed against Harry's face, felt rough against his cheek. Harry breathed in an unfamiliar scent of damp wool and fog and musk. It was Tom's scent, and yet not Tom's at all. Harry lifted his face, and suddenly he felt Voldemort's cheek linger against his own for a moment. The soft, unexpected caress took Harry's breath away. He could hear the rushing of blood in his ears and somewhere, very near, a gentle breathing. He sensed a pulsing beat somewhere, a heavy rhythm, but it took him a moment to understand that it was Voldemort's heart, beating against his own chest.

The embrace lasted only for a brief moment. Then the stranger - Voldemort, Harry reminded himself - turned and began to exchange a few conventional pleasantries with Professor Dippet and Slughorn, while Harry stood silently by his side. Harry was unable to look at Voldemort's face; his bewildered glance lingered on the sleeve of the dark cloak. Black. Voldemort always wore black. Harry realized that he had always vaguely thought of Voldemort's cloak as a shroud of night-black darkness that surrounded him, an absolute impenetrable blackness. But now that he saw the cloak so close, in the warm, flickering lamplight of Professor Dippet's office, Harry saw that the blackness was an abstraction; the cloak was not entirely black after all. It was only at a distance that its fabric seemed all black; up close he could see that the coarse material of the cloak had thin, almost imperceptible threads of verdigris and charcoal and silver running through it. Strange, how different things appear when they are this close. Even Voldemort's cloak. Even Voldemort.

"I know you wanted to talk to me, Elias. I apologize for not coming to see you sooner, but it took me a while to be able to... get away." Voldemort's voice had become that of a stranger again. He turned to Armando Dippet, who was regarding them with a little smile. "Headmaster, is there a place where I can speak to my ward alone? We have a great deal of catching up to do, you see, and I do not want to continue to trespass upon your hospitality by staying here in your office so late in the evening."