#neurowriter14

"You killed my mother." "And I brought her back!" "You used hatred to propel yourself to power." Harry continued. "You say that as if Muggles are good people." Voldemort snarled. "You know the people I grew up with. Look at your aunt and uncle." He had a point, but Harry wasn't willing to relent. "A few bad people doesn't make them all bad. There are good people too. You just wanted power and you took it from hateful people. And now you don't know what to do with them." "What do you want me to say, Harry?" Voldemort demanded. "What do you want to hear, Chosen One?" By now their argument had drawn an audience, but Harry couldn't be bothered with the four figures that were floating at the edge of his vision. At some point during the last two weeks, Voldemort had brought Wormtail to the manor. Harry supposed it was a kind of peace offering between them, giving Harry's parents a chance to deal with the man who betrayed them. Mostly he was just annoyingly underfoot as James and Sirius couldn't see him without wanting to explode and Lily had thrown several potions at him. It left only Harry and Voldemort to deal with him and he was genuinely surprised neither had killed him. "Tell me why you keep fighting a war you no longer seem interested in." He demanded in return. "Tell me why we have to stay locked away in this manor. Tell me what happens if you win the war. Where do we go?" He gestured to his parents and Sirius. "Tell me the place I have in the new world order you want to build. Tell me why you even bothered locking us together when you had no idea how to deal with the consequences. Tell me why people have to die." Voldemort focused on him intently, likely not even seeing the people who were still a good distance from them. "Then you tell me what happens if you win. Tell me where I belong after I tied us together. I'm not a good man, Harry. Do you really think I could be saved?" "Yes," Harry answered immediately. "If you wanted to be." Voldemort almost sneered at him, he could see the other's lips twitch that way, but he stopped before the look finally came over his face. "You don't have to be Lord Voldemort," Harry continued, softening his tone lightly. "People don't have to die." "I-if I might," Wormtail muttered from one end of the room, seeming suddenly much braver than Harry knew he was. But neither Harry nor Voldemort were in the mood to deal with him. They turned at the same time, looking at the man cowering by the front door, and snapped: "Shut up!" "Then what would you have me do?" Voldemort asked after a moment, looking back at him. "End it. End the war. Do the right thing." Harry knew he misstepped the moment the last words left his mouth. Voldemort closed off immediately. "It's more complicated than that." He waved his hand at the front door which swung open. "You wish to leave? Leave." Harry had one last card to play as Voldemort turned away from him once more, ready to walk away. "Tom," He said softly. "It doesn't have to be like that." "I don't see any other way it could be." "You're just too stubborn to do what even you know you should!" Harry yelled, his frustration getting the better of him. "You would have me end a war because of feelings, " Voldemort muttered the last word with venom as though the word itself were his sworn enemy. "Am I not worth ending a war for?" Harry asked, not caring about his audience. Voldemort stopped then as he had made it to the other side of the room, turning to look back at Harry who still stood in the middle of the room. "You are."

...a power he knew not. According to Dumbledore, or at least the version that still lived within the boy's memories, it was love. Dumbledore, the old coot, had fallen into one of the most basic traps of those conceived under a love potion. He, like others, assumed Tom couldn't love. And that wasn't the truth. The truth was he despised love. He had seen what it could do. His own mother was dead from loving someone who didn't love her back. Dead after faking that very same love in the man who would go on to father Tom Marvolo Riddle himself. But Tom had also seen what his very hatred could do as well. What happened when he didn't take into account love but instead spurned it as a weakness. It was love, the very thing that Tom hated the most, that was his undoing. He supposed that was ironic enough. This boy though, Harry Potter, was nearly the exact opposite. He loved, and love quite deeply.

Truly, the boy was a master at repression. He continued through those memories, seeing the various times Harry had glanced Death only to live once more. ...He continued to dig, watching memories of himself, even the ones that occurred not long before Tom was locked away for safekeeping in this locket. And he heard the boy's thoughts about it all. Handsome. Harry Potter thought him handsome. And quite often. He watched as Dumbledore tried to drill into Harry's mind the importance of Horcruxes, and of their destruction. "So," He said out loud, though no one could hear him, not even the memory. "You know what I am, Harry. But what are you?"

He didn't know love until it was strangely foisted upon him from a boy with too much courage and not enough self-preservation with a heart overflowing with love and kindness. Voldemort despised kindness. He rarely saw it as a child, and when he experienced it, it felt more like pity. Except when it came from Harry. Perhaps it was the depth of their connection that he knew the other's kindness was genuine. That he knew the other's love, which he still had yet to fully accept, was real. Even Voldemort hadn't truly accepted his own love for the boy. Harry Potter was the last person on the planet he should consider loving. He was his prophesized undoing. He was the one person who could tear everything he had worked to build down. But Voldemort had fallen into the same trap as so many before him. He had fallen into the trap of so many in Greek myths who sought to undo their fate by purposefully subverting it. He had taken the prophecy all too literally, thinking that his defeat would mean his death and the loss of everything he had worked to build. In truth, that was what happened. He was Voldemort, he was the Dark Lord. And yet he was completely and utterly destroyed by Harry Potter. He had no room for remorse in his life. And yet he felt remorse. Guilt. Fondness. Love. He felt. He felt because of Harry Potter. Because he had tied himself so completely to Harry after learning their connection that he knew the other would be wound in him. He had hoped initially to use this to his advantage. Having the Chosen One on his side would have utterly obliterated his opposition. Their hero was his. Harry Potter belonged to him. And strangely enough, he belonged to Harry Potter.