Night still clings to Hogwarts’ grounds, though the darkness is thinning now, loosening its hold in the east where the sky has begun to fade to a pale blue. Harry should be asleep, inside the castle with the others, stretched out on a conjured mattress among the wreckage of the Great Hall, or back at the Burrow with a full stomach and a warm blanket.
Instead, he is in the Forbidden Forest.
The earth is damp and soft beneath his trainers, cold seeping through the thin soles. He aches everywhere. His body feels used up, wrung dry by months on the run, by hunger and fear and the constant threat of violence. Used up by the fight yesterday and his spells. By dying and then standing back up.
In the distance, Harry hears a cock crowing. The sound carries cleanly through the waning night.
A symbol of light overcoming the dark, Petunia had said once, in her vague attempts at Christianity, talking at Dudley while he sat at the kitchen table eating. The rooster crowed three times before the resurrection as a sign that the night was ending, a sign that Jesus had died and come back.
Harry exhales, bemused despite everything. Another chosen one risen above the life he wanted. Jesus was a carpenter by trade, and Harry imagines him as just a simple man who likely wanted nothing more than a family and food on his table, calm nights after hard days at work, friends who did not expect miracles from him.
Harry understands that now, in a way he never did as a child, standing in the kitchen doorway at Privet Drive.
He never wanted this life either, never wanted the fame and praise and derision, the pressure, the expectations. But here he is, a hero again.
He doesn’t feel like a hero, though; he’s hungry, cold too, and so tired that his thoughts move slowly, and yet he has been drawn here, into the dark woods, and he knows exactly why.
The Hallows are calling to him. They have been all night, filtering into his attempts at sleep until he was simply lying there staring up at the ceiling as their quiet insistence nagged at him to get up. Now, they tug him through the trees, guiding him along the same path he walked only yesterday. He hears the rooster again in the distance, voice loud in the pre-dawn haze, likely coming from Hagrid's cottage.
There at his feet, half-hidden in the leaves and twigs, lies a dark glimmer. Harry bends, and then the Resurrection Stone is cold in his palm. He closes his fingers around it, and something in him settles and that pushy, nagging hum subsides.
A weight shifts in his back pocket, and he slowly reaches back to draw out the wand he broke yesterday in front of Ron and Hermione’s shocked faces. He remembers the crack of it, the splintering, the relief that followed at one more weight and responsibility being lifted.
Now it rests whole and perfect again in his hand, gleaming faintly in the weak pre-dawn light.
He sighs and leans back against a tree. Stone in one hand, wand in the other, cloak wrapped close. The power of the three items is a buzz under his skin, a heat in his blood, a wild yearning inside him to use them. He will, eventually. He knows this inevitability with the same certainty he felt on his walk into these woods yesterday.
He lifts his head, and Tom Riddle stands before him.
They look at one another for long moments, the link between them singing as strong as ever. It vibrates deep in Harry’s chest, in his throat, in the space behind his eyes where Tom is always there, looking out.
Guilt eats at him. The knowledge that he is the weak link in all of this, all this effort and work and sacrifice, and his inability to kill the Horcrux in his head is the point of failure.
Tom’s face is cruel and beautiful, curved into a faint frown. He is the man Tom Riddle was before all of this, before the dying and rebirthing, before the snake body and the four years of mental degradation. His skin is bone white, his eyes burn red in the low light. Dark magic has marked him deeply, and yet he is as close to a simple man as he ever could be, captured in the moment of his death inside Harry’s mind.
“It’s not your fault,” Tom says quietly. In their quiet conversations over the years, Tom has always shouldered the blame, his time in Harry's mind changing him as he could never have changed in life.
Harry swallows. He has never told anyone about Tom. Never admitted to hearing him, seeing him, relying on him, confiding in him. Through the long years at the Dursleys, the terror and wonder of Hogwarts, the months of running and the hunger and the cold, Tom had been there.
It is toxic and twisted, Harry knows that. And yet, at this point, after nearly two decades of being in one another's minds, there is no future where they live without the other.
He thinks of the in-between space in the moments after his death. The white light of that liminal train station and Dumbledore’s horrified gaze as Harry turned away from him, and took Tom’s hand. The choice had been easy for Harry. He’d intended to die in this forest, that had been true, but his own life had never been something he held onto too easily. What he couldn’t do, as it turned out, was kill Tom.
They were in this together, to whatever end.
“I killed him,” Harry says now, more to hear the words out loud than anything. “I killed Voldemort. We’re free.”
Free to live. Free to leave this place entirely. Free to start fresh. Free to give Tom a life again, a body again, and to do it properly this time—no half-baked spells, no rituals performed by incompetent rat men.
Harry hears the unspoken thoughts running through Tom’s mind. Calculations and plots, their future in vague outlines, and threaded through it all is something new—hope. Tom’s face is cruel and cold, but Harry knows his heart. He is, underneath it all, just a man.
He reaches out, and his fingers close around Tom’s hand. His skin is soft and undefined, and their fingers phase through one another. Tom is not truly here, though their minds are trying their best.
“Yes,” Tom agrees, his voice low in the thinning dark. “We’re free.”
Behind them, the sun inches higher and the forest begins to wake. The cock crows for the third time, louder now.
A ficlet for the Purge but Worse in the Tomarrymort Events Server
Prompt: Cock
