8Author's Note: To those about to embark on this fic, I warn that this is a sequel to "The Unwinding Golden Thread" and a prequel to "October" and if you haven't read those then you'll be very confused. Also, it's NOT CANON to either, clearly.
"When you get to the other side, please, don't forget this place or everything I've done. And when you see that bastard Voldemort, kill him for being everything I never got the chance to."
- Tom Marvolo Riddle, The Unwinding Golden Thread
Tom had always been petrified of death.
He had gotten very sick one winter in Wool's Orphanage, had caught a fever that had already carried off an orphan or two, and he'd had his first brush with death.
The trouble was, Tom didn't know where he'd gone then. Oh, he hadn't been present in that sweating, feverish, body of his. It was as if the thing had been shutting him down and pushing him out as it prepared to surrender to the virus claiming his life. No, Tom Riddle, in any meaningful sense, had gone somewhere else. However, wherever else that was it was simply a great gaping void, a black pit that represented both a lack of memory and a lack of being.
Tom Riddle, during that fever, had simply ceased to exist altogether.
By some miracle, or by the Devil's luck as Mrs. Cole might say, he'd managed to come back.
He'd never forgotten though, what it had felt like to not exist.
He didn't vow then that it would never happen again, that Tom would simply refuse to pass onto the other side, regardless that graveyards were filled with indispensable men. No, that wouldn't come until much later and the realization that Tom wasn't simply extraordinary but a wizard, someone who might have the means to combat the great equalizer. The seeds, however, were planted in that childhood winter.
As a result, even as he'd passed Harry Potter, Evans, his sundered soul in the form of a notebook, his one lifeline to the mortal plane, a part of him had expected nothing on the other side. A simple, black, lack of existence and meaning. Something worth less than even a candle, who at least left behind a thin trail of smoke.
He had not expected Kings Cross station.
Platform nine and three quarters stretched out before him, empty and pristine in a way that it never was at the beginning or else end of the year. There were no anxious, tearful, parents wishing their children goodbye for the schoolyear, no sign of a Hogwarts uniform, nor the sound of the trilling and hooting of distressed owls who longed to be anywhere but in their overcrowded metal cages. Just a perfect, eerie, silence with the Hogwarts Express glinting in the streaming sunlight and the sense this was not a place at all but simply the idea of one.
Although, why it was King's Cross was beyond Tom.
Perhaps it meant he was supposed to be going somewhere, a metaphor for travel, that Tom's soul was currently waiting with a ticket for the next train to depart.
However, Tom wasn't dressed for Hogwarts. He glanced down, he was wearing what he'd had on in those last moments, blood-soaked militaristic clothing of a muggle variety. More, his hands were not the hands of a Hogwarts schoolboy anymore, aside from his own drying blood they were calloused and thin, the larger hands of a man too old and weathered now for the hallowed halls of Hogwarts.
He couldn't help but smile at them, almost fondly, had he really planned to infiltrate Evans' Hogwarts with these? What would they think of him? He was already too tall by half, but did he really think he could hide the past few years in a Hogwarts uniform? Did Evans?
Tom hoped so, and in the absence of having any means to tell, he chose to believe so.
Which left Tom and a train that he did not think he had the means or ability to board.
"Tom Riddle?"
Tom looked up and felt as if his heart would stop. There, staring at him from the entrance to a compartment on the Hogwarts Express, was the man who was supposed to be anywhere but here. Tom, after all, had sacrificed everything so that this man could be anywhere but here.
It was still him though.
He looked taller, his face impossibly paler, hair grown out slightly but as dark and curly as ever, and those burning eyes of his just the same as they'd always been after he'd abandoned those embarrassingly thick glasses.
He wasn't wearing what Tom had left him in though. It wasn't his Hogwarts uniform, that Slytherin necktie always two seconds from coming undone, nor the worn muggle clothes from Wool's, or the patched together muggle clothing he'd worn for the past few years.
No, he was in robes again, strange foreign robes that Tom had never seen in Britain. Stranger, though, than their unfamiliarity was that there wasn't a hint of color anywhere in them. Black upon black, thick layers that should have been different colors instead blended into one another and made it seem as if his pale hands, neck, and face grew out of shadows.
If he had walked into Hogwarts, Tom dazedly thought, looking like this then Tom would have had no trouble believing he was in the wrong time. Perhaps, Tom would have concluded he was in the wrong world.
Evans stepped forward, down towards the platform, the sound seeming to echo, and Tom couldn't help but notice that Evans even in his strange get up seemed as shocked and petrified as Tom himself. However, the moment didn't last, and soon the expression was gone leaving a stony kind of blankness in its place.
Evans had never been capable of that sort of expression.
Tom had seen his brief moments of joy, his fury, his despair, and every moment in between. However, everything he felt, everything he was, it was always written on his face. Even his contempt burned and was anything but indifferent.
Even in the beginning, when he had known nothing about Tom except a bitter hatred learned from a future that would never happen, he hadn't looked at him like this.
Tom waited, watched, as the man walked towards him with an alien grace that didn't suit Harry Evans in the slightest. Yet, all the same, here it seemed he had grown into it, so that this motion seemed far more natural than Evans' usual rushed footsteps.
Finally, he stopped just in front of Tom, who was still sitting on the bench, and said coldly, "Strange, that after all these years and all this time, it'd be you waiting for me."
Somehow, he couldn't help it, Tom laughed.
As always, when everything was at its most miserably absurd, he found it absolutely hilarious. And, just like always, Evans was looking at him as if Tom had gone absolutely mad. Who knew, perhaps he had, given everything that had happened Tom wouldn't blame himself for it.
"So, it's been that long, has it?" Tom finally managed to ask, that irrepressible smile still on his face as he looked at his only friend in any world, "Strange, you look as if you haven't aged a day."
The way he was acting, the way he was talking, it was as if Tom had been dead and rotting for centuries. Tom didn't know how he felt about that, that it didn't seem to matter whether it had been seconds or centuries, but he was at least glad that Evans had never forgotten him nor apparently forgiven him for leaving in the first place.
He had wondered what Evans would do, what he'd say, when he found himself in that bright future he'd given up on years ago.
"Although, really Evans," Tom said with another laugh, "Waiting for you, isn't that my line? After all, where would I have to go?"
Slowly, as if Tom Riddle was a beast that might dart off at any moment, Evans took a seat next to him. He stared, with those eyes that really were much too green, like he'd never seen anything like Tom Riddle before in all his life. His eyes lingered on the blood stains, that wound that would have done Tom in if he hadn't decided to go gently into that good night of his own accord.
"I suppose it's because I'm dead," Tom said, pulling at his shirt and looking at the drying stain, "But I can't feel it at all anymore."
Not even the cold, that bitter seeping cold as his life bled out of him. Still, somehow, it didn't seem to matter anymore. It didn't matter that Evans had never called him back to the world of the living and that he apparently would now never find a body again. Somehow, the end was not so dark or empty as he had imagined, and it seemed right that he had waited until Harry Evans had been kind enough to join him.
"Harry, if isn't too much to ask," Tom said slowly, "How did it happen?"
"What happen?" Harry asked, breathless and looking afraid, that same way he'd looked in Tom's last moments when he'd realized it was Tom's end as well.
"How did you die?" Tom asked, "I went through such great lengths, after all, to see that you wouldn't."
He looked as if Tom had just punched him in the stomach, first a slackening of his features and shock, then a pained grimace and a bitter laugh, "That's the trouble, I didn't."
"I—" he stopped, paused, looked over at Tom again, this time with a more familiar curiosity burning in his eyes, "I wonder if you and I are even having the same conversation."
And Tom was starting to think death had done Harry Evans no kindness, "Did you hit your head on the way back to 1996?"
"Is that where you think I'm going?" Evans asked with a laugh, amused and delighted all at once. He looked over at the train he'd just disembarked from, as if he'd now realized something absurdly obvious, "Is that where I thought I was going?"
"Well, I can't tell you where you thought you were going," Tom said, wondering how it was that someone as dim as Evans had managed to pick up enough cryptic bullshit to still be obnoxious with it.
"No, I think… I think you're right, I wanted to go back to Hogwarts, back to that time. It's why it's always been the Hogwarts Express. But you can never truly go back, can you, Tom?"
Tom wanted to sigh, no he wanted to hit him, but all he could do was look down at his own clothes then over at Evans, "Somehow, I don't think Hogwarts would approve of our new wardrobe."
He laughed, and there he was, there was Harry Evans in full form. Even dressed for his own foreign funeral, he was here, at the very end of the world with Tom Riddle.
"More's the pity," Tom said, nodding towards the train, "I was just starting to think I was supposed to board."
"Board?"
Tom motioned to their ethereal and empty surroundings, "Not that this is dull, Evans, but it just doesn't have the kind of excitement that I'm used to."
"But—" Evans stopped, looked at him again, "Why would you leave? You know that means…"
"Dying?" Tom asked, eyebrows raised as he stole the words out of Evans' mouth, "Strange, but I'm not afraid of that anymore."
That black pit he'd glimpsed, perhaps, but it seemed that death was something different than that. Where you met familiar faces in unfamiliar costumes, had conversations that you half understood and half needed to hear.
Perhaps, in the orphanage, Tom wouldn't have liked this either. He would have run as far as he could from that train and all it represented. However, Tom had changed, for better or for worse and he now understood that there were times you simply couldn't come anymore.
"Will you come with me?" Tom asked.
"With you?!"
"You're the one who said I was waiting for you," Tom noted, even as Evans looked as if he'd die a second time of a heart attack right then and there, "And did you have any other pressing business here?"
"No, no I—" Evans stopped, cut himself off, and tried to smile, "That's the trouble, nothing was pressing anymore, there wasn't anybody…"
"Then come with me," Tom said, standing and holding his hand out to Evans, "I've had enough of this world and its wars. If we can't go back, then we should always press forward."
"Even if it takes us somewhere worse?" Evans asked, eyes wide and so terrified, hand shaking as it was caught between gripping the bench and taking Tom's, "Brings up all those phantoms we thought we'd forgotten?"
Tom smiled thinly, now well and truly irritated, "If that was a veiled insult towards me, I'll have to tell you that I've heard you do better."
This new found cryptic attempt at subtlety didn't suit him in the slightest.
Harry just laughed again, as if he couldn't help it, and in that moment took Tom's hand and used it to pull himself off the bench, "Why is it, Tom Riddle, that it's you dispensing wisdom to me?"
"Because you're an idiot," Tom said, but if anything, that seemed to make the idiot Evans smile harder, rather than the irritated and angry frown Tom would have expected.
"I really am," he asked with that smile at once both fond and nostalgic, "Aren't I?"
Tom could only stare, feel himself grow more lost by the minute, and finally conclude, "And I really am starting to think you hit your head when I wasn't looking."
Still, there were trains to ride and places beyond everything Tom had ever known to be. Perhaps it was like what Evans had once said to him, in his dafter and sappier moments, that death was nothing but the next adventure.
Author's Note: Written for the 2100th review of "October" by Shadowclonier who asked for a story where Azrael and Tom have a conversation at the end of "The Unwinding Golden Thread". Well, they have a heart wrenching conversation here, too bad they both think they're having entirely different conversations with entirely different people.
Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter
