Warnings: implied LV/HP slash, implied TMR/HP slash, implied sex, fancy prose, time travel

Pairings: LV/HP, past TMR/HP

Disclaimer: Harry Potter, along with all of its characters, belong to J.K. Rowling (obviously, since there was no fail!slash in it)

Oh, how time has left us stained…

It was funny, almost, how they could never quite match, like two jigsaw pieces that never belonged yet held the illusion that they did. And it was like Fate herself was the person trying to put them together, mashing them up and trying to cram their odd sides and angles to click and form their respective parts of a picture. She went through great difficulties to fulfill this, forcing them through time and through space, through all that was right and logical in the world…

But in the end, they never quite fit, and the attempt had made them both too different to click in their rightful places, too… so they were outcasts and the picture would never be the same. The ripples of time would always be revealed, no matter who tried to cover their effects.

So they stood there, the Boy-Who-Lived versus the Dark Lord who had surpassed even Grindelwald's power, Harry James Potter and Tom Marvolo Riddle, only not.

How could he, who physically had the green eyes and the lightning bolt scar but mentally held the knowledge of wars and deaths and lies and desperation and time, of all things—yes how could he be Harry Potter, the innocent boy with low self-esteem and knew only of lonely, painful nights filled with hunger and bruises and broken bones?

For this Harry Potter, who stood here now, found he could not be called by the name everyone knew him by—no, not in earnest at least. In his youth he knew only the bright warmth of friendship, of the teasing, wistful glint of familial love. He had not understood the intimacies between true lovers, of that a husband feels for a wife or a wife feels for a husband. He saw, but did not know. And that made all the difference.

Tom Marvolo Riddle was quite the same, but not. In his youth he knew of war and death, definitely of lies and desperation, perhaps even suspicions of time and its effects, and he saw and despised what love stood for before he came to understand it on the deepest level of his conscious. Instead of low self-esteem he had an amazing amount of self-confidence bordering arrogance, for he knew to combat those who would only seek to drag him down into the very pits of hell and beyond that he would have to be. He was a survivor who was not yet done surviving, not yet past the challenges he knew existed but had not on a first-hand basis encountered, only tasted.

But then he had met Harry Potter, who was strange and different and not of his own time—not that he had known that little fact.

The boy named Harry Potter who had the most striking green eyes and the strangest scar upon his forehead had been almost everything to Tom. Almost. Harry Potter was his first love, his first kiss, his first intimacy; he was the first and only person that young Tom had wanted to both protect and show off, to hold and to beam proudly at. Harry Potter was the only creature in existence to be able to boast how Tom would look at him tenderly, lovingly, with passion and raw emotion that only a lover would.

And yet, because of his youth and his in-experience in experiencing the full experiences of life, the boy named Harry Potter was not Tom Riddle's everything. Oh, he was close—no doubt about that—but to be so consumed by someone, so utterly obsessed and immersed in the very soul of another, so much so that one could say they were to be forever linked, bound by the cruelest, most blessed chains to ever to have come into creation, was not what they were; was not what Tom Riddle was. Thus, almost was a perfect description.

They say that you never know what you have until it's gone. Tom was not an exception.

So when Harry Potter—that boy with his green, cursed eyes and his odd, blessed scar, who held Tom Riddle's heart and protected it as if it were even more precious than his own—yes, when Harry Potter disappeared and faded into the invisible folds of time, Tom Riddle had found to his immediate discovery that almost everything of himself was gone, taken away like his boy had been.

But that almost, that leftover bit whose existence seemed to be the rest of Tom, grew to be Lord Voldemort. And then he knew that Harry had not taken almost all of him. In actuality, he had taken young Tom with his defensively confident ways and his charming claws and those tender, soft, secret looks away. What was left then was Voldemort, albeit young and inexperienced and undoubtedly not yet suited for the title of Lord… but Voldemort he then was, masquerading as the Tom Riddle who he was that small bit part of.

And now here they were, standing before each other, gazes locked in a sort of passive stare that was more recognizable to the way one might look at a mildly interesting novel than that of two enemies who were, in the end, not really enemies at all, but who had decided in their own minds that being under said label was less headache-inducing than taking into consideration the fact that they straddled the line of acquaintances and old friends, of lovers and rivals, of strangers and comrades, of one and of two—so really, simply saying enemies was irrefutably less specific, but far more of a convenience, and thus that was the classification they would use.

Here, Harry Potter was not the young boy facing starvation, nor was he the boy hopelessly in love with Tom Riddle. He had suffered and changed and, looking back on everything, he figured the only thing that had ever really stayed constant was his green, green eyes—that may not even count due to their often changing association to either his mother or a certain unforgivable curse that he hated with a passion—and his scar… which in retrospect might not count either because of his changing opinion of it, when he had loved and admired to when he had loathed and feared to his curiosity and growing attachment.

But, he supposed, if there was ever a thing that was not part of my physical description that truly, genuinely stayed constant in my inconstant life, it would be my undeniable connection to this infuriating man.

That man had not stayed unchanging either. From his inexperience, Voldemort had become a master, a wealth of knowledge of not only the things written in textbooks but also life. He had become worthy of the title of the Lord in his name, successfully hid away his blood status, and had later then become He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Yes, all these things he had done and became and yet not one of them meant as much to him as the man that now stood before him, right at this minute, this second, this moment of time that he privately held within his chest lest time be influenced by Fate and take Harry away again.

For though Harry Potter had stolen most of Tom Riddle, he had not been able to tear away the imprints that only emotion could have caused, the love that they had shared and the bond that had went even deeper than that very feeling. And now that the Dark Lord found his mind surprisingly clear, free from the insanity that had so gripped him for most of his experienced years, he clung to it.

Harry Potter had not been Tom Riddle's everything. Rather, he was Lord Voldemort's. After all, wasn't it only right that the man who his boy's life revolved around be just as utterly tangled in him as well?

"It seems," Voldemort began quietly, the unnaturally raspy quality of his voice acutely heard by the one who stood across from him, "that we've reached some sort of standstill."

Harry's lips quirked upwards, a ghost of an old, innocent smile. "I suppose that means we're not going to be dueling to the death, right?" he joked.

"Much to the greater disappointment of the majority of the British Wizarding population… no. I suppose not."

"And I was so looking forward to the clash our spells would inevitably make…" Harry mockingly sighed. "Weren't you?"

"Not really. Perhaps in the past, when I could not decipher what my desires were, then maybe. Now I find there is no room left in me to store any want of battle," Voldemort admitted.

Harry's face fell, taking on a serious expression. "Inside of your heart?"

"Whatever there is of me," said the Dark Lord as he motioned to himself. "My heart, I'm afraid, is not something I'm in possession of at the moment, but if I were to hazard a guess then I would also include it in my description as well."

"You speak romantically for someone who assumes they have no heart," he whispered.

"It isn't an assumption. And I never said I didn't have one; simply that it isn't in my current hold at the moment—"

"Then where is it?"

Voldemort pierced him with an unreadable look. "Take a guess," he answered slowly.

Harry was silent, the look on his face heart-wrenching as only he could make it—a mix between hopeless desperation and knowing beyond what words could speak and ears could hear. He swallowed audibly, and maybe it was a trick of the light, but the Dark Lord could swear he saw a single tear slide down the side of his right cheek.

His boy, he thought affectionately, his emotional, beautiful boy…

"I'm not the person Tom Riddle fell in love with," Harry said finally, his voice hoarse and unsteady.

"Then who are you?"

"I dunno, Fate's bitch I suppose," he replied with a forced, bitter laugh.

"Nonsense," Voldemort said immediately, his tone almost chiding, "you know who you are. That's a terrible habit—to say you don't know because you don't want to say."

"What the hell do you want me to do?!" Harry shouted suddenly. "We can't—it's not—we're both—"

"Too broken, too incomplete?" Voldemort finished.

"Too less of something to make a whole," he agreed.

Perhaps he was right. The world didn't revolve around them, after all—there was a war, going on between their sides, and ignoring that would be a straight insult to everyone else. But did it matter? Did everyone else matter to them? Did their opinions shift because the majority of strangers that they would never personally meet desired they would?

"I love you," the Dark Lord said slowly, finally, steadily as his feet deliberately brought them closer. He didn't emphasize his words, but that was because he didn't need to. The three-word phrase was only a placeholder for all of the emotions that flowed freely between time, space, all of the distance in the world, as their bond linked them together in ways not even Fate had planned.

They were words spoken because words were the method of communication, and not saying them was like ignoring that the feelings that so scarcely were able to be conveyed existed at all.

Harry sighed, his body sagging as the distance between them could now be closed by an inch of movement. "I adore you," he mumbled back, letting his forehead come to rest on the Lord's shoulder. They both knew the emotion that swam within his eyes, hidden by his position, would've mirrored his words exactly.

The next day, no one knew where Lord Voldemort had disappeared to; certainly not his followers. The same could be said about Harry Potter. Rumors went around, of course. Some say they both met and dueled to the death, destroying each other with their power, while others say one was holding the other captive. No one knew the truth.

When Lucius Malfoy went to check in his Lord's office, there was a neat pile of ash on a cushion he knew to be Nagini's exclusive spot. In the Lestrange vault, another similar pile of ash could be found, resting on top a shelf surrounded by golden finery. No one discovered any others, and no one knew their significance either.

Somewhere in the forests of Albania, two figures rested beneath the boughs of an ancient tree, breathing deep and hurried as their urges to whisper and cry out hushed; abandoning their versions of ambition as the foolery it was when one was not whole enough to hold more than a single main desire.

Obligatory time travel fic...? No, I don't think I want to claim this one as my "official" time travel fic just yet, haha.

Uhm. So hope you enjoy this oneshot. Nothing really more to say, I don't think. Review to make fun of my prose...?

Sincerely,

R.R.