Killed by Death

He can barely see the outline of the cathedral from here; it's blocked by the misfit sunlight and shadows welcoming him home. It's terrible to think of anything other than what he's here to do, but his stride is purposeful and his eyes are black, black like night, black like coal, black like the footsteps he leaves behind, and he can't help but wonder what it's like inside the pages of his mind.

The door won't even open for him, he whispers a deceitful curse beneath his breath, and it shudders open with a reluctance frozen by the death tracing the edges of his coat. Mirrors line the walls; the sky watches him with a reverence he could never quite command of his followers, the sniveling lot of them. Even the redheaded girl, the weakling who stumbled in his grip and let tears fall onto the stain of his mind in the ink she so carefully scribed, even she was unsure of painting the walls of the school with threats to the boy he most wanted to see, the boy he most wanted to kill. Killing is a thing of the past, now; it is careless and lacks the grace he will always keep tucked into his limbs, flowing through the tendrils of midnight smoke that seem to follow him.

Now he reaches the altar, where that very same boy kneels asking for a forgiveness Tom knows he won't find with his head bowed, blind to the exit to life the boy so desperately seeks. It stands behind him, and he won't even look up - Tom wants to laugh at the boy's utter stupidity, a headstrong gap in his brain that took over when the fear licked at his heels. But he was, after all, the Boy Who Couldn't Die, because people needed him to stay alive, not for his sake, but for theirs.

Tom doesn't need anyone; he doesn't need to be alive, and he certainly doesn't need Harry Potter to be.

He kneels behind the boy, who is perfectly still; not a shiver from the emotional workings of repentance he is perhaps unfamiliar with, something Tom notes somewhere back in his mind that they have in common, or even from the chill hovering over the room, creating silk patterns curling over the windows and sealing the heavy doors. Tom reaches forward to wrap a delicate hand around the boy's throat, and Harry doesn't even struggle, doesn't, in fact, try to move at all. The boy feels cold under Tom's fingers, and the racing heartbeat Tom expected to mock against his chest is still. A realization sweeps over Tom, cold like the room, cold like Harry's skin, cold like someone who's been dead for awhile. Tom stands quickly and drops the body with a snarl; someone has beaten him to a beautiful creation, a death to mourn by the thousands, and twice as many tears Tom would smile beneath. Now, the sky watching is no longer devout; it is growing darker and falling faster, and Tom stumbles backwards into one of the pews, the sharp edge of the wood knocking into his lean frame. He struggles to breathe in the swift air, hastening from him like the little girl used to try and escape, and he turns and tries to forget grace, and all the things he will never have, all the things he will never admit to being afraid of, the cathedral closing in behind him. Harry's body lays abandoned on the altar, where it fell and where it perhaps will dissolve into those mourners Tom won't have the satisfaction of being around. He wants to scream and claw at Harry's frozen skin, rip the blood from the boy's veins and prove to the world that everyone dies someday, but that would mean him to, and he's not ready to die, not yet.

The air bites at his eyes and ears as he manages to lurch outside, into the open atmosphere that now glares at him, and the endless universe suddenly got a lot smaller. Tom stands on the steps of the cathedral, laced with fragments of snow and the shadowed white skies, and he is a silhouette against the world. There is no longer room for destruction, nothing that means anything, now that the Boy Who Couldn't Die is Dead, and sucking in a breath proves a tug of war with the very wind itself.

Tom doesn't need anyone; he doesn't need to be dead, and he certainly doesn't need Harry Potter to be, but it seems he is.