"The flesh surrenders itself… Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time"

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert

There was no moon out and as a result the dark choppy sea seemed to merge with the overcast night sky.

Even though it was early summer, it was still cold and dark as they pushed out from the shore in a stolen muggle vessel, a light notice-me-not charm cast on its surface, light enough to get them past the muggle military that still patrolled the beaches but not enough to get them noticed by the wizards who also routinely patrolled these beaches for those doing what Evans, Tom, and Minerva were now attempting to do.

Although, likely they assumed no wizard would be desperate enough to humiliate himself by either swimming or sailing like a muggle across the channel.

Tom and Evans pushed the boat out from the dock, Minerva in one of her half dozes again as she lay on the wooden floor of the vessel, and hastily they rigged up the sale, Tom casting a quick spell to direct them towards Normandy.

"How long will it take?"

"If we don't drift off course, until morning, at least," Tom said, but in that was the thought that neither he nor Evans had learned how to sail, and that Tom wanted to use as little magic as possible during this venture.

Easier to sneak past the muggles than it was the wizards.

"And then how long to Germany?"

"Longer, the German border is to the southeast if we're going to be direct rather than crossing through Belgium, and once we're on the continent we're deep in Grindelwald's territory, we'll need to be quick on our feet to avoid patrols," Tom said, which spelled out that it could be weeks, perhaps even months, especially with Minerva growing weaker by the day.

Tom did not want to say it out loud, but it became increasingly clear, that one of these days they would be burying her.

"But we'll be in Berlin by the end of August?" Evans asked, but in an insistent manner, as if Tom's answer had to be positive.

"God willing," Tom simply replied before sitting down, watching as the night breeze blew into the sail and the waves rocked their small boat, "And god willing Grindelwald will be there too."

"Where else would he go?" Evans asked, almost accusing as he stared out towards the horizon, towards the unseen shores of France.

"The world is his oyster, Evans, half of Europe is now under his thumb," Tom pointed out, "Where wouldn't he go?"

And, more importantly, the words he didn't say aloud, if they succeeded in Evans' mad quest, then would it really stop this? Would it stop the muggles for that matter once they learned the truth about the world they lived in?

However, these weren't words that Evans was ready to hear, so Tom bit his tongue.

"Thank you."

Tom was torn out of his musings, staring down at Evans in shock, "I'm sorry?"

"I just wanted to say, thank you, I know…" Evans sighed, looked at him then, and those green eyes seemed to pierce once again through to Tom's very soul, "I know that you don't want to do this, that you don't think it will work, and that you're probably right. But you're still here, so… thank you, Tom."

"Well," Tom drawled as he inspected the sail once again, his wand firmly pointed towards France, "It wasn't as if I had anything better to do."

To this Evans offered him a rather sardonically amused smile, because he knew, of course, that anything in the world was better than charging towards one's certain death. Still, in a way Evans was right, if the world as Tom knew it would soon come to an end, then better to die in some attempt to save it.

What a thought, a few years ago Tom would have been appalled at himself, when had he become so disgustingly noble?

Still, there was one other impossible avenue of escape that haunted the edges of his thoughts…

"What did you learn about time travel, out of curiosity, during that first year in Hogwarts?" Tom asked.

"Oh, Merlin, I don't even remember," Evans said with a despairing shake of his head, "Bloody good it did any of us, eh?"

"Indulge me," Tom prompted, "Surely something will come to mind."

"Well, most of it said that you can't go this far back, otherwise you turn into goo. You know, useful stuff like that. Nothing on going forward in time either…" Evans hand waived this off with that same somewhat amused and nostalgic smile.

"The only thing I really got down was that crushing a bunch of time turners all at the same time is a bad idea," Evans finally finished with a small laugh, "Which, really, I could have told them that."

"What about why you're still here?" Tom asked, "Even when we were still in Hogwarts you said you caused rather large changes, surely, you must have researched that as well."

"Sure, but no one really writes about that," Evans said with a exhausted and rather indifferent shrug, "That's all hypothetical nonsense, or at least, what most of the books said. They'd spend maybe a sentence on what would happen to a time traveler who created a paradox… Some said I'd turn into goo, some said I'd destroy my own original reality and become some sort of paradox myself, some said I'd create a branch, and some said I'd be snapped back into my own world. Well, the last clearly didn't happen, but as for the rest, who knows…"

"It's worth thinking about," Tom pointed out, "It's not theoretical for you, after all."

"Yeah, but, I mean… What are we going to do about it?" Evans asked, looking rather entertained by Tom's comment, "Even if my version of 1996 still exists out there somewhere, how would I ever get there? But I guess it's a nice thought, to imagine that they're all still there, waiting for me…"

Somehow that did seem to comfort him, as Evans closed his eyes, looking at peace for the first time in weeks as he prepared to meet his maker, somewhere out there in Berlin, this idea that his friends and family would persist in some other untouchable world.

The small smile on his lips, filled with bittersweet nostalgia.

Tom, closed his own eyes briefly, then allowed himself to look back over his shoulder towards the fading British shore, the homeland he would likely never see again, not in this world at the very least.

He thought back on his childhood, on Hogwarts, on the rolling hills of Scotland, the rocky shore of Black Lake, and even the morning mist of London…

And though it could be just the wind in his eyes, he swore he felt the prickling of tears at the edge of his vision, as he offered one final wave to his homeland, "Goodbye, Britain."

On the battered shores of Normandy, the evidence of the Allies arrival was still more than evident. There were blackened divots in the beach where none had been before, German bunkers facing out towards the sea…

They quickly landed, carried Minerva between them, and abandoned their vessel, sticking close to muggle troops and away from the wizards posts still more than active. Then began the long, dread filled march towards the eastern border with Germany, ducking under trees and into caves at the sign of any enemy movement, sticking to the rural countryside and away from any major city or magical enclave.

And everywhere there was visible evidence that the war with the muggles was over but the war with the wizards had begun, desecrated muggle corpses lined the countryside, wreaking of dark magic and French and German pureblood slurs written in glowing writing over them. In the distance they could hear the rattle of gunfire and the boom of tanks, spell light would flash like colored lightning over the horizon.

"Don't they realize what they're doing?" Evans asked quietly at one point as they stared out towards the sound and sight of battle.

"It's the high of war, Evans," Tom responded softly, "You of all people know what that tastes like… I imagine they're not thinking at all, and if they are, then it's that they're only muggles. And what have muggles ever been capable of?"

Minerva, as predicted, grew worse, her lucid moments were few and far between, her conscious moments even fewer and further, it was a good day when she recognized Tom at all, and when she did he inevitably still seemed to be head boy to her and Hogwarts still standing.

She'd babble about quidditch or Transfiguration and anything in between, and Tom, he'd nod his head and agree at all the right moments.

And that… He felt more about that fact than he'd ever thought himself capable. Perhaps, in some other world, or even in this one if there had been more time, then perhaps they could have been friends.

For whatever friendship was worth to someone like Tom.

Tom, for his own part, when Evans was on guard and Minerva safely drifting off towards that other plane, watched as the diary sketched out the beaches of Normandy, the great endless night on the channel, the sky painted black and red from the clouds and spells like a sunset in hell, Evans' smile filled with nostalgia, and items that must have been from Evans' own mysterious past in a world that now never was.

A gangly boy with hair dyed red from the blood of soldiers and a smaller bushy haired girl, both in Hogwarts uniforms with striped red ties, smiling across at a younger bespectacled Evans' bearing his own Gryffindor tie.

Evans in a too large knitted sweater, red, with an 'H' emblazoned on the front in great looping stiches, Evans looking down at it in shock and awe, as if he'd never seen anything so fine in all his life.

Eventually, Tom surmised, this was the diary's way of telling Tom that it wanted to chat, by piquing Tom's curiosity.

And there was, though he hated to admit it, curiosity when he regarded these younger eerily realistic sketches of Evans. Some of it was for Evans and the world he grew up in, the world Voldemort had nearly conquered, but also there was one far more nagging, the fact that the diary knew these details that it had no business knowing.

A fact that it no doubt knew, since it had the alarming capacity to scheme and know and do all those things that Tom had believed it to be incapable of, Tom would ask after.

Tom had avoided writing in it since landing in France, looking at it, certainly, but writing inside… It wreaked too much of weakness, of giving into some temptation he couldn't name, for him to be entirely content with.

However, enough, eventually, was enough and halfway through France, just north of Paris, he wrote on the pages without any preamble, "What do you want?"

As always, the sketch of the hour, this time of an alarmingly pretty young girl with silver hair, likely part veela offering Tom a rather contemptuous glare, stopped, then collapsed, the ink rearranging itself to form the diary's usual sardonic words.

"Oh good, you're still alive," a pause, the words fading, then below them another sentence appearing, "I was fairly certain you were still among the living but forgive me, sometimes it's hard to tell, the days are long in here."

"What do you want?" Tom repeated with a grimace.

"Intelligent conversation," and in Tom's head there was the idea of a rather amused laugh, "Honestly, Tom, you wouldn't believe how dull it gets inside this place. Leave me alone too long and I swear I'll go mad."

"You weren't supposed to think in the first place," Tom pointed out rather tersely.

"Yes, well, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride," the diary quickly responded back before adding, "But I'm here, and I think therefore I am, and there's nothing either of us can do about it. No matter how unnerving you find me."

And there was an irony in that, that Tom found himself so very unnerving, but it was an undeniable truth as well. The diary… It was unnerving, there was no other word for it.

"Well, what kind of intelligent conversation were you looking for?" Tom's words bled into the page, his handwriting rushed, and far inferior to the ones of the other half of his soul, but they disappeared into the pages soon enough.

"Oh, any kind will do," the diary responded, "But I suppose I can start things off, how about our good friend Harry James Potter?"

"You want to talk about Evans?" Tom asked rather wryly, wondering why this somehow didn't surprise him, even though it felt like it should.

"Don't sound so unenthused, Tom, he's had a very fascinating life," the diary chided before continuing, "But yes, I'll start us off, I know something you don't know."

That, was hardly intelligent conversation, but then, as Tom read those teasing words he felt that was entirely the point of them. This, was where whatever the diary's scheme was came into play. Now it was up to Tom whether he chose to indulge his own horcrux.

"Come on, Tom, aren't you curious?" the diary goaded in black curved letters on the white pages.

"No, not particularly," Tom responded with easy handwriting, entirely more than ready to slam the diary shut and get whatever sleep he needed, "Was that all you had to say to me?"

"Well, I was going to say that I know a lot of things you don't know, most of them small details that honestly wouldn't interest you, but I also know something that you desperately wish to know. Something you've been thinking about for a long time now."

Well, wasn't that ominous, and irritating?

"Well, what is it?" Tom wrote, more than at the end of his patience now, rubbing the bridge of his nose and asking himself why he was even putting up with this when there were so many better things he could be doing.

"I know why Harry James Potter is trapped in this timeline, more, I know how to send him back."

Now that, caught Tom's attention, "What?"

"You're not blind, Tom," the diary responded, and then, silence, waiting for Tom's response, that white page almost seeming to scream at him.

"Well, aren't you going to tell me?!" Tom hastily scrawled across the page and the words, slowly, too slowly, bled into the white paper.

"War has made you impatient and dull, Tom," and he could almost hear a sigh coming from the diary, as if Tom exasperated him entirely. Then, these words faded, replaced by ones written in the red blood of too many men to count, "I don't think you're ready for that answer yet."

The words almost seemed to fly from his pen, "What are you talking about?! The sooner we can leave this place the better! There is nothing tying us here! I am more than ready…"

Overtop of Tom's word, bloodied fingers emerged from the page, the grotesque form of Tom Marvolo Riddle himself crawling out from some great white abyss, blood streaking down his face and a desolate look in his eyes.

Then, repeated, in words that spanned both pages in a mixture of ink and blood in great jagged letters, like those that he had painted on Hogwarts walls in roosters' blood, "I don't think you're ready for that answer yet, Tom."

Then, abruptly, the pages were clean and pristine white again, a single sentence, in perfect penmanship, in the center of the righthand page, "Come back later, Tom, when you're ready. And we'll talk."

And Tom's furious scribbling, his demands of, "You'll tell me now! I'm ready now! Don't you hear me?! Tell me!" just faded into the diary, eliciting no response from Tom's soul which rested inside. The diary making it more than clear that their intelligent conversation had ended.

A week later, almost to the minute, Minerva McGonagall died.

They were in a forest in northern France, hidden in a warded clearing among the trees, standing over the body of a young woman who, now, would never look back up at them.

"We should say something," Evans said, standing over her corpse, looking down at her with eyes duller than Tom had ever seen them. Something, just looking at her, seemed to have gone out of him.

It'd been quiet, if Tom had been less diligent in checking her vitals while she slept, they likely wouldn't have noticed. She'd been quiet for weeks now.

Even now, though her face was pale, gaunt, and sickly, she looked the same as she had any other day since they'd reached France. Death had been chasing her for weeks though, it had finally caught up.

"You should say something," Evans corrected, a lump seeming to catch in his throat, "I… I barely knew her."

"We weren't friends," Tom said, "But then… we might have been close enough."

"She was my professor, one of the best I ever had," Harry said, a wobbling smile stretching across his lips, "My head of house too, for Gryffindor."

"And you know, I think she was, a Gryffindor, more than anyone else I can think of. She wasn't afraid to die, and that's… That's very rare," Tom said and then, allowing himself a softer smile than he thought possible, "The world will be a darker place without her in it."

Evans didn't seem to feel the need to add to that, and, for that matter, neither did Tom. Perhaps she deserved a better eulogy, but then, too many did. Without further ado, Tom lit her body on fire, watched as it burned with Tom's magic for fuel until nothing remained but her ashes, scattering into the wind.

Without further ado, Tom and Evans turned, picked up their packs, and continued southeast towards Germany and the death of Grindelwald.

And Tom's vision of 1996, his fantasy of a world he'd never seen, now had a gaping hole inside of it that Minerva McGonagall had once occupied.

It was perhaps inevitable that he'd do exactly what the other half of his soul expected him to, but then, war was a tiring, draining, thing that shifted and turned Tom Riddle into the antithesis of what he'd been before.

Something the diary could dangle from strings and watch as Tom Marvolo Riddle danced.

However, in his rage, he couldn't bring himself to care. He took the diary out from under his shirt, ignoring Evans' sleeping form, and practically ripped it open.

"You," he wrote into the diary think ink hemorrhaging into the page, "Have caused more than enough damage."

For a moment the diary did not respond, then, slowly, it remarked, "My condolences, Tom."

Tom paid this no mind though as he continued to write.

"I brought you into this world, don't forget that I can take you back out of it," the ink stained Tom's fingers as he wrote smearing up onto his hands, "You are nothing more than a shell of what I am and we both know it."

The diary seemed to consider this, the brazen threat in Tom's words, and then said, "Perhaps it's best we meet face to face for this, so much gets lost in the written word alone. Please, Tom, step into my parlor."

And then Tom was falling, falling through the diary and somehow inside of it, where the Slytherin common room, warm and comforting and untouched by war, awaited him, with a doppelganger of himself in prefect's robes standing inside.

It was such a surreal thing, too, because Tom couldn't remember the last time he had bothered to look into a mirror or had any opportunity to do so.

"That's better," the other Tom, the diary, remarked, "It's good to see you, after all this time."

"All this time?" Tom scoffed, "It's only been a few months."

The diary, wearing Tom's shoulders, shrugged and offered Tom a somewhat amused smile as he took a seat by the fireplace, "Well, you've changed. This, for example, this lack of composure… it's very new. You've become… softer, I think."

"Softer?" Tom asked with narrowed eyes but the diary seemed anything but perturbed.

"You wouldn't have blinked before, and we both know it, since when do the likes of us care about the likes of Minerva McGonagall?" the diary asked, and it said far too much that Tom had nothing to say to that, because it had a point, wearing Tom's face so easily as it did, Tom shouldn't care at all, "But enough of that, I believe, that you had a question for me."

"No, not a question," Tom corrected, stalking forward until he was towering over his horcrux, "An accusation. That was unnecessary and you know it."

"Was it?" the diary questioned, then, with a pale hand, motioned to the other seat, "Sit, Tom, you're making me nervous glowering down in judgement like that."

Tom made no move, the diary motioning again with a little more insistence, "Sit, please, you are in polite company."

Reluctantly, with a tension he could hardly explain to himself, Tom sat in the seat.

The diary offered him Tom Riddle's patented charming smile, the kind he had given to Slughorn on so very many occasions, "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?"

Tom said nothing, just stared, allowing the silence to stretch itself and form jagged edges, cutting into the false reality around them.

Finally, the diary broke the quiet in a calm and entirely too composed voice, "To answer the question, Tom, that you haven't asked, I said I knew how to return Harry Potter to 1996, I said nothing about Minerva McGonagall or you for that matter."

Oh, oh Tom had never wanted so badly to kill anyone in his life, not even Evans…

"And what good does that do anyone?" Tom asked, his voice devoid of all inflection, all emotion, seeming beyond emotion entirely now as he thought of his wasted rage and all of the corpses.

The diary considered him, then said, as if entirely indifferent in the face of Tom's maelstrom of rage, "More importantly, I think you're ready to hear why."

Leaning forward, a gleam in his pale blue eyes, the diary said with Tom Riddle's lips, "Harry James Potter is a horcrux."

"What?" Tom asked, it was so… absurd, that he felt some of his anger diminishing in the sheer confusion of trying to understand what that even meant.

The diary, however, didn't falter, "He is the horcrux of the Voldemort we could have been, once upon a time, and so in a sense, is also our own horcrux."

Tom felt an absurd smile growing on his lips, "That's an interesting theory you've made for yourself."

Unspoken was the thought that perhaps the diary had a little too much time on his hands inside this notebook of his.

"Not a theory," the diary corrected evenly, "He is a horcrux. Granted, he seems to be just as unaware of this as you yourself are, but he is."

"A human horcrux?" Tom asked throwing his hands into the air with a somewhat bemused laugh, "But that's absurd! Why would anyone, why would I make something like that? Humans are mortal, putting a horcrux inside one defeats the purpose of even having a horcrux to begin with!"

"Haven't you noticed that strange, instinctual, eerie connection you two share? How sometimes you find his thoughts slipping into yours or yours slipping into his? How you seem to be able to find him over great distances and step into his dreams?" the diary stopped, paused, and then remarked, "Because I certainly have, Tom."

No, Tom had as well, but that didn't mean… Surely, it couldn't mean… There had to be some other explanation for how the diary had gathered so much intelligence about Evans' past, how Tom seemed to hear Evans' pounding in his head, the way Evans seemed to be able to stare into his very soul…

The diary continued, as if Tom were not coming to terms with information that was earth shattering, "The only thing keeping Harry James Potter confined to this warped timeline, rather than hurled back to where he belongs, is Tom Marvolo Riddle himself. Thus, to return to his own time, it is beyond simple, Tom Marvolo Riddle must die."

The words seemed to echo, Tom lifted his head and stared at the unsympathetic form of his doppelganger, who was staring back without flinching.

"Reality is stretched thin, like a rubber band, and that one small death will be enough to catapult Harry Potter back into his own present of 1996."

A slow, sinking, horror bled down his throat painting his lungs in ice, "No, that can't be…"

"Life, is the greatest magic there is, and the willing sacrifice of it, even more so. You know this as well as I do, and you know that it will be more than enough," his doppelganger cut in mercilessly, not even letting Tom get in a disbelieving breath.

Tom stared at him, at himself, in horror, waiting for something, anything to intervene and shift this scene on its head, but nothing did. Finally, in a voice that he dared not let tremble, he asked, "Why even bother to tell me this?"

"This may be the best avenue of escape for us, the only path we have left," the diary said, folding Tom's hands together and giving Tom a rather frank look, "This Grindelwald assassination plot is suicide, we both know it, even Harry knows it. It is the last noble cause of a pair of desperate men before everything you've ever known flickers out. However, if you give the diary to Harry Potter, if you sacrifice your mortal body, then we are guaranteed survival. Your horcrux will exist in another dimension, one free from a wizarding war on this level, guarded by Evans himself. You will effectively be immortal. More, perhaps your half of the soul, bodiless then, will be pulled by my presence over the great divide into Harry Potter's 1996."

Tom sneered, "Why do you think I'd ever agree to this?"

The diary offered him a smile laced with pity, "I'm just putting out the option, Tom, for when all hope is lost."

And with that last comment, Tom found himself thrown out of the diary, back into his own body, breathing heavily as his eyes flung open to stare up at the night sky. Rolling onto his side, making to stand up, he caught sight of the diary, still open, a great faded red desert sketched across its pages, and a cloud in the shape of a mushroom on the horizon.

Over top of this, in elegant writing, the words, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds", stared back at Tom before fading back into the white pages.

"When will we reach the border?"

It was late, dew beginning to form on the blades of grass, and around them the night seemed so eerily quiet, as if even the crickets and the toads knew that a wizarding war was taking place. Or perhaps it was simply Tom, who lately found everything so eerily quiet.

"Soon, a few days," Tom said quietly, "But we have a while to go in Germany as well."

"Do you think there will be trouble?" Evans asked.

"I don't know," Tom responded, "If we're lucky, it will be as easy as the channel."

And if not then they had been in fights before, surely, they would survive this one too. Surely, they had not come so far for so long only to be shot down now.

"Tom."

Tom stopped, looked over at Evans with a rather wid- eyed slack-jawed look on his face, and he wondered, had he ever called him Tom before?

"Tom, I want you to promise me something," Evans said, a strange insistence in his green eyes as he looked at Tom, "You know, since we're not currently facing certain death."

"I won't make a promise I can't keep," Tom responded, but this just seemed to amuse Evans, his lips quirking into a smile before the solemn look returned.

"You can keep this one," Evans said before taking a breath and stating, "I want you to promise, after all of this, that you become a good person. To the best of your ability, anyway. Don't become a dark lord, don't kill muggleborns and children or anyone else. Even if I'm not here, especially if I'm not here, just… be what you always could have been."

Evans motioned to their surroundings, that derisive smile back on his face, "This is the only thing I can think to give the world, they may have to deal with Grindelwald, and maybe I ruined everything, but if I can keep Voldemort from them… Then that's something, at least."

Yes, that was something, and perhaps it was something that should infuriate Tom beyond measure, that Evans was stealing that last pining dream from him. Evans, who was the shadow of his own soul, so that even now when Tom looked at him he could see a reflection of himself staring out of those green eyes.

Tom smiled back, "Evans, don't you know? Ever since you killed the basilisk, Voldemort never had a chance of existing."

And for the first time in years, it seemed that Harry Evans, Harry James Potter, understood what that meant.

"Do you remember when we loathed one another, Evans?" Tom asked, staring up at the night sky, "Life seemed so much simpler then, when our greatest challenges were those of our own creation."

"You mean your creation," Evans said with a scoff, "You were the one who released the bloody basilisk."

"Yes, still, I pale in comparison to Grindelwald," Tom responded with a sly smile.

"You would have done damage in your own time, if that means anything to you," Evans said, "Still, I'm glad at least, that even if I've destroyed the world, I at least made some kind of difference with you."

"You think so?" Tom asked, it seemed a steep price to pay, but then, could any less have touched Tom Marvolo Riddle? Tom himself wasn't sure.

"Well, there has to be some sort of silver lining in here somewhere, right?" Evans gave a grin that was entirely too cheeky, belonging on the face of a much younger man, maybe the moody, terse, fifth year version of himself rather than this war-hardened one.

"Perhaps," Tom said, and then, staring out into the horizon, toward the border and the never-ending war they seemed caught in, "Harry, why haven't you given up on these people? When they're clearly so intent upon destroying one another?"

Had Tom been on his own, then no doubt, he long ago would have washed his hands of all of them, for better or worse.

"I don't know," Evans said slowly, then, giving Tom a rather pensive look, "An old friend always said I had a saving people thing… Maybe it's my destiny to spend too much energy saving people from themselves, and if I didn't do it, well, I wouldn't be me."

I wouldn't be me…

But what was Evans, exactly? How could he answer something like that, smile back at Tom, and yet still wear his face like a mask over a fragment of Tom's soul? Because, somehow, impossibly, in this quiet moment before the sun rose, Tom thought that he saw what the diary had seen all too easily.

That he and Evans, in some strange inexplicable way, were mirrors of each other. And that both existed, in this strange balancing act, only because the other was there. As soon as one disappeared, the other, then, would be granted his freedom.

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches… born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies… and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not… and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives."

It was silent as they reached the border, just as it had been silent through all of France, the only sound Tom's footsteps, heartbeat, and breathing. And for a moment, there was an opening, only a few idle guards, Evans darting forward as he always did with a steel pipe in hand, Tom with his wand out, blazing past the patrol, the killing curse exiting his wand without a thought…

And in truth, they must have missed, because Tom only stumbled forward with a cry, his side on fire, able to turn and kill the caster without missing a beat. A single lucky shot…

But sometimes, that was all it took.

Evans grabbed him, even as Tom's shaking hand put pressure on the wound, blood seeping through his clothing, and apparated them back into France, paying no mind to the way the wards tore at Tom's injury.

"Oh shit, oh Merlin shit," Evans chanted, replacing Tom's hand with his own, even as Tom swayed in place, seeing stars…

"Riddle, Tom, Tom, you have to tell me what to do! Give me your wand and tell me what to cast!" Evans said, Tom looking down, blinking, seeing the desperation on Evans' face as he stared up at him, "Remember, we've done this before. It's no different from all the other times, just a little worse than usual. You have to get it together Tom. Tom, please, Tom! Just tell me what to do and I'll do it!"

The sun was setting, how had he not noticed? It painted everything in shades of red, purple, and gold, and the longer he stared at it the more he wondered that he hadn't noticed only moments before.

And staring out into the golden light, feeling even as the warmth left his fingertips, that light somehow seeping in him, he found himself smiling, and coming to a decision that by all rights should have been impossible.

"Harry," with shaking, bloodstained fingers, Tom brushed away Evans' hands and reached into his shirt, pulling out the now bloodstained diary and handing it to Evans.

"What is… What is that?" Evans asked, but by the look on his face, he knew exactly what it was. Somehow, in some other world, Evans had seen this diary before.

"Harry, I need you to keep this safe for me." Tom insisted, pushing the book into Evans fingers.

"No, no, that thing is evil, Riddle! It almost killed me and…"

"Is that so?" Tom asked, a smile growing on his lips, somehow not surprised, but all the same he said, feeling increasingly light headed as he kept standing, "I promise, this one won't do that, it's… I'm different, Harry, and you'll know what to do, I know it."

Evans fingers reluctantly curled around the black leather cover, and Tom immediately let his shaking fingers drop away from the cover, feeling the instinctive loss of letting a piece of his own soul go.

"I'm telling you, Tom, I don't want whatever this thing is and… What are you doing?"

Tom reached out towards him once again, drew him in with shaking arms, and whispered into his ear, "The last thing I can, my final gift to you, Harry."

Evans arms instinctively moved to Tom's shoulder's squeezing him back, even now saying, "Look, you're losing a lot of blood and you're out of it and I'll take your wand if I have to…"

"You're the closest thing I've had to a brother," Tom continued, cutting Evans off before he could start, "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."

Somehow, it was both the hardest and easiest thing in the world, to push Evans away from him, Evans still holding onto the diary, and turn his wand on himself.

"Avada Kedavera"

May, 1996

Gasping, crawling out of the dust of scattered time machines, Harry James Evans, with bloodstained fingers and a black diary clutched in his shaking hands, stood, and inconceivably, found himself right back where he'd started.

As if nothing had changed at all.

Author's Note: It's over, and the conclusion is, the diary wins! Good work, you creepy horcrux. And good work me, finishing this thing at last.

Now, to answer some of those questions I have put off, such as what Dumbledore has been up to... Who knows, but honestly, I intended for him to be dead. Grindelwald isn't that sexy and Dumbledore not that evil. But then again, that isn't the tale our heroes told, so who's to say what happened and what didn't?

Thank you all, readers and reviewers, and reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter