Update 5-30-13: A reviewer brought it to my attention that there might be some interest in adopting this fic/ this fic's plot. To any interested in adopting it: I completely welcome you to

* use as much (or few) of my plot ideas as you like

*use as many, direct lines/paragraphs/quotes ect as you like

Just in case there is any confusion about this point: you are free to completely rewrite the beginning if you like, please don't feel like you have to go off of what I have.

tldr version: I wasn't made for the writer life but alas, I do not want to leave you kind people hanging forever so I have posted my story outline/notes [about 18k words] on tumblr to give you some sense of closure (see below the full A/N for the link). Thank you everyone for your kind words, advice, favs and alerts! This was honestly a great learning experience and I truly am grateful to every one of you. I wish you all the best!

Full version:

God the prose in here is downright mortifying at times, I'm glad some of you were still able to enjoy this fic despite the prose. When I wrote this, I knew I wasn't much of a writer but I felt it was a shame that few fics took advantage of Harry's link with Tom Riddle to teach him some degree of empathy [while also having Riddle keeping most of his key "Slytherin" traits] so I figured what the hell, I'll give it a shot.

Truly, thank you everyone for the reviews, favs and alerts thus far! I apologize that I haven't replied to everyone's reviews but I really am touched that all of you have sent me either kind words or given me constructive criticism when reviewing . Really, I'm downright shocked that I didn't get a flame for this at some point, especially with how bad the prose is at times. This has been a wonderful learning experience; I really can't thank all of you enough for being part of this experience.

There were quite a few reasons I ended up abandoning this fic:

*Hard drive crashed with all my original detailed outlines/notes (also literally happened a few days after I finished the following chapter and was proofreading it).

*Frustrated because I knew the fic was turning into crap but I was unsure about what to do, especially regarding my characterization of Harry. Despite having pages upon pages of quotes that I felt captured him best, to look at for guidance, he still felt terribly off no matter what I did.

*I also made things far more complicated that they had to be [was trying too hard to make it fit with the canon universe as much as possible, which was ruining the fun of it], to the point of stupidity on my part.

*Absolutely hated my OC characters because, like most people, I usually end up disliking OC characters in fan fiction stories. So I'm rather certain my bias resulted in me creating rather crappy OC characters.

* writing became a chore [since I was stuck on writing sections I felt "had" to be written rather than focusing on writing something fun for both the reader and myself].

*Beta reader wasn't able to beta read anymore

Nonetheless, I won't leave you guys hanging. I am posting a link to my outline/notes [about 18k words] under this note so you can have an idea of what I was kind of aiming for. According to this site's rules, my story may be deleted if I post the story notes here so I have put them on tumblr instead.

I apologize to all of you who had been looking forward to future chapters but I hope you're able to find at least one thing you enjoy in these detailed notes!

Feel free to borrow any ideas (as many as you want) from this fic if anything happens to interest you.

If you have questions, you can pm me though don't be surprised if I don't remember the answer to some questions.

Slim chance I might try to redo this idea one day but again, that's quite unlikely.

This varies from rather detailed scenes to very brief notes:

storynotesforhh. tumblr DOT COM SLASH post/51350735043/helpless-and-haunted-notes

or just go to storynotesforhh. tumblr DOT COM and the notes will be the only post on that blog