Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling. I claim ownership of nothing but ideas and plots that are not mentioned in her works.

Author's Note: I'm really sorry about the delay (as you can see, my other story also took a long while to be updated). I'll do my best not to impose such a long waiting period ever again.

Crossing Over

...

Chapter 1

The Aftermath

What follows after he regains consciousness is a mess of unimaginable proportions.

At first, he is unable to think. He hardly believes that he is awake; his mind resembles the hallucinations that are characteristic of the magical coma that follows some dark rituals. His very being is a blizzard of swirling ideas and feelings, and he is constantly and painfully bombarded by his senses. The instability from the previous night is nothing compared to this.

He will later, in retrospect, surmise that maybe it was all a matter of delayed shock, or that Dumbledore found out about the merge and attempted an insanity-inducing curse, or that Black was incompetent enough to feed him one of those disgusting recreational drugs that muggles use.

He will instead conclude that the constant occlumency of Voldemort allowed him to keep a certain degree of coherency the previous night—and, in his unconsciousness, he had been unable to keep up the barriers and thus forcefully acquainted with the wonders (not) of having a single mind with two vastly different (read: clashing) developmental levels.

As evidenced by his disordered reactions from directly after the merge (with the disastrous trio of Dumbledore, Hagrid and Black), he is indeed, at that point, in need of much mental organization. He will never deny that having the adult mind of a dark lord—memories, thoughts, and feelings that are, for all accounts and purposes, his own—while also having all the mental gaucherie, primal emotions and fuzzy awareness of an infant to claim as his own, is not exactly productive (to put it mildly).

Hence his fit of extensive synaesthesia and his general inability to deal with his own selfhood.

But he is currently aware of none of that: he has no coherence, he is sight (blurs and hues and lines) and hearing (voices and water and movement) and touch (soft and rough and warmth) and smell (morning and tears and himself) interlaced with vague impressions of memories, and all of those things at once, undistinguished.

Eventually—seconds, minutes or hours later—he grows numb to sensory input and, for lack of a choice, drifts to those scrambled impressions of souvenirs and is forcefully sucked into them. He cannot direct his attention—he is submerged in the actor of each snapshot in the tangled ribbon of his mind, he is the thinker, and everything goes faster and faster as the experience of two lives leaves its trace on him.

He does not know that, right now, he is neither Tom Riddle in those memories, nor Lord Voldemort in later ones or Harry Potter in others.

Warm times. 3 years old.

The Others go about their business, ignoring him. He looks up at them from his short height. He does not understand their purpose or what they want, he does not understand why their lips twitch up and their mouths open (a smile, he thinks an Other called it) when they do not need to, because they are not using their mouths to talk. He does not understand. Why they 'cry', why they 'laugh', why they 'hug'—he feels none of it, not like they do, and so he never cries, never laughs, never hugs, never smiles. When the Others realize this about him, he is forgotten. One after the other, they forget and forget and forget. They do not bathe him or feed him or clothe him, not like he needs. He is hungry and afraid, most of the time. He thinks that, maybe, if he understands the Others—if he knows why they do those incomprehensible things, he will know when to do them, too, and so, one after the other, they will remember him. Like with the other children—those who smile. Tom—that is what the Others call him—needs to learn Otherness.

He already knows that the Others treat him like a smaller Other. So he observes and learns to identify situations where smiling is good for the smaller Others—where the bigger Others will smile, too, and give the smaller Others what they want. He has already seen that the smaller Others want the bigger Others to look at them, to be theirs for just a few moments. Sometimes they will ask for toys, but Tom sees that they only do so when the bigger Others refuse to belong to the smaller Others. Smiles are exchanges, Tom learns, because Others respond to a smile with a smile. But smiles are about wanting and getting.

Tears, too, are about getting. He watches a smaller Other whose leg is oddly bent. It is crying, but loudly. Very soon, bigger Others run to her. Tom thinks that, perhaps, tears are like smiles—but then why have two things for the same thing?—and that they are for getting attention. But then he realizes that the smaller Other cannot move on its own. The bigger Others are there to give assistance, not themselves. Tears are demands, Tom learns. But they are about needing, not wanting.

'New Year's Eve'; 'Birthday'. 4 years old.

The Others are being weirder than usual. When a small Other asks a bigger Other, it is told that it is 'New Year's Eve'. One of them tells Tom that this is his 'birthday'. Hugs and laughter, Tom decides, are siblings, just like smiles and tears. They are obligations that some Others have to different Others, but they come with different words. He dismisses hugs, because smaller Others with hair as short as his never do it. He only notes that hugs often come with tears, or with smiles—but hugging an Other forces them to hug back. Forced exchanges. If smiles are exchanges to get things, hugs are forced exchanges that get things, too. They have more certainty than smiles. When he focuses on laughter, Tom sees that words that exist to make an Other laugh force the listener to laugh. Giving the obligation to laugh to an Other seems to be a good thing, because Laughter when an Other does not ask for it is about leading and superiority—because when one Other laughs at another, when it is not their obligation to do so, more Others start laughing, too. And the first ones to laugh without an obligation are also the ones who get the most of what they want from others. Giving obligations to the Others, Tom learns, is an excellent way of getting.

Spring. Still 4 years old.

He is a little older, now. He has finally learned enough Otherness to get things. The Others are enchanted, or so they claim, when he introduces himself to a new employee of the orphanage. He knows that they are not truly Others—they think that he is an Other like them, and if he lives among them, he supposes that he might be one as well, and that perhaps the others learned Otherness faster or better than he did, but then if he is an Other, they cannot be called Others to him. But the habit is hard to break, and Otherly behaviour does not come easily or naturally to him. (Otherness will never be his own, and he is an island). But he knows the words and the actions, and he follows the rules. Because it does not matter that he knows he is not an Other. Because, as long as they think of him as one of them, he will be, since what he thinks clearly doesn't change anything. He still has to follow the same rules.

Now the bigger Others clothe him and feed him and allow him to bathe. But the Others are not his, because he has to work to get what he needs from them, and they don't need anything from him.

He does not like the fact that some Others obviously know and understand more things than he does. Bigger Others clearly know more than the smaller Others, and they never seem to need anything from smaller Others. But the smaller Others—they know less, and understand less, and they need things that only the bigger Others can give them. He overhears that Others that go to school learn things through books, so he resolves to do so, too. Between looking over the orphanage employee's shoulder at story time and looking at the books and papers that those who go to school bring back, Tom learns to read. The smaller Others still ignore him, and he is glad for it.

December 25, 'Christmas', 1932. 5 years old.

The smaller Others are asking the bigger ones for presents. It is a deviation from the rules—rules that he did not understand enough in past years to see the peculiarity—so, as always, he seeks to understand more. Apparently this is a day where smaller Others should always get something they want but would not usually get, but the smaller Others—children, he corrects himself—are told that there are no funds for 'orphans like them', because there is not enough money to satisfy everyone and the 'honest people' deserve it more than they do. Tom observes. He isn't sure why there is a day where he shouldn't have to do anything for the things he wants, but then again, neither does he see what makes some Others more deserving than him. He thinks that, maybe, it is because someone made it true by thinking it and making others think so, too—just like the Others think that Tom is one of them, and so now for all intents and purposes he is.

September 27, 1933. 6 years old.

He is at school, and—as he expects—school bores him. He has read enough books that he is far beyond his age peers, so he escapes to the library whenever he can. The teachers do not care, because whenever they give him something to do or ask him a question, his performance is exactly what they want. At the end of his day, he steals a newspaper from a teacher's desk on his way out of the classroom when no one is looking, and finds a bench outside to read. He reads about the slight fall in unemployment with the economy's modest recovery because they don't use the gold standard anymore and have more competitive exports. Many of those terms do not mean much to him, and he doesn't understand how they work together, but he will research them during his next visit to the library. And he will understand, because once he does, he will not need to listen to a well-dressed adult tell him about shameful poverty and how Tom is his inferior. That is a rule of the Others that he refuses to let them apply to him.

When he walks back to the orphanage, some of the neighbourhood children stop him. It seems that, though the children at the orphanage are used to his solitary tendencies and do not bother him, the children at the school demand that he act like them and remain ignorant. They apparently have their own rules, where being polite and smiling at appropriate times is not enough. They call him a teacher's pet (though, frankly, he does not see how his behaviour makes him one). Soon, they are pushing him to the ground and their leader begins to laugh—which gives the others the obligation to laugh, too. And then they leave.

As days and weeks pass, and Tom refuses to accommodate the boys (he will not stop learning, because knowledge belongs to those who do not need—and he will escape need) the 'bullying' (as a girl with pig-tails calls their actions) gradually escalates. But he is alone and has no way to fight back, and he will not involve an adult because enlisting their help will cost him.

November 6, 1933.

The very first time Tom looks into someone's eyes, it is a Monday during recess and their arm has just broken. For a moment he is transfixed by the mind he sees: impressions of fear, memories of past pain, and the lingering thoughts of taunting transforming themselves into a panicked blur. (Perhaps this is what Tom has been missing—maybe if he looks into Others' eyes, he will feel the smiles just as he now feels the tears). Meanwhile, the boy's companions break out into whispers—that Tom is a freak, unnatural, a monster. Similar things have happened around him, before, so he has never thought it unnatural when clothes that he outgrows change to accommodate him, when books that were out of reach jumped into his hands, when snakes come to see him for a chat, or, back when the matron forgot to feed him, when cookies sometimes made their way to him overnight. But this time when it happens… when a boy's arm breaks… he is not alone, and Tom learns that, while he does things when no one is looking and that, likewise, no one else does while he is looking, it does not mean that they do these things when he is in fact not looking. When the children run to a teacher, he learns that the world doesn't simply do these things for everyone, and that he's the one making them happen, somehow. It is… a revelation.

January 1934. 7 years old.

Tom makes things happen—things that do not normally happen if he, specifically, is not around to will them into being. He makes chairs float, he makes food look invisible to everyone but himself. He practices willing, until he can feel something within him rise up to the occasion and bring his will into being. It becomes as easy as breathing. Just like people can decide what is true by having enough people think it, Tom can decide what is real with the strength of his will—by believing that he can remake the rules that say objects can't just shrink.

The children at the orphanage see him at it, sometimes. Tom looks into their eyes and learns their fear. For now, their minds tell him that they will avoid him. The children at school have spread the word about the bully's broken arm, and they leave him alone, too. Others cannot do what he does, and it frightens them. What Tom does… it is control, a power that the others do not have.

Others fear what is beyond their understanding—Tom is a perfect example of that. But Tom does not fear what he does not understand. He knows what fear does; it takes control and power away like they never existed. So he will continue to learn what he does not know, until there is nothing for him to fear—like the adults who do not need because they know more, have more power because they do not need and vice-versa. These theories are a jumble of thoughts, but he concludes one thing: his will-control power is good.

Summer 1936. 9 years old.

Some of the older orphans have overcome their fear, because he has never hurt them. He sees it in their eyes, just as he sees the caution in the minds of the matron and other orphanage employees. They will not help him like they help the other children who get hurt, because they once again think that he is odd and they do not understand him, either—they try to forget him like they did before, but he does not let them.

So when a boy crushes the skull of his favourite snake, Tom retaliates (hurts him, because it will make him fear and never again take away what belongs to Tom) and kills his rabbit.

Whenever a child tries to hurt him, Tom takes away what they want, too, because it is Tom against the world.

Summer 1938. 11 years old.

Albus Dumbledore crashes into his life and destroys his carefully regulated equilibrium with one short sentence. Tom is both enchanted and devastated to learn of the wizarding world. Enchanted because maybe being a wizard is like being a different species to 'muggles', and it's the reason why Tom still can't feel the smiles even after he knows what they feel like from the minds of others, and the other wizards have their own set of rules that will make sense to Tom. Devastated because he is ignorant and powerless and will have to work hard to know how to get what he wants, and because the professor's mind isn't available for perusal which makes him even more ignorant. And when Tom thinks that maybe he isn't an island anymore, he isn't sure whether he is pleased or displeased.

September 1st, 1938.

He is on the train to Hogwarts, doing some additional reading. He has already read the required textbooks over the summer, along with some general history to get a feel for the culture. It turns out that the magical world hasn't had an economic depression like the muggles did. Already, wizards seem a little better than muggles. He shares his compartment with another child, but he largely politely ignores the witch and forgets her name when they leave the train.

He does notice that the only wizard he has run into whose mind he could not access at all was the professor. He wonders why—perhaps it is an indication of magical strength. When he glances into the minds of other first years, he also notices that none of them have even half as much control over their magic. Tom wonders if he might be the only one who can see minds, just like he is the only one who wills things into reality.

That evening, before proclaiming him a Slytherin, the sorting hat will assure him that the ability is 'natural legilimency', and that it is not the only rare gift Tom has. He gets the feeling that he will be investigating.

September 2nd, 1938.

The 'pureblood' students in his dormitory call him a 'mudblood'. His surname isn't known among wizards, and he has no ancestry to name. Tom is already aware of what the prejudice means, and is frankly revolted by the thought that he might be related to muggles. But he might not, because maybe the matron's story about his birth is false and they just made up a name for him.

He sees a ghost for the first time. The encounter opens up a new field of inquiry: the afterlife. In the subsequent months, he will spend some time sneaking around the restricted section of the library when he realizes that the regular books cannot inform him. He wants to know—as always.

June 1939. 12 years old.

Tom outclasses everyone on the final exams (theory is easy, and practical magic is will), and yet he is sent back to the muggles with the threat of being expelled if he uses magic over the summer. He asks to stay at Hogwarts—he might continue his scrutiny of the library and keep in magical shape—but is rebuffed. It is almost as if whoever is making the rules wants muggle-raised students to have disadvantages. He is not pleased, not at all.

September 1939.

Soon after classes begin, he overhears muggleborns discussing letters from their parents. The war has begun, and Tom wonders—truly wonders—if he will be sent back to muggle London if the conflicts bring danger to Britain.

He voraciously latches on to the library and stumbles upon an obscure tome that tells him about that second gift the sorting hat mentioned: he is a parselmouth. A trait passed down from Salazar Slytherin, all the way to Tom; he isn't born of muggle parents. He latches on to that idea just as tightly as he did to the library, but his true obsession is something else. The Chamber of Secrets. He wants to find it, and Tom always gets what he wants if he tries.

April 1940. 13 years old.

He continues breezing through lessons, but his performance has attracted the attention of some upper years. They do not know that he is the Heir of Slytherin, not yet at any rate, because Tom knows the power of a name, and names carry beliefs. And Tom knows that belief can become truth at his command, but that timing and preparation are everything. That is why he has been preparing for this, because he has seen it coming just like he did when the muggle orphans planned to hurt him.

None of them ever succeeds in bullying Tom (they may have more experience and a bigger repertoire of spells, but he has raw power and cunning), but that is not the point. The point is that the other Slytherins, the ones closer to his age, the ones who already know they cannot best him, see him win; Tom is breaking the rules of hierarchy, and slowly but surely, they will come to fear him even if they do not admit it to themselves.

Summer 1940.

They send him back to muggle London. His orphanage evacuated to the countryside in June because the government expects a seaborne invasion, and they send him back anyway. They are, by all accounts, knowingly sending him to a probable death. It is not a compliment to wizards that Tom is not surprised. He cannot even use magic without being expelled, not even what he does without his wand because they monitor that, too. That is what Slughorn (whose mental defences are surprisingly present, as he discovers one day) says, and the professor is so besotted with Tom that he would never lie to him for the sake of protecting a few worthless muggles. He is thus left to fend for himself, defenceless; he will sneak into the orphanage building for shelter and steal for sustenance with no magic to bail him out of trouble.

August 23.

There is a bombing on the outskirts of London, not too far from the orphanage building where he is sleeping. It is the ground's vibrations and the deafening sound of the explosion that wake him, but it is the screams that keep him awake. That night, Tom thinks he might understand the ghosts for being afraid, because he is troubled by what might happen if he were to die in a raid. He resolves to take his studies of the afterlife more seriously, because he hasn't found much to satisfy him but is sure there must be an answer somewhere, since there always is.

September.

By the time school begins, he is filthy and exhausted and emaciated. He attracts stares, and every time he defiantly matches them, he sees the disgust in their minds, their thoughts about his inferiority and barbarism as a 'mudblood'. A few of the seventh year Slytherins with nascent shields around their minds make it clear that he isn't welcome in the common room when he heads to the showers immediately after the opening feast, but he makes it even clearer that they are weak.

Soon enough, he hears about the Blitz beginning and the mounting death toll. He could have been among the corpses if the attack had started earlier. His magical strength would have done nothing to save him had he been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and now it irks him more that he still does not know what it is that the ghosts are avoiding—though he is starting to be quite certain that it is nothing good.

February 1941. 14 years old.

He has had enough of being called a mudblood when he clearly is not. It is his name, he knows, that causes the problem. So he remakes it, changes it into something that suits what he wants—and vows to make it real. And if being pureblood means to hate mudbloods and half-bloods, he will.

October 1941.

Someone asks him if he's ever been in love with anyone. He does not understand that emotion even when he takes it from the minds of others, and he hates that they give the same name to many different things that are just as superfluous as one another. He says no, and makes sure no one ever asks him again.

Spring 1942. 15 years old.

He comes to the realization that nothing can tells him what comes after death, but he still refuses to ever go into something uninformed, because the unknown is his fear if he has one at all. So instead of solving the mystery, he will make sure that he is never confronted with it. He begins researching.

Fall 1943. 16 years old.

He stumbles upon an obscure reference—'horcrux'—in an old book. He thinks it might be what he is looking for, so he works his charm on Slughorn.

Spring.

He finds the Chamber of Secrets in the place he least expected, which is why it has taken him this long to find it. One day a girl accidentally dies, but he is unbothered except for the fact that he ends up having to frame someone to make sure Hogwarts does not close.

Summer 1943.

He completes the diary. When he tears his soul apart, it hurts more than he imagines the Cruciatus curse hurts, like he is losing himself and becoming something else entirely in the process. But when it is done, he feels nothing. So he tells himself that it wasn't painful and that he didn't lose anything—and that makes it true, because the line between belief (will) and truth is so thin he can't even see it anymore.

He carries on with his plans, and from now on nothing else matters but that single-minded determination.

Summer 1944. 17 years old.

He is staring down at the corpse of a muggle named Tom Riddle. Not his father, because he has no relationship with muggles.

June 1945. 18 years old.

He graduates with the highest honours—Head Boy, Medal for Magical Merit, valedictorian. The Slytherins know who he is, and they will follow him when the time comes. He looks down at them from the podium while he gives his speech, and he hides his contempt as he thinks ahead—of how he will obtain more artefacts to use as horcruxes, of how he can deepen his knowledge of the dark arts.

Winter 1952.

He is learning necromancy from unsavoury individuals. It is an interesting subject, but he is attracted to its uses rather than to the theory. He will be able to raise an army of inferi, when he needs to.

1970.

Corpses at his feet, again. It is… so easy. He follows no rules but his own, has no power above his own and no great unknown giving him the obligation to fear.

1980.

A prophecy will not dictate his future. He viciously casts the cruciatus on Severus Snape.

(July 31, 1980).

Change, difference. No other distinctions; a swirl of a world that is as much him as he is it.

(May 1980).

Mother, mother always brings good. Sometimes he feels unpleasant, but she always stops it. He sees clearly enough to see her smile and his muscles imitate hers and it feels good and warm, too.

October 31, 1981.

He points his wand at the child from the prophecy and says the words.

Green light coming at him and pain, pain, pain—

The curse bounces back but he has no time to duck and it hits him in the chest and he knows this ripping feeling from somewhere and then—

It takes the amorphous Voldemort/Harry soul-thing a few hours to sort through both sets of experiences and adjust to the merge with some degree of decency. Even as thoroughly messed up as he is, he somehow (by the skin of his teeth, really) manages to make it all—the vastly different sets of memories, feelings and thought patterns—fit together into a consistent whole. Organizing everything as part of a single whole, rather than as separate wholes (which is what the occlumency inadvertently did before the loss of consciousness), helps minimize the confusion in his mind a great deal.

Luckily, things like that are possible for the paragon of magical might and superiority that he is. (Ah, pride—how many lesser wizards has it felled?)

When the confusion finally does end, it gives way to a headache. Merlin, no. It is the mother of all migraines, not a mere headache.

Voldemort/Harry keeps his eyes closed to let it fade. At least now the two souls are properly organized, with their experiences meshed together… though he does disdain having a body this young.

He finds it difficult to define himself. Many of the things he has learned as Tom and put into practice as Voldemort no longer apply because of what he has experienced as Harry—those brief flashes of warmth and trust and well-being render many of Voldemort's understandings obsolete if not entirely meaningless. But then, even though he is not Voldemort, he is even less Harry Potter. The toddler, unlike Voldemort, has never had the chance to develop much of an awareness before he became… well… Voldemort/Harry.

Perhaps he is Tom starting over again with the advantage of a stable home and sanity (both of which he attributes to the influence of Harry's soul) along with a big head start in knowledge and life experience (enough to avoid the unforgiveable imbecility of making horcruxes). Truly, he doesn't know what he was thinking as Tom when he made horcruxes, but he is glad for the merge—hindsight makes it obvious that horcruxes precipitated Voldemort's insanity and impulsivity, not that his grasp on reality was ever particularly strong.

He concludes to himself that he is nameless, of indeterminate mental age, and plagued by the constraints of his current physical age. Not the best self-diagnosis to receive, or the most pleasing one, but at least he is not a horcrux anymore since the merge produced an entirely different soul that does not tie Voldemort to life.

When, for lack of a better thing to do (the migraine from hell has yet to abate, so he really does not want light to hit his eyes while he looks around), his thoughts drift to what happened the previous evening, he is more than tempted to deny that it has ever happened. Particularly upon revisiting the overly emotional thought process he has exhibited. He settles for blaming it all on his infantile body; no one whose rooting reflex disappeared less than a year ago can rightfully be expected to think straight, so he is of the opinion that it is a wonder he was even able to formulate the thoughts that led to those dreadful emotional reactions.

Come to think of it, he considers himself lucky that Dumbledore perpetually insists on the assumption of innocence, because he isn't certain that he would have taken it lightly if an infant started creating destructive acid blobs with a dark lord's wand—particularly given the circumstances and Voldemort's tendency to dabble in magic he really, really shouldn't touch.

Well, he has said it before, and he will say it again: the old goat is completely and indubitably insane.

Nevertheless, aside from rants about Dumbledore, it remains that, to the world (and to said old man), he will be Harry James Potter, one year old, nauseatingly adorable, adorably polite, and politely inoffensive (as he sees it, the wizarding population is stupid enough that they might find him intimidating—and thus, rude—if they thought he was able to use his magical power and political clout), and commonly known as whatever moniker they made up for him, destroyer of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. It is, to say the least, not exactly congruent with his self-evaluation. It is slightly annoying to think of the act he will have to put up, especially in his youth.

On that note of his musings, he notices the sound of dragged footsteps uncomfortably close to wherever he is.

His eyes snap open in surprise.

Bright, glaring, painful morning sunlight greets him.

And of course this body has very little motor control and he is unable to stop the resulting wails even as his eyes shut again. But then arms wrap around him and he is picked up.

He recognizes Black's voice from his whispered words of comfort, and—whether it's the absence of the aversive stimulus or the bouncing movements the man makes—he is able to stop howling. He finds the entire process embarrassing, and some part of him wonders why he must be subjected to the indignity of being held by Black again, but something in him can't help but find it not entirely uncomfortable.

He lashes out at the feeling and makes it go away.

When his captor notices that he has calmed, he speaks a little more clearly.

"Shh Harry, everything's going to be fine, everything's going to be just fine. We'll be alright you and me," his voice cracks, and Voldemort/Harry wonders whether Black is trying to convince himself, "and we'll manage and we'll make Ja—James and Lily proud and—"

And then the man starts sobbing.

On him.

Again.

And, to his dismay, it does not look like he will stop anytime soon. If anything, he is getting worse and having a nervous breakdown, because Black sinks to his knees and holds Voldemort/Harry so close it impedes his ability to breathe.

This is not helping with the migraine.

Voldemort/Harry is saved from attempting an intervention when someone slams what he assumes is the main door open, and noisily barges into wherever they are.

… Weren't they supposed to be under a Fidelius charm? He is surprised that the old coot has not already set it up.

"Sirius! I'm back! …Sirius, where…?"

Well, the fact that this unknown male visitor was there before explains the vague voices he thinks he heard earlier that morning, and how this person knows where they are.

He hears footsteps as the visitor nears the room they are in, and before he can attempt to extricate his face from Black's chest to identify the man…

"There you are—What on Earth do you think you're doing?! Harry's asphyxiating!"

And then another pair of arms wraps around him and frees him from Black's clutches. Finally, he can breathe properly! He shoots a glance up to see the face of his liberator and vaguely recognizes him as the one Harry knows as 'Moony'—he hazards a guess and goes with the assumption that this is Remus Lupin, James Potter's werewolf charity case, as Pettigrew characterized him.

Voldemort/Harry's attention is brought back to his new godfather when the latter somehow manages to look even more miserable as he sobs a stream of barely intelligible apologies—for being a bad guardian to Harry, for not trusting Lupin, for steering the Potters into the decision that killed them...

Lupin, whose eyes are already graced with dark circles, looks even more tired when the tension seeps out of his muscles and he looks at Black pityingly before interrupting him.

"Padfoot, stop… it—it wasn't your fault. You know that. Don't—" he pauses and composes himself, "don't spend all of your energy on blaming yourself for something no one can change when you still have someone that needs you."

Voldemort/Harry (he is reluctant to refer to himself as 'Harry', since it really isn't quite him) is astonished at the contrast between the two men. It is clear, with just one look past the amber eyes to brush against his mind, that the werewolf is no less distraught than his friend, but whereas the latter allows himself to drown in his sorrow to the point of dysfunction, the former keeps himself composed and looks to the future. It is impressive, but then again, he has already had much experience with doing just that—one does not survive being bitten by a werewolf in early childhood and become a functional individual without great strength of character. Greyback and his pack illustrate that point. Voldemort/Harry thinks that he might grow to respect this 'Moony' person, especially since it looks like he will be the only sane company he gets.

Black ceases his visual fixation at the floor, and looks up at Lupin, then at his godson. Tears well up in his eyes again, but he picks himself up from his place on the ground and gives a feeble agreement.

"I know. I know that, but—it's just—everything keeps reminding me, and then—I—I just… Merlin, Remus, it's just—I don't know what I'm doing, and I'll be a horrible guardian and I'll fail Harry just like I failed Lily and James and they'll never forgive me and I'll never be able to do this alone but I'll have to because Dumbledore said everyone's going to be after Harry and—and—"

Thankfully, Lupin does them all a favour and interrupts once again.

"Sirius…" he moves forward and tentatively rests his free hand on Black's arm, "Don't panic, alright? If—if you don't mind me too much, maybe I'll move in with you, actually maybe it's best if I do, I'll help around and we'll figure it out. You won't fail Harry." He gives a small reassuring smile, "After all, I'll stop you from doing anything too disastrous, right? So I'll stay."

Voldemort/Harry's respect for Lupin goes up another notch: he does not need to worry that Black will do something extremely stupid that ends up accidentally killing him.

Black looks at Lupin like he just saved him from being kissed by a dementor just as Voldemort/Harry is unpleasantly reminded that his young body affords him no control over its natural needs.

His eyes grow large with horror. He (well, a part of him) has been the single most feared dark lord in centuries, and the only one whose name is so feared that most people do not dare say it and flinch upon hearing it. He does not want a pair of youngsters humiliatingly changing his nappies. Ever.

He attempts to direct his magic fix that particular quandary before either of the men becomes aware of his dilemma (which is a foolish endeavour, as neither of them is quite ignorant enough not to check the nappy after a while). Unfortunately, while he does succeed in banishing the mess without losing control of his magic—it is, after all, nothing complicated even without a wand—he is not quick enough to fool Lupin's nose.

"Er… Sirius?"

"Yeah?"

"When's the last time you changed Harry's nappy?"

The two stare at each other and manage to look as horrified as Voldemort/Harry is feeling. It has apparently dawned on them that they do not, in fact, have any clue about taking care of a toddler.

End Note: I've taken some liberties with the timeline because the "50 years ago" dates are awfully iffy. I tried to make Tom's childhood reflect his probable attachment disorder (from anonymous and inconsistent caregivers) as opposed to Harry's strong background of trust and assurance. There's also genetics/biology playing a role, with Tom having difficulty with the innate facial expressions (possibly trouble with the amygdala as a neurological basis for psychopathy--may be related to the inbreeding of the Gaunts) and Harry's mirror neuron feedback system working just fine in its entirety. Obviously the biological factor will apply to "Voldemort/Harry" since he is in Harry's body rather than Tom's. There are also substantial blanks in the memories after Tom begins making horcruxes, but that is intended to reflect how he loses whatever grasp he had on reality. Do tell me any of your suggestions to make this chapter better, because I'm not sure I've succeeded in portraying everyone accurately.