The Darkening of Your Soul

Chapter 42

“Fine.” Harry leaned back in his chair, fighting the overwhelming urge to suddenly have a good, long sulk.

Briefly shaking his head, Tom leaned back in his seat as well. “Dobby, could you bring us some tea?” Within a minute Dobby had arranged a full tea service with some little finger pastries and Harry gratefully sipped a cup of hot brew, only now realizing how thirsty he was after crying his eyes out for a good, long while.

Tom took his time as well to take a few sips of his own cup before offering Harry a reassuring smile. “Not all is lost, my dear. Black believed you and he was firmly on your side until you mentioned the fact that you’d brought Voldemort back and had thrown in your lot with him.”

“But I didn’t say I brought Voldemort back,” Harry insisted with an angry little groan.

“Harry, you sweet little Gryffindor.” Tom leaned forward a little to stare deeply into Harry’s eyes. “You seem to expect that everyone will be able to forgive me as easily as you have, but you forget that there are many people in our world who’ve suffered so much under my violent past that they’ll never be able to forgive me, no matter what you and I do or say.”

“Well,” Harry started and then pursed his lips while his eyebrows knotted up into a deep frown. “But I didn’t easily forgive you, though.”

“Didn’t you?” Tom asked with a quiet chuckle. “You all but invited yourself over for tea with your arch-nemesis and immediately decided we’d be allies.”

“In this life, yeah,” Harry said with some urgency. “But in our last lives, I bloody well killed you. How’s that for quick forgiveness?”

“Ah, if you’re counting our previous lives then no, you haven’t easily forgiven me.” Tom sipped his tea again before continuing, still talking in an utterly reasonable tone. “But you forget that besides the two of us, the rest of the world doesn’t have the luxury of doing their lives over. All they have is this life, with all their pain and suffering still fresh in their mind. You cannot possibly expect someone like Black, who’s lost so much to me and my previous actions –”

“But they weren’t your actions, Tom,” Harry cut him off, quick as always to jump to his soulmate’s defence, even against Tom himself.

“But they were.” Tom narrowed his eyes and gave Harry a decidedly stern look, as if lecturing him on a life changing subject. “I split my soul, however young and stupid I was at the time. I did that to myself and I turned myself insane and I then spent decades terrorizing our world, killing and torturing my way through our society without a care of who got hurt.”

“But…”

“You have to understand, my dear, that almost no one is willing to forgive me for that, except for people like Dorus and Barty who already were on my side to begin with. Everyone else will never accept that Voldemort got a magical make-over and is suddenly best friends with his prophesized enemy and that this somehow should make up for the decades of horror he’s caused.” When Harry didn’t have anything to say to that, Tom added with a challenging curve of his eyebrow, “How do you think the Longbottom boy you’re friends with would react if he knew you’d snogged what was once the Dark Lord?”

Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing at that description, and he tried his best to imagine Neville hearing about Harry being in love with a new and improved version of Voldemort while Neville’s parents were stuck in a hospital utterly insane because of their involvement in the fight against the aforementioned Dark Lord.