Of all the ways he had been reborn, and though he had yet to experience them all, Tom could not imagine any was as satisfying as this one. Ever so slowly he had rematerialized before his own eyes, watching the blue veins running beneath his pale skin darken as they slowly began to fill and pulse. Suddenly memory was not enough to sustain his speaking but rather his lungs demanded ragged breaths be taken, drawn in and huffed out, so limiting in their capacity and yet helping to form his clad feet into things steady enough to support him on his own. He felt woozy and sick, a heat rushing up his cheeks and chilling his spine as decades of words and another’s life source spun and knotted and gnarled together into Him Now.
 
And in its expected way, his return demanded a price. Oh, not from him. The prone body of Ginny lay without ceremony or mortification, a quiet shell that wasn’t a sacrifice, merely a means. And beside her another curled, shaking her in fury that she had not held on, clenching her as though his very will could revive another.
 
But it never had.
 
Tom watched the slip of a being, more energy than form; Tom’s own energy, transferred and intermingled with Harry’s by some prophetic joke. Through the desperation Tom could almost hear the sibilant sounds of Slytherin’s own tongue seated deep within Harry’s throat under-towing softly, mockingly. It coiled in lazy circles, mindless of both Harry’s anguish and Tom’s rage, a malevolent overseer bound to no restrictions that any other sound wouldn’t be. The words were all the same. Tom. Harry. Rebirth. Hissed, spit, barked, cried, whimpered, it didn’t matter. Hate, luck, deserving, pride, force, change. The same.
 
The same.
 
Tom squeezed their intangibility, his hands closing in on themselves, fingers digging into his own flesh which was just new and now again nothing but a tool. Instinct.
 
Hatred was turned on him, Harry’s eyes behind glasses mirroring a loathing, deadly certainty well beyond twelve years.
 
Tom had fifty years on him.
 
The boy was broken but not beaten, his wand gone, no weapon in sight save a defiance that dared Tom to undo him. Touching him was no release, it seared in worse ways than any physical charring. His hands craved tangibility, corporeality, certainty. Smooth unbending yew that was an extension from his arm, a power that focused him.
 
A focal point would have to do.
 
His entire body felt like it had been asleep and was just waking up, pins and needles pain shooting throughout him as he first used it to straddle Harry, the boy’s sweat soaking up through the material of his clothing. Tom wanted methodology, the clinical, the cold. To back away and not touch this defiled thing, not let it taint him or know his own touch in any way after it had already taken so much from him. But he shook with longing, a base urge to survive, to revenge, at any cost. His hands slide around the slick neck, fingers reaching each other with room to spare.
 
It wasn’t slow, his mind wanted it to be. To take note and capture it all as he pressed, feeling first the thin layer of flesh compress, then the neck bruise in it’s resistance, damaging, collapsing in, all the parts inside that area of him which Harry probably could not name.
 
But other hands, Harry’s, were reaching out, tearing at Tom’s collar, punching him, drawing out his own breath, striving for Tom’s own neck. Tom felt Harry buck and writhe beneath him, nearly capsizing Tom. It was a frenzied exhaust of movement beyond what their matter should be capable of, willful ego outlasting reason as their desire drove them on.
 
It wasn’t slow. He wanted it to be. His mind was set, focused on what his instincts wanted, unthinking beyond them, a calm automotive response that was a fictional control. Tom shook, gagged, grunted, trying to knock off the hands that shot out and clung round his throat. Harry knew what he was trying to do.
 
Harry had taken everything else.
 
Both bodies were rigid, thrashing, fighting to breathe not to breathe, but to prevent the other from ever doing so again. One breath longer than the other was all they craved, a mutuality that Tom noticed, that hit his spine and cut through Harry’s hold to have his mind take note. That was worthy of gasping all on its own.
 
He wouldn’t. He wasn’t. Harry was not him. Harry would not be allowed to be him.
 
It was then all Tom saw, all he thought. Tom was gasping, but Harry was more. Tom’s hands were longer, his pressure stronger, his desire to undo entangled in his very being, something he owned, something he nurtured, something he instilled in Harry. It had not been taken, and only Tom himself owned it.
 
The poison hadn’t left Harry much time, but Tom refused to let it take him. Tom as rightful heir had commanded the basilisk, but now that he could breathe and walk and do, he would undo the boy. The Slytherin blood in Tom’s veins had left him unharmed, but he, Lord Voldemort, would ensure he remained that way.
 
It was titillating to own himself again, exhilarating and rushed, a giddy humor that left him in rasping laughs of ecstasy. His body was new, exhausted, bruised, feeling swollen and pulsing and dizzy as he fought for his life. It was right, it was familiar. He wanted it.
 
Harry never gave up or in, even as his eyes rolled back and hands fell from Tom’s clawed and shuddering neck. He was a boy who had lived. Who had wanted to live. He just hadn’t been enough.
 
When the life fully left Harry Tom wasn’t sure, there was no great gust of spirit, no theatrical collapse. Merely a slackened form, the panted low garglings stilling, the chest failing to nearly burst through his torn shirt and sinking in as Tom still refused to let go, holding on to the moment, dragging it out now that he could. The body was empty beneath him, larger than Ginny’s but beneath him and still, done, and at that he collapsed on top of it, drawing in the sickening smell of sweat and fluid that nearly made him sick, hands releasing the throat and pushing himself off Harry with as much force as he could. But he didn’t roll far away as he drew his next breath.
 
He’d ensured he’d never have to.