Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
--Dylan Thomas

We're afraid of the dark, Nagini and I. She curls around me in the bed, soaking up heat from my body, and I hiss to her my fears. She hisses back. It's nice to have a friend.

She isn't mine, but she's not his either. She's ancient and wise and she helped nurse him back to health but she stays, she says, for me.

They thought she was a goddess long ago, and she whispers of temples, of altars. The only altar I remember is a thousand years ago through the dusty pages of a book. It's too long to matter and it's not my past. It's his, every bit of it, it made him who he is and he made me who I am. We three could be a family - are, in some respects. White and thin and hairless except for my head and face (he doesn't like hair on my chest or legs and it makes me look young but my skin is very smooth), and his eyes are red and mine are blue and hers are green like springtime.

I haven't seen the springtime for so very long. More than fifty years, he says, that I was in the book. I expect to feel ink running through my veins, but I stretch like flesh, don't tear like paper.

And he loves me. I asked him once, in the sleepy haze after we made love, what the most beautiful word in the world was and he said Tom.

He still leaves me in our bed, curled helplessly against the great desert of silk sheets that smell of him, musty and snake-like, and of us.

He's her little one, she says. She makes the little noise which is a laugh for a snake and I grin because he says the same thing about me and when I cuddle her in the dark and kiss her smooth, flat head I tell her she's my baby. She isn't really but it's nice to pretend and after all, in the dark there's nothing else to do.

Except now I hear him, and that's about the nicest thing there is. He's in the hall and talking to someone - Avery, I think, from the sound of his voice. I'm going to close my eyes against the burst of hall-light that might scald them, and she slides off the bed to the door to welcome him like a faithful dog. His footsteps pound in time with my heart.

I pretend I'm asleep when he comes in because he likes to wake me up and chase the languor out of my eyes. I can't help smiling when he closes the door and turns the lights up ever so slightly so it won't be dark but still not light enough to see more than the shape of him. He's afraid to show himself to me, I know, but I love him anyway maybe because of it. He knows everything there is to know about me, and he knows what I want and need and he knows how scared I am, too. Not only of the dark, but of death and endings and fate. We tricked fate, he and I, because he gave up beauty for power but he's still got me for being pretty. He says he'd rather look at me than look like me and that always makes me happy.

One of his hands is cupping half my bum and it's cool against me like metal or stone. Sometimes he just likes me to lie there and wiggle, and I can't help it because it tickles a little. He laughs at me when I do, because it's such a little-boy thing and I'm sixteen but I can't help it. When I was little I had to be grown up, and now he's here to take care of me. He gives me potions to soothe and quiet me because, he says, otherwise I'd be ill. I don't mind.

He makes love to me like a symphony and he's the conductor and then he lies beside me, sweet and sated, and Nagini winds herself around our four pale legs in Celtic knotwork fashion and we all begin to doze.

I think the most beautiful word in the world is Voldemort.

"Who is he?" Draco muttered.

"To the best I can make out," Theodore Nott drawled, "he's the Dark Lord's boy toy."

Tom looked up from his plate of runny eggs and smiled at them. Draco coughed uncomfortably and waved, then elbowed Theo in the ribs. "Who is he, though? I don't know him."

Theo shrugged. "Last time I was here they had him tied down. He was thrashing like mad, kept trying to get away in a panic and all. He's much calmer now, isn't he?"

"Well, of course," Travers said from Draco's other side. "They crucio'd the shit out of him. I'd be a bit mad if it were me!"

"Really? Doesn't that give you brain damage?" Theo inquired.

"Well, of course. He's as old as either of you but he doesn't act it. Doesn't remember a thing about himself. Loves the Dark Lord like mad. Pass me the salt, Malfoy. Thanks. It's like…okay, so a mind is like a house, right? And when you've got people like us and the Dark Lord, there's walls all around the house. Well, his head - this what Mulciber told me, mind, 'cause he helped - was a ruddy fortress. It took just about everything Mulciber could do plus some help from our Lord to tear down the walls and they couldn't just take them down enough that he'd be cooperative, they had to tear them down to the ground and dig up the foundations, like. There's a Muggle word for it, what was it…oh, yeah. Brainwashing. But our Lord has what he wants, so who's to complain? Not him, at any rate!" Travers leered at the two boys. "And not your parents, either!"

End.