*

He moves silently like shadow, with nothing more than an anaconda hiss to whisper his trail. Many a time Lucius feels - senses - his touch on his neck and flinches, unaccustomed to the casual intimacy.

Lucius wonders if Tom enjoys startling him, seeing his muscle tense and goosebumps rise. He always loves affecting things on a physical plane, sometimes sitting for hours watching the flame of a candle wave to his breath. At times the light flickers hesitantly, although mostly it stays coolly unaffected. But Lucius never manages to segregate the layers of existential reality that divide them, and so Tom occupies his time idly playing the illicit cause and effect on him. They are defying the fundaments of the universe every time Lucius shivers at the touch to his bare flesh, and less spurned beings would have cared.

Tom talks when it strikes his fancy, teasing silken threads of ethereal memory across his ears. Lucius is careful not to speak, and when it is an effort to keep silent Tom places a slender insubstantial finger on his lips. Shhh, I am hard on souls.

The first two hours are always the best, coming back after disposing of the some unfortunate house-elf or minion and seeing him almost solid and clear-cut on the edges, revitalized with borrowed life. In those moments he could reach out and almost feel the resistance of his flesh, feel his fanning breath, feel his humanity.

*

Dancing cheek to cheek in the shadowed room, a thin white-blond man and a shimmering phantasm figure - this is another memory, edges worn smooth with frequent regard.

Flesh and blood and moonlight and dust moves in unison across the cold marble floors and antique lace curtains, the solid form ever so careful with his arms, as if a careless movement will pass easily through the other and prove him to be truly nothing - as if the other one was a bubble, with only the finest sheen of luxuriant skin to transcend it from the empty space all around.

"Do you feel him!" Tom whispers fiercely, and indeed his voice is one of the few parts of him that have not lost its vitality. "Saturated in the water and air and yes, shadows. He is a second pulse to me."

Lucius sees his eyes glowing; the eyes too had always the same intensity, whether he is freshly satiated with the ether of stolen time or an insubstantial suggestion of a thing, fading in and out of reality like objects of a dream.

A ghostly hand brushes against the linen sleeves that clad Lucius's forearms, and Lucius obediently pulls the sleeve back. Tom bends his head to kiss the dark mark and pauses for a moment, relishing the shiver his cold insubstantial lips evoked.

"Does it thrill you?" he asked once, words rings of smoke and frost to caress Lucius's cheek. "Being so close to power, even a flimsy secondhand one? Is that why you pour life into me, take me into your arms?"

No, Lucius wanted to say, because I love you, have loved you since I woke up with the book under my pillow and ink stained on my fingers and lips. And it is you, you of your discipline and your cunning and your will, who summoned me. It is you.

But he could not lest he gives away too much of his soul, and so he presses his lips to where the curve of Tom's neck should be and closes his eyes.

*

He is pure soul, so everything touches him to the quick. He has no resistance, he has no defense. Will and resolve are tied as much to the flesh as they are to the mind, and even someone with as forceful a mind as Tom's would be hard put to endure.

Lucius repeats this to himself when he sees the black flames in Tom's eyes, the hunger as he presses his forehead to the walls as if listening for reverberations of a distant volcano. There are horrible moments when his façade cracks and the fury emerges in a flurry of flashing shadows and glinting stardust, and worse of all when everything is over the room looks exactly the same as before. His helplessness is never emphasized more than in times like these, when he, in colossal vindictiveness, could not manage to scatter a sheaf of paper. These are the rages, and they would render him stolid and unresponsive for days.

He is pure soul, and nothing is buffered. He is free to roam a vault of dust and filtered moonshine, while the future he would never have is overturning the anchor of the world.

He is pure soul, and he is nothing.

*

"What is there to believe in, but beauty? Surely there is no greater attestation to the existence of a higher power."

He had smiled then, teeth the same shade as the perfect white lily he holds in front of him.

When he crushes the fragile flower beneath his weight, he raises his face to the sky, drinking in the pollen perfume in this garden of perfectly manicured aesthetics. "Sacrilege!" he whispers harshly to the trees and the grass and the violet midnight clouds - "I defy it all!"

Lucius turns away then, because he could not bear to see the gossamer teardrops glinting on the corners of Tom's eyes.

"I defy," the whisper rustled through the air like silk and autumn leaves, a weak hopeless ghost breath from the mouth of a boy whose very center is rebellion and ambition, and can do nothing more than tear off the wings of butterflies.

*

Lucius doesn't suppose that a memory can sleep as a normal human does, but there is something that rises up from the recesses of diary that Tom retreats to at night.

He does not know if he should think of them as dreams.

What he does know is that falling asleep in Tom's chamber his own dreams would be assailed with a torrent of unfamiliar and unfathomable images - a jumbled mess of water silver and auburn hair and lurid flashes that he is scared to even try to decipher and is relieved to have fade away when he wakes. It gave him an uneasy thrill to know that these are clips of Tom's life, leaching into his subconsciousness unawares of him.

He never approaches the diary at night, because he is afraid to see what might be written there.

*

Lucius hates feeling helpless, but that is the foundation of his time with Tom. Or, if not that, at least the canvassing and much of the cement.

He is helpless to soothe during the dark rages; he is helpless of anything but the most flimsy of touches, physically or verbally. Theirs is a bittersweet affair, he tells himself, the kind strengthened on longing and regret and wistfulness. He could contend himself with the sight of Tom, his words, his presence - except for the hours when he couldn't, and then he is fraught with a desperation so deep he thinks that if he just reached out and touched Tom it might permeate tumultuous gray into his fragile translucent skin.

He tries to use house-elves, inconvenient servants, wily spies, even small children - in hope to rendering him solid and whole for once and for all. But he would always bleed out of his arms after a while, vitality drained into his doppelganger who holds the license for life. And Voldemort - they never speak that name anymore, Tom is always Tom - is growing more indestructible all along, in great part owning to the efforts of Lucius.

Someday, he thinks, he will not be able to stand it anymore. And then...

*

There is a piano in the foyer, which Lucius sometimes plays. One day, in the middle of a piece, he finds Tom standing behind him. Impatiently he motions for Lucius to continue, and he does.

A few lines later he feels something not unlike plunging into a miasma of ice-steam, and a chill went through him when he realized what had happened -

Tom is one with him.

He can see the hint of fingers other than his own, moving to his in synchronously. It is more than a little disturbing, although nothing to the effect of a body-snatch had actually taken place. No, Tom is merely trying to gain a secondhand experience of solidity through him.

"Such joy..." he felt the words and heard them at the same time - "For the gift of touch..."

He hears the catch in his voice, feels the crack in the smooth façade - it is more than he can bear.

He stands up and walks away, throat burning.

*

The diary is lying on the lectern as always, coated with a layer of dust. He seizes it and flips it open to the middle, and with his right hand he produces a quill.

This is a gift, and it is Memory.

The response comes with the first written word - What are you doing? Stop this at once!

But he is weak and frail and powerless, and Lucius will see to it that he isn't ever one of these things again.

Memory.

Pouring out in great torrents, each ambiguous written word carrying with it a luggage, a package of his person to be absorbed into the parchment of interwoven unicorn hair.

He slumps onto the gritty surface and feels strength draining from him. Only his hand is moving, furiously scribbling out before dazed eyes, scribbling out everything he could call to mind.

The room blurs

Next he sees a boy, and it is a familiar boy.

Black hair and pale, pale skin, lips and eyes and limbs sliding around him. He comes towards him with animal hunger in his eyes and Lucius does not retreat. A mouth locks on his, arms wind across his back and legs hooked together. Numbed shock - oh god he's solid he's real he's human he's mine - and a distant pain. Then there is only one entity, taking and receiving in a whirlwind dance of silvers and grays.

Familiar foreign recollections began unfolding somewhere within, and he is filled with the life of someone that is and is not him.

He whimpers, hands clenched around the base of his neck and not being able to dig as deep as he wants, into warm and solid flesh.

Then he is being torn away and he tries to fight it, but the power is coming from all sides and muffling heavy walls are holding him immobile, forcing him out...

When he awakes, the diary is still and silent and it speaks to him no more.

*

Three years later, Voldemort falls.

*

Lucius Malfoy stumbles home after a raid to find Tom Riddle sitting on his bed, as solid as he had ever been. The cooling body of a servant lies nearby.

"You must send me into the world," he says, and Lucius goes to his arms.

*

He manages to put it off for twelve years. They needed the era of suspicion to pass, Lucius claimed. It was, of course, irrelevant that the hiatus was the best time of his life. When Tom Riddle finally put his foot down, Lucius only nodded in bitter acknowledgement.

*

He chooses the redhead girl because she lookes like easy prey, sanguine and trusting and brimming with life. And mostly because of what he had seen, a long time ago, in Riddle's dreams.

*

On the day he slips the diary into her books, her ministry father has nothing but daggers for him. Of course, he thinks he is pledged to Voldemort; they all do.

Lucius Malfoy nurses his wounds and watches Tom disappear into the distance, and he smiles at how far from the mark they are.

End.