Work Text:
Tom doesn't think anyone else has seen it before.
It only ever appears when he's alone, either coming back from his Prefect rounds or doing a little bit of after-hour studying in Slytherin Common Room. He sees it from the corner of his eyes, looming around the edges of the large, circular viewing glass that fills the entire west wall. That's the best view of the Black Lake in the whole castle, a privilege only awarded to Slytherins.
Tom thinks it's watching him.
It's there again tonight. He knows it the second he pulls his cloak about him tighter, feeling the air chill despite the warming charms heavily enforced down in the living space. When he moves to take a sip of his tea, it's cold, and no flick of his wand will heat it.
There's something staring at the back of his head.
His body knows it before his consciousness can register it, tensing out of instinct. Tom's grip tightens around his wand, but the same urge that bid him turn around holds him still; a power baser than magic, troublesome, deadly, selfish and uncontrollable:
Fear.
Something pointed skitters across the glass. He can hear every clink, every scratch, every scrape and slide. It moves from left to right in an upward arc, tracing the curvature of the window at a taunting speed. Tom knows it can move faster. It's done it before.
It taps once, twice, thrice. Like an innocent knock at the door.
No, not like. Exactly as, and had it come from in front of him rather than behind him, perhaps Tom would've gone to the door, opened it, and let in the poor soul who forgot the Common Room password. But this creature isn't one of the poor, lost Slytherin first years. This creature isn't one of the Care of Magical Creatures beasts.
The Slytherin Common Room is 75 meters beneath the Black Lake. It's the middle of winter, and he knows a snowstorm is raging outside.
"Tom
"Marvolo
"Riddle."
Tom flinches. He knocks his teacup off the end table, staining the carpet and littering it with the jagged porcelain shards. There's the sound of chilling—human—laughter, nails screeching against the window, and then—
"The Heir of Ssslytherin."
Tom leaps to his feet and spins around. His wand is already slashing through the air, sending a whip of crackling red across the window. It sparks as it hits the wall, but does no more damage than a firework set off in the middle of the ocean.
There's nothing there.
Tom slowly lowers his wand. His hand trembles. The spilled tea is frosted over at his feet, the window too, and all he can see is his name, TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE, scrawled in thorny letters across the expanse of glass. Then it's shifting, rearranging, and in front of him is spelled the future he'd been so carefully planning for himself:
I AM LORD VOLDEMORT
But there's nothing there.
Tom flicks his wand. The teacup repairs itself, pristine and new, but the tea still stains the carpet.
Parseltongue sounds exactly like the native language of the listener—for Parselmouths, that is. Tom hasn't been able to confirm this as fact, but from experience, all the snakes he's met speak perfectly British English to him.
It's taken years of practice to recognize the nuanced difference between Parseltongue and spoken English. It's not obvious, but Tom's trained himself to differentiate them in his sleep. He can tell. There are signs.
And that's how he knows: the phantom spoke in Parseltongue.
The phantom is a Parselmouth.
Perhaps the fact was meant to scare him, but it doesn't. In fact, it makes the phantom less of an unknown variable and something he can control. He's the Heir of Slytherin—all snakes obey him, and this one, sentient as it may seem, will be no different. He just has to meet it face to face, command it to stop—doing what it's doing, and done. Problem solved.
Maybe, if it's old enough, been around the Black Lake long enough, it'll even know where the Chamber of Secrets is and can point him in the right direction.
He can do this.
He'll need something stronger than a bubblehead charm, Tom muses. If the phantom attacks him before he can get a word in edge-wise, it might pop the bubble. Besides, who knows what depths he'll have to swim to.
"Gillyweed," Tom mutters under his breath. The hallways are blessedly devoid of students, everyone who's stayed over winter break choosing to sleep in. "Yes, gillyweed would do it…but where to get some…"
Who might have a rare plant with oddly specific uses?
Professor Slughorn, for one, but Tom had just asked him about the Black Lake's inhabitants a week prior. Even someone as willfully ignorant as him might catch on. No, Slughorn won't do, even if he is the easiest option…
…Or perhaps not. Hadn't Professor Beery mentioned a student of his was currently doing a project involving aquatic plants?
"Greenhouse seven, for extracurricular advanced projects…"
Surely a little Ravenclaw wouldn't mind if he took some, would she? And even if she did—
Who's to say Tom would let himself get caught?
Tom doesn't recall the precise name of Beery's student, but he figures gillyweed wouldn't be too hard to find. It's only grown in water, after all.
Unlike greenhouses one and three, which are purposefully classroom-sized, greenhouse seven spans at least four times their size. He can hear the sound of running water in the distance, muffled by the walls and shelves of plants in between. Each section has a small placard with a name on it, and each plant has a label which included the name and danger level.
There doesn't seem to be a pattern to the layout—and if there is, perhaps it's only known to dedicated Herbology students—so Tom decides to head for the sound of water. He casts a disillusionment spell on himself before proceeding. Beery, the only visitor who could probably see through his spell, is currently occupied with lunch.
Tom passes some plants he knows, others that he doesn't know. Wormwood, nettles, fluxweed and toadstools, snargaluff and wild rice…
He reaches the eastern wall and sees, stretching along the outer perimeter of the greenhouse, extended troughs of water filled with various aquatic plants. Tom stops in his tracks and stares. None of them look remotely similar to gillyweed.
It figures.
At the very least, finding a plant couldn't possibly be more difficult than locating the Chamber of Secrets. Tom moves toward one of the troughs and casts one of the analysis spells they learned in Herbology. He does this several more times until he's able to identify the water pattern of the trough arrangement. Then, all he has to do is follow the line down to the proper environment for gillyweed.
If only finding his ancestor's legacy was so simple.
He tracks it down to the far northwest corner, where most of the unusual saltwater plants are. A water terrace mechanism spills a waterfall of saltwater down into the trough, each shelf filled with a handful of different plants. Tom observes the state of the water changing from level to level, and locates at the topmost shelf his prize: four stalks of gillyweed.
Just as he's musing how to get it down, the entrance to the greenhouse opens. Tom tenses.
"Ah yes, gillyweed, a fascinating plant to experiment on. I do applaud your independent initiative, Ms. Warren—much befitting of your house."
Tom slowly glances at the name tag sitting beside the gillyweed. Myrtle Warren, 4th Year, it reads, in bold cursive script. The Ravenclaw emblem sits beside it.
Ah.
"Thank you, Professor," Myrtle says, shy. "I, I read your paper on the study of learning Mermish as a non-hereditary speaker—if the required properties could be bred into gillyweed…"
"Certainly, certainly a brilliant idea," Professor Dumbledore says. "You said you already began?"
"A little; I can speak underwater with it, but the properties of Mermish are still so confusing—"
Not good. Dumbledore can see straight through disillusionment spells even better than Beery.
Tom adjusts his grip on his wand. It's too late to turn back now. He points his wand toward the backmost stalk and, with a slow precision ill-matched with the tension in his bones, plucks the stalk from its place and levitates it back down to ground level.
Just in time, too—Dumbledore is fast approaching, even at his jaunty pace. Tom stuffs the gillyweed into his pouch and pushes himself back under a table. He just barely sees the sleeves of Dumbledore's obnoxiously purple robes.
Myrtle is standing beside him.
"Up there," she says, pointing. "Oh, that's odd…"
"What is it, Ms. Warren?"
"I…" Myrtle pushes his glasses up. "I could've sworn I had four stalks instead of three. Maybe it's hidden behind the last one?"
As soon as their backs fully turn, Tom crawls out from beneath the table and darts through a small pathway between the shelves. He sprints down the empty hall, silencing his footsteps as he just narrowly slips between the ajar entrance.
The door hinges squeak as he leaves.
Tom is walking back from Slughorn's office, minding his own business, when one of his steps…echo, the wrong way.
He stops. There's silence.
Slowly, Tom takes another step forward, and at the very end of the click of his shoes is a scratching sound, like nails on metal. His hand instantly goes for his wand.
"Peeves," he says, but he knows the moment he says it that it's not Peeves. "The Bloody Baron won't be pleased if he finds you playing tricks on his snakes."
There's the scratching sound again—closer, it's coming closer, and Tom doesn't know where to look. A chill rolls down his spine. He feels—corralled, exposed, like a sheep set up for slaughter. There's only one thing that can make him feel this way.
"Peeves," he says again, but this time, it's a call. He hopes Peeves comes—how the phantom is here, outside of the Black Lake, he doesn't know, but as long as he's not alone—
The phantom laughs. It gushes out like water from a broken faucet—starting low, cresting high into a range out of human reach—breathless, dropping, giggling, slamming against the walls like the force of its laughter has gone beyond bearing—
Tom recalls, in his youth, before he spent his winters at Hogwarts, the bugs and critters that would sneak in between the orphanage rafters in search of warmth. At night, when all was silent, he would lie in his tiny cot beneath his fraying, thin blanket, and listen to them scurry inside the walls, their every movement known to him.
Occasionally, a centipede or a cockroach would manage to slip between the ceiling boards, or the peeling paint, and they would drop—plink—to the floor, skittering with their tiny, skinny legs along the wood back into the shadows. The sound was so distinct, he could still hear it echoing in his ears long after they had died.
The phantom's movements sound exactly like that, only bigger. Sharper. Deadlier—a mix of a spider's crawl and a thudding slither as it moved erratically within the castle walls.
"Poor little heir," it hisses, hushed in comparison to the volume of its laughter. "Lossst?"
Tom doesn't answer.
"Or sssearching? For me…"
More laughter. The scratching sound is now directly to his right, but he can't bring himself to look up. He doesn't know what he'll see, but like being trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, like being face-to-face with Medusa, he knows he cannot look.
"I
"Know
"What
"Lord
"Vol-
-de-
-mort
"Fears…"
So close—the phantom feels so close, right behind him, against his ear, its claws pricking against the length of his spine—
"Me."
"Mr. Riddle?"
Tom jolts. He whirls around, finally unfrozen, wand at the ready, only to see…
"Professor Dumbledore," he says. Reluctantly, he lowers his wand. "My…apologies. You surprised me."
Dumbledore gives him a flat look. "It is my hope that you do not react like that to all persons who catch you off guard. It would make you a rather poor example of a Prefect."
Tom bites his tongue. "Of course not, sir," he says. "My mind was on…Defense Against the Dark Arts. Avery showed me a rather magnificent shield before he left for home—I was wondering how I might…replicate it."
"Perhaps you might consult Professor Merrythought, then," Dumbledore says. "Academic pursuits are all well and good, but one should always have a mentor, to show you the proper ways."
Tom forces a smile onto his face. "A brilliant suggestion. Thank you, Professor. I think I might go do that now. Please excuse me."
Dumbledore slowly nods. "Yes. A wise choice." Then, just as Tom turns back around, he says, "And Mr. Riddle?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Be sure to keep yourself warm—it's been unusually cold these days, and the weather outside is quite unfavorable. Perhaps…an evening inside, next to the fire, and a cup of hot chocolate would not be remiss."
Inwardly, Tom sneers. Outwardly, he nods and keeps smiling. "Thank you, Professor."
"Of course."
He needs to either control the phantom, or kill it. That's the conclusion Tom's come to.
It isn't without founding. If the phantom can shake him that much—if he's right and he does fear—then it's an obstacle to his rise. He can't become a Dark Lord if some…thing can get away with stalking him. And since it's clearly sentient, that means it can get in the way of his plans. It leaves him only two choices: claim its power for his own, or eradicate it completely.
Best case, the former; worst case, the latter.
That's what Tom has on his mind as he braves the ice and cold, long after the majority of the residents have gone to bed. The runic pendant he's prepared specifically for this task keeps him warm. It makes him confident that it'll hold in the water, too.
…He'll find it, whatever it is, and it won't catch him off guard this time. All he has to do is Speak to it before it strikes. Simple.
Easy.
Tom stuffs the gillyweed in his mouth before he can change his mind. One dose will hold for an hour, which he figures is good enough to explore the Lake. After all, he knows the phantom's usual haunt—it'll be expecting him in Slytherin Common Room, only, he won't be there.
He'll be hunting it, instead.
Once he's stripped himself of his clothes, Tom does one last check for his wand before he dives head first into the water. He doesn't even feel the change in temperature, and when he flicks his wand for a quick lumos, the tip lights without delay.
With everything in working order, Tom heads deeper into the Lake, angling for where he's approximately mapped the dungeons to be.
No one's ever really told him how…dark the bottom of the Lake was. It always looks so bright from the viewing glass, like the world below has its own miniature sun. Clearly, that's not how it works; Tom's forced to choose between seeing where he's going and alerting the phantom to his presence. Fortunately, he's better prepared than that—another silent charm grants him improved night vision, and he lets the lighting spell extinguish like a torch in the water.
There's nothing much to see; not when he maneuvers around the kelp gardens and steers clear of the mermaid village. He doesn't think they'll take too kindly to an unexpected visitor.
Finally, he reaches Slytherin Common Room. In fact, he stares right through the viewing glass, probably in the exact spot the phantom was as it stared at him sitting on the chaise. How odd to see it from the other side.
Tom frowns.
But the phantom isn't here.
A violent vibration in the water has him spinning around. If he squints, he can barely see the outline of a dark shape moving towards him. Tom grips his wand, but there's no hiding place—only open water. He presses himself against the castle bricks as the shape gets closer.
And closer.
And closer…
It's—large. Bigger than he thought. Such a thing couldn't possibly be his phantom, but there's an undoubtedly serpentine movement to its shadow. It's familiar, almost, though Tom can't quite place where he's seen it before—
—And then it's close enough, and he knows.
It's not just big, it's giant—at least the width and length of a tower. The serpentine movement, its tentacles, momentarily lashing behind it before their silhouettes faded from view again, blocked by its fins. Tom remembers hearing stories about it as a first year, still unsorted and half paying attention, half in awe as he rode the boats across the lake to the castle for the very first time.
He's seen it, too; no more than a flash of a tentacle on particularly rare days. Its skin flesh-red, patterned with white spots like rusted marble on a sculptor's magnum opus as it curls above the water. There are drawings depicting it in every library book dedicated to the Black Lake, each more stylized than the last.
But no painting can compare to the sheer presence of the beast itself—the size of it dwarfing an ordinary man by several scales. Tom holds his breath as it looms closer, closer, closer until it's within an arm's reach of him. It's there to protect the castle's inhabitants, certainly—there have been several known instances where it's saved a drowning student—but something so large still calls for caution.
…Caution.
Tom, who has held himself as still as a statue, frowns. The Giant Squid has almost glided right past him, but it too has stopped.
If…if the Giant Squid is here to protect the students, and has virtually free reign of the Black Lake…
Then why has his phantom been allowed to stay here?
Before him, the Giant Squid opens its one large eye. It flickers, reflecting him in its wide, black gaze, and after a moment of inaction, Tom thinks that'll be the end of it.
It isn't.
Out of the corner of his eye, one of its tentacles shifts out of place. Tom tries to move out of the way, but it's already reached him. The fleshy limb grasps around his middle, suckers convulsing against his skin, squeezing the life out of him. He kicks his legs and the water makes his feet feel like he's wearing ten thousand-ton weights: the Giant Squid, needless to say, doesn't bat a nonexistent eyelash.
It tosses him like a ragdoll into one of the Black Lake's mysterious currents, and Tom can't do a thing as he feels his body pulled along the rapids.
Fortunately, before long, the current passes through a forest of kelp. It feels almost like fighting against a paralysis spell, but Tom manages it—he successfully lifts his wand and takes aim, pulling one of the kelp strands into the current.
Just as he's about to rush past, Tom grabs ahold of it and manages to pull himself out. The shift in water pressure sends him reeling; he doesn't know which way is up or down, what direction the castle is in or where the harbor is. For a moment, he just drifts, hand tightly clutching the slick kelp strands as he heaves breath after breath of water through his gills.
It's cold in the Black Lake.
He should get moving…before…before he falls asleep…
Tom lets go. Just as he's about to close his eyes, a shadow darts past in between the tall stalks of kelp.
His breath catches. It was too large to be a Grindylow, too fast to be a floating piece of debris. A fish? Surely they live among the kelp forest, but…
That thin, slender silhouette didn't look like it belonged to a fish.
The shadow flicks past again. This time, Tom catches sight of a tail—a mer, then. He relaxes, if only minutely. At least merpeople are sentient, and he knows they have some sort of deal with Hogwarts. They'd probably just send him off back to shore, and though he might get in trouble with the professors, at least it isn't—
"To—om Ri—iddle…"
Tom freezes. The reverberations in the water make the voice echo and distort, but he knows that lilt. He knows that voice. It'd haunted him, night after night after night…
The phantom cackles, the only sound it makes as it circles behind him.
"Lost?" it coos, "Alone? Poor, poor Tom…"
For a moment, there's no sound from it at all. Tom blanks. What is he supposed to be doing again? Suddenly, the idea of confronting it in its own element doesn't sound so smart anymore. The phantom had always been so loud when it approached him, making a variety of noises that sent the tiny hairs on his arms, neck, and legs standing on end, like a spider had decided to call his skin its home and was scuttling all over.
He thinks, snakes eat spiders. He thinks, he could squash a spider under the heel of his newly shined shoes and it wouldn't take a single thought, but—
But—
How is he supposed to squish something crawling, itching, squirming, writhing, twitching beneath his own skin?
"You came out here for little old me, didn't you?"
There's a ripple in the water. Tom feels it brush against his arm, feels it and hears it mock his wand arm that stays motionless at his side. He thinks he could use it, he should use it, he needs to use it and is the best in his class, all he has to do is wave his damn wand—
But the phantom makes him weak, makes him scared, and he can't.
The phantom laughs. It's even closer now—can't be more than a few meters away.
"I'm flattered," it says, "The last time anyone ever came down here for me was…ages ago."
It's now or never.
Tom closes his eyes, takes a breath, and hisses, "You will obey me."
There's silence.
Did he do it? Did he overcome the phantom? Surely, if it was a snake, the blood of Slytherin would prev—
Cold, clawed hands dig into his upper arms. The phantom digs its nails into his flesh, piercing skin, muscle, tendon all in one go before it buries itself there, latching itself to him like a leech.
Tom doesn't know if he screams or not. He thinks he does, because a sharp warning nip bites into the nape of his neck.
"Mmm…" The phantom lifts its head and breathes, chilling the water around his ear. "How cute, you think you can control me… No, you haven't had that power for eons, Tom Riddle."
"W-What—"
"Do you want to see me? Me, the monster who's haunted you your every waking moment…"
Tom doesn't get a chance to reply. The phantoms' claws disengage from his arms, sliding out mockingly slow. Blood pours into the water around them, like a fine mist of red wine straight from the casket.
Something leathery brushes against his bare leg.
Tom jolts. A silvery blue tail coils around his thighs, knees, calves, ankles—a sharp, pointed nail traces down the line of his spine, there's the chilling breath again against his shoulder blades, and then—
The phantom twists around him, keeping him in his coil as they come face to face.
"My name," it purrs, "is Harry Potter."
It's a merman, and it is not. His face is distinctly human in nature—hair short and black with bangs that sometimes brushed into his eyes with the sway of the water, but his eyes are round and dark, wide like a fish, an embryo of black in a liquid of green.
Tom knows that color. He's seen it before, crashing against the walls of an abandoned classroom's wall as he practices again and again, slashes again and again—
—Avada Kedavra.
He's beautiful.
Harry smiles, revealing two rows of dagger-like teeth.
"I've waited for you," the phantom says, "For so long, through time…through space…long after those mortal fools who summoned me perished."
The phantom reaches a hand up to touch Tom's cheek. Tom tries to move away, but he can't—something freezes him in place, binds his gaze to Harry's. He can't look away.
The phantom giggles, soft. "'I…can touch you now,'" he says, and taps a single claw against Tom's forehead.
He scratches in on the way down, drawing more blood into the water.
"My, how the tables turn."
"What do you mean," Tom grits out, "'summoned'?"
"Oh, that," the phantom says. "Just a handful of wizards and witches too power hungry for their own good. Trying to summon the Master of Death with the Deathly Hallows. But don't worry, I showed them just how dangerous I could be—"
The phantom licks his lips.
"They transfigured me, tore my body apart until they realized I was still alive—would still be alive if they did it again and again. So they chained me here, to the foundation of the castle. Passed down the key to each and every headmaster. I decided it might be fun to wait. Wait for you, the bane of my existence—the very seed of my existence."
"And how's that going for you?"
"Wonderfully, thanks for asking. Ah…your blood, quite the delicacy—it was good I scared everything off before you came here, otherwise, everyone would want a pretty piece of you. And to think, the Giant Squid almost helped you escape me… You were quite the stupid thing when you were young, weren't you? So filled with pride, arrogance…and without the magical power to back it up."
Tom glares. He can feel it—just a little longer and he'll be able to move again, the paralysis in his bones weakening with every second. Though his wand arm is tightly bound to his side thanks to the phantom's coil, he's still holding it. The phantom might be calling him arrogant, but he's the one who left Tom armed.
"I almost feel guilty for picking you off like this," the phantom muses aloud. "I wonder, should I let you grow into the mantle of Lord Voldemort after all…?"
"I could," Tom says, "if you let me go now…I could free you later. Dippet's a pathetic excuse for a wizard. If you just gave me a little bit of time, it'd be easy to make him disappear."
The phantom seems to consider it. He cocks his head and stares with wide, unblinking eyes. His pupils are so black that Tom can't even see his reflection in them.
Tom's heart hammers inside his chest. He waits for him to accept his proposal.
But then, phantom's lips curl. The phantom begins to laugh—small, muffled, growing louder and more hysteric by the second. Soon his entire body is shivering with it, from his upper torso to his coils still wrapped around Tom's body, and Tom tenses as he knows just what that laughter means.
In the distraction, Tom slips his wand arm free.
The phantom doesn't notice.
"Oh, if I wanted to be free, I'd have freed myself a long time ago," the phantom says. "It's been what, 900 years? Silly, silly little Tom—I'd have razed Hogwarts to the ground if I wanted to."
Nine—nine hundred years? But Hogwarts was only established in the 10th century—
"Those—those wizards that bound you—they were—?"
"Your precious Salazar Slytherin? 'Greatest of the Hogwarts Four'? And company—yes," the phantom licks his lips again, "He was oh-so delicious. I ate him right up after his daughter continued the line. Couldn't change too much of history, otherwise you wouldn't be here."
If even Salazar Slytherin fell victim to this monster…
Tom's heart feels like it's about to beat out of his chest. He can't hesitate for a moment longer; he rips his wand arm free of the phantom's last coil and sends him flying back, even in the water, with an amplified knockback jinx straight to the chest.
Tom doesn't wait to see where he landed in the kelp fields. He points his wand upward and casts another spell, propelling him towards the surface.
He's in the final stretch when something rushes past him, the force of the creature's speed knocking him off course. Before Tom can regain his wits, something hard and leathery slams into his wand hand. The bone in his wrist shatters with a loud crack, knocking his wand far away into the depths of the lake.
"How I do love it when they run," the phantom coos. Now at this distance, Tom can see the full extent of him—that long, long tail, fins pointed like a shark's, the emaciated cavity of his abdomen—
The phantom lunges for him again.
Tom tries to dodge, but the phantom is much more agile than him in the water. His tail slams into his chest, knocking the very breath out of him as his bones shudder from the blow. Tom wouldn't be surprised if his ribs just cracked.
He tries to scrabble for a punch, a scratch, something to push the circling phantom away, but it's like dropping a newborn kitten into a sea of hungry piranhas. The phantom is everywhere, and all of Tom's attempts are dodged and rebuffed like it's child's play.
There's blood in the water. It clouds his vision, forces itself into his mouth with every ragged, rattling breath he takes. He can't see the phantom anymore, only knows it's there because he can feel the water shifting around him, hear its loud, jubilant laughter as it tosses him around like a rag doll.
Its claws dig into his shoulder again, pulling at the meat there. Tom makes one last final effort—uses all of his remaining energy to try and wrench away. At first he thinks it's working, but then the phantom is twisting, too, and he hears the loud pop of his shoulder as it dislocates.
There's something else. Something more. It pulls and pulls and pulls until—
Tom screams. The phantom's claws not only dig, but they rip and tear and twist. It wrenches until he thinks his arm's going to fall off and then it does, because the creature's cold, hungry mouth is at his shoulder, and then its teeth bite down and pull, taking mouthfuls of chunks of flesh with it.
It severs his entire arm this way, and when Tom finally sees it again through the inky water, it doesn't look human to him anymore.
The phantom's jaw unhinges. Its gaping maw takes bite after voracious bite from Tom's arm, teeth spearing bits of flesh all the way up to its gums. Then the phantom begins to swallow it, starting from the shoulder down to the elbow, forearm, hand—
Down, down it goes. The phantom closes its mouth around the fingers and chews. It spits a single bone out, as if that one in particular paled to the rest in both crunch and marrow.
Then it turns its wide, aquatic eyes back to Tom. They glow in the dim light of the lake, the color the death spell might've been had it cut through the air.
Tom will not make it back up to the air—Tom will not take another breath of air at all.
The phantom swims closer, coils its tail around Tom's ragged, bruised body again.
"I've not dined so well in centuries," the phantom moans, close and closer to ecstasy. "How I will savor you, Tom Riddle…"
There's not an ounce of strength left in his body, but Tom somehow, magically, perhaps through the will of the universe and Fate and all the Powers That Be, squeezes together one final reply:
"Vore me harder, daddy," he hisses in Parseltongue, and Harry's answering smile is all teeth and flesh.
"Gladly," he purrs, and Tom knows no more.