Harry told himself he wasn't going to the park. He told himself again at half past nine, while he was cleaning his trainers, and once more at a quarter to ten, while he was trying to make his hair lie down. His hair won, as it always did. At five to ten he was on Wisteria Walk, and by ten he was at the park gate, having walked, he felt, in a manner that committed him to nothing.
Lily Moon was on one of the swings. She wasn't swinging. She had a paperback open on her knees and a paper bag on the swing next to her, and she held the bag out as he came through the gate, without looking up.
"Bun. From the bakery. My aunt says bread's only worth eating before seven, and I don't know if that's true, but I get a bun out of it, so."
It was, Harry had to admit, a very good bun.
They stayed at the park most of the morning. Lily, it turned out, had questions about everything, several at a time, and nearly all of them were about him. What had the dragon smelled like, up close? Who had been driving the car when it hit the Whomping Willow, him or Ron? What did the Dursleys actually do all day? What did the Sorting Hat do the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year? Harry answered what he could. Twice he caught himself talking more than he had talked all summer, and stopped, embarrassed, and she waited cheerfully until he'd finished being embarrassed and asked the next one.
"You keep checking the sky," she said, at one point. "You did it yesterday too. Is it owls, or something worse?"
"It's habit," said Harry. And then, because she just went on looking at him: "Owls. Mostly owls."
"Hm. All right," said Lily, and went back to her book, and did not tell him he was being paranoid, which by the standards of the summer made her the best company in Little Whinging.
After that the mornings arranged themselves. He did the weeding early, and by ten he was at the park, or walking the long loop past the allotments, where Lily kept up a running commentary on the neighbours' gardens and, more often than not, ended up pushing Mrs. Prentice's wheelbarrow around on some errand. She borrowed it, as far as Harry could tell, rather more often than Mrs. Prentice knew. He learned things about her sideways, in passing. The aunt was called Margaret. The old house was two streets from the allotment. There had been a move at Easter which she called, when she had to call it anything, "the move," in the same bright voice she used for everything else. It was the only subject that made the bright voice sound like work. She never mentioned her parents. Harry, who knew what it was like to be a question people wanted to ask, didn't ask.
In return he told her things he had not planned on telling anyone. Small ones first. What the Dursleys were like at dinner. What Hedwig did when she was sulking. Then, one morning, without any warning even to himself, what the graveyard had smelled like. Lily, who had joked her way through every silence of the past week, did not make a single joke for the whole of it. When he finished she said, "Thank you for telling me," and let him sit in the quiet, and did not try to fix it.
On the fourth morning Ron's next letter arrived. It said, in its entirety, that things were busy, that he couldn't say much, and that Harry should keep his head down. Harry read it twice, wrote WHAT IS GOING ON on the back of it, and didn't send it. He sent nothing instead. Hedwig took his silence north with profound disapproval.
It was the sixth morning that the phoenix fell out of the sky.
They were on the long loop, level with the allotments, arguing about whether a marrow the size of Mrs. Prentice's could be honest, when a sound came from somewhere very high up: a single note, like a great bell struck once. It rang down through the warm morning air and was gone.
Lily stopped walking. "What was that?"
Harry was already looking up, without knowing why.
A streak of gold crossed the sky above Wisteria Walk. It was moving wrong. It came down too steep and too fast, trailing a thin line of ash, and it struck the grass verge thirty yards ahead of them, tumbled twice, and lay still.
Harry ran. He heard Lily running behind him.
It was a phoenix. It lay on its side in the grass, one wing folded and the other bent at an angle wings do not take, its scarlet and gold dulled with ash, as though it had crossed a very great distance the slow way. Its breast moved in shallow jerks.
Harry knew him at once. Fawkes was the only reason he had ever made it out of the Chamber of Secrets alive. You did not forget a debt like that.
"That's... okay, that's a phoenix," said Lily, catching up. "Harry, why is there a phoenix?"
"He's Dumbledore's. His name's Fawkes. He lives at the school..." Harry knelt in the grass. "He shouldn't be here. Phoenixes don't crash. They don't even fly anywhere far, they go by fire; one blink and they're across the country. If he's come down looking like this, then something's-"
Fawkes opened one eye.
It was black and gold, and it fixed on Harry with an attention that silenced him mid-sentence. The eye moved over his face, slowly, deliberately. Harry had the sudden, ridiculous feeling of being measured for something.
Then the phoenix stretched out his neck, laid the tip of his beak flat against Harry's chest, and burst into flames.
"Harry-" Lily's hand caught his sleeve.
The fire didn't burn. That was the last clear thought Harry had, it doesn't burn, as the flames poured off the phoenix and up his arm and wrapped him to the shoulders like a coat being helped on. There was heat without pain, and a brightness that got inside his eyes with his eyelids shut, and a sensation in his chest as though a door he had never noticed was being opened.
The street thinned. Lily's voice went with it.
He fell.
* * *
He landed on a floor that had not existed a moment before, and knew, without being able to say how, that it existed now only because he needed something to land on. There were no walls yet. There was a whiteness with the politeness of a room.
Then the room decided what to be, and it was the cupboard under the stairs.
It assembled itself around him piece by piece: the sloped ceiling with the underside of the staircase showing through, the shelf with the tin of shoe polish, the spiders, the smell of old paint and older dust. The light came through the slats in the door in three flat grey bars. Harry was sitting on the little bed with his knees against his chest, because there was no other way to fit anymore. He had grown. The cupboard had waited.
Somewhere on the other side of the door, in the house that was not a house, a voice spoke.
"Do you know," it said, "I never had one of these."
It was a boy's voice. Unhurried. Pleasant, even.
"At the orphanage we slept ten to a room. Iron beds, one window, a woman called Mrs. Cole who counted us twice a night like spoons. Eleven years of that. I'd have killed for a door of my own. And they gave you one, and you hated it. There's the difference between us, right at the start."
Harry kicked the door. It didn't move.
"That won't work."
He kicked it again, harder.
"It's your door, Harry. It opens when you stop fighting it. Everything in this house works like that. Fourteen years, and you never once came to look round. I confess I found that insulting."
Harry sat very still in the dark. He knew the voice now. He had heard it once before, in a chamber full of green light, coming out of a boy who was also a memory. His mouth had gone dry.
He stopped fighting the door.
It swung open.
The cupboard was gone. He was standing in a wide, pale space that had no edges, and ten feet away, with his hands loosely folded in front of him, stood Tom Riddle.
He was sixteen, and handsome, and tidy in the old-fashioned Hogwarts uniform Harry remembered from the diary, and there was a prefect's badge on his chest. The badge, for some reason, was the worst part. He was watching Harry with an expression of frank and unhurried interest, the way a man reads the menu in a restaurant he has been meaning to visit for years.
"You're dead," said Harry. "I killed you. The diary... the basilisk fang... you're dead..."
"You killed a diary." Riddle said it kindly. "Do try to be precise. It matters, in our situation."
"What situation? What is this?"
"This is the inside of your own head. I'd say make yourself at home, but..." He glanced around the pale nothing, and something amused crossed his face. "You never have, really, have you? All this room, and you live in three memories and a cupboard."
"How are you here?"
"I've always been here." Riddle took a slow step to the side, not closer. Looking, apparently, for a better angle. "Fourteen years, Harry. I was there when you learned to read. I was there for every day of that cupboard. I was there in the graveyard in June. Best seat in the house, as it happens." He smiled slightly. "When you cried in the hospital wing afterwards, and made sure the curtains were shut first so no one would hear you. No one did. Except me. I know you better than anyone alive. I am, when you think about it, the closest friend you have."
Harry's fists had closed. "You're him. You're Voldemort."
"A piece," said Riddle modestly. "The rest of me is out there somewhere, newly restored. I felt that too, in June: a body again, after thirteen years. Good for him." Something flickered across the pleasant face; it might have been contempt. "But a piece is enough. A piece is plenty. Which brings me to why we're finally talking." He stopped moving. "Something has come into the house, Harry. Something old and burning, and it is in my room at this very moment, making itself comfortable. I felt it come in. That's what woke me properly, after fourteen years of dozing." His voice stayed level, but something underneath it had stopped being pleasant. "I want it gone. And you, I think, want a great many things. So let us trade."
"Trade," Harry repeated.
"I've watched them do it to you all summer. The newspaper. The little items, page four, page seven. The friends who write and say nothing." Riddle's voice was soft, sympathetic, dreadful. "I know exactly how it's done, because I am very good at being believed, and I could teach you. How to make them sorry. How to make them listen. You'd never need Dumbledore's permission for anything again. All I ask in return is that you put that burning thing out of the house and let me go back to sleep. You'd never hear from me again. Word of honour."
And the terrible thing, Harry thought, the thing he would not tell anyone for a long time, was that for about two seconds, it sounded reasonable.
"No," he said.
Riddle sighed through his nose, a short, genuinely disappointed sound.
"No. Of course not. Gryffindor." He drew his wand out of his robes, unhurried even now. "You know, I asked the Hat about you. All those years watching, I did wonder: it considered Slytherin, didn't it? For quite a while."
"How-"
"I was there," said Tom Riddle, and the green light came out of the dark of his wand with no warning at all.
Harry threw himself sideways. The floor caught him badly; he rolled, came up, and ran, and the pale space offered him nothing: no cover, no walls, no wand. He reached for his back pocket and found it empty. He tried to want a wand into his hand, the way the cupboard door had worked, and nothing came, because you cannot stop fighting for a thing and want it desperately at the same time, and he did not know any other way.
Another bolt. He felt the heat of it pass his ear.
"You can't outrun anything here." Riddle wasn't even walking quickly. "There's no here to run across. Really, this is the kindest way it could have gone. The house was always going to be mine eventually. You were the spare room."
Harry's foot went out from under him (the floor had simply stopped being flat, because Riddle had decided it should) and he went down hard on his back, and the third bolt was already coming, green and patient, and there was no time and nothing in his hands.
Something under his ribs answered.
It was warm, the way a hand on your shoulder is warm, and it had been sitting there, he realised, sitting quietly since the street, since the beak against his chest, waiting to be needed.
The green light broke against a shield of pale gold fire that Harry had not raised, and went out.
The silence afterwards was total.
Riddle looked at the fading gold where his curse had died. Then he looked at Harry.
And then his face went away.
It did not twist, and it did not snarl. It simply left: the colour first, then the lines of it, softening and sinking like wax. What came up underneath was white. Whiter than a skull. The eyes rose out of it scarlet, with slits for pupils; the nose flattened into two raw openings; and the sixteen-year-old prefect was gone, and the thing that had killed Harry's mother and father stood in his place, wearing the same neat school robes.
Harry had seen that face in June, by cauldron-light, and it had not occurred to him until this moment that the face in the graveyard had been new: hours old, made of potion and bone. This one was the original. This was what had come up the stairs at Godric's Hollow. This was the last thing his mother ever saw.
"Get that out of my house," said Voldemort.
The voice had changed with the face. It was high, and cold, and the patience had gone out of it entirely, and Harry understood, finally and completely, that the patience had never been real. It had been upholstery.
"It's not your house," said Harry, getting up.
Everything went wrong at once. The pale space buckled; the graveyard came up out of the floor (the yew tree, the headstones, the cauldron, all of it exact, June-cold) and Cedric was on the ground with his knees still bent, surprised forever. The smell was right. That was the unforgivable part. He had told Lily about the smell, and here it was again, on demand, an exhibit.
"I keep this one at the front," said Voldemort's voice, from everywhere. "I look at it often. You made such a noise."
Harry stood over Cedric's body and shook, and the fire under his ribs held steady, not pushing, not deciding for him, and he understood dimly that it would not fight this one for him. It was only a light. He had to be the one to say it.
"No," said Harry.
The graveyard trembled.
"You're not... this isn't yours to use." His voice came out cracked and he didn't care. "He was real. He was better than both of us. You don't get to keep him in a drawer."
The graveyard went flat, all at once, like a photograph. And then it was a photograph, small and grey and far away, and then it was nothing, and Cedric was not there, because Cedric had never been there. Cedric was buried in the West Country under a stone his father visited. What Voldemort kept in the drawer was only Harry's grief, and Harry, shaking, took it back.
The pale space returned. Voldemort stood in the middle of it, white-faced, scarlet-eyed, and raised his wand again.
The fire came off Harry's skin in a single wave.
It was gold, and utterly silent, and it crossed the space between them faster than any spell. Voldemort brought up a shield; the fire went straight through it, and through him, and where it passed, something that had held on for fourteen years let go all at once, like ivy pulled off a wall.
Voldemort looked down at himself. His edges were going.
And then (vanity, Harry would think afterwards; even at the very end, vanity) the white face folded itself away, and the boy came back to die in its place. Sixteen, tidy, handsome, the prefect's badge straight.
"Interesting," said Tom Riddle, and came apart like soot.
In the last instant, between the collapse and the dark, something crossed the space where he had been and struck Harry in the chest.
It was green, and cold, and it was not a curse. It was a connection snapping, the two ends of a cut rope whipping back, and it carried into him, all in a jumble and none of it asked for: a cracked table in a dim room with a ring on it. A black shoreline, water slapping into a cave mouth, and deep inside, in the dark, a heavy golden locket; and the water was not empty. A small golden cup on dark velvet. A tarnished crown on a high shelf in a room piled with hidden things. A diary, open to a blank page, already dead.
And with the pictures, colder, deeper: the feel of a mind closing a door from the inside. The exact balance point where a spell stops being noise and becomes clean.
Tools, left behind in an empty house.
The floor stopped pretending to be a floor. The whiteness went out.
Harry fell the right way.
* * *
There was a ceiling. It had a paper lampshade, and a crack shaped like a question mark, and it was not any ceiling he knew.
He was on a sofa under a crocheted blanket. The room smelled of soap and toast. Somewhere close by a kettle was working itself up, and beside the sofa, in an armchair, with the paperback shut on her finger, sat Lily Moon, very still, watching him.
"Say something," she said.
"Toast," said Harry.
Lily laughed. One note, much too loud for the joke. "Right," she said, recovering. "You're fine."
"Where-"
"You're at my house, Church Road. You've been out a day and a half. I finished my whole book and everything."
"Fawkes," he said. "Where-"
"In you." She said it lightly, and her knuckles on the paperback were white. "The phoenix turned into fire, and the fire went into your chest, and you dropped like a sack, and then there was no phoenix. I looked everywhere. There wasn't a feather."
"Does your aunt know I'm-"
"She knows. She helped me lift you. She's at work now. She says if you die on the sofa, she never saw you."
"How did you even get me here?"
"Wheelbarrow."
Harry turned his head and stared at her.
"Mrs. Prentice's," said Lily. "I put it back after. I told her you'd fainted from the heat, and she says you're to wear a hat."
"You brought me across Little Whinging in a wheelbarrow."
"You're heavier than you look! And I was very dignified about it," said Lily Moon, "and you can thank me when you've had toast," and she got up to see to the kettle as though that settled the matter, which, on reflection, it did.
Harry lay under the crocheted blanket and looked at the crack in the ceiling.
Deep in his chest, the warmth settled, patient as a banked fire, and stayed.