Chapter Text
“One-two-three…There we go, you’re doing fine.”
“Technically the one practicing dancing should be you.”
“When have you last danced at an event?”
Harry thought about it.
“The yule ball.”
“The yule ball,” Ginny gagged. “God, they ought to have strung you up. You’ve been getting venerated as the saviour of the wizarding world for a year and you’re going off the yule ball?”
“McGonagall is a very skilled instructor.”
“I heard she went bonkers for dance club after she got a quidditch injury.” Ginny paused, the living room still save for the gentle ticking of the metronome. “Please don’t let me get weirdly into dancing if I break something out there.”
“You’re mean enough to be an announcer,” Harry assured her, and she laughed. The way she snorted was adorable, and he wanted to press himself all against her in the sudden wave of fondness.
He couldn’t describe how wonderful it felt after so much time spent grieving, arguing, and trying to find security in a relationship built on gossamer thread, to finally just be in love. Being with Ginny felt like being a part of the real world again, all his irrational fears as distant as the stars in the sky.
He thought he’d ruin her. Wasn’t that stupid? He really thought the world, which had gone out of its way to pick off everyone Harry cared about save for Ron and Hermione, would also see fit to circle back and tear Ginny out of his life too. She had been so angry, but how could Harry ever express to her what it felt like, the almost methodical way death seemed to work in his presence, lingering only in his footsteps? The fact he loved her was enough to kill her.
Ginny was too sensible to believe that she would die because he was haunted by death itself. The only thing haunting him was Voldemort. Everything he cared about died because he was the main target, and thus everything he cared about was a target of Voldemort. Simple as.
Voldemort was dead. Ginny was sublimely alive, safe, calloused fingers in his, the light practically glowing over her copper hair. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“You’re losing your footing again,” she sighed. “You’re going to take me to a fancy ball, and whisk me off to dance, and immediately fall on your arse in front of all and sundry.”
“I’ll probably take a few tables out with me,” Harry agreed.
She grinned, wide and genuine enough he could see her blunted, crooked little fangs. “Oh, yeah, shattered dishes everywhere, food splattered underfoot, and I think we might expect it all to be set on fire.”
“Afterparty in Saint Mungo’s.”
Giggle-snort again.
“Okay, Mr. Potter, keep tempo. To the metronome, you’re dragging your feet again. You should be able to hold a conversation and shuffle around at the same time, alright?” Ginny laughed.
“Aren’t we supposed to dance to music?”
“Your fault for missing the beat and tripping when I put it on. You get music when I can trust you to not break your nose.”
The palms of her hands were rough, but when Harry ran his finger over the back of her hand, he felt soft skin between her knuckles. He watched her warm brown eyes flicker up to him through her lashes.
“And stop mooning,” she said with a wry smile.
“Stop being…lovely as moonlight,” Harry tried.
She kicked his ankle and pulled him back into tempo. Her cheeks were a beautiful, rosy pink, and she could no longer look up at him. Incredible results for such a mediocre return. Harry could hardly imagine what he could get if he tried a little harder.
“Maybe the eery quiet is making me stumble too,” Harry whispered.
“Make some noise, if you think it’ll teach you to dance any better.”
Harry considered as they circled around, socked feet sliding against the hardwood, and he began singing under his breath, “The boys are back in town, the boys are back in town…”
Ginny threw her head back and cackled. “You really expect them all to be ballroom dancing to Thin Lizzy?”
“You know Thin Lizzy? That’s a muggle band.”
“Bloody hell, I know every muggle band that ever charted I think,” she palmed the tears from her eyes, “what dad would do, is that he had his muggle wireless and he’d make notes on just…every muggle song, and then he’d—he’d look for anything he recognized and steal the records from the office, like he’d read the backs and if it had a song he knew he’d just take it. And we got to listen to whatever he had lying about. Charlie loved Thin Lizzy.”
Harry laughed, shocked. “Ron’s never said!”
“I don’t think Ron can tell the difference. Mum doesn’t like muggle music that much, but she puts Memory – the one by Streisand – on every single Christmas. It’s not even Christmas music! But Charlie’s always been the only one really into that stuff.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “What was your favourite?”
“I was crazy about Blondie. This is so stupid, I actually tried to play it for T—” Her smile died.
The metronome ticked.
Ginny looked more startled at herself than horrified, as if she was shocked she could speak about it so casually, which is why Harry made a risky comment.
“Did it work?”
She screamed and whapped him on the shoulder. Her snorts clustered together so frequently she could hardly breathe. “It’s a fucking book, of course it didn’t!”
“Always wondered how paintings manage it.”
“I tried to—I tried to describe—have you heard The Tide is High? ‘I’m not the kind of girl who gives up juuust like thaaat’, that one? I tried to describe it. The trumpets, and the… I said it was ‘you know, ocean music.’”
Harry doubled over laughing. “Ocean music?!”
“It was the marimba, I think. When I was little I’d only ever been able to open up to Ron, because he’s always extra sweet with me if I say something stupid,” Harry barked out a laugh just as he was catching his breath, “And I just knew it would be like with Percy or the twins if I didn’t say the right thing and he’d be so smug and then I said…It’s like ocean music. I think I would have broken character if I were an evil book.”
“Please.” And then, before the following silence could decay into melancholy, “I didn’t used to know Thin Lizzy wrote Boys Are Back In Town.”
“What? You just said—”
“I only heard music when Dudley was blasting it, and it was usually through the walls. Or, you know, a warning signal that the titan approaches, there, on the horizon,” Harry held his hand out to some unspecified distance. “He listened to music on cassette, and CD. Lot of Greatest Hits. I don’t know who did Hotel California either.”
“Eagles. How’d you know then?” Ginny peered at him curiously, clearly expecting a story at least as funny as hers.
It wasn’t. “I found it in a closet. When I was clearing out Snape’s place. Massive stack of records— not even rock, he’s got ABBA, Fleetwood Mac—”
He could barely keep going over Ginny’s disbelieving laughter. “Snape listened to Thin Lizzy?”
“No,” Harry said, followed by, “I don’t know, maybe. Probably not. He had a collection by the record player, mostly freeform jazz, blues rock, bossa nova – that’s ocean music to you, missy,” giggle-snort, “anything that didn’t have lyrics. About half of it was wizard-made, I think he just wanted the noise.”
“What’s the ones in his closet for, then?”
Harry hesitated, unsure how saying it would make him feel. Ginny hated when he hid things from her, though, so now that he brought it up, he had to say it out loud. “I think they were for my mum.”
They stopped rocking in place.
“Or they were mum’s. I don’t know.”
Or maybe Snape had seen her collection and bought his own copies and let them rot somewhere out of sight, the same way he let everything else rot. Some of them were still in their packaging. Some of them looked well-used. Harry had gauged which ones she probably listened to as a little girl by which tracks Snape saw fit to play for himself.
Sometimes, he recognized a song from the memories Snape had left behind. He hadn’t truly thought about what that meant until he heard Black Magic Woman and realized that he recognized it as the song 10-year-old Snape had playing on his battered old record player by the tree, and his mother came sprinting up the hill, auburn hair flying every which way, screaming ‘that’s me, that’s me!’, and Harry was sick with how hard he cried.
“So you had plenty of time to know how it goes,” Ginny said softly, rousing him from his thoughts more gently than he did her. “You know that chick who used to dance a lot…Every night she’d be on the floor shakin’ what she’s got…”
Harry laughed, and laughed harder when Ginny remained pointedly silent after that. He righted himself, carefully making the steps in time to the metronome, and sang it. “Man, when I tell you she was cool, she was red-hot,” he smirked down at her triumphant smile, “I mean she was steamin’.”
She rejoined from there, and they sung together as they danced, chins tilted up and postures rigid, as if it were the most refined and elegant sound for the occasion: “…Man we just fell about the place, if that chick don’t wanna know, forget her!”
He spun her, and all in time to one-two-three, they sang The boys are back in town, the boys are back in town, both back-and-forth and together, laughing, dazzling, orange strands of hair flying free from her ponytail, the way her whole face went red in her joy, tears of laughter beading on her lashes, and he could see the lovely curve of her nape when she stumbled because she had forgotten at which point you were meant to go ‘ow-ow-ow-own’ and had tried stepping to the wrong thing.
She sang the guitar solo too when they got bored of the chorus, and her voice was as beautiful as a heavenly choir.
The doorbell rang. He dipped her dramatically, with a hand clutching her head, and gave her a kiss. “I think that’s the boys back in town.”
“Ron? I hope he brought dinner, I’m starved.”
He hoisted her up and practically skipped to the door. The lights were off, sun low on the hills, and it was dark and blue and lonely.
Harry paused, and he said, “yeah.”
It made him feel weird. That was why he went back to Grimmauld Place. At least there it felt like it was meant to look that fucking miserable. He opened the door and took the pizza he had ordered. He’d been cooking the first two weeks, but then he had gotten so many dishes dirty, and realized he didn’t have the energy to clean them every day anymore.
Kreacher would have a conniption. Harry brought the pizza back to the living room.
The sofa leg-rests were permanently popped. Harry had been sleeping in the living room the entire time, as if he’d wake up one morning and there Ginny would be, standing in the fireplace. He couldn’t sleep in his own bed. He wasn’t used to the extra space, and all he could think about was the absence when he laid down without her. He used to lie on Sirius’ bed before she finally dragged him out of Grimmauld Place. Maybe they started dating for real because she thought it would rouse him from his moping. It had worked, for that brief window.
He cleared the coffee table of papers and trash to put the box, and found the records he had left there, a collection of songs he’d been leaving on to keep the quiet away. His mouth quirked at the black-and-white striped cover of Ginny’s favourite Blondie record. 1978. She described going through Arthur Weasley’s collections as going on expeditions, selecting a few at a time and playing them until she and her older brothers decided whether it was worthwhile. Arthur would put a piece of tape on each one with the song from the radio that made him take it. This one said One Way or Another.
He lifted it to put it on again, and underneath was a yellowed Fleetwood Mac record. The Pious Bird of Good Omen. He was sure he hadn’t heard it in ages. He was sure it was his own copy, but it must be Arthur’s, because it had tape too, reading in the same scrawl, Black Magic Woman.
He should listen to Blondie instead.
Harry got up and put it on.
Morose strings, guitar, and bass filled the house. He knew the record was a choice. A childish one. It’s been nearly a month, she’d given him plenty of direction on pulling himself together. It’s been a month, and here Harry was, with his delivery pizza.
“I need someone’s hand, to lead me through the night,” Harry sung along, off-key. He imagined Snape slouched in his seat with a slice of delivery pizza listening to sad blues music and snorted under his breath.
There were upbeat songs on this album, weren’t there? With harmonicas. He just had to wait it out to the good parts.
This time, when he imagined Snape listening to this, he did not laugh.
The pizza was soon gone, the house remained empty, the metronome went tick-tick-tick, even though that was two years ago, and the sad blues played on endlessly, echoing inside his skull, When the lights are low, and it’s time to go, that’s when I need your love so bad.
The doorbell rang.
“The boys are back in town,” he sang tunelessly over tell me that you love me.
He heaved himself upright, and padded through the empty blue halls. In one more week, Kreacher would break into his kitchen and drag him back to Grimmauld Place to rot, rot like Spinner’s End rotted, isolated and outliving its master, and he was sure this flat would rot too.
He opened the door, and there was no one standing there, but there! At the bottom of the stairs, the boys! Death Eaters, all in black robes like the nun on the album, waiting for Harry, like they always waited. Lingering in his shadows, waiting for him. He existed for them.
“I need a soft voice to talk to me at night…” Harry continued, hopping down the stairs two-by-two. The Death Eaters were here for him, but they were not looking at him. Their white masks all faced the bonfire, which crackled like a dozen metronomes out of time.
“Happy Samhain! You guys celebrate Samhain, yeah?” Harry called. “Fuck, it was Beltane, though, wasn’t it?”
They were all silent. There was no noise except the guitars and sad strings. He had brought the song with him in his head. Voldemort stood tall, taller than he ever did as a human man, staring into the fire. Harry stepped heavily up to stand next to him.
“Happy Beltane,” he corrected himself again.
Voldemort’s red eyes were lit by the fire. They were luminous and alive.
Harry stared into the fire too.
“I thought she would come,” said Harry.
Voldemort did not move or react. It was like a moving picture. Harry was standing in a little picture, a little cutout of past perils pasted on his neighbourhood street.
“I was mistaken,” he said conversationally. “Actually. I actually was. I was mistaken, not you. That was the problem, right? That’s how you kept getting them all.” He threw a stick into the fire. It was the elder wand. “You knew me better than I ever knew her.”
Voldemort was a statue cut in harsh shadows, skin glowing almost human from the warmth of the fire. Harry would vanquish him by morning.
“You’ve got to kill me,” Harry whispered.
It’s in his head. Surely they could hear it, sad, sad blues like heavy luggage on the way to King’s Cross. I know we can make everything alright…Listen to my plea, baby…
Harry’s heart pounded so desperately, trying to keep him alive even under the crushing weight of the way things were and had to be. He should be dead by morning. Something like horror filled him.
“That’s how it has to work. You have to kill me, or it won’t be over. Please. I know you can, please.”
She was so beautiful. In the firelight, just before the floo powder turned rich emerald green, she was so beautiful. It cast across her hair like flames licking across a halo, the whole of her blazing.
“Harry, just tell me,” she said to him, though she was resigned, like she knew it was pointless to ask, but she had to anyway, just so he knew it was why she was leaving him, “were you trying to kill yourself?”
⎯ ♢♢♢ ⎯
Harry woke sobbing.
Bowl was a cruel mistress, but even her frigid stone heart could move when Harry didn’t climb out of bed. Harry’s head ached, and he could feel his pulse all through it, right to the tip of his oozing nose. It slid right over his face, cool porcelain soothing hot tears. It only made it worse. Harry was choking on snot and sobs and his saliva felt thick and sour on his tongue, and everything made it worse, that he was alone, that Ginny had stayed gone, that she was 50 years in the future, that everyone was 50 years in the future, and that the only one who was around to care about Harry was his stupid fucking bowl. He only had the two, and the other one had oatmeal grains dried onto it he’d only half-heartedly picked at with his thumbnail before deciding to just eat at the Leaky Cauldron.
He cried, which he hadn’t managed to do in months. It would make it real the same way recognizing the sound of Black Magic Woman made his mother’s unforgivably short time being a living girl real, and after it was real, he didn’t know what to do next. It was hard enough to try to exist in the same way he existed before Ginny was gone, just without her next to him. It was hard enough.
His throat was so tight that when he tried to wail all that came out was a tight, squeaking hiss, and Harry caved in on himself, and he replayed it a thousand times in his head, and each time he said no, of course not, and each time she didn’t believe him, and each time he could understand that just because that wasn’t what he was trying to do didn’t mean there wasn’t something wrong, and each time he’d let her go anyway.
He curled into a tight ball, and he had his knees firmly underneath him, the cool surface of Bowl’s body laying lazily on his hot neck, and he seeped tears and drool on the hardwood next to the mattress which had a cover but still no bedframe, and he could sense a great black chasm in his mind that would suck him into a spiral that would make him want to kill himself.
But he didn’t, which is what he told Ginny. What he wanted was, and he had no one to tell this so he clumsily swept Bowl from his neck and dropped it onto the floor and squeezed it with fierce determination so he could look it in its green-paint eyes, “I have got to break into his house.”
It was 1946, and now Voldemort had begun putting together a shaky picture of his identity, and if Harry stepped out of line, he would die. Harry wanted to live. He was a crazy stalker and he needed to break into Tom Riddle’s house.
Harry showered for much longer than strictly necessary, and when he came out his head felt like it had been cleaved through with an axe. He took two of his eye-spier eyeballs, which he only tenuously recalled the function of.
He got dressed, told himself he wasn’t going to look any better than he did now before Tom got home, and headed out.
It was the weekend, so Harry’s half-day, but Tom did not take half-days. He worked the exact same hours during the weekend, and thus at 11AM he was busy fussing with Dark objects in Borgin & Burkes.
Harry returned to Tom’s flat like he was returning home. It seemed like eons ago he had just travelled back in time and hunted down this unassuming little building, which looked like an already-cramped townhouse that had been carved into fourths. He remembered that he was trying to be cautious. Harry didn’t want to tip Tom off that someone was after him, and there was no bigger tip-off than a B&E.
It was okay to do now. At last.
The building boasted four homes from what he could tell; one per floor, two in front, two in the back, with the entrance to Tom’s upstairs flat tucked away in one of the narrow squeeze of an alleyway. Tom had a very optimistic planter box hanging off the window that overlooked mostly red brick, though Harry mused that it was close enough to the front it had a decent view of the street if he poked his head out.
Harry took his broom from his pouch and urged it to rise. It lifted him up by the arm, slowly at first, and then picking up speed.
Harry dangled in front of the planter. He shook his sleeve down to reveal Bowl. He still couldn’t use parseltongue without a snake. “Anyone home?”
As he expected, two snakes emerged from the planter. Voldemort didn’t strike him as a gardening type, after all.
“I’m hungry.”
“Smells bad.”
“Smells bad, will we get food?”
“Food, yes.”
He narrowed his eyes at them. “You’ll only get food if you don’t tell him I was here.”
“We only talk about food.”
“Magic things. I don’t hear them because I am digging.”
“I talk about food. She is digging.”
Common garden snakes were not compelling conversation partners.
Harry used the elder wand to check for traps, not really bothering to check for witnesses. Everyone in Knockturn Alley was dead asleep around this time, either because they sleep during the day or they keep late enough hours that they were only just starting to wake up.
Magic lock. An alarm.
…That’s it.
That couldn’t be right.
Harry disabled the protection measures and hoisted himself inside. It was, if such a thing was even possible, even more mediocre inside, though he could have guessed as much from the fact Tom had raided the Room of Hidden Things for furniture. There was a writing desk just under the window for Harry to climb onto, a small table and chair, and absolutely nothing else. The kitchen was closer to the door, and wasn’t even a kitchen, just a line of countertops and a cabinet-like stove that looked straight out of the 18th century all set against the wall.
He checked for enchantments again. The door was guarded far better, but not anything Harry couldn’t unwind if he wanted to. The kitchen window was warded the same as the window he came through.
Harry peeked into the bedroom, which he was surprised existed, considering the place was much smaller than his own little bedsit. Same two wards as the other windows. The bed was narrow and unmade, blankets crumpled into a pile at the end.
In a fit of possible insanity, Harry collapsed face-first into the bed to rate the conditions Lord Voldemort slept in. It was a decent mattress, but far too firm for Harry, who grew up with a sagging camping cot, a sagging mattress, and the plush four-posters of Hogwarts.
He turned his head and took a deep breath, practically anticipating a cloud of condensed evil to coat his lungs like cigarette smoke (though what he was actually expecting was a foul sort of snake musk, to assure himself the Dark Lord still lived here and may soon return).
Harry jerked back off the bed, ashamed by the fact it smelled like nothing but Sleekeazy’s and human sweat.
Sneaking around wasn’t how he usually did things; he would have preferred it if Tom had been the one to duel him last night, and they could handle matters face-to-face. It was strange that he hadn’t. It was strange he was so sick. Harry remembered the way Tom looked so disoriented trying to read his afternoon newspaper; he’d been that sick for weeks. Why did he attend the party? He sounded like he was dying when he left.
But he wasn’t. He’d lived to seventy. Technically speaking.
Tom’s tiny bedroom did not have a closet, and his clothes were kept in a chest of drawers so fancy it ought to be referred to as a chiffonier, though it looked like it had personal experience with both world wars, with a nasty-looking crack thtough the top. It was covered in little baubles of unclear purpose, reminding him strongly of Dumbledore’s shelves – or in this era, Merrythought’s. Strewn among them were little trophies, so proudly displayed that Harry could tell in a single sweep there was no jewelry – and thus, no ring.
The most incongruous item was one of those vintage Tinker Toys, the kind Harry only saw in playset instruction manual illustrations. It was a bunch of wooden orbs in the shape of a man, with a chipped paint face. It was incongruous in that Tinker Toys were obviously muggle.
Harry fished out an Eye-Spier eyeball and tucked it behind a brass corner accent that was practically falling out. It wriggled until it completely vanished.
Harry wandered back out into the main room, narrow and cramped like the living space was built from nothing but a single wide hallway. He couldn’t imagine Lord Voldemort suffering such a claustrophobic and pitiful living space, but he supposed he could picture Tom Riddle brooding as he coughed ominously in his handkerchief, irritated at being held back from his grand adventures in Albania.
…How long until then? Harry only knew he’d lost his baby fat and grew out his hair. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might suffer this tiny flat for multiple years, frozen in its mediocrity by the thought that any moment now he’d need to pack the lot up and never return. It all seemed very sad.
Harry poked his head into the bathroom, which was just as cramped as he expected. The toilet was sat so close to the wash basin it was threatening to shelter underneath it, all to give some leg room to the space around the shower, which was built into the tiled wall and had a thin curtain that wouldn’t be blocking so much as the morning dew if it weren’t for the water-repelling charm cast on it.
There were clothes piled on the floor. Harry stared at them, and hesitantly lifted them to his face. They didn’t smell of anything nefarious like graveyards or Dark potions or blood. It was just Sleekeazy’s, that weird old people smell – likely from Borgin & Burkes – and sweat with a slightly sourer edge that indicated worse health.
A weight sat heavy in his stomach as he dropped the clothes, and his skin crawled and crawled until he abruptly stood up and strode to the kitchenette. Harry took deep breaths through his nose, taking in the slightly musty smell of decrepit housing instead of the indication that Tom Riddle was a human being, with bodily functions that could fail.
He scanned the room again. From this angle, he could see that on one side of the desk were scattered shards of wood underneath an ugly dent – a more familiar and welcome sight in the home of a Dark Lord – and on the other was a book that appeared to have met the same fate as whatever piece of furniture had been hurled against the wall.
Harry picked it up, and went very still.
T.M.Riddle was written on the first page in smudged ink, so faint and warped Harry could not discern how much control Tom had over his pen when he wrote it. It was cool to the touch, but it may as well have been burning, for all his blood roared through his trembling fingertips.
The diary. The horcrux.
He felt dizzy, and abruptly sucked in a breath. He hadn’t realized he stopped breathing.
It was good, wasn’t it? He needed to destroy the horcruxes before he could kill Tom. He needed to find them. He needed to…
Why had Voldemort thrown a piece of his soul at the fucking wall?
Gingerly, Harry placed it on the desk and smoothed it open. He could feel it calling to him, which made him extremely uncomfortable, because he had talked to Ginny about the diary. It was part of building their relationship back up, addressing the way her misfortune was interspersed with his. He told her the nostalgia that overcame him when he touched it, as if T.M.Riddle was a half-remembered friend, and an urge to dig deeper, to scratch the itch of a story untold and unfinished. The compulsion charm it used to make people write in it, he reasoned.
Ginny told him she never felt anything like that. She’d only written to him because he was kind to her, and the compulsion felt more like an anxious attachment, as if she were the unfinished story, and if only she spoke to Tom, he would complete her.
It waited, expectant, almost pleading.
Harry carefully unscrewed the ink bottle on the desk, dipped a quill, and let it hover over the diary. His heart felt as if it were being slowly squeezed. He thought he might cry, or burst into hysterical laughter, anything that let this awful energy escape his body.
The ink splattered against the blank surface of the diary, and vanished.
He waited there, arm hovering over that awful book. He thought of the basilisk venom in his pouch.
Words emerged.
Don’t bother coddling me. I can see reason.
Harry’s breath hitched, and he finally registered what had been filling him with such creeping horror, why he wanted to crawl out of his skin just looking at it.
Lord Voldemort had been writing to his own diary. Of course he had! It was his fucking diary!
I was just a little cross. Are you alright?
Harry stared at the words blooming out from his silent droplets. He hadn’t managed to take a second breath yet.
Something happened, didn’t it?
He’d been—he’d been arguing with his own diary. It didn’t know what happened at the gala. Harry’s eyes danced to where he found it on the floor. Tom had an argument with himself and threw himself at the wall. This was so fucked up.
Another droplet.
Voldemort?
Harry gently took the quill away, resting it in the ink bottle, his thoughts lingering on Ginny still, the way she tried to explain Blondie to Tom, that it was already a given he’d have tastes and behaviours, and beliefs about ocean music. His scalp felt numb, and his vision was beginning to swim. He forced himself to breathe. He closed his eyes and made himself breathe, in, and out, and in, and out, and then he took the quill and the bottle both, brought it to the diary, and slashed viciously through the air so a harsh line of ink splattered across its pristine pages.
This time, Harry did not have to wait for a response. The letters were immediate and scratched out.
Imsorry
Harry slammed the diary shut and tossed it against the wall in a panic before the letters even faded. “What the fuck,” he gasped.
And before he knew it, he was climbing through the window, stumbling over the planter to retrieve his broom, and he needed to throw his legs out to skid down the walls because the broom could sense his haste to get the fuck out of there. He stumbled out into the street and ran and ran until he was in Diagon Alley and there he stopped and pressed his eyes with his palms.
…He needed the ring.
If he destroyed the diary then Tom would hide the ring, and he needed the ring, if he destroyed the ring and the diary went missing he could guess it would have gone to the Malfoys, but what about the ring? Harry told Tom that he knew about his family, he wouldn’t hide it in the shack again, which meant he couldn’t destroy the diary and he needed the ring, and so he shouldn’t think about the diary.
Harry did not think about the diary. He went straight home and made himself a hot cup of tea and looked out his window at the cheerful sunshine, until his hands finally stopped shaking.
