Fic: Plan B (Harry, Tom, Voldemort; Rating PG)
About a third of the way through reversathon story, which is fun. Meanwhile, here's another challenge fic that I had due:
Title: Plan B
Author: gehayi
Characters: Harry, Tom, Voldemort; Dumbledore, Pettigrew and Hermione mentioned
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,068
Summary: Tom manages to find a way of defeating Harry that Voldemort never thought of.
Author's Note: This was for the Quotations Challenge at hp_literotica. My quotation: It was beautiful and simple, as all truly great swindles are. O. Henry, "The Four Million."
***
He still remembered the Chamber of Secrets. It was one of his clearest memories, less because of the basilisk and its fatal beauty that he only dared to gaze upon in dreams than the dark and arrogant boy he met, the vain young man willing to destroy everything that mattered purely for his own satisfaction.
He thought back, sometimes, and the images of that time gleamed like pristine jewels. He saw it in his imagination as if he were gazing at a coloured illustration in a book of Russian fairy tales. Prince Ivan, thin and wounded, wielded a glistening sword. Princess Marya Morevna lay crumpled and white-faced in a corner behind a wizard whose face was twisted into a cruel sneer. Above flew a firebird, all flame and heat and light.
What was the name of the story whose illustration fit the Chamber so well? Ah, yes. The Death of Koshchei the Deathless.
Koshchei, the evil immortal wizard of Russian myth. He had a thousand powerful enemies, and died repeatedly in tale after tale, but he always returned to life--and to conquest.
Strange how wizards and witches kept forgetting that.
The other one--that ignorant, arrogant boy--surely never forgot it, for he could never have known it in the first place. For all of his vaunted serpentine cunning, in the Chamber he thought in astonishingly direct lines.
Such as plunging the basilisk fang into Tom's diary, for instance.
That hadn't been the weapon he had expected. He'd feared that Harry would use Incendio. Everyone knew of the purifying power that fire possessed.
Not that the venom didn't burn. It did. It seared and charred and corroded his parchment skin, his ink-dark eyes. It had cost him no effort at all to scream.
What Harry had forgotten was that he, Tom, was not--precisely--alive. And there was no way to kill a memory with poison.
But a being that was memory and malice and stolen soul could not exist indefinitely without shelter, and now his diary body was gone. There was only one fully alive body in proximity. Ginny, bereft of most of her life force and nearly all of her soul, did not count.
Tom sighed, and probed for the connection between his mind and Harry's, found it, and flowed into the younger boy's mind.
It had hurt, at first. Not surprising; it was mind rape, after all. As Tom seeped into Harry's mind, he could feel the boy's pain and shock and horror as if they were his own. Harry shrieked in silent protest, and struggled to erect infinite dark walls against Tom's power.
The walls had proven to be no more than fragile sheets of crepe paper.
Then it was done, and Tom coiled lazily within the moist black swamp of Harry's subconscious, where the nightmares and monsters lived. And Harry was left with a spinning head...and no idea what had just happened.
Tom elected to bide his time over the next few years, toying with Harry's fears and rages and insecurities, shaping his dreams. For the most part, though, he let Harry alone. Better that people should forget about the Chamber, and Harry's meeting with that clever, cunning Riddle boy.
Behind Harry's own eyes, Tom observed his rival.
He discovered that Harry had an entertaining streak of malice, and that he hated with swift, implacable loathing. Furthermore, Tom was delighted to find that those whom Harry hated, Harry invariably judged to be evil.
He decided to feed the malice, the tendency toward hasty judgement, for no particular reason save that they were weaknesses and a weakness in an enemy could prove useful.
It was slow work. Tom chafed under the restrictions, longing to flood Harry's mind with rage and hatred that would shatter the brat. However, he did not. That would be stupid. Illogical. He would not rush into any action that could destroy him. And in any event, Harry was far more useful to him alive and sane--at least for now.
The slow poisoning of Harry's mind took time, and twice Tom's plans were very nearly derailed, once by Ron's pet rat (and the grovelling, snivelling, cowardly wretch that he was in human form made Tom think that he should have remained a rat) and once by his older, hideous self.
Tom was annoyed to discover that Ron's rat was Pettigrew; he was a Legilimens, and he should have noticed this. He learned soon afterward--much to his displeasure--that many of his powers and abilities were weakened to the point of non-existence simply by Harry's youth and lack of training. He needed Legilimancy...and its corollary, Occlumency. If Dumbledore should ever choose to peer inside his mind...
But learning of his reduced skills was nothing compared to what he learned in Little Hangleton a year after Pettigrew's transformation.
The most jarring thing was discovering that he was going to lose.
He watched and saw what Harry, frightened and angry and convinced he was about to die, did not see: the fearful shuffling of the nervous Death Eaters; the jeering laughter when someone else suffered for ignorance or disloyalty; the smooth-faced lies they told to appease his elder self.
Mostly, he noticed Wormtail--bitter, terrified and plainly longing to be anywhere but here. He winced when Voldemort's first act on resurrection was to Crucio the man who'd given his hand that Voldemort might live.
Do you realise what you've just told them? he thought furiously at his older and far more stupid self. You've just informed them that loyalty means nothing--that there's no benefit to following you! They know now that there's no point in being loyal and sacrificing because you'll torture them no matter what they do!
After that, he knew he couldn't rely upon Voldemort. A shame, he reflected, that he had learned so much about magic and forgotten everything he had known in school about manipulating people.
Plan B, then.
He continued to let resentment, fear, rage, pre-judgement and pride seep into his host's mind, but now he speeded up the flow. He goaded and guided Harry, now brimming with angst and adolescence, to brood over things that troubled and frightened him.
Dumbledore proved to be a rich lode.
Tom couldn't help but chuckle as he resurrected Harry's memories of Dumbledore sending two third-years out onto the Hogwarts grounds to save two innocent lives--quite ignoring the fact the grounds had been a perilous place. A bloodthirsty, angry werewolf--long caged by Wolfsbane Potion and now free at last--who could easily have infected or killed either or both of them. Two Death Eaters--one armed with a wand and the other with a double-bladed axe--who had no reason to spare a filthy Mudblood or the detestable Boy Who Lived. And a hundred or more Dementors starving for lack of their proper food, eager to devour minds--for what is a mind without the memories that shape its past, and without the ability to remember the present?--lusting to suck out and digest human souls, rendering their victims empty husks, corpses that didn't know enough to stop breathing.
I could have been killed, Harry thought. I could have been tortured and murdered by Death Eaters. I could have been torn to shreds by my favourite teacher. I could have been turned into a mindless, soulless thing forever. And Dumbledore knew it. He knew what was out there. Hermione and I told him.
A strange way to treat the future saviour of the Wizarding World, Tom remarked silently. After all, if you're gone, there's no way that anyone can beat Voldemort, is there?
Not true. But Tom was sure that the wizarding world wanted to believe this, wanted to believe that one boy could destroy the flat-eyed monster under the bed, the one whose cold, scaly, sucker-covered hand was creeping altogether too close to their ankles. Wizards and witches hungered for someone else, someone not them, to fight and bleed and, perhaps, die for them, so that the bogeyman could be vanquished and that life could go on as before, flabbily comfortable and unchanged.
Drop by poisoned drop, bitter memories and outraged thoughts oozed into Harry's mind--thoughts like Why did Dumbledore look so pleased when I told him I was hurt? and Why doesn't Dumbledore try to get Sirius cleared--he must have some friends at the Ministry that Fudge would listen to and What's the point of asking questions? No one ever tells me a bloody thing.
Beyond this, Tom, who had noticed that Harry's dreams were sometimes vaguely prophetic, moulded those as well, letting this memory of or contact with Voldemort leak through while crafting seemingly prophetic visions from whole cloth. Sirius's death (for which Tom was not responsible, though he enjoyed it immensely) helped immeasurably in this; within a year, Harry no longer trusted the visions that might have provided him with clues about what was happening to him.
Time passed. Voldemort tried, once again, to kill Harry. This time, Dumbledore died. Tom rejoiced. The boy would have no target for his rage now...and that rage would need to go somewhere.
Tom fed Harry's rage and hatred all through the summer, and all through seventh year as well. By the time Voldemort attacked again--in June, naturally--the boy's fury had reached towering proportions.
In the end, the war was not decided on a crowded battlefield, but in a narrow alley in Hogsmeade that Harry was using as a shortcut to Zonko's.
Voldemort, like Harry, was alone. Neither attacked with the Killing Curse; Voldemort, apparently, had learned from three failures, and Harry was not interested in merely killing Voldemort any longer. Now he wanted the Dark Lord to suffer first.
The battle swiftly turned hideous. The spells themselves were ordinary enough, but the hatred with which they were cast quadrupled their power. Incendio burned Harry over eighty percent of his body; Confundus robbed Voldemort of his mind, if not his emotions.
Harry, dying of his burns, cast his final spell. "Accio Heart!"
As Voldemort's heart began to pull free of his chest, he tried the Killing Curse one last time. "Avada Kedavra!"
Green light struck Harry, and he cried out in pain and horror...and then he was gone.
Voldemort, his chest burst open in a mass of blood and bone and gore, his heart thirty feet away, died satisfied.
And back where Harry had been, Tom--who, not being truly alive, could not die with his host--began making repairs.
It was exhausting work--not unlike trying to regain control of a broom in the middle of a lightning storm in the mountains when the broom was in a tailspin and the pilot had fallen off. Nor could he heal everything. But he did manage to force Harry's body to keep breathing, and to deal with the worst of the burns. When he was found at last, he was in critical condition...but not dead.
The wizarding world went mad with joy.
That was hardly the end of the war, of course; that lasted another two years. But once the war ended, the wizarding world had to be rebuilt. And no one was more zealous about rebuilding than Harry Potter.
He crafted many of the new, seemingly more just laws--ironically, with the help of Hermione--while slipping in little barbs and loopholes that might be useful later. He found a spell that banished the Dementors to a far-off and empty dimension, from which they would never return.
He didn't want to have his mind and stolen soul sucked away from him, after all.
Five years to rebuild. Five years to change from the brilliant young strategist-general to an experienced and powerful young leader. Five years to convince the wizarding world that Harry Potter was precisely what the world needed.
And now he had succeeded. Succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Amelia Bones--Fudge's successor--had stepped down as Minister of Magic, and had named him in her place.
Minister--unless he should choose to abdicate his position--for life.
And, of course, he, like the Bones woman, would be able to name his successor. In fact, all he had to do was disengage from Harry's mind and leap into another one, and he would BE his successor.
And he could do this--would do this--indefinitely.
Tom Marvolo Riddle, Minister...forever.
And the millions cheer.
Title: Plan B
Author: gehayi
Characters: Harry, Tom, Voldemort; Dumbledore, Pettigrew and Hermione mentioned
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,068
Summary: Tom manages to find a way of defeating Harry that Voldemort never thought of.
Author's Note: This was for the Quotations Challenge at hp_literotica. My quotation: It was beautiful and simple, as all truly great swindles are. O. Henry, "The Four Million."
***
He still remembered the Chamber of Secrets. It was one of his clearest memories, less because of the basilisk and its fatal beauty that he only dared to gaze upon in dreams than the dark and arrogant boy he met, the vain young man willing to destroy everything that mattered purely for his own satisfaction.
He thought back, sometimes, and the images of that time gleamed like pristine jewels. He saw it in his imagination as if he were gazing at a coloured illustration in a book of Russian fairy tales. Prince Ivan, thin and wounded, wielded a glistening sword. Princess Marya Morevna lay crumpled and white-faced in a corner behind a wizard whose face was twisted into a cruel sneer. Above flew a firebird, all flame and heat and light.
What was the name of the story whose illustration fit the Chamber so well? Ah, yes. The Death of Koshchei the Deathless.
Koshchei, the evil immortal wizard of Russian myth. He had a thousand powerful enemies, and died repeatedly in tale after tale, but he always returned to life--and to conquest.
Strange how wizards and witches kept forgetting that.
The other one--that ignorant, arrogant boy--surely never forgot it, for he could never have known it in the first place. For all of his vaunted serpentine cunning, in the Chamber he thought in astonishingly direct lines.
Such as plunging the basilisk fang into Tom's diary, for instance.
That hadn't been the weapon he had expected. He'd feared that Harry would use Incendio. Everyone knew of the purifying power that fire possessed.
Not that the venom didn't burn. It did. It seared and charred and corroded his parchment skin, his ink-dark eyes. It had cost him no effort at all to scream.
What Harry had forgotten was that he, Tom, was not--precisely--alive. And there was no way to kill a memory with poison.
But a being that was memory and malice and stolen soul could not exist indefinitely without shelter, and now his diary body was gone. There was only one fully alive body in proximity. Ginny, bereft of most of her life force and nearly all of her soul, did not count.
Tom sighed, and probed for the connection between his mind and Harry's, found it, and flowed into the younger boy's mind.
It had hurt, at first. Not surprising; it was mind rape, after all. As Tom seeped into Harry's mind, he could feel the boy's pain and shock and horror as if they were his own. Harry shrieked in silent protest, and struggled to erect infinite dark walls against Tom's power.
The walls had proven to be no more than fragile sheets of crepe paper.
Then it was done, and Tom coiled lazily within the moist black swamp of Harry's subconscious, where the nightmares and monsters lived. And Harry was left with a spinning head...and no idea what had just happened.
Tom elected to bide his time over the next few years, toying with Harry's fears and rages and insecurities, shaping his dreams. For the most part, though, he let Harry alone. Better that people should forget about the Chamber, and Harry's meeting with that clever, cunning Riddle boy.
Behind Harry's own eyes, Tom observed his rival.
He discovered that Harry had an entertaining streak of malice, and that he hated with swift, implacable loathing. Furthermore, Tom was delighted to find that those whom Harry hated, Harry invariably judged to be evil.
He decided to feed the malice, the tendency toward hasty judgement, for no particular reason save that they were weaknesses and a weakness in an enemy could prove useful.
It was slow work. Tom chafed under the restrictions, longing to flood Harry's mind with rage and hatred that would shatter the brat. However, he did not. That would be stupid. Illogical. He would not rush into any action that could destroy him. And in any event, Harry was far more useful to him alive and sane--at least for now.
The slow poisoning of Harry's mind took time, and twice Tom's plans were very nearly derailed, once by Ron's pet rat (and the grovelling, snivelling, cowardly wretch that he was in human form made Tom think that he should have remained a rat) and once by his older, hideous self.
Tom was annoyed to discover that Ron's rat was Pettigrew; he was a Legilimens, and he should have noticed this. He learned soon afterward--much to his displeasure--that many of his powers and abilities were weakened to the point of non-existence simply by Harry's youth and lack of training. He needed Legilimancy...and its corollary, Occlumency. If Dumbledore should ever choose to peer inside his mind...
But learning of his reduced skills was nothing compared to what he learned in Little Hangleton a year after Pettigrew's transformation.
The most jarring thing was discovering that he was going to lose.
He watched and saw what Harry, frightened and angry and convinced he was about to die, did not see: the fearful shuffling of the nervous Death Eaters; the jeering laughter when someone else suffered for ignorance or disloyalty; the smooth-faced lies they told to appease his elder self.
Mostly, he noticed Wormtail--bitter, terrified and plainly longing to be anywhere but here. He winced when Voldemort's first act on resurrection was to Crucio the man who'd given his hand that Voldemort might live.
Do you realise what you've just told them? he thought furiously at his older and far more stupid self. You've just informed them that loyalty means nothing--that there's no benefit to following you! They know now that there's no point in being loyal and sacrificing because you'll torture them no matter what they do!
After that, he knew he couldn't rely upon Voldemort. A shame, he reflected, that he had learned so much about magic and forgotten everything he had known in school about manipulating people.
Plan B, then.
He continued to let resentment, fear, rage, pre-judgement and pride seep into his host's mind, but now he speeded up the flow. He goaded and guided Harry, now brimming with angst and adolescence, to brood over things that troubled and frightened him.
Dumbledore proved to be a rich lode.
Tom couldn't help but chuckle as he resurrected Harry's memories of Dumbledore sending two third-years out onto the Hogwarts grounds to save two innocent lives--quite ignoring the fact the grounds had been a perilous place. A bloodthirsty, angry werewolf--long caged by Wolfsbane Potion and now free at last--who could easily have infected or killed either or both of them. Two Death Eaters--one armed with a wand and the other with a double-bladed axe--who had no reason to spare a filthy Mudblood or the detestable Boy Who Lived. And a hundred or more Dementors starving for lack of their proper food, eager to devour minds--for what is a mind without the memories that shape its past, and without the ability to remember the present?--lusting to suck out and digest human souls, rendering their victims empty husks, corpses that didn't know enough to stop breathing.
I could have been killed, Harry thought. I could have been tortured and murdered by Death Eaters. I could have been torn to shreds by my favourite teacher. I could have been turned into a mindless, soulless thing forever. And Dumbledore knew it. He knew what was out there. Hermione and I told him.
A strange way to treat the future saviour of the Wizarding World, Tom remarked silently. After all, if you're gone, there's no way that anyone can beat Voldemort, is there?
Not true. But Tom was sure that the wizarding world wanted to believe this, wanted to believe that one boy could destroy the flat-eyed monster under the bed, the one whose cold, scaly, sucker-covered hand was creeping altogether too close to their ankles. Wizards and witches hungered for someone else, someone not them, to fight and bleed and, perhaps, die for them, so that the bogeyman could be vanquished and that life could go on as before, flabbily comfortable and unchanged.
Drop by poisoned drop, bitter memories and outraged thoughts oozed into Harry's mind--thoughts like Why did Dumbledore look so pleased when I told him I was hurt? and Why doesn't Dumbledore try to get Sirius cleared--he must have some friends at the Ministry that Fudge would listen to and What's the point of asking questions? No one ever tells me a bloody thing.
Beyond this, Tom, who had noticed that Harry's dreams were sometimes vaguely prophetic, moulded those as well, letting this memory of or contact with Voldemort leak through while crafting seemingly prophetic visions from whole cloth. Sirius's death (for which Tom was not responsible, though he enjoyed it immensely) helped immeasurably in this; within a year, Harry no longer trusted the visions that might have provided him with clues about what was happening to him.
Time passed. Voldemort tried, once again, to kill Harry. This time, Dumbledore died. Tom rejoiced. The boy would have no target for his rage now...and that rage would need to go somewhere.
Tom fed Harry's rage and hatred all through the summer, and all through seventh year as well. By the time Voldemort attacked again--in June, naturally--the boy's fury had reached towering proportions.
In the end, the war was not decided on a crowded battlefield, but in a narrow alley in Hogsmeade that Harry was using as a shortcut to Zonko's.
Voldemort, like Harry, was alone. Neither attacked with the Killing Curse; Voldemort, apparently, had learned from three failures, and Harry was not interested in merely killing Voldemort any longer. Now he wanted the Dark Lord to suffer first.
The battle swiftly turned hideous. The spells themselves were ordinary enough, but the hatred with which they were cast quadrupled their power. Incendio burned Harry over eighty percent of his body; Confundus robbed Voldemort of his mind, if not his emotions.
Harry, dying of his burns, cast his final spell. "Accio Heart!"
As Voldemort's heart began to pull free of his chest, he tried the Killing Curse one last time. "Avada Kedavra!"
Green light struck Harry, and he cried out in pain and horror...and then he was gone.
Voldemort, his chest burst open in a mass of blood and bone and gore, his heart thirty feet away, died satisfied.
And back where Harry had been, Tom--who, not being truly alive, could not die with his host--began making repairs.
It was exhausting work--not unlike trying to regain control of a broom in the middle of a lightning storm in the mountains when the broom was in a tailspin and the pilot had fallen off. Nor could he heal everything. But he did manage to force Harry's body to keep breathing, and to deal with the worst of the burns. When he was found at last, he was in critical condition...but not dead.
The wizarding world went mad with joy.
That was hardly the end of the war, of course; that lasted another two years. But once the war ended, the wizarding world had to be rebuilt. And no one was more zealous about rebuilding than Harry Potter.
He crafted many of the new, seemingly more just laws--ironically, with the help of Hermione--while slipping in little barbs and loopholes that might be useful later. He found a spell that banished the Dementors to a far-off and empty dimension, from which they would never return.
He didn't want to have his mind and stolen soul sucked away from him, after all.
Five years to rebuild. Five years to change from the brilliant young strategist-general to an experienced and powerful young leader. Five years to convince the wizarding world that Harry Potter was precisely what the world needed.
And now he had succeeded. Succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Amelia Bones--Fudge's successor--had stepped down as Minister of Magic, and had named him in her place.
Minister--unless he should choose to abdicate his position--for life.
And, of course, he, like the Bones woman, would be able to name his successor. In fact, all he had to do was disengage from Harry's mind and leap into another one, and he would BE his successor.
And he could do this--would do this--indefinitely.
Tom Marvolo Riddle, Minister...forever.
And the millions cheer.