Complete header information may be found in
Chapter One. You may find all parts of this story by clicking the
Harry Potter and the Slytherin's Hair tag.
Chapter Seven: That Destiny of His
It was awful, sneaking through Hogsmeade and trying to avoid
the Dementors. Harry felt a rushing
through his veins-adrenaline and fear-and could not
shake the feeling of surrealism that was his
presence in an unfamiliar body, but he pressed on. The soul-sucking
creatures seemed to be drifting
toward the direction of the Shrieking Shack, though he caught a few
with his Patronus as they were
attempting to break into buildings, and drove them ahead of himself.
The Death Eaters he had seen
seemed to be remaining in the vicinity of the Three Broomsticks.
He went toward the train tracks on the outskirts of Hogsmeade
and followed them toward and partially
around the shack, approaching it from the side. And then he saw
himself-Voldemort!-standing on
the roof, his back turned on his position. Harry wrapped his fingers
around the Dark Lord's wand and
tried to decide what to do as a sheet of ice began to form over the
shack. The Dementors had arrived,
all of them, from the looks of the ground and the building, and the boy
was terrified.
Fear, Potter, is a weakness.
"Take him!" Voldemort screamed, and then a cloud of
back robes rose
in the sky.
Shit, Harry thought, levitating himself. This
would be easier on a broomstick.
Without warning, the Dark Lord's wand lengthened,
thickened, and sprouted a brush, and Harry found
himself in possession of a broomstick.
"Right, that's cool," he said,
throwing his leg over the wood and kicking off into the sky.
He flew straight up, fast, and then circled around to see if
the Dementors had followed him. They had,
but they moved through the air as slowly as if it were water.
"Damn it! They've got to go
faster!" Harry exclaimed, thinking, I want them to
follow me straight
into the earth, but if they don't go any faster .
. . . "If they won't go any faster, I'll
just have to bring
the ground to them."
Taking a deep breath, he charged the
'death' of Dementors and scattered them, a
procedure he
repeated until they were milling closely together to prevent it, and
then he began rising into the air again.
When he had them, hundreds of them, he thought, right on his tail, he
swooped toward the ground and
willed it to rise.
Great chunks of earth flew into the sky, striking the
Dementors and knocking them out of the air.
"It's working!" he crowed before
rushing the creatures again.
He managed to subdue most of them in this way, but the effort
was exhausting. By the time he flew
back toward the Shrieking Shack, Voldemort was gone.
"NO!" Where are
you?
"Right here, boy," he heard himself say,
and then he felt hands-his hands-on his neck as
Voldemort
Apparated onto the broomstick behind him and began to throttle him.
It was a mistake.
"Wha-no!" his voice yelled as
the hands fell away and his broomstick became heavier.
Oh, God! He can't touch
me no matter what body he's in! Harry thought,
frightened by the
prospect of remaining in Voldemort's body forever if his was
destroyed.
He did the only thing he could think of and flew upside down,
and watched as the Dark Lord went
crashing into the earth.
No, that's my body!
That's me, Harry thought, flying after
Voldemort.
Another explosion from the direction of the castle erupted as
he landed and ran to his broken body.
"Healing spells-I don't know any
sodding healing spells!" he yelled.
One of his eyes opened and glared redly at him, and Harry felt
a frisson of fear travel up his spine.
"Give it back," Voldemort said.
The boy did not know if the wizard meant his body or his
power, but it seemed clear to him that he
would have to give something if he wanted to take anything of his own
back. That's how I ended up in
his body in the first place, isn't it? he thought,
steeling himself for what was to come.
It came quickly-the sensation of being
pulled-and he laid one hand on 'his'
chest, causing the Dark
Lord to shriek and attempt to move, but he was unable to do so.
"You want your body back, do you?"
Voldemort only screamed louder.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Then give me," Harry began to say,
stopping when he felt the chill approach again. Dementors.
Good.
"Fine, take it!" he said, pushing himself forward
through their bond.
The moment he was in his own, broken body again, an alien
screech emerged from Voldemort's
mouth-a screech that was abruptly cut off as three Dementors
descended upon him and grasped him
in their skeletal claws. They did not give him time to rescind his
earlier order, and soon, the very
essence of the Dark Lord was being sucked out by one of the creatures
in an obscene Kiss.
Harry felt a pressure against his mind, and he knew the wizard
was attempting to retake his body, but
he was ready for this. He built a wall of metaphysical bricks between
his mind and Voldemort's and
prevented the man from forcing his consciousness back inside of his
mind.
But just as quickly as Voldemort had returned to his body, he
left it again-and entered one of the
Dementors, turning on the other fiends as his proper body fell to the
ground and scattering them with an
unnatural hiss before looking at Harry and throwing back his hood.
"No!" Harry screamed, looking away. Don't
look!
Harry looked away, focused on a fleeing Dementor, and forced
himself without thinking into the
creature. Power he knows not, he thought, viewing
the world as one conglomeration of gray and
white. If he can do it, so can I.
His true body was a pure white splotch on the ground, as was
Voldemort's, and the other milling
Dementors' were gray. But the grayish being floating toward
him, he knew, was the Dark Lord. Wait
for it, he thought, as the creature approached him. Wait
. . . .
When Voldemort reached for him, put his hands on him, Harry
drew the wizard back toward his prone
form and slipped into it again, reaching out unsteadily for the leg of
the Dementor whose body the Dark
Lord inhabited before he could realize that the thing he was attacking
was no longer Harry.
And he learned that Dementors could make noise, could scream,
as he gripped the creature with all the
strength he had left and watched the body turn to stone and crumble,
just as Professor Quirrel's had
done years ago.
Voldemort's true 'voice' was a
searing scream against the edges of his consciousness, but Harry
repelled him, held his mind still, trapping him in his borrowed body
until the Dementor disintegrated
completely, and the Dark Lord's screaming stopped forever.
The ground shook, but not because of Tom Riddle's
passing.
"Hogwarts," Harry choked out, becoming
aware of the pain in his body.
He wanted to revel in it; it was his pain after all, but all
he felt was dread. "Have to . . . help. Have to
get to . . . castle," he said, whimpering as the force of his
pain washed over him. "Oh,
I'm-" broken,
bleeding, can't move. Oh, it hurts. Oh-
"God."
"Not quite, Potter," Severus Snape said
then, "but you'll no doubt have plenty more
worshipers soon
enough."
Harry felt the Potions master's hands moving over
him, assessing his injuries, and, too tired to do
anything else, he allowed the threatening darkness to claim him.