[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Retreat, R, Harry/Voldemort, 4/4
Part Three.
Part One.
Title: Retreat (4/4)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Voldemort
Rating: R
Content Notes: Forced marriage, AU (ignoring DH), angst, torture, extremely dubious consent, disassociation
Wordcount: This part 4700
Summary: AU. Harry didn’t understand why Voldemort had suggested their marriage as a solution to the war. He didn’t understand why his friends were supporting the suggestion. But he goes into it, trying to be as numb as possible, trying to retreat into his mind and just let the world play out around him-no matter how difficult that is.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics that are being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It should have four parts, to be posted over the next four days. This is very dark; please pay heed to the warnings.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Part Four
After that, the days…drifted.
Harry learned to ignore the sensation of Malfoy’s slavery bond hovering in the back of his mind, if not the hate-filled glares that Malfoy gave him and the way he scurried out of a room when Harry entered it. He didn’t have to do anything with the bond. Just having it there was a pretty effective deterrent for Malfoy, and for his parents, who also went out of their way to avoid Harry.
He went into the gardens a lot, watching as autumn came in and faded the leaves on the Malfoys’ trees. There were magically-warmed plots of flowers that would probably stay the same all through the winter, for all that Harry knew. The flowers were bright brassy red and gold, but Harry found that he preferred the softer colors the gardens got as leaves drifted to the ground, and he walked through them with them crunching softly under his feet. The house-elves would clean them up in the mornings, but there were enough huge trees and enough stretches of garden that Harry could nearly always find some to walk through in the afternoons.
Nagini sometimes accompanied him, although she whined constantly in Parseltongue about how cold it was and how much she wanted to hibernate. One day when they were near a huge crystalline pond in the back of the Malfoys’ grounds, Harry asked her, “Why don’t you hibernate if that’s what you want to do?”
Nagini lifted her head. “My master needs me.”
Harry sighed a little and sat down on a marble (of course) bench next to the pond. Nagini promptly crawled into his lap, the way she always did for the warmth when he held still long enough. Harry stroked her belly and murmured, “Must be nice to have a purpose.”
“You have one, too.”
“I can’t figure out how to do it,” Harry replied, thinking of the plan that Ron and Hermione had wanted him to carry out. Or not carry out? The more he thought about it, the more he doubted the conclusion that he’d come to. He’d been too…upset when he’d first learned he was a Horcrux to think rationally about what his friends wanted or knew.
But they were still his friends. Harry knew that with an unshakeable faith that Voldemort and Dumbledore together couldn’t destroy. So they wanted him to do something else. But what?
“You are doing fine, little brother. You make the master happy.”
Harry blinked and returned to himself, and then felt dumb for feeling surprised. Of course Nagini wouldn’t think of the same purpose Harry was thinking of. “I don’t see how I can. He just talks to me a few times a day and asks to come to my bed, and I refuse.”
“But he is much calmer with you here.” Nagini flickered her tongue out so that it brushed in a tickling way across Harry’s wristbone, and he jumped. “He does not torture people simply for failing him.”
“He tortured Malfoy.”
“That one hurt you.”
Harry couldn’t come up with a reply to that, so he shrugged and continued to watch the pond, the little transparent ripples curling in to the foot of the bench. His fingers brushed over something carved on the arm next to him, and he turned his head to see runes.
Nagini turned her head with him. “They could keep us warmer. Why do you not use them?”
Harry had his wand, but he shook his head. “I’ve never studied them. I don’t know how to use them.”
Nagini gave a little hiss that sounded surprised. “I thought all humans knew. I shall speak to the master about this.”
Harry tensed, thinking of how Voldemort might punish him for not being smart enough, and then let it go with a sigh. Honestly, he didn’t think that would happen. Voldemort wanted him to be secure, and that didn’t include torturing him.
*
“Uh…what is this?”
“Books.”
Voldemort had indeed unloaded a bunch of books on the small desk that had been added to Harry’s room on his second week there, but Harry didn’t understand why Voldemort had brought them himself, or why he was now staring expectantly at Harry. Harry picked up one of the books and turned it over.
Runes for the Beginner.
Harry licked his lips. “Nagini told you that I didn’t know how to use them.”
“Yes. Why did you not take Ancient Runes at Hogwarts?”
Harry darted a glance at Voldemort, but he only stared back expectantly, and Harry was the one who ended up looking away. “I chose my optional classes based on which ones looked easiest and which ones Ron was taking,” he muttered, digging through the books and revealing they were mostly on Runes, although one was on Defense. “So I picked Divination and Care of Magical Creatures.”
Voldemort made a soft noise, which Harry didn’t recognize as laughter until he looked back at him. “And here I thought you had chosen Divination because you were looking to harness the magic of prophecies against me.”
Harry blinked. “I didn’t know about the prophecy until a little more than a year ago. End of my fifth year.”
Voldemort leaned towards him, smooth snake-like face alight with…something. “Why did Dumbledore not tell you about it earlier?”
“He said that he wanted me to have a happy childhood.”
“He failed you, then.” Voldemort stared at Harry with the kind of intensity that always made Harry feel as if he was having a layer of skin peeled off. Harry didn’t know why he did that. Yes, he was a Horcrux, but Voldemort already knew that. It didn’t make him interesting. “You were abused.”
Harry could hardly object to Voldemort putting it like that, not when he’d told the man himself. “Yes,” he said simply, and reached for the nearest Runes book. “Is there someone besides Snape here who can teach me?”
“I will never allow him near you again.” Voldemort reached out and closed his fingers in that immovable grip around Harry’s wrist. “I think that you are trapped.”
“Well, yeah.”
Voldemort’s fingers tightened for a single moment, but he shook his head. “Not here in this house. I mean that you are trapped in the constant expectation of having to do something, rescue someone, save yourself. It makes sense for the kind of childhood you had, where you had to be vigilant for what insult was coming next. And then your Hogwarts years, which I imagine look different when one is not listening to a Snape or Malfoy recite the tale.”
Harry frowned at him. “You’re saying that I don’t know what to do with myself because I’m trapped in a fight-or-flight response?”
“That is, I think, the Muggle term.” Voldemort’s fingers pressed down hard one more time, caressed, and then released him. “Your magic is always poised around you, do you know that? Nagini reports that with all the time in the world, you can rarely settle to a book or a task. You are not used to having so much quiet time. Time when you are expected to study, to rest, to improve yourself.”
Harry stared at him, feeling the way he had when Voldemort was asking about his OWL scores. “Why do you care, though? I mean, why does it matter to you if I study and read and-improve myself?” He couldn’t keep the contempt from his tone on those last words, but Voldemort only watched him with unwinking red eyes, not even sending a hint of a burn through Harry’s scar. “Resting, yeah, I can understand that. You want my body to be healthy to keep holding the Horcrux. But the rest?”
“You are my consort.”
“That’s a convenient excuse to keep your Horcrux nearby.”
“No. It is not.” Voldemort leaned near, overwhelmingly, the way he had when Harry woke in bed after Malfoy’s attack. “It is true. I have already told you that I want your tamed defiance. That remains true. Do not drift through your days, Harry Potter-Gaunt. Live.”
“I don’t know how!”
The words broke out of Harry’s throat, and he blinked. Voldemort eased back a little, a faint smile curling around the edges of his mouth like Nagini around a chair. “And you, being the Boy-Who-Lived,” he said, soft, mocking. “Well. We will begin with Runes.”
“Wait a minute. You’re teaching me?”
“Why would I not?”
“You’re busy running an empire. Plotting the ruin of all that’s good and true in the world. Killing Muggleborns.”
Voldemort’s eyes flared for a second, and Harry looked away. But Voldemort’s voice had acquired only a mild hardness when he said, “The war does not take up as much of my time now that we have the treaty. I can make longer-term plans.”
“You haven’t given up on them.”
“Of course I have not. But you are one of the most important pieces of my plans, Harry. I need you happy and safe and healthy.”
Harry eyed him. “Why?”
Voldemort sat there as if weighing how much he should tell him. Harry nodded to himself. He hadn’t really expected an answer.
And then, shocking the hell out of him, Voldemort gave him one. “Surely you have noticed that I have not had the kind of outbursts that I used to.” He switched to Parseltongue, as if he thought someone might be listening in. “Your presence has begun to balance me, as my explorations down the Horcrux link to figure out what you were did during the last year. I am able to plan and think with a clarity that has not been mine in decades. On the other hand, that clarity diminishes when I feel your unhappiness. So. It becomes my place to ensure that happiness.”
Harry stared with his mouth open. He thought Voldemort would tell him to stop doing that, that it was undignified, but Voldemort simply stared at him, and a tickle of something that might have been amusement ran behind Harry’s scar.
“What is it, Harry? Have so few people ever said that they wish to see you happy?”
“I-I can only remember one or two.”
Voldemort’s face changed, to one of those smooth blank expressions that Harry had trouble reading, and the trickle of amusement disappeared. He leaned forwards. “Now there are three.”
Harry glanced away from him and picked up one of the Runes books with shaking fingers. Then he had to put it down again and take a deep breath. “I’m not a good student. You’re going to get frustrated with me.”
“That does not matter. This increases your happiness, and I have told you why I am invested in that.”
Absurdly, that calmed Harry down. Voldemort hadn’t changed overnight into a good person. He had simply become someone who needed to act a certain way to secure his own immortality and satisfaction. It was just that this time, that involved making someone else happy instead of killing and torturing people.
“Now, the first book will give you a good overview of Runes, which you will need, as you’ve never studied them before. Open it to page five…”
And Harry let himself sink into the absurdity of the situation that was being tutored in Runes by the Dark Lord, and opened the book.
*
“Potter! Potter, wait.”
Shit. Harry had been wandering the corridors of Malfoy Manor, for once by himself, without Nagini or Voldemort or any of the Death Eaters who spoke to him in anxious ways as they attempted to curry favor with the Dark Lord’s husband. And now Snape had found him.
Harry turned around, his hand resting lightly on his wand, although he didn’t think that he could beat Snape if it came down to a duel. Which meant that he didn’t want it to come down to that.
“What is it, Snape?” Harry lifted his chin high and adjusted his stance, the way Voldemort had also been tutoring him on, and Snape sneered at him as he came to a stop. But he also glanced cautiously around, in a way that said he knew as well as Harry that Harry being alone wasn’t going to last much longer.
“I know what you are.”
Harry blinked, but in a way, he wasn’t surprised that Snape knew he was a Horcrux. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort might have trusted him with that information. “Okay. So what?”
“You must not live.”
Wow. So Snape was Dumbledore’s man after all. This wasn’t the way Harry had expected it to be confirmed. He wormed his fingers into the cloth of his robes and stared blankly at Snape. “I think our lord would disagree with you about that.”
Snape curled his lip back from his teeth. “So you quickly become the subservient whore that I thought you would.” He drew his wand, which was gleaming ebony. “Albus was wrong to put so much faith in you, and so were your friends.”
Harry swallowed. “My friends expected me to get killed mouthing off to Voldemort. Forgive me if I think that their opinions don’t count for much.” He was watching Snape’s wand hand, not his face, but the contempt in his voice was enough to tell Harry what expression he would have been wearing, anyway.
“You stupid boy,” Snape whispered. “Albus thought there was some way that you would survive, as long as you taunted the Dark Lord into casting the Killing Curse at you himself. That it would kill the soul-shard in you and not the soul that makes you Harry Potter. That was what they hoped to accomplish, Weasley and Granger, after they had destroyed the other Horcruxes. They held faith in Albus’s ridiculous interpretations of the research he found on living Horcruxes. I do not have that faith, not when the snake still lives.”
Harry flung himself to the side as the first blast of golden light came at him, but the golden light clung to the floor, and the walls, and began to grow and crackle. It was fire of some kind, Harry saw, even as he backed away and began to pant from the heat. Fire that formed into the shapes of beasts with horns and fangs and claws and uplifted wings, stalking towards him, snapping their teeth.
“Fiendfyre,” Snape said, from somewhere behind the wall. His voice was strained, as if he had to avoid the fire himself. “It will kill any Horcrux.”
Harry closed his eyes and reached out through his mental link to Voldemort. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it was only based on the past few weeks of studying Runes and talking with Voldemort and spending time in the gardens with Nagini, but he wanted to live.
Voldemort!
Then he turned and ran.
He avoided all the doors of the rooms that stood open; he didn’t know whether any of them led outside, and he didn’t want to be trapped. He sped as if a hundred Dudleys and a thousand gangs were chasing him, panting, the air rushing in and out of his lungs rapidly becoming superheated. He leaped down a staircase and galloped around a corner that he hoped would lead further up into the house.
It led into a dead-end corridor with just a few doors on either side. Harry flung them open and found only blank-walled places that once might have been used as Potions labs, considering the odd-colored splashes on the floor.
The fire roared behind him.
Harry turned around, shaking. He found himself thinking of Voldemort’s promise that death would never touch him, and feeling an odd, disorienting jolt of sadness that that promise had proved as false as all the others that everyone had ever made him.
This Fiendfyre could kill a Horcrux, he was sure, in the way that the combination of Sectumsempra and a Cruciatus couldn’t. He was going to die.
Harry swallowed and tried to stand as tall as he could. The flames boiled towards him, the nearest one forming into the shape of a basilisk. He wondered what it would feel like to burn. If it would be quick or not.
Then the flames abruptly surged away from him. Harry stared open-mouthed as a circle of empty floor and cool air opened between him and them, and then the beasts were crowding back down the corridor, being forced away by what looked like an invisible expanding barrier.
Into the space, Voldemort Apparated.
He was glowing along the edges with a red-black haze Harry had never seen before, but supposed must be the result of handling high-level Dark magic. He lifted his arms, and his black robes fell away from them, revealing gleaming pale skin. Voldemort extended his hands and waved his yew wand once, twice, in quick slashes.
The fire wailed and began to shrink, compressed by that same invisible barrier into a smaller and smaller space, except that it was closing in from all sides now, instead of only in the front. Harry didn’t want to move, not right now, but he felt the heat draining away, saw the beasts losing their forms and becoming only mindless fire again. Then they shrank into a pinprick of golden-yellow light.
Harry expected that pinprick to vanish, but instead, Voldemort stalked forwards and picked it up. He tilted it in his hand for a second as if it actually weighed something-and maybe it did-and then looked up and along the length of the corridor at Snape. Snape stood there with his wand dangling at his side, his face deathly pale.
“Severus.” Voldemort shook his head. “You have signed your death warrant.”
Snape shifted his feet and seemed to balance his weight as if he was getting ready to charge. Harry found himself moving forwards to stand beside Voldemort, and then stopped. He didn’t want to protect Voldemort, did he?
This was still the man who had killed his parents and tortured him in the graveyard and imprisoned him in this farce of a marriage.
This was the man who had answered his questions and saved his life.
Voldemort flicked a brief glance at Harry, then faced Snape, who was saying, “I have never been more than half-alive since the day you killed her.”
“Who?” Harry couldn’t help blurting. It absolutely wasn’t the thing he should have been worrying about, but it had taken him so far aback that he didn’t think he could see the ground from here. Snape had been in love with someone at some point? Someone Voldemort had killed? Was that why he’d changed his mind and started serving Dumbledore?
“Your mother,” Voldemort said, his attention briefly straying to Harry again. “He begged me to spare her life. I would have if she had given you up.”
Harry couldn’t help but swallow. Stand aside, you silly girl. Stand aside now!
But she hadn’t, and she had died, and Snape had turned, and Harry had lived.
Harry stared at Snape and said, “How would my mum feel about you trying to kill me?”
“How would she feel about her son sleeping with her murderer?”
“We are not here to trade insults,” Voldemort said. “I would have given you a quick death for the years of service you had shown me, Severus, but that is not to be.” He tilted his head and breathed on the concentrated fireball hovering in his hand.
The Fiendfyre loomed up and surged down the corridor, rapidly expanding as it did, and grabbed Snape. Harry saw him struggling for a long moment, screaming, in the midst of flames that had once again transformed into chimeras and manticores and basilisks and dragons, and didn’t seem to want to let Snape go. His silhouette finally collapsed inwards, but he went on screaming for a long time.
“I notice that you did not beg me to spare his life.”
Harry started and lifted his head to stare at Voldemort. Voldemort stared back. Harry swallowed and said, “He-he confirmed that it was Dumbledore’s plan and my friends’ plan to have me defy you and taunt you into killing me, because they thought the soul-shard would die because of the Killing Curse and I would survive. I think they wanted me to kill Nagini, too, because Snape said that she was still alive, and he sounded disgusted by that.”
“How?” Voldemort sounded fascinated. “You have nothing capable of killing a Horcrux here.”
Harry shook his head, and abruptly, he felt his eyes burn with tears. What Ron and Hermione had wanted wasn’t as awful as he had been envisioning, because they had still hoped he would survive, but they had known he was a Horcrux, and Dumbledore had known he was a Horcrux, and Snape had known he was a Horcrux, and all of them had been counting on him to do some impossible heroic feat again, the way he had with the basilisk and Quirrell and surviving the graveyard, and-
Voldemort’s arms came around him, clasping him. He lifted Harry and spun once, and they were in someone’s room. Harry wasn’t surprised, when he lifted his head from the stupid tears consuming him, to see that it was Voldemort’s.
And it was stupid, everything was stupid, but his world was breaking apart, and he wanted to forget. He wanted to feel something different.
He looked Voldemort straight in the eyes, and said, “Yes.”
*
Voldemort insisted on using a whole lot of spells to prepare him, which made Harry feel weird and empty and clean and slick. But he didn’t mind it because Voldemort was purring through the link into his mind, sending him feelings and sensations and images of pleasure, and it was much easier to concentrate on those.
Even when Voldemort insisted that Harry lift his legs practically over his shoulders and entered him, it was easy to concentrate on his eyes, brighter than the fire that had eaten Snape, and the way that their link shivered and solidified in a sudden snap, so it was more like they were one being in two bodies than two standing on either side of a connection.
Did you know that this would happen? the Harry-part of them thought.
I have hardly had sex with Nagini or my other Horcruxes.
Part of them laughed. Part of them delighted in that laughter and clutched it to them and wove it around them, and the madness that had threatened to consume them briefly when they thought that part of them was in danger of dying faded further away.
Through the tumbling storm that consumed them then, they saw and felt and understood and forgave everything. Why they had wanted to kill Malfoy and spare him. Why they had come for a toddler on the basis of a half-heard prophecy and what it had been like to grow up without parents. Why they despised and loved the Muggle world. Why they had fought so strongly to survive everything.
An orphanage in the middle of falling bombs. Growing up in a cupboard. Being considered a Mudblood in Slytherin House. Having one of them try to kill the other one of them again and again. Being rendered a bodiless wraith for thirteen years. The hatred and suspicion of the entire wizarding world. The Imperius Curse, the Cruciatus Curse, becoming a Horcrux, making Horcruxes.
The storm blew further and further through them, and then grasped and raged and subsided, leaving them drifting together in perfect understanding, which was not the same as perfect unity. But they did understand.
And every thrust was mutual, too, and every gasp, and when they came, it was another storm of their own, Fiendfyre that blasted through them and gave them pleasure and triumph they had not known existed.
*
Harry woke up, slowly, the next morning, separate again. He knew it was Voldemort’s cold arm wrapped around his waist, and he knew it was his own arse that was sore, not theirs.
But with the Horcrux link open and thrumming between them, Harry also knew that it was unlikely they would ever be completely separate again.
He lay there and thought about that, about the fact that he’d let his parents’ murderer fuck him. But he didn’t retreat from the thoughts, this time. He lay there and looked at them, and let them look back.
He’d done that. Just like he’d walked into the wedding and decided that he would try to achieve some combination of obedience to Voldemort and living his own life.
Feeling what some people would think was the appropriate amount of self-hatred for the rest of that life wasn’t something Harry was interested in doing.
So. He kept Voldemort sane. He could temper his actions, too, surely, as long as he did it carefully and without moving too fast. He-
He understood, from the inside out, what it was like to be Voldemort, what had driven him to try to be immortal. He’d felt that fear himself, held those memories now. He couldn’t just reject that and go back to the person he had been yesterday, a week ago, two months ago.
And one thing Harry understood was that Voldemort had felt the amount of rage over being rejected and vilified by the wizarding world that Harry should have felt for his own circumstances, and never had.
They’d labeled him the Heir of Slytherin, they’d looked aside while he was tortured with a blood quill, they’d called him a delusional liar and a cheater and they’d made him compete in a Tournament against bloody dragons, and they still had the-the gall to expect him to save them?
Well, I already did.
They had the treaty. They had their peace. Ron and Hermione might destroy the other Horcruxes and still not bring down Voldemort’s wrath on them, since he had said he would give up all the others for the sake of being with Harry. Harry hoped he could see his friends again, and have the chance to explain his choices to them.
And hear their explanation.
For the first time, he no longer thought it should only flow one way.
“I have never seen him truly asleep before.”
Harry glanced around, not starting even though he hadn’t consciously been aware of Nagini’s presence in the bedroom before. She was his sister, and she was part of himself, and Harry knew he would never be in danger around her.
Nagini slid over and raised her head to glance across the sheets. Harry didn’t turn. “What do you mean? I thought he slept.”
Nagini turned her head slightly to look at him. “Once, when he was pure human, but not since he made the second of our siblings, from what he has told me. He would lie still and let his mind roam among thoughts, but he never went below the surface. I do not believe that he has dreamed in decades. But his eyes move as if he is dreaming now.”
Harry did have to roll over then, and Nagini was right. Voldemort’s eyes flickered rapidly back and forth under his eyelids.
Also, he didn’t move even when Harry touched his marble-like cheek. He never would have done that before. He trusted Harry and Nagini deeply enough to lie like this and not register their movement around him as a threat.
I gave Voldemort back his dreams.
A strange wonder encompassed Harry then, perhaps with some flicker of a thing like pride. He lay back down beside Voldemort, his hand resting on the arm that hadn’t stopped embracing him, and breathed slowly out.
He had stopped the war. Not the way he’d always thought he would, but-it was stopped, wasn’t it? And Voldemort was sane. And he was invested in Harry’s happiness.
And Harry could live. He didn’t have to die a martyr, or even someone who might have a slim chance of returning. He didn’t have to give up the Horcrux connection that throbbed now in his head like the edge of sunlight on dancing leaves.
Then he remembered Voldemort burning Snape to death yesterday, and sighed.
This wasn’t a life of pure sunlight. This was going to take so much work.
But for the first time, Harry could think of himself as Harry Potter-Gaunt, the husband of Lord Voldemort, and not mind.
He thought, soon, it would be deeper than not minding.
Voldemort stirred next to him, and paused, still and careful. Harry was the one who turned to face him, and smiled.
“Good morning,” he said.
The End.
Advance, sequel.