[From Litha to Lammas]: Advance, Harry/Voldemort, sequel to Retreat, 1/3
Title: Advance
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Voldemort, background pairings
Content Notes: Established relationship, AU from the end of HBP, forced marriage, consent issues, angst, anger, mention of minor character deaths.
Wordcount: This part 5000
Rated: R
Summary: Sequel to “Retreat.” Harry has the chance, finally, to speak to his friends and figure out what they were thinking by suggesting he get married to Voldemort, as well as a chance to navigate the complexities of his marriage.
Author’s Notes: A few people requested this sequel to Retreat, so I’m posting it as the first of my “Litha to Lammas” fics for this summer, fics posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have three parts.
Advance
Harry stared down at the letter in his hands and didn’t know what to say. He swallowed several times, and still his tongue was too thick to speak and the letter felt too heavy.
“What does it say?”
That was Voldemort, speaking Parseltongue the way he almost always did when they were alone now. Harry gave him a helpless look and handed over the letter. He had already read it, anyway. That was the problem. He had read it, and he knew what it said, but that didn’t give him any more guidance on how to respond.
Voldemort read it without any expression crossing his smooth face, but Harry felt the Horcrux link snap and spark with a crackle like fireworks. He handed the letter to Harry and lay back on the bed. Harry sat on his own side, his legs dangling off it, the Runes book he had been studying abandoned on the chair in the corner.
“You may invite them here if you wish. They will be safe from harm. Unless they try to harm you.”
Harry closed his eyes and nodded. Hermione had said in the letter that they needed to talk, and that she was sorry, but she had also said that she was shocked Harry was, from all reports, settling into the marriage.
That seemed to indicate that she had hoped he would taunt Voldemort into hitting him with the Killing Curse, even if she had believed, the way Dumbledore apparently had, that the curse would only destroy the Horcrux and leave Harry able to return to life.
“If they try to hurt you, I will kill them.”
Voldemort’s arms wrapped around Harry, and pulled him close. Harry lay with his neck draped along Voldemort’s shoulder and swallowed a few times before he managed to say, “Even if-even if that would hurt me?”
“I want you safe and happy. But if I must choose, your safety comes before your happiness.”
Harry pressed into his husband with a little noise of distress. It was still beyond odd to think about Voldemort as his husband, but the magical world, including Ron and Hermione, had supported the marriage. And Voldemort was never going to let him go, not when he had known Harry was a Horcrux even before Dumbledore had died.
Sometimes Harry woke in the morning and couldn’t believe that this was the life he was living and had accepted, either, this life where he ate dinner with Voldemort and studied Runes with him and spoke in Parseltongue more often than English.
But what other option had he had? When even his friends had acted as though the marriage was the best choice, and at least it had won safety for the Muggleborns in Britain and the Weasleys and other people Harry cared about, and innocents who wouldn’t have survived a more violent takeover.
Voldemort’s hand slid along his side, cool as always, keeping above Harry’s robes even though he knew perfectly well what the skin was like below. “Does it take merely a mention of them to send you back into the conflicted guilt you experienced for years?” he asked, sounding fascinated. Of course, guilt was something Voldemort only knew about through his Horcrux link with Harry. Otherwise, as far as Harry was aware, he didn’t feel it.
“The thought of seeing them again,” Harry said, turning his head so that he could see Voldemort’s eyes. They glittered like hot red stars from this close. “And knowing that no matter which explanation they offer, it’s likely to be one that I find inadequate.”
Voldemort’s forked tongue darted out, caressing the side of Harry’s mouth in a touch too brief for him to feel it. “But at least you will know what they think.”
Harry nodded, and waited until Voldemort’s hold on him eased before he reached for the parchment and ink to answer Hermione’s letter. A house-elf appeared silently to take it to the Owlery.
And then they continued their study of Runes, because one thing Voldemort never allowed was an interruption to throw them off their routine for long. Two to three-thirty every afternoon was for Runes, and so it might be for years, or until the point when Voldemort thought Harry had learned enough to rank as competent.
Harry tried not think about possible eternity stretching ahead of them, and bent over his latest attempt to draw Sowilo perfectly, ignoring the mixture of amusement and fascination flowing like a fast river in the back of his head.
*
“Mr. Potter. I have something to speak to you about.”
Harry winced and turned around. Normally, he came to this crystalline lake in the far corner of the Malfoy Manor grounds to be by himself, other than Nagini. And the Malfoys had kept their distance from him since Draco had nearly killed Harry with a combination of Sectumsempra and the Cruciatus Curse and been placed under a slavery bond by Voldemort in response.
Harry controlled that slavery bond. He loathed it deeply and sincerely, but by now, he was almost used to it in the back of his head, feeling like an ice cube continually in the process of melting.
Today, though, Mrs. Malfoy was picking her way towards him around the clumps of snow and the silent flowerbeds. Harry watched her, his hand resting on the runes carved into the arm of the marble bench he sat on. He knew enough about them now to use them to defend himself, if he had to.
Harry grimaced, but remained where he was. Mrs. Malfoy halted and stared at him out of eyes like pebbles. Harry didn’t need to see the hatred there to know what she felt.
“I need you to free my son from this slavery bond. It is killing him.”
“What?” Harry stood up. “Voldemort promised me that he wasn’t going to kill him. Did he implant something in the bond which-”
“I did not mean physically. I mean mentally, spiritually.” Mrs. Malfoy clasped her hands in front of her in a way that might have made her look like she was pleading or praying, except for her eyes. “He is dying by inches. No matter what he does, he receives reminders that he is a slave. I am begging you. Free him.”
Harry stared at her and thought about it. Voldemort’s anger over Malfoy’s crime had cooled now, since months had passed. Perhaps he would do it if Harry asked.
And Mrs. Malfoy loved her son enough to come and ask Harry, even though she must have found it humiliating.
But she didn’t love him enough to keep him from taking the Dark Mark in the first place.
Harry shook his head a little. Bringing that into the conversation would do no good.
On the other hand, he didn’t feel the guilt he once would have for thinking it, either. He had so many better things to feel guilty for.
“If I ask for the removal of the slavery bond, then my husband will kill him. That’s what he made clear when he replaced the Dark Mark with mine.”
Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes glittered at him for a second before lowering. “But you could make him change his mind. We know how…happy you make him.”
“I don’t want to try. Like I said, he’d probably just kill your son, and I don’t want to live with that.”
“My son does not want to live the way he currently is now!”
“But I don’t want to be involved with his death. So the answer is no.”
Harry stood and turned back towards the Manor, and felt movement behind hm more than he saw it. He whirled around, to find Mrs. Malfoy’s wand clutched in her hand. But she was lying on the ground, rather than standing to face him, because enormous green loops of snake were draped over her.
“I didn’t know you were here, Nagini.” As far as Harry knew, the gardens had been too cool for her for nearly a month.
Nagini’s head rose, and her tongue flickered out as if she was testing to make sure his scent was his before she answered. “Master cast Warming Charms on me. I told him I did not like the way the Malfoy woman was watching you.”
Harry sighed. He hadn’t even noticed, but then, sometimes he still didn’t notice anything outside the chaos of his own head or his attempts to live as normal a life as possible. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, little brother.” Nagini lowered her head until her neck rested along Mrs. Malfoy’s neck. “Tell her that Master has promised her to me as meat the next time she attempts to hurt you.”
Harry felt his mouth fall a little open. “He doesn’t have to do that.”
“I like human prey. You are my brother. Why should he not do that?”
Snakes were too simple to argue with, in Harry’s opinion, so he just shook his head and said in English, “The next time you lift your wand against me, Mrs. Malfoy, Voldemort is going to let Nagini eat you.”
There was a long, tense, coiling silence. Harry wondered if the woman was really stupid enough to challenge Voldemort, of all people, or if she was just too afraid to make her mouth work.
It seemed to be fear, or perhaps Nagini cramping her lungs, because when Nagini moved her weight a little, Mrs. Malfoy cleared her throat and whispered, “I will not raise a wand against you.”
Harry thought a moment, especially since Nagini seemed perfectly happy to stand still, and added, “And your husband won’t, either.” He wouldn’t ask her to make a similar promise about Draco, since Draco’s inability to do it in the first place was literally what had brought her here.
“No, he will not,” Mrs. Malfoy whispered.
“Let her go, Nagini.”
Nagini coiled back with a grumble about rabbits and effort that Harry didn’t bother to listen to. He just kept a narrow eye on Mrs. Malfoy as she braced her elbow against the frost-crackling grass and stood. Her head was lowered, and she gasped as though she’d got pneumonia in the last few minutes.
When she glanced at him, her eyes were still full of hatred, but she walked away, which Harry thought counted as a win.
*
“I expected you to ask before now.”
Harry jumped, and turned around. He was in the middle of dressing for dinner, and he had got good enough now at putting on formal dress robes that the Malfoy house-elves no longer had to help him. But Voldemort had never intruded before.
He stood motionless in the doorway of Harry’s room at the moment, his eyes running up and down Harry’s bare chest in blatant appreciation. Harry’s scar hummed a little. Harry swallowed and reached for the tunic-like shirt that he had to put on next. “Ask for what, sir?”
“You need not call me sir.” Voldemort flowed towards him across the floor. “Let me help you with that.”
Harry held out his arms to the side and didn’t groan as Voldemort’s cool fingers moved across his shoulders. Sometimes he woke from dreams of those fingers, and sometimes he woke horrified at the thought of them. That made as much sense as anything else in his life right now did. “I don’t really know what to call you otherwise. Your original name would be insulting, and it’s hard to say Voldemort.”
For long moments, Voldemort was silent, adjusting and draping the fall of the tunic the way the house-elf did. Then he nodded and held out a commanding hand for the ice-blue robes that went over it. Harry gave them to him, and closed his eyes against the tickle of the cloth.
“I expected you to ask to see your friends, with it so nearly Christmas,” Voldemort said, ignoring the comment about his name.
Harry’s eyes flew open, and he blinked at the mirror. “If they did come, you said you would kill them.”
“Only if they tried to hurt you. You are wise enough to make such distinctions, Harry, and to know that I make them as well.”
Voldemort lowered his head until his serpentine face was at the same level in the mirror as the line of Harry’s shoulder. His eyes were bright with what someone else might have mistaken as good cheer, and which Harry knew was more complicated. His hand rubbed idly back and forth along Harry’s collarbone.
“You need them with you,” Voldemort said, his hands fluttering for a moment and then coming down with a sharp press on Harry’s shoulders. “And I must admit that I am curious to see what they have to say for themselves.”
“If you don’t like their justifications, are you going to count that as hurting me, and kill them?”
“You are deeply desirous of their safety, considering what they did to you.”
Harry took a deep breath, and moved away from Voldemort’s hands to turn and stand with his back to the mirror. Voldemort didn’t move with him, or restrain him, but continued to watch him. “I don’t know exactly what they did, or what they hoped to have happen,” he countered. “That’s why I want to talk to them.”
Voldemort tipped his head back and forth, somewhat like a bird, but his face was so alien that the comparison wasn’t a neat one. Finally, he nodded. “Then you shall have what you want,” he said, switching back to English. “I want you to be happy.”
Harry hesitated. Part of him still screamed at him to keep Ron and Hermione away from Voldemort and never let them in the same room with each other, but that part of him wasn’t the most rational one. For all he knew, Ron and Hermione would refuse the invitation Harry sent anyway, and the situation would never arise.
And if it did arise…
Harry had weapons, too, if Voldemort broke the implicit promise that would keep his friends safe. The way Voldemort had reacted when Harry had despaired of being a Horcrux said that.
“A bargain,” he said.
Voldemort inclined his head, and held out his arm to escort Harry to dinner.
*
“I wonder if you will come here and do something for me.”
Harry swallowed and glanced up at Voldemort. They had reached the door of Voldemort’s bedroom, and although Voldemort regularly asked Harry to come in, Harry only did it sometimes. And none of their carefully-negotiated sex had started with this kind of request.
“Please just ask,” Harry said, moving a step nearer. “Otherwise, it sounds like you’re trying to get something out of me that I’ll hate.”
Voldemort waited, and then reached out and curled his fingers around Harry’s left wrist as if seeing how close they would come to completely encircling it. “I would like you to take me in your mouth.”
Harry blinked, unnerved. So far, it had always been Voldemort in his arse, and that was-well, he had asked for it the first time, and the other times, Voldemort hadn’t seemed upset if he refused. And that broke down the barriers between them and joined them as one creature, a pleasure Harry relished more than the physical one.
“I-will it be like what happens when you’re fucking me?”
“I do not know. I have never been with anyone who does what you do to me.”
Harry blinked, and then sighed. This was so surreal. No matter how long this marriage continued or the kinds of things Voldemort asked of him, it never matched the “normal” picture that Harry carried in the back of his mind.
Then again, he didn’t have much idea of what “normal” looked like. What had he envisioned about getting married? Nothing, except that he wanted a family and it should be nothing like his aunt and uncle’s marriage.
“If it tastes too weird, I’m stopping,” he said, and stepped into the bedroom.
“You are mine.”
Harry didn’t flinch at the words, the way he’d been prone to doing in the first months. He thought it was the closest Voldemort could come to expressing appreciation of Harry agreeing to something.
Voldemort was already undressing, taking his robes off. Harry licked his lips and asked, “Do you want me naked?”
That got him a wide-eyed stare and a small sting in his scar. “Of course.”
Harry nodded, even though he didn’t know why he needed to be naked if he was just going to be kneeling there, and began taking off his clothes with steady hands. Voldemort’s chest rose and fell the slightest amount with his breathing as he stared, and stood, and stared, and Harry’s hands trembled less than that as he slid off his robes at last and the pants underneath them.
“You are not aroused.”
“Not right now,” Harry agreed quietly. He started to kneel, but Voldemort reached out a hand to stop him, setting it on Harry’s bare shoulder.
“Listen to me.”
Harry only figured out what he meant when the link opened between them, and Voldemort’s lust and desire and possessiveness and greed settled over him like a thick canopy of falling leaves. He tilted his head back, his throat working, and Voldemort chuckled sibilantly above him.
“Now, I think, it will work.”
Harry nodded, a little dazed, and reached towards Voldemort’s cock, which was engorged and had a faint scale-like pattern on the tip. Harry didn’t think about that, though. It was easy not to think about it, when he was going to suck Voldemort. He leaned in and stretched his jaws wide, and Voldemort surged forwards a single step to rest his cock on Harry’s tongue.
Harry closed his lips down, and realized that it wasn’t as dry as he had feared, either Voldemort’s skin or his own tongue. That blast of emotion had caused saliva to flood his mouth. He licked, and Voldemort sent another tide through the link.
“Do it.”
The words came, of course, from Voldemort, but Harry thought that they might have originated in his own brain. He moved his tongue carefully back and forth, then gave a hearty suck, and found the taste slick and bitter, but not as bad as he’d feared.
“Feel me, Harry.”
Voldemort’s voice disappeared in small hisses, but also in another flood through the link. This time, Harry was seeing flashes of Voldemort staring down at him as they lay in the same bed, and his own flushed face, and the stunned look Voldemort had met in the mirror when he figured out that Harry was his Horcrux.
Desired. Held. Coveted.
And Harry could feed the emotion back to Voldemort, and even though the erection in his mouth was heavy as hell and he was already gasping through his nostrils long before the end, he clutched that knowledge to himself as tightly as Voldemort had clutched the realization that he had a human Horcrux.
Desired.
He was. He was made to be held here, in Voldemort’s mind and in front of him with Voldemort’s cock in his mouth, and no one was made to take him away, or do anything that would endanger Harry’s survival.
Held.
The link blazed with the sensation of arms encircling him, and Harry’s mouth encircled Voldemort, and the emotions surged back and forth until the taste seemed to mingle with the memories of lying in bed.
Coveted.
Voldemort was jealous of Nagini, when she touched Harry. He was jealous of the air itself, blowing around Harry and resting lightly on his hair and skin. He was jealous of his own body, as Harry reached up and braced his hands on Voldemort’s hips and sucked him in deep.
Voldemort came with a hiss and a flex of his hips, and Harry coughed as some of it trickled out of his mouth. He swallowed, and some of it went down, and that made him cough again. He leaned back on his haunches and reached down to tug on himself, only distantly aware that he had got the carpet dirty and was about to get it dirtier. He no longer feared making a mistake like that, the way he had when he’d first arrived. The house-elves would clean it up.
“I shall.”
Harry’s eyes flew open, thinking for a second that someone else had come into the room, and hating them for how much that interfered with his relentless need to come. Then he realized that Voldemort’s hand was resting above his on the shaft of his erection, so familiar that he hadn’t even noticed it, and Voldemort’s long fingers were swirling and coaxing and drawing the seed forth from him-
Harry came with a long sob, and Voldemort reached his glistening hand out to smooth over Harry’s cheeks and forehead.
“I can feel your pleasure like a firestorm in my mind.”
Harry licked his lips and nodded. He didn’t know if he could speak. He was too overwhelmed.
“You would never have that with anyone else.”
Harry shook his head this time. He leaned against Voldemort’s legs, and the Horcrux bond shimmered a few more times before it folded itself shut and there was the warmth of the hand on his face and the slickness of his own seed and the aftermath of pleasure.
That brought back some of the worries about whether this was the right thing to do, and what his friends would say if they could see him now. Harry shuddered and ducked his head, only to have Voldemort’s fingers hook their way under his chin and lift his face at once.
“Look into my eyes.”
Dimly, it crossed Harry’s mind to wonder why that mattered to Voldemort at all, when he could get all the thoughts he wanted out of Harry through the Horcrux link, but he obeyed, and Voldemort stared at him as though he was looking at the next place he planned to raid with his Death Eaters.
“You have nothing to worry about. I shall take on all challengers, and turn them aside. I shall make your friends fear my wrath if they hurt you.”
Harry would have said that was exactly what he was worried about, but he didn’t have the breath or the strength. In the end, he just nodded and closed his eyes, and it was probably Voldemort who put him to bed. He woke there the next morning.
And not long after he did, he sent the owl telling Hermione and Ron to visit.
*
“Tell me what you want for a present, Harry.”
Harry stared at Voldemort across the length of the dining room table in Malfoy Manor. Lately, Voldemort had had him sit at the foot instead of right beside the head. The Death Eaters still dined with them, although it seemed to be fewer every week, but Voldemort ignored their attempts to talk to him whenever he wanted to speak to Harry in Parseltongue.
Harry licked his lips and tried to think through the request as calmly as possible. “You’ve already said that Ron and Hermione can come. That’s good enough for me.”
“But not for me.”
Harry just shook his head helplessly. For a moment, his eyes went to Draco on the other side of the table, but Draco ducked his head and sat there. The writhing ball of the slave bond in the back of Harry’s head, which he tried his best to ignore most of the time, ignited, and he swallowed back despair. “I really don’t know. There’s nothing else I want.”
Voldemort considered that, his hand rubbing back and forth across his neck as if he was contemplating a Throat-Cutting Curse. The Death Eaters watched him with a different kind of caution than the one they displayed towards Harry, Harry thought. They wanted to be sure they didn’t damage Harry and cause Voldemort to explode at them. But for Voldemort, it was a mixture of fear and reverence.
“I will come up with something,” Voldemort decided at last, and returned to his meal.
Harry nodded as calmly as he could, and went back to his own.
*
“Mr. Potter.”
Harry braced himself so that he was standing with his back to the wall, since they were in the middle of a staircase where Malfoy-Draco-had once pushed him. He stared at another Malfoy, Lucius this time, who was several steps below him, staring up with a deathly pale face and one hand clasped around the head of his cane.
“Yes?” Harry asked, when a few moments had slid past and there was no reaction from Mr. Malfoy.
“I have come to beg for my son’s freedom.”
“You’re not going to have any better luck than your wife,” Harry said, fighting the urge to close his eyes against the headache that had started up under his temple. “You know as well as I do that if your Lord freed him from the slavery bond, it would only be to kill him.”
“And my answer will be the same as Narcissa’s.” Lucius visibly considered kneeling, and as visibly decided against it. “Our son is dying under this bond, and there is no one who can please our lord like you can. You will be able to please him so much that he would consider freeing Draco.”
Harry’s breath caught. Voldemort’s words rang in his head. I will come up with something. A Christmas gift, something he wanted Harry to want.
No, under ordinary circumstances, there was no way that Voldemort would consider freeing Draco. But if Harry asked for it as a gift, would that be enough? Would Voldemort’s desire to please him and make the holiday special for him make him agree to free Draco when ordinarily he never would?
“You have thought of something.”
Harry met Lucius’s eyes and nodded. He ignored the contempt aimed at him in that gaze. It truly didn’t matter. “Yes. I’ll put the proposal to him and see what he says. But not tonight. I don’t think he would agree unless he had the impression that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
He started to turn away again, but Lucius snapped, “How do we know that you’ll put the proposal to him at all?”
“I suppose you’ll just have to trust me.”
Again, Harry made to leave, and again, Lucius’s voice stopped him. “What is it about you that Draco doesn’t have?”
Harry gaped despite himself. “What?” It sounded as if Lucius was asking why Voldemort hadn’t married Draco, but Lucius seemed smart enough-barely-not to want his son in the Dark Lord’s bed.
“You are a half-blood.” Lucius’s gaze swept disdainfully down Harry’s robes. “Not possessed of any fashion sense or extraordinary cleverness, not handsome, not powerful, not wealthier than we are, not loyal to the Dark Lord at all. And yet he chose you. He was willing to stop the raids that we were making on Muggleborns, the successful war, for you. Why?”
Harry chuckled humorlessly. Lucius waited, and Harry just raised his eyebrows at him a little. He couldn’t believe that Lucius had thought he’d receive an answer.
“I demand to know,” Lucius said, his voice low. His wand flickered into his hand, and Harry hissed. He didn’t want to draw his own unless he absolutely had to, because he knew that it would be a signal for Voldemort to kill Lucius later.
And he was so tired of death and killing. That was why he had agreed to marry Voldemort in the first place. He had thought it would prevent those things. He had thought that the peace might be lasting.
Instead, it was hard to find peace even inside Malfoy Manor.
And that made a resolve Harry hadn’t even realized he was entertaining turn to a solid sheet of ice inside him. He sneered, which made Lucius lower his wand from the position he’d lifted it to out of what looked like sheer surprise. “Fuck off, Malfoy.”
“My son-”
“I’ll do what I can for him,” Harry said, and heard his own voice chill to the point that Malfoy backed away as if he expected a torrent of ice. “That doesn’t mean that I can spare him all the consequences of his actions. And it means that if he immediately goes back to trying to torture or kill me, he’s going to die. See if you can get that through his thick head.”
Lucius caught his breath in what sounded like hopeful outrage. “I assure you that Draco is far more intelligent than you think him.”
“Yeah, that would be why he tried to kill me after he knew how Voldemort wanted me,” Harry said, shaking his head. He paused, then added, when Lucius showed no sign of going away, “And I see that he comes by that honestly, given that his parents can’t refrain from insulting me or pointing their wands at me even when they’re begging favors from me.”
“Half-blood.”
“Arsehole,” Harry half-sang, and waited until Lucius backed down the stairs before he turned his back and continued on to his room.
He wouldn’t ask tonight, and not only because Voldemort had indicated he would be occupied with something else. Harry was most interested in forming the requests carefully, both the one the Malfoys had made and the one he had decided he wanted for himself.
And that was worth forming carefully. Harry would win Draco’s freedom if he could. He had never wanted the slavery bond, had only agreed to it because he knew it would mean Draco’s death otherwise, and had no desire to go on punishing the idiot.
But for the first time, he had something on his mind that he wanted more than that, a purely personal desire.
Which Voldemort might grant because it’s what I want.
Part Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Voldemort, background pairings
Content Notes: Established relationship, AU from the end of HBP, forced marriage, consent issues, angst, anger, mention of minor character deaths.
Wordcount: This part 5000
Rated: R
Summary: Sequel to “Retreat.” Harry has the chance, finally, to speak to his friends and figure out what they were thinking by suggesting he get married to Voldemort, as well as a chance to navigate the complexities of his marriage.
Author’s Notes: A few people requested this sequel to Retreat, so I’m posting it as the first of my “Litha to Lammas” fics for this summer, fics posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have three parts.
Advance
Harry stared down at the letter in his hands and didn’t know what to say. He swallowed several times, and still his tongue was too thick to speak and the letter felt too heavy.
“What does it say?”
That was Voldemort, speaking Parseltongue the way he almost always did when they were alone now. Harry gave him a helpless look and handed over the letter. He had already read it, anyway. That was the problem. He had read it, and he knew what it said, but that didn’t give him any more guidance on how to respond.
Voldemort read it without any expression crossing his smooth face, but Harry felt the Horcrux link snap and spark with a crackle like fireworks. He handed the letter to Harry and lay back on the bed. Harry sat on his own side, his legs dangling off it, the Runes book he had been studying abandoned on the chair in the corner.
“You may invite them here if you wish. They will be safe from harm. Unless they try to harm you.”
Harry closed his eyes and nodded. Hermione had said in the letter that they needed to talk, and that she was sorry, but she had also said that she was shocked Harry was, from all reports, settling into the marriage.
That seemed to indicate that she had hoped he would taunt Voldemort into hitting him with the Killing Curse, even if she had believed, the way Dumbledore apparently had, that the curse would only destroy the Horcrux and leave Harry able to return to life.
“If they try to hurt you, I will kill them.”
Voldemort’s arms wrapped around Harry, and pulled him close. Harry lay with his neck draped along Voldemort’s shoulder and swallowed a few times before he managed to say, “Even if-even if that would hurt me?”
“I want you safe and happy. But if I must choose, your safety comes before your happiness.”
Harry pressed into his husband with a little noise of distress. It was still beyond odd to think about Voldemort as his husband, but the magical world, including Ron and Hermione, had supported the marriage. And Voldemort was never going to let him go, not when he had known Harry was a Horcrux even before Dumbledore had died.
Sometimes Harry woke in the morning and couldn’t believe that this was the life he was living and had accepted, either, this life where he ate dinner with Voldemort and studied Runes with him and spoke in Parseltongue more often than English.
But what other option had he had? When even his friends had acted as though the marriage was the best choice, and at least it had won safety for the Muggleborns in Britain and the Weasleys and other people Harry cared about, and innocents who wouldn’t have survived a more violent takeover.
Voldemort’s hand slid along his side, cool as always, keeping above Harry’s robes even though he knew perfectly well what the skin was like below. “Does it take merely a mention of them to send you back into the conflicted guilt you experienced for years?” he asked, sounding fascinated. Of course, guilt was something Voldemort only knew about through his Horcrux link with Harry. Otherwise, as far as Harry was aware, he didn’t feel it.
“The thought of seeing them again,” Harry said, turning his head so that he could see Voldemort’s eyes. They glittered like hot red stars from this close. “And knowing that no matter which explanation they offer, it’s likely to be one that I find inadequate.”
Voldemort’s forked tongue darted out, caressing the side of Harry’s mouth in a touch too brief for him to feel it. “But at least you will know what they think.”
Harry nodded, and waited until Voldemort’s hold on him eased before he reached for the parchment and ink to answer Hermione’s letter. A house-elf appeared silently to take it to the Owlery.
And then they continued their study of Runes, because one thing Voldemort never allowed was an interruption to throw them off their routine for long. Two to three-thirty every afternoon was for Runes, and so it might be for years, or until the point when Voldemort thought Harry had learned enough to rank as competent.
Harry tried not think about possible eternity stretching ahead of them, and bent over his latest attempt to draw Sowilo perfectly, ignoring the mixture of amusement and fascination flowing like a fast river in the back of his head.
*
“Mr. Potter. I have something to speak to you about.”
Harry winced and turned around. Normally, he came to this crystalline lake in the far corner of the Malfoy Manor grounds to be by himself, other than Nagini. And the Malfoys had kept their distance from him since Draco had nearly killed Harry with a combination of Sectumsempra and the Cruciatus Curse and been placed under a slavery bond by Voldemort in response.
Harry controlled that slavery bond. He loathed it deeply and sincerely, but by now, he was almost used to it in the back of his head, feeling like an ice cube continually in the process of melting.
Today, though, Mrs. Malfoy was picking her way towards him around the clumps of snow and the silent flowerbeds. Harry watched her, his hand resting on the runes carved into the arm of the marble bench he sat on. He knew enough about them now to use them to defend himself, if he had to.
Harry grimaced, but remained where he was. Mrs. Malfoy halted and stared at him out of eyes like pebbles. Harry didn’t need to see the hatred there to know what she felt.
“I need you to free my son from this slavery bond. It is killing him.”
“What?” Harry stood up. “Voldemort promised me that he wasn’t going to kill him. Did he implant something in the bond which-”
“I did not mean physically. I mean mentally, spiritually.” Mrs. Malfoy clasped her hands in front of her in a way that might have made her look like she was pleading or praying, except for her eyes. “He is dying by inches. No matter what he does, he receives reminders that he is a slave. I am begging you. Free him.”
Harry stared at her and thought about it. Voldemort’s anger over Malfoy’s crime had cooled now, since months had passed. Perhaps he would do it if Harry asked.
And Mrs. Malfoy loved her son enough to come and ask Harry, even though she must have found it humiliating.
But she didn’t love him enough to keep him from taking the Dark Mark in the first place.
Harry shook his head a little. Bringing that into the conversation would do no good.
On the other hand, he didn’t feel the guilt he once would have for thinking it, either. He had so many better things to feel guilty for.
“If I ask for the removal of the slavery bond, then my husband will kill him. That’s what he made clear when he replaced the Dark Mark with mine.”
Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes glittered at him for a second before lowering. “But you could make him change his mind. We know how…happy you make him.”
“I don’t want to try. Like I said, he’d probably just kill your son, and I don’t want to live with that.”
“My son does not want to live the way he currently is now!”
“But I don’t want to be involved with his death. So the answer is no.”
Harry stood and turned back towards the Manor, and felt movement behind hm more than he saw it. He whirled around, to find Mrs. Malfoy’s wand clutched in her hand. But she was lying on the ground, rather than standing to face him, because enormous green loops of snake were draped over her.
“I didn’t know you were here, Nagini.” As far as Harry knew, the gardens had been too cool for her for nearly a month.
Nagini’s head rose, and her tongue flickered out as if she was testing to make sure his scent was his before she answered. “Master cast Warming Charms on me. I told him I did not like the way the Malfoy woman was watching you.”
Harry sighed. He hadn’t even noticed, but then, sometimes he still didn’t notice anything outside the chaos of his own head or his attempts to live as normal a life as possible. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, little brother.” Nagini lowered her head until her neck rested along Mrs. Malfoy’s neck. “Tell her that Master has promised her to me as meat the next time she attempts to hurt you.”
Harry felt his mouth fall a little open. “He doesn’t have to do that.”
“I like human prey. You are my brother. Why should he not do that?”
Snakes were too simple to argue with, in Harry’s opinion, so he just shook his head and said in English, “The next time you lift your wand against me, Mrs. Malfoy, Voldemort is going to let Nagini eat you.”
There was a long, tense, coiling silence. Harry wondered if the woman was really stupid enough to challenge Voldemort, of all people, or if she was just too afraid to make her mouth work.
It seemed to be fear, or perhaps Nagini cramping her lungs, because when Nagini moved her weight a little, Mrs. Malfoy cleared her throat and whispered, “I will not raise a wand against you.”
Harry thought a moment, especially since Nagini seemed perfectly happy to stand still, and added, “And your husband won’t, either.” He wouldn’t ask her to make a similar promise about Draco, since Draco’s inability to do it in the first place was literally what had brought her here.
“No, he will not,” Mrs. Malfoy whispered.
“Let her go, Nagini.”
Nagini coiled back with a grumble about rabbits and effort that Harry didn’t bother to listen to. He just kept a narrow eye on Mrs. Malfoy as she braced her elbow against the frost-crackling grass and stood. Her head was lowered, and she gasped as though she’d got pneumonia in the last few minutes.
When she glanced at him, her eyes were still full of hatred, but she walked away, which Harry thought counted as a win.
*
“I expected you to ask before now.”
Harry jumped, and turned around. He was in the middle of dressing for dinner, and he had got good enough now at putting on formal dress robes that the Malfoy house-elves no longer had to help him. But Voldemort had never intruded before.
He stood motionless in the doorway of Harry’s room at the moment, his eyes running up and down Harry’s bare chest in blatant appreciation. Harry’s scar hummed a little. Harry swallowed and reached for the tunic-like shirt that he had to put on next. “Ask for what, sir?”
“You need not call me sir.” Voldemort flowed towards him across the floor. “Let me help you with that.”
Harry held out his arms to the side and didn’t groan as Voldemort’s cool fingers moved across his shoulders. Sometimes he woke from dreams of those fingers, and sometimes he woke horrified at the thought of them. That made as much sense as anything else in his life right now did. “I don’t really know what to call you otherwise. Your original name would be insulting, and it’s hard to say Voldemort.”
For long moments, Voldemort was silent, adjusting and draping the fall of the tunic the way the house-elf did. Then he nodded and held out a commanding hand for the ice-blue robes that went over it. Harry gave them to him, and closed his eyes against the tickle of the cloth.
“I expected you to ask to see your friends, with it so nearly Christmas,” Voldemort said, ignoring the comment about his name.
Harry’s eyes flew open, and he blinked at the mirror. “If they did come, you said you would kill them.”
“Only if they tried to hurt you. You are wise enough to make such distinctions, Harry, and to know that I make them as well.”
Voldemort lowered his head until his serpentine face was at the same level in the mirror as the line of Harry’s shoulder. His eyes were bright with what someone else might have mistaken as good cheer, and which Harry knew was more complicated. His hand rubbed idly back and forth along Harry’s collarbone.
“You need them with you,” Voldemort said, his hands fluttering for a moment and then coming down with a sharp press on Harry’s shoulders. “And I must admit that I am curious to see what they have to say for themselves.”
“If you don’t like their justifications, are you going to count that as hurting me, and kill them?”
“You are deeply desirous of their safety, considering what they did to you.”
Harry took a deep breath, and moved away from Voldemort’s hands to turn and stand with his back to the mirror. Voldemort didn’t move with him, or restrain him, but continued to watch him. “I don’t know exactly what they did, or what they hoped to have happen,” he countered. “That’s why I want to talk to them.”
Voldemort tipped his head back and forth, somewhat like a bird, but his face was so alien that the comparison wasn’t a neat one. Finally, he nodded. “Then you shall have what you want,” he said, switching back to English. “I want you to be happy.”
Harry hesitated. Part of him still screamed at him to keep Ron and Hermione away from Voldemort and never let them in the same room with each other, but that part of him wasn’t the most rational one. For all he knew, Ron and Hermione would refuse the invitation Harry sent anyway, and the situation would never arise.
And if it did arise…
Harry had weapons, too, if Voldemort broke the implicit promise that would keep his friends safe. The way Voldemort had reacted when Harry had despaired of being a Horcrux said that.
“A bargain,” he said.
Voldemort inclined his head, and held out his arm to escort Harry to dinner.
*
“I wonder if you will come here and do something for me.”
Harry swallowed and glanced up at Voldemort. They had reached the door of Voldemort’s bedroom, and although Voldemort regularly asked Harry to come in, Harry only did it sometimes. And none of their carefully-negotiated sex had started with this kind of request.
“Please just ask,” Harry said, moving a step nearer. “Otherwise, it sounds like you’re trying to get something out of me that I’ll hate.”
Voldemort waited, and then reached out and curled his fingers around Harry’s left wrist as if seeing how close they would come to completely encircling it. “I would like you to take me in your mouth.”
Harry blinked, unnerved. So far, it had always been Voldemort in his arse, and that was-well, he had asked for it the first time, and the other times, Voldemort hadn’t seemed upset if he refused. And that broke down the barriers between them and joined them as one creature, a pleasure Harry relished more than the physical one.
“I-will it be like what happens when you’re fucking me?”
“I do not know. I have never been with anyone who does what you do to me.”
Harry blinked, and then sighed. This was so surreal. No matter how long this marriage continued or the kinds of things Voldemort asked of him, it never matched the “normal” picture that Harry carried in the back of his mind.
Then again, he didn’t have much idea of what “normal” looked like. What had he envisioned about getting married? Nothing, except that he wanted a family and it should be nothing like his aunt and uncle’s marriage.
“If it tastes too weird, I’m stopping,” he said, and stepped into the bedroom.
“You are mine.”
Harry didn’t flinch at the words, the way he’d been prone to doing in the first months. He thought it was the closest Voldemort could come to expressing appreciation of Harry agreeing to something.
Voldemort was already undressing, taking his robes off. Harry licked his lips and asked, “Do you want me naked?”
That got him a wide-eyed stare and a small sting in his scar. “Of course.”
Harry nodded, even though he didn’t know why he needed to be naked if he was just going to be kneeling there, and began taking off his clothes with steady hands. Voldemort’s chest rose and fell the slightest amount with his breathing as he stared, and stood, and stared, and Harry’s hands trembled less than that as he slid off his robes at last and the pants underneath them.
“You are not aroused.”
“Not right now,” Harry agreed quietly. He started to kneel, but Voldemort reached out a hand to stop him, setting it on Harry’s bare shoulder.
“Listen to me.”
Harry only figured out what he meant when the link opened between them, and Voldemort’s lust and desire and possessiveness and greed settled over him like a thick canopy of falling leaves. He tilted his head back, his throat working, and Voldemort chuckled sibilantly above him.
“Now, I think, it will work.”
Harry nodded, a little dazed, and reached towards Voldemort’s cock, which was engorged and had a faint scale-like pattern on the tip. Harry didn’t think about that, though. It was easy not to think about it, when he was going to suck Voldemort. He leaned in and stretched his jaws wide, and Voldemort surged forwards a single step to rest his cock on Harry’s tongue.
Harry closed his lips down, and realized that it wasn’t as dry as he had feared, either Voldemort’s skin or his own tongue. That blast of emotion had caused saliva to flood his mouth. He licked, and Voldemort sent another tide through the link.
“Do it.”
The words came, of course, from Voldemort, but Harry thought that they might have originated in his own brain. He moved his tongue carefully back and forth, then gave a hearty suck, and found the taste slick and bitter, but not as bad as he’d feared.
“Feel me, Harry.”
Voldemort’s voice disappeared in small hisses, but also in another flood through the link. This time, Harry was seeing flashes of Voldemort staring down at him as they lay in the same bed, and his own flushed face, and the stunned look Voldemort had met in the mirror when he figured out that Harry was his Horcrux.
Desired. Held. Coveted.
And Harry could feed the emotion back to Voldemort, and even though the erection in his mouth was heavy as hell and he was already gasping through his nostrils long before the end, he clutched that knowledge to himself as tightly as Voldemort had clutched the realization that he had a human Horcrux.
Desired.
He was. He was made to be held here, in Voldemort’s mind and in front of him with Voldemort’s cock in his mouth, and no one was made to take him away, or do anything that would endanger Harry’s survival.
Held.
The link blazed with the sensation of arms encircling him, and Harry’s mouth encircled Voldemort, and the emotions surged back and forth until the taste seemed to mingle with the memories of lying in bed.
Coveted.
Voldemort was jealous of Nagini, when she touched Harry. He was jealous of the air itself, blowing around Harry and resting lightly on his hair and skin. He was jealous of his own body, as Harry reached up and braced his hands on Voldemort’s hips and sucked him in deep.
Voldemort came with a hiss and a flex of his hips, and Harry coughed as some of it trickled out of his mouth. He swallowed, and some of it went down, and that made him cough again. He leaned back on his haunches and reached down to tug on himself, only distantly aware that he had got the carpet dirty and was about to get it dirtier. He no longer feared making a mistake like that, the way he had when he’d first arrived. The house-elves would clean it up.
“I shall.”
Harry’s eyes flew open, thinking for a second that someone else had come into the room, and hating them for how much that interfered with his relentless need to come. Then he realized that Voldemort’s hand was resting above his on the shaft of his erection, so familiar that he hadn’t even noticed it, and Voldemort’s long fingers were swirling and coaxing and drawing the seed forth from him-
Harry came with a long sob, and Voldemort reached his glistening hand out to smooth over Harry’s cheeks and forehead.
“I can feel your pleasure like a firestorm in my mind.”
Harry licked his lips and nodded. He didn’t know if he could speak. He was too overwhelmed.
“You would never have that with anyone else.”
Harry shook his head this time. He leaned against Voldemort’s legs, and the Horcrux bond shimmered a few more times before it folded itself shut and there was the warmth of the hand on his face and the slickness of his own seed and the aftermath of pleasure.
That brought back some of the worries about whether this was the right thing to do, and what his friends would say if they could see him now. Harry shuddered and ducked his head, only to have Voldemort’s fingers hook their way under his chin and lift his face at once.
“Look into my eyes.”
Dimly, it crossed Harry’s mind to wonder why that mattered to Voldemort at all, when he could get all the thoughts he wanted out of Harry through the Horcrux link, but he obeyed, and Voldemort stared at him as though he was looking at the next place he planned to raid with his Death Eaters.
“You have nothing to worry about. I shall take on all challengers, and turn them aside. I shall make your friends fear my wrath if they hurt you.”
Harry would have said that was exactly what he was worried about, but he didn’t have the breath or the strength. In the end, he just nodded and closed his eyes, and it was probably Voldemort who put him to bed. He woke there the next morning.
And not long after he did, he sent the owl telling Hermione and Ron to visit.
*
“Tell me what you want for a present, Harry.”
Harry stared at Voldemort across the length of the dining room table in Malfoy Manor. Lately, Voldemort had had him sit at the foot instead of right beside the head. The Death Eaters still dined with them, although it seemed to be fewer every week, but Voldemort ignored their attempts to talk to him whenever he wanted to speak to Harry in Parseltongue.
Harry licked his lips and tried to think through the request as calmly as possible. “You’ve already said that Ron and Hermione can come. That’s good enough for me.”
“But not for me.”
Harry just shook his head helplessly. For a moment, his eyes went to Draco on the other side of the table, but Draco ducked his head and sat there. The writhing ball of the slave bond in the back of Harry’s head, which he tried his best to ignore most of the time, ignited, and he swallowed back despair. “I really don’t know. There’s nothing else I want.”
Voldemort considered that, his hand rubbing back and forth across his neck as if he was contemplating a Throat-Cutting Curse. The Death Eaters watched him with a different kind of caution than the one they displayed towards Harry, Harry thought. They wanted to be sure they didn’t damage Harry and cause Voldemort to explode at them. But for Voldemort, it was a mixture of fear and reverence.
“I will come up with something,” Voldemort decided at last, and returned to his meal.
Harry nodded as calmly as he could, and went back to his own.
*
“Mr. Potter.”
Harry braced himself so that he was standing with his back to the wall, since they were in the middle of a staircase where Malfoy-Draco-had once pushed him. He stared at another Malfoy, Lucius this time, who was several steps below him, staring up with a deathly pale face and one hand clasped around the head of his cane.
“Yes?” Harry asked, when a few moments had slid past and there was no reaction from Mr. Malfoy.
“I have come to beg for my son’s freedom.”
“You’re not going to have any better luck than your wife,” Harry said, fighting the urge to close his eyes against the headache that had started up under his temple. “You know as well as I do that if your Lord freed him from the slavery bond, it would only be to kill him.”
“And my answer will be the same as Narcissa’s.” Lucius visibly considered kneeling, and as visibly decided against it. “Our son is dying under this bond, and there is no one who can please our lord like you can. You will be able to please him so much that he would consider freeing Draco.”
Harry’s breath caught. Voldemort’s words rang in his head. I will come up with something. A Christmas gift, something he wanted Harry to want.
No, under ordinary circumstances, there was no way that Voldemort would consider freeing Draco. But if Harry asked for it as a gift, would that be enough? Would Voldemort’s desire to please him and make the holiday special for him make him agree to free Draco when ordinarily he never would?
“You have thought of something.”
Harry met Lucius’s eyes and nodded. He ignored the contempt aimed at him in that gaze. It truly didn’t matter. “Yes. I’ll put the proposal to him and see what he says. But not tonight. I don’t think he would agree unless he had the impression that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
He started to turn away again, but Lucius snapped, “How do we know that you’ll put the proposal to him at all?”
“I suppose you’ll just have to trust me.”
Again, Harry made to leave, and again, Lucius’s voice stopped him. “What is it about you that Draco doesn’t have?”
Harry gaped despite himself. “What?” It sounded as if Lucius was asking why Voldemort hadn’t married Draco, but Lucius seemed smart enough-barely-not to want his son in the Dark Lord’s bed.
“You are a half-blood.” Lucius’s gaze swept disdainfully down Harry’s robes. “Not possessed of any fashion sense or extraordinary cleverness, not handsome, not powerful, not wealthier than we are, not loyal to the Dark Lord at all. And yet he chose you. He was willing to stop the raids that we were making on Muggleborns, the successful war, for you. Why?”
Harry chuckled humorlessly. Lucius waited, and Harry just raised his eyebrows at him a little. He couldn’t believe that Lucius had thought he’d receive an answer.
“I demand to know,” Lucius said, his voice low. His wand flickered into his hand, and Harry hissed. He didn’t want to draw his own unless he absolutely had to, because he knew that it would be a signal for Voldemort to kill Lucius later.
And he was so tired of death and killing. That was why he had agreed to marry Voldemort in the first place. He had thought it would prevent those things. He had thought that the peace might be lasting.
Instead, it was hard to find peace even inside Malfoy Manor.
And that made a resolve Harry hadn’t even realized he was entertaining turn to a solid sheet of ice inside him. He sneered, which made Lucius lower his wand from the position he’d lifted it to out of what looked like sheer surprise. “Fuck off, Malfoy.”
“My son-”
“I’ll do what I can for him,” Harry said, and heard his own voice chill to the point that Malfoy backed away as if he expected a torrent of ice. “That doesn’t mean that I can spare him all the consequences of his actions. And it means that if he immediately goes back to trying to torture or kill me, he’s going to die. See if you can get that through his thick head.”
Lucius caught his breath in what sounded like hopeful outrage. “I assure you that Draco is far more intelligent than you think him.”
“Yeah, that would be why he tried to kill me after he knew how Voldemort wanted me,” Harry said, shaking his head. He paused, then added, when Lucius showed no sign of going away, “And I see that he comes by that honestly, given that his parents can’t refrain from insulting me or pointing their wands at me even when they’re begging favors from me.”
“Half-blood.”
“Arsehole,” Harry half-sang, and waited until Lucius backed down the stairs before he turned his back and continued on to his room.
He wouldn’t ask tonight, and not only because Voldemort had indicated he would be occupied with something else. Harry was most interested in forming the requests carefully, both the one the Malfoys had made and the one he had decided he wanted for himself.
And that was worth forming carefully. Harry would win Draco’s freedom if he could. He had never wanted the slavery bond, had only agreed to it because he knew it would mean Draco’s death otherwise, and had no desire to go on punishing the idiot.
But for the first time, he had something on his mind that he wanted more than that, a purely personal desire.
Which Voldemort might grant because it’s what I want.
Part Two.