[From Litha to Lammas]: Advance, Harry/Voldemort, sequel to Retreat, 3/3
Part Two.
Part One.
Title: Advance (3/3)
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 6200
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.
“It’s the third day, Harry.”
Harry blinked at Voldemort for a long moment before he remembered what he was talking about. Right. Voldemort had given him three days to come up with a place that he’d like to live in which wasn’t simply a copy of somewhere else, and then Draco would be free of his oath. Or the Dursleys would be dead.
As it happened, Harry had made a list of his requirements the first night, before the mess with Ron and Hermione had happened, and he went to take it down from the mantel now. He presented it to Voldemort without a word.
Voldemort, sitting on the other side of the small table that had migrated into Harry’s room once he began doing his studies there, flipped the parchment over and began to read. Harry stared out the nearest enchanted window and told his heart to stop tumbling around inside his ribcage like an overexcited Snitch. So what if Voldemort didn’t approve? He’d never had any trouble making his disapproval extremely clear, in that case.
“This is…more extensive than I expected.”
Harry glanced over his shoulder. He felt as if his neck was creaking with the tension in it, but he managed it, and Voldemort blinked at him slowly, waiting. Harry nodded. “I tried to think of what I’d really want, and not just what I needed.”
“Someone told you to think only of what you needed in the past?”
“Not in so many words.” One of the things Harry had thought about in the last day was how many things he’d assumed, and also assumed were true or right or good, even though no one had ever told him that he should believe them. The Dursleys had certainly never taken care of his needs, and his friends had never said that he should limit himself to them.
“Well?”
Harry walked slowly away from the window to sit down across the table from Voldemort, and stare at him. This was still the man who had enslaved Draco to him, and burned Snape to death, and had no problem sending pain through the Horcrux bond if Harry displeased him.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Harry asked. “I know you want me happy, but you’ve never done this before.”
“The despair that you felt when you were with your Mudblood and blood traitor.” Harry hid his wince, and watched as Voldemort’s fingers slid across the table, long and pale as icicles. “I thought it entirely possible that you were miserable enough to take your own life, or find some other way out of this arrangement.”
“So you want to make sure I don’t.”
“Yes. And I want to make sure that you think of me differently from the ones who tried to get you killed.”
“You did trap me. Just not into that.”
Voldemort’s nostrils flared. He watched Harry in a way that made Harry think he would pounce across the table with his fingers curved like talons for a moment, and then sat slowly back in his chair. “If that is the way you feel, it means I need to change other things.”
Harry blinked. “I-I know that finding out I was a Horcrux changed some of your plans and the things you concentrated on. But it didn’t change your whole personality.”
Voldemort inclined his head slowly, eyes fastened on Harry the whole time. His scar was buzzing and humming as if a washing machine had taken up residence behind it, but there was no pain.
“You have part of my soul,” Voldemort said simply. “At first, I thought of you as I did the other Horcruxes. Then I realized that you would need more care than that, because you are alive. I thought of you much as I did Nagini, then.”
“And now?” Harry wondered if he should be uneasy about how much Voldemort seemed to have changed his attitude, or not.
“I think of you as part of myself.” Voldemort’s eyes visibly flickered to the scar on Harry’s forehead, and he smiled in a caressing, possessive way. Harry could imagine him looking into the mirror, with that smile. “There is nothing I would not do to spare myself pain, to spare myself from death.”
“But I’m not you.”
“The piece of soul that you carry is.” Voldemort leaned back against his chair with liquid grace. “And I know your moods and your emotions because of the times we have blended in sex, and because of the bond between our souls and our minds. I am not as-gentle as you would doubtless prefer. But I can take care of you, Harry. I would do it better than has been done so far.” His voice thickened into a hiss on the end without becoming Parseltongue.
“So you still wouldn’t have the same level of care for anyone else?”
“No.”
“You-told me not to complain about the Death Eaters when I came here. Or interfere with them.”
“Because I was getting inaccurate information from a traitor and a slave.” Voldemort managed to look serene while waves of anger rolled off him. “And I would not have hesitated to kill Death Eaters who displeased me, if the displeasure outweighed their usefulness. I will free the Malfoy boy from his slavery bond because you wish it, not because I think he should be free or because I have grown what I believe you would call a conscience.”
“I, um. I should be careful what I ask for, then.”
“Oh, Harry.” Voldemort leaned forwards, his face the most animated Harry had ever seen it, and the emotions sang in Harry’s Horcrux like bells being whipped. “I would like it so much better if you would ask for whatever you wanted. Anything that comes to mind. Any revenge you want. If you would allow me permission to torture your relatives and those traitors you think of as friends.”
“Torture. Not kill?” Harry couldn’t even believe he was asking this.
Voldemort’s eyes brightened, and a pleasure as thick as oil dripped down behind Harry’s scar. “I would, of course, kill them. But they would suffer…if you could know how they would suffer, Harry.” His eyes stared dreamily past Harry, and then they focused and sharpened on him again. “Or rather, if you knew and could take pleasure in it.”
Harry licked his lips and managed to shake his head a little. “I won’t ever want that.”
“Perhaps you will not.” Voldemort smiled at him as if he knew something that Harry didn’t.
Harry clenched his hands on the back of his chair. “Is the list sufficient?” he asked, with a sharp nod at the parchment still lying in front of Voldemort. “Will you free Malfoy from his slavery bond?”
“Yes, I will.” Voldemort stood and circled around the table, reaching out to ghost his fingers down Harry’s shoulder and arm. Harry shuddered, despising himself for liking the tingles that the touch left behind. It was only because no one else had ever touched him like this, he told himself. Except for kisses with Cho and Ginny, he just hadn’t had anything before Voldemort.
“But make no mistake, Harry,” Voldemort murmured to him. “I keep alive only those I believe no threat to you. Draco has proven his willingness to be such a threat. I will simply kill him if he puts a foot out of line again. It will be up to you to explain that to him when I release him from the bond.”
“Thank you,” Harry said.
“Do you even know what you are thanking me for, Harry?” Voldemort’s head tilted in what looked like amusement, his eyes locked on Harry and his mouth opening in what seemed to be a quiver on the edge of a smile.
“Yes,” Harry said. “For dissolving the bond and listening to me and-and even leaving me alone with Ron and Hermione. I know that you had the Horcrux link closed, but it was good for me to try and handle them myself.”
Voldemort studied him for long moments, so closely and intently that Harry shifted his weight. The tingle behind his scar felt more neutral now, like falling water instead of oil. Then Voldemort nodded. “You are welcome, Harry. Show me how well you can explain to Draco in the morning. If you do well enough and he lives, then I will expect you to thank me at night.”
He reached back and snatched the parchment with the list of qualities Harry wanted in a home from the table. “In the meantime,” he murmured, “I will begin the process of locating our home. Some of these criteria will be difficult to fulfill.”
“I can always-”
“I was stating a fact, not a complaint.” Voldemort stared at him, and a small flicker of heat struck behind Harry’s scar.
After a long moment, Harry made himself bow his head. “I see. Thank you.”
Voldemort inclined his head to him from a sideways bow of his neck, which made him look like a heron preparing to snatch a fish, and then left the room.
Harry sat down and stared at his hands. He had no idea what he was supposed to feel right now. The sting of heat behind his scar was gone, and there were waves of a flowing darkness that reminded him of the way the surface of the ocean might look at night. Serene, for now, but there was a long way down beneath it.
Harry shook his head and sighed. He would probably never understand exactly what Voldemort was feeling, but this day hadn’t been too terrible despite the anger he felt at Ron and Hermione. He shed his robes and went to bed.
*
“I want to make it plain that I am ending this slavery bond solely because of the intervention of my husband.”
Harry hid a grimace as he watched Narcissa and Lucius bow their heads. They were in Malfoy Manor’s dining room, although for once only Harry, Voldemort, Nagini, and the three members of the Malfoy family were present. Draco knelt in front of his parents, sweating. He hadn’t raised his face once since Harry sat down.
That probably won’t actually deter Narcissa and Lucius from asking me for another favor. They were the ones who had insisted that Harry would be able to influence Voldemort in the first place, after all.
From the continued serene feeling behind their scar, Voldemort was just as pleased with silence as the Malfoy response. He reached out and traced his wand in a crisscross pattern over Draco, finishing with a long circle that seemed to encompass most of the floor around him.
Draco gasped, and so did Harry, as the almost-unnoticed feeling of the connection between them drained away. Harry could see something like green dust sifting out from Draco’s left sleeve, which probably meant that Voldemort had destroyed the replacement for the Dark Mark that bound them, too.
Draco edged backwards on his hands and knees, never looking up and murmuring, “Thank you, my Lord, thank you, thank…”
“Thank Harry. He is the one who demanded your freedom.”
Draco stopped speaking. He just knelt there, his head sinking down, his shoulders hunching, and Harry blinked. He couldn’t feel Draco’s emotions anymore, but-
He wasn’t that stubborn or contrary to resist thanking Harry just because he hated him, was he?
“Draco,” Narcissa hissed out of the corner of her mouth.
“Thank you, Potter-Gaunt,” Draco said at last. His voice dragged, and for a second, his eyes darted up in a glare. Harry held back a sigh. No, Draco hadn’t learned to keep his feelings to himself under that punishment, or even to hate Voldemort for creating it. He had decided that he hated Harry for being the one the slavery bond was anchored to, because of course he had.
Honestly, the sooner Voldemort found them another place to live, the better it would be. For everyone.
*
“You are restless.”
“Yes,” Harry said, not bothering to deny it, when Voldemort had come into his room to find him staring out the window. He turned around and tried to smile, although he was pretty sure he’d failed. “Have you found somewhere we can go that has some of the characteristics I described in that list?”
“I want to make sure that it has all of the characteristics described in that list.” Voldemort moved towards him once more, a slow, rolling gait that made Harry think Nagini would have walked like that if she had legs. “Happy Christmas, Harry.”
That had been what Harry was so desperately trying not to think about, the fact that the clock in his room had struck midnight and it was now Christmas. Last Christmas, he had been at the Burrow with Remus and Molly and Arthur and-
And Ron and Hermione-
He closed his eyes, feeling the brutal sting against his eyelids, and turned his head away. But Voldemort turned it back with a soft murmured noise, his fingers sliding and pinching along, down to the bottom of Harry’s chin.
“I gave you Draco Malfoy’s freedom from the slavery bond.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t,” Harry whispered, trying to pull away and go on staring out the window. Voldemort’s hand stayed right where it was. “I know I asked for that. But what I’ve lost isn’t something I can get back or you can give me.”
Voldemort dropped his chin on Harry’s shoulder, always a heavy weight. Harry stood there, bearing it, and the strange serenity through the Horcrux bond. Voldemort felt like that most of the time lately, unless he was intently plotting something or having sex with Harry.
Or murdering someone?
But, at least to Harry’s knowledge, there had been no murders since Snape’s death.
That was a weird thing to be grateful for, but he still was.
“Are you sure that I could not give it to you?” Voldemort asked, his voice hissing and rasping along like scales.
“Yes, because you’re not my friends,” Harry said softly, staring out the window. He no longer thought that speaking the truth would get him tortured, although he still didn’t know why. “You’re not-you just don’t feel emotions like they do. You might value me, but you don’t value other people.”
“My Death Eaters-”
“You know that’s not true.” Harry turned abruptly, and Voldemort’s chin slipped off his shoulder, but he didn’t move away, which left their faces closer than Harry was truly comfortable with. He took a deep breath, and didn’t flinch or step back. “You value me more than anyone else because I’m part of you. You said that yourself.”
Voldemort’s head turned slowly to the side, like an owl’s. “And after years of not being valued enough, you do not want someone who will cherish you above all others?”
“It’s weird.” Harry clenched his hands behind his back and stared Voldemort down. There was a little pain behind his scar now that might be irritation. That was all right. The feeling as though someone had torn out part of his chest was a lot worse. “It’s hard to get used to, because the one who’s doing it is also the reason that I wasn’t cherished for so long.”
Voldemort said nothing. Harry sighed and went over to lie down on his bed. When he glanced up again, Voldemort was gone.
*
The smell made Harry’s nostrils tickle and then his nose wrinkle. He sat up, shaking his head and dashing his hand through his hair. The smell was familiar, but he couldn’t bring to mind what it was. Cinnamon? Something with cinnamon?
“Happy Christmas, Harry.”
Harry glanced up and opened his mouth to tell Voldemort to piss off, and then stared. In front of him was a table with a huge array of sweets, including cinnamon biscuits of the kind he’d used to see Dudley eating, and cups of hot cocoa.
And, in chairs beyond the table, with their mouths gagged and their arms chained to the arms of the chairs, Ron and Hermione.
Harry leaned forwards and placed his head in his hands. He breathed, slowly. He did not scream. This was very important.
“Does it please you?”
Harry started and looked up. He hadn’t seen Voldemort come in through the door, and he hadn’t felt him, either. The Horcrux bond must have been closed. Now it opened to its fullest extent, a bright serenity rolling through him with touches of what might have been curiosity and anxiety here and there.
“No,” Harry said flatly, in English, for Ron and Hermione’s benefit. “I-I missed them, yeah, and I was dreaming of spending Christmas with them, but with them willing. Kidnapping and bringing them here misses the point.”
“But they would not have come willingly.”
Harry did not scream, still. He turned and plucked his wand from the small table next to his bed, not missing the way that Hermione and Ron both started. They probably thought that he couldn’t use his magic with Voldemort around, or something.
Hermione took a deep breath as their gags vanished and their chains loosened. Harry couldn’t make the chains vanish, but honestly, he shouldn’t need to. He shot another venomous glare at Voldemort, who blinked at him like a lizard.
“I didn’t want you to kidnap them.”
“But they are here.”
Voldemort’s voice was distracted, his head tilted and his nostrils fluttering, and Harry realized with a start that he was savoring the emotions flowing down the Horcrux bond. Harry took a deep breath and pushed as hard as he could, closing the door on the link between them for the first time. It had always been Voldemort doing it before.
Voldemort started and hissed at him. Harry glared back, then turned to his friends.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said. “I’ll see if I can-well, if I can’t get you back to where you were staying, then I’ll walk you down and make sure that you’re free to go.” It had occurred to him even as he spoke that they might not want him to know where they’d been, and he buried the lump of hurt that he felt about that. He had already known that things were like this between them.
“That might be best.” Hermione’s voice was stiff, and she had her shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow from above. Ron nodded. Harry started to stand up, bringing his wand with him. He’d go and put on a robe from the cupboard since the ones he wore to sleep were-
“How could you, Harry?”
“It was my husband who did that,” Harry said, walking past Hermione. It felt as if sticky strands of pain connected him to her, but he ignored that, forced them to break. “You know, the one you wanted me to marry?”
“We didn’t mean-we never thought you would turn into this.”
Harry thought he might have been the only one who noticed the tip of Voldemort’s wand beginning to glow green, given that both Hermione and Ron were sitting in chairs turned away from him. He glared at his husband and said, “Stop. You know very well that I’d only step between.”
Voldemort’s wand went dim again, and he made a gesture at Harry that spoke of nothing but frustration. “You caused this situation, you can deal with the consequences,” Harry hissed at him, and turned around to face Hermione.
She was pushing her hair out of her face, and obviously struggling to recover her dignity. “We can’t discuss anything with your husband here.”
“If you’d step out of the room, please, husband?”
Voldemort sent a throb of displeasure through the scar. Harry just raised his eyebrows and waited for Voldemort to remember that that hurt him, too. Voldemort turned away, head still half-cocked back as if he was going to look over his shoulder at any moment, and stepped outside the room, shutting the door.
“That’s no good!” Ron complained at once. He’d turned around in time to see the door close. “He can still hear us!”
“That’s the furthest away I can get him to go.” Harry rubbed his forehead, and watched Hermione watch the motion of his hand.
“I thought you would have done anything you could to destroy the Horcrux,” Hermione whispered. “Once you knew.”
“What do you suggest I do, exactly?”
“You always managed before! The Chamber of Secrets seemed hopeless, too, and rescuing Sirius from the Dementors, and-”
“And I had help each time,” Harry snapped. He was so sick of this. He turned to face them and folded his arms, glaring down Hermione when she looked startled and offended. He thought she had a right to be startled and offended when Voldemort had kidnapped her, but she’d focused that on him and not Voldemort. “Fawkes and the Sorting Hat, you and the Time-Turner, and the shades coming out of Voldemort’s wand in the graveyard. And sometimes it still didn’t work. Sirius died, and Dumbledore died, and Cedric died! And you were the one who kept telling me over and over again how the marriage was a good idea and how vital it was for me to behave myself!”
“We had to give you memories that Voldemort would see as the truth.” Hermione’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “We thought you would know that we didn’t mean it.”
Harry just shut his eyes. He didn’t know what to say. He was dizzy, and sick, and there was the throb of Voldemort behind the scar in his head that showed he was listening, and he could understand Hermione’s perspective, and-
And he had to say the words that were pressing on the edges of his tongue.
“Hermione, if I’d thought, even once, that what you said wasn’t the truth, Voldemort would have known. You wanted me to achieve the impossible and know your plan without knowing it and without revealing it to him and without help and on some kind of impossible timeline…”
Harry let his voice trail off. Hermione’s eyes were wide with fear, and he was reminded, forcefully, that he wasn’t Muggleborn himself, that he knew Voldemort wouldn’t hurt him but she had no such assurance. It wasn’t like she really trusted Voldemort despite the promises he had made when he married Harry. And she hadn’t been with Voldemort when he was talking to Harry at dinner and promising to find a place for them to live and helping him study Runes.
For that matter, she wasn’t the one person Voldemort would strive to protect in all circumstances.
Harry glanced swiftly at Ron and saw that he looked as ill as Hermione. Maybe he didn’t have quite as much personal fear since he was a pureblood, but he was still one of Harry’s closest friends and a member of a notorious blood traitor family.
They don’t understand what I’ve been through, and it’s not fair to expect them to. Any more than it was fair of them to expect me to pull off a miracle.
Harry sighed and sat down in the chair that normally was pushed under his desk. “All right. Listen. I’m going to try to explain.”
“What is there to explain?” Ron sounded resigned, and angry, and betrayed. “You’ve chosen his side-”
“Do you want to listen, or do you want to just get dumped back outside the wards and never see me again?” Harry snapped. “Because, at the moment, believe me, Voldemort would be pleased to do just that.”
For a moment, Harry sensed a throb of wistfulness through the closed door of the Horcrux bond that was so unexpected he almost laughed. He hastily bit his lips and controlled himself at the last minute, though. That was probably the worst thing he could do if he wanted to preserve some semblance of his relationship with Ron and Hermione.
“We’ll listen.” Ron muttered it, but he said it, and a glance at Hermione told Harry that she agreed.
“Fine.” Harry leaned back in his chair. “Voldemort isn’t going to harm me no matter what happened. Even if I killed Nagini-and how exactly am I supposed to do that?-then he would keep me. He would be displeased with me, but he values me more than all his other Horcruxes. So even if you found and destroyed the rest of them, it wouldn’t matter, because he would have me. And he would keep me.”
The pleasure that came through the Horcrux bond was unreal. Harry thought he kept most of it off his face, even if Ron did eye him suspiciously for a second.
“Fine,” Hermione said shortly. “Then someone else will just have to kill you.”
“Wow,” Harry said, stomach dropping as he stared at her. “Fuck you, Hermione.”
“You would come back! I mean that someone else should kill you and kill the soul-shard in you, and you would come back, and we could defeat him.”
“Hermione! He’s listening right outside the door!”
“That doesn’t matter, does it?” Hermione’s tears were overflowing now, tracing slow paths down her cheeks. “Because it wouldn’t even work if it was someone other than Voldemort, I forgot. There’s no way that we can defeat him.”
Harry nodded slowly. That was the part that Hermione was having the most trouble accepting, with good reason. No matter what happened from now on, they had lost the war. Voldemort would reign, and Dumbledore’s plans wouldn’t work.
“How long did it take Dumbledore to convince you that the best plan was letting Voldemort kill me?” he asked, because he wanted to know.
“Professor Dumbledore,” Hermione said, but it died away when she saw the look Harry was giving her. She swallowed and looked at the window, and the darkness outside it. “It took months. He was the one who pointed out that you had a chance of living. We wouldn’t have agreed if not for that.”
Harry knew they wouldn’t have. They were-they had been-strong, loyal friends. Even now, he didn’t think they hated him. They hated the circumstances, and they hated that they had taken such an extreme gamble, something that could have resulted in the death of their friend, and still lost.
“Well,” he said, and leaned back in his chair. “So, the next best thing is accepting that this is the way things are, and leaving me to get on with it.”
“Get on with what?” Ron was the one who asked, putting a hand on Hermione’s shoulder; Harry thought she was a little too overwhelmed to talk right now.
“Changing the course of the war. The peace. Whatever it’s going to be now.” Harry shrugged a little, and did what he could to open the Horcrux bond to its widest extent, something he’d never done before. “He wants to keep me happy. I’ll work on him and make sure that he understands slaughtering a bunch of people would make me unhappy. And I’ll try to make sure that the laws that are passed are fairer.”
“But he’s still going to be a tyrant.” Hermione’s voice was low.
“I’ll try to make him less tyrannical.”
“No offense, mate, but how do you know you’re going to succeed?” Ron was rubbing Hermione’s back. “I mean, he knows that you’re going to do this, the same way that he knows we were going to destroy the Horcruxes. How can you manipulate him when he knows what you’re doing?”
“How did you think I was going to succeed at what you wanted me to do before?” Harry asked, his eyebrows rising.
Ron bowed his head and was quiet.
Harry sighed as he felt the thunderstorm of magic stirring outside the door. “I think my beloved husband wants you to leave,” he said dryly. “I’ll walk you down to the door, and beyond the Apparition wards. Then you should be able to go wherever you want to go.”
He hadn’t expected it, but Hermione abruptly lunged from her chair, reaching for him. Harry shied on instinct, and she missed, but the distance was too great and she still had chains binding her, anyway. She stared at him desperately from where she was half-sprawled on the floor.
“What the hell, Hermione?”
“Come with us,” she whispered. “You said that he wants to keep you happy. Well, this is his chance to prove it. Your freedom would make you happy. Your friends would make you happy. Let him set you free. We’ll go off, and we’ll talk, Harry. Maybe we can come up with some plan that’s better than you spending all your time in a tyrant’s bed.”
Harry swallowed and glanced at the door. He didn’t know if he was the only one who saw the hinges strain slightly, but he was definitely the only one who felt the strike down his scar like a lightning bolt of Voldemort’s own.
Rage. And loneliness. And desire. And fear.
“No,” Harry said quietly.
“Why not?” Hermione bowed her head, choking on tears, so Ron was the one who asked. “Why do you keep acting like you’ve chosen him?”
“I’m living in the world that we all made, where I was made to choose him.” Harry didn’t explode because he was holding himself firmly in so that he didn’t. This was wearing, but he couldn’t have imagined a second confrontation with Ron and Hermione that wasn’t. “No, I’m not just going to leave, not when he would tear the world apart looking for me. And it would get rid of all the oaths and vows that we swore. Right now, he’s not hunting down Muggleborns, and neither are his Death Eaters. And he brought you here, but he didn’t hurt you. I’d like it to stay that way.”
Not that I want them for Christmas next year.
That thought, he whirled down the bond, and Voldemort responded with a hungry, hollow hiss that Harry didn’t understand until he thought through the implications of what he’d said. Voldemort was celebrating the fact that Harry was planning on being there for Christmas next year.
“Then he’s a hypocrite and he doesn’t mean anything he says.”
Harry closed his eyes and held himself still again. Then he shook his head. “He didn’t promise to let me go wherever I wanted and not marry me. He promised to do what he said he would.”
“It’s a legal contract to rape you!”
“That you said I should fucking sign!”
Two of the cups of cocoa on the table blew up, sending liquid that still steamed high into the air. Harry gestured sharply with his wand and raised a shield in front of Ron and Hermione, then lowered it down again. They just stared at him.
“Listen,” Harry said. “I’m going to do my best to make this work, and make sure that you can live the kind of lives you want to. But I’m not going to try to kill him, or make him kill me, and I’m not going to kill Nagini, and the sooner you accept that, the better off we’ll all be.”
“The kind of lives we want include him dead and you free.”
“And that’s not going to happen, and it’s stupid and childish to go on wishing for it! Live in the real world, Hermione.”
She stared at him with broad, startled eyes, and Harry had the odd impression that was the first thing he’d said that had actually reached her, for all the arguments and angry words they’d exchanged before then. She blinked and looked down at her hands twisting in her lap, and then looked up at him and took a deep breath.
“I want to be escorted to the edge of the wards, please. I don’t trust anyone else we might meet in this house.”
“I’ll go with her,” Ron said, but he gave Harry a deep, sad look, as if he would have liked to stay and talk this over. In a different lifetime.
Maybe someday, in this one. Harry nodded and stood up. “I’ll come with you.”
He silently asked Voldemort to please move back from the door, and although he didn’t make a comment, the corridor was empty when Harry stepped out, although both Ron and Hermione flinched in anticipation.
“I don’t understand…” Hermione whispered as they walked downwards through the darkened house. It was too early for the Malfoys to be up, probably. Harry thought of them lying in bed until eleven, when cups of hot chocolate might be delivered to them, and had to hold back his snort.
“What don’t you understand?” Harry asked, although he thought it might start another argument.
“Why did you decide that honoring your contract with him was something you had to do? You could have defied me, and Ron, and Dumbledore, and all the other people who asked you to do this. You defied lots of things before.”
They had reached the front door. Harry opened it, but stood holding the knob for a second, his back to it. He stared at his friends, and Ron stared back at him, opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“How could I not honor it when everyone I knew was saying it was a good idea?” Harry asked simply.
“But then when you knew what we really thought and we wanted you to do-”
“Then it was too late,” Harry said sharply, cutting her off, because he didn’t want to have this argument again. “I could have done something different, maybe, but this is what I chose to do. And I told you why I think I might be able to influence my husband to honor his own word and make the world better for Muggleborns and other people than it would have been. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“You shouldn’t have to be a sacrifice, mate,” Ron whispered.
“One way or the other, I was always meant to be.” Harry shook his head when he saw their gapes. “My life, or my freedom, or my pride, or my body-did it really matter that much which one it was? When Voldemort took my blood for his resurrection ritual, I was a sacrifice. When I got stabbed through the arm by the basilisk fang, I thought I was a sacrifice. The prophecy said I was going to be one. Dumbledore’s plan would have made me one if it’d worked. This marriage did. That’s the way it is.”
“But afterwards-”
“You have no idea about that. We have no idea how the wizarding public would have reacted if I’d said that I would marry Voldemort for peace and then broken my word. I think I would have gone on being one, just under gentler terms.” Harry opened the door further. “The only thing I can do is take control of my life and try to make sure that the sacrifice is on my terms, not anyone else’s, and it’s made of things I can stand to give up.”
Hermione and Ron walked out the door, still looking painfully bewildered. Hermione turned back to him for a second, but Ron grabbed her arm and walked them swiftly down the path. Without discussion, they seemed to understand that the original plan to walk them to the end of the wards had changed.
Harry watched his friends until they had Apparated and were out of sight. Then he turned around.
Voldemort stood on the bottom step of the grand staircase, staring at him as if Harry was made of rare glass he was afraid to touch.
“Is it all a sacrifice?”
Harry thought about Draco under the slavery bond, and Draco free from it. The moment he’d walked towards Voldemort in the Ministry Atrium, and the moment when his friends had first urged him to accept the marriage offer. The moment when Voldemort had first fucked him, and the moment when he’d found out he was a Horcrux. The moment when he’d stared down at Runes for the first time and understood them.
“Not all of it,” he answered quietly in Parseltongue. “Just a lot.”
Voldemort came down the last few steps and reached out slowly towards him. Harry let him do it, let those long, pale fingers brush over his forehead and come to a stop resting on his scar.
“I regret this. Once, I never knew what regret was.”
Harry nodded slowly. He was right, he thought. He could change Voldemort. Even if this admission was in Parseltongue and no one else could hear it, Voldemort had made it.
And even if he had made it only because he thought Harry wanted to hear it-well, once he would never have left his enemies’ desires influence him like that. Let alone his greatest enemy.
Harry took a slow step forwards. Voldemort wrapped his arms around him and hauled him closer, hissing the way Nagini did when she got toppled off the bed, irritated nonsense noises that crowded down into softer ones as Harry stroked the back of Voldemort’s head.
It wasn’t what he would have chosen. It was still a sacrifice in many ways. Harry wished things had been different with a bitterness as strong as the sun.
But this was the real world, and he had made his choice.
He was going to live.
The End.