[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Flank, Retreat series, Harry/Voldemort, R, 5/5

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of “Flank.” I’ll update this series again with another story in the summer solstice series for 2022.

Part Five

“I would kill them if they were here.”

“I know.”

Voldemort paused and turned to stare at Harry. They were in their bedroom, and Harry was sitting in the center of the bed, while Voldemort prowled up and down on the carpet around it. “You are not protesting?”

Harry took a deep breath and looked at the letter that Voldemort still held. He hadn’t ripped it into shreds once he’d read it, but it had been a near thing. And he thought of the way Hermione’s words had crashed into him, and the way that she had held him on the morning of the wedding, and the way that she and Ron had talked when they’d visited.

“I think that she’s chosen a course that can only end with her death. And Ron’s. Either at your hands, or at the hands of people who would betray them to you, or because she’ll die of old age still raging against you. Or kill herself trying to make another potion that would kill me or something.” Harry stood when he saw the way Voldemort’s eyes were shining. “This doesn’t count as my approval of random murder.”

“I know that.” Voldemort’s voice was low, almost a croon, while the Horcrux bond was filled with a rotating storm of emotions again. “But most of the time, I have no reason to commit random murder. Most people in magical Britain have done nothing to me or to you.” He took a long step forwards. “You want things to change, however.”

Harry nodded. “If your regime stays the same, you know that you’ll provoke rebellions from more people than just Hermione and Ron and the like.”

“I can deal with them.”

“And if I don’t want to be a widower at seventeen?” Harry shook his head when Voldemort started to open his mouth. “If Dumbledore figured out that you have Horcruxes, someone else can. It doesn’t make sense to try and bury the information and crush any rebellion before it starts, when you could just do something else instead.”

Voldemort paused. “You think I would be facing a lot of rebellions.”

Harry nodded. “I know Viktor said that people in other countries accept the rule of powerful wizards more easily, but what people in Britain know is fifteen years of comparative peace, followed by a year of war, followed by you suddenly ruling. And if you make people hopeless enough, then they’ll just do anything they can to get rid of you.” Harry had reached that point more than once during his fights against Voldemort and his years with the Dursleys.

Voldemort stepped up to him and gripped his chin. Harry watched him impatiently.

“I want to kill the ones who taught you that,” Voldemort whispered, predictably.

“And maybe later we can talk about that. But this is a different conversation. Are you going to listen to me or not?”

After a long moment, Voldemort stepped back with a flowing movement and nodded.

“Allow me to be an avenue of appeal for them,” Harry said steadily, his eyes locked on Voldemort’s. “Their hope that things will get better. Let them bring cases to me and get some kind of compassionate response instead of summary judgment.”

“You are once again making yourself a martyr for them.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I didn’t say that we’d do it without rules. I’d spend a limited amount of time on it, and anyone who was rude to me, in person or through the post, doesn’t get to ask me for something for at least a year. And there are certain people I’d just refuse to talk to you at all. Like any of the Malfoys, for instance.”

Voldemort was still. Harry narrowed his eyes and made the bond twist and writhe like a whip. “What did you do?”

Voldemort went back to pacing. Harry just watched him. He had an odd sensation thrumming through his bones, which for a second he thought originated with the bond and a second later knew came from him, his own emotions.

He had power here. He could render Voldemort confused and defensive without much effort.

It was more than he had thought he would ever have again.

“You must have wondered how Granger got the Apparition coordinates for our home to give to her assassin.”

“Yes,” Harry said, ruthlessly shutting out any thoughts of pity for Justin. They would undermine his argument, and Justin was at peace, anyway. Harry had got that much for him.

“I chose the place for the house before I began to assemble the building, and I used the Malfoys’ study for some of the research. I left parchments on the table with the coordinates. Only for a day or so, but Lucius entered and saw them. He thought it good news and passed them along to Draco, who—”

“Passed them along to Hermione somehow,” Harry finished. He felt sick. Hermione would trust Draco before him?

“I know how. I saw the memories in Draco’s mind hours before he died.”

“They’re all dead,” Harry whispered, because he couldn’t imagine Lucius and Narcissa not risking their lives to save their son.

“Burned in Fiendfyre. Yes.”

Harry shivered as he imagined their deaths, but he didn’t allow himself to panic or beg. Their deaths were over with now. What could he do but move forwards?

“How did Draco send the Apparition coordinates to Hermione?”

“She owled him and told him that he must find it humiliating living with his schoolboy rival, and that she and Weasley had given up on you. They could achieve both their goals if he helped them kill you. She did not have Apparition coordinates specifically in mind, as she did not know I was building the house, but that is what he chose to send her.”

Harry breathed out slowly. “So they decided it would be better to make common cause with a Death Eater, and he didn’t bring the owl to you even though he had to know by then how highly valued I was.”

“Do you not mourn the Malfoys?”

Harry looked up. Voldemort was tense, and the bond had narrowed down to a thrumming tunnel. Harry thought Voldemort was prepared to block it off fully again and leave if he said the wrong thing.

And that might not be to protect Harry, only, or be thoughtful towards him. It might be to protect Voldemort himself.

“I did as much as I could for them,” Harry whispered. “Begged for Draco’s life and then his freedom. Even tried to disguise that he was the one who had hurt me at first. And spared Narcissa’s life when Nagini would have eaten her. I—I tried to do some of the same things for them that I did for Ron and Hermione. I married you and asked that their lives be spared. In each case, they chose to throw away that assurance.”

Voldemort lifted his head and flicked out his tongue. Harry had no idea what he was smelling that the Horcrux bond couldn’t tell him, but Voldemort nodded as though both senses were telling him the same thing. “Good. I am pleased that you can think of it this way.”

Harry nodded. It took an effort. He still wanted to see things from other people’s perspectives. And he could imagine how badly it must have startled and then hurt Draco that Harry was living in their house and was so favored by Voldemort that he’d been kept under the torture curse for more than a day.

But he hadn’t learned. And Ron and Hermione still expected Harry to be the one to defeat Voldemort when they’d made that impossible for him.

Children. They never had to grow up. They’re just children.

But they were children with the age and legal responsibilities of adults. And if they chose to ignore that and do what they wanted in an effort to hurt Harry, then he was done protecting them.

He looked up, a little surprised that Voldemort hadn’t commented on that, and jumped as he saw how Voldemort’s neck was weaving back and forth, his tongue slithering out to test scents, his breath coming in measured sips of air.

“What are you doing?”

“Feeling.” Voldemort opened his eyes. “You actually mean that. You are not lying to try and spare my emotions, or trying to feel what you think you should and falling short. You have no idea, Harry, how much you please me.”

“The bond gives me some idea,” Harry muttered.

Voldemort gave a sharp hiss, and the bond coiled in such a way that Harry knew Voldemort didn’t like his foray into English. Harry stared stubbornly back at him. Voldemort was the one who had just talked about Harry pleasing him. He could put up with the moments when Harry didn’t please him so much, then.

Voldemort chose to laugh instead of protest, which did relieve Harry’s mind a little. “We will discuss how you might become more active politically and perhaps temper the image of my rule in the minds of local wizards and witches,” he said. “For now, I want to do what I was dreaming about while burning the Malfoys alive.”

Harry shivered, and couldn’t have said which of the two reasons why was stronger. “What’s that?” he croaked.

Voldemort strode towards him and didn’t remove his robe, which was unusual. He unceremoniously shoved Harry’s robes open, though, and his pants down, and fastened his mouth around Harry’s cock.

Harry tossed his head back as he collapsed onto the bed again, immediately incoherent in a way that he knew must have flooded the bond with sensation. He didn’t—he hadn’t thought—

No one had done this for him, he thought, while the sensation of Voldemort’s mouth gathered up his feelings and blew them apart.

He had never believed Voldemort would do it, he thought, while his hands scrabbled in the sheets and scratched and rucked them up around his legs.

It was unreal, how good it felt, he thought, while his mouth opened in a panting cry and he came into Voldemort’s mouth an embarrassingly short number of minutes later.

Voldemort sat back on his heels. Harry could feel his satisfaction, spinning through the bond like a steel lattice.

Harry tried to hiss something, asking what Voldemort wanted in return for that, but his mouth felt as if it was permanently open. He couldn’t move his lips in either English or Parseltongue words. Luckily, Voldemort either thought he should claim some reward as his natural right or felt Harry’s desire through the bond.

He lay down on the bed and rearranged Harry with that unnatural strength that he still wasn’t used to. Harry stared at him through dazed, half-blinking, hooded eyes as Voldemort hauled Harry onto his lap.

“Not inside, only between,” Voldemort said, casting a lubrication spell.

Harry didn’t know what he meant until he felt Voldemort’s cock rubbing between the cheeks of his arse. Voldemort was right. He didn’t try to put it inside. Harry let his head hang back, and just felt.

It was heady, the feeling of Voldemort hard, there, but not penetrating him, and the stronger heat of Voldemort’s gaze on him, and the hands that gripped him and held him and rubbed him back and forth. And the bond, open to its fullest extent and roaring with something ruby-red and hot that Harry recognized.

Voldemort’s voice might as well have been echoing through his thoughts. Mine. Mine. Mine.

When he came, Harry almost didn’t register it, the increase of warmth against his arse only one more sensation. He grunted and rolled limply to the side as Voldemort rearranged them yet again, cleaning up with a negligent wave of his wand.

“We still need to talk more about what I’m going to do to make your image better,” Harry murmured as he closed his eyes.

“We can do that in the morning. All the mornings to come. Are we not immortal?” Voldemort’s hand skimmed across his forehead, pausing on his scar. “Sleep, Harry.”

Whether there was magic behind that command or not didn’t really matter, since Harry was more than pleased to obey it.

*

“I am not willing to have you placed in danger while you attempt to please your many detractors yet again.”

Harry rolled his eyes and adjusted his robes in the mirror. Voldemort had bought them, as he had most of the clothes Harry wore now, but these were more elaborate and nearly the dark green color of the ones Harry had worn to the Yule Ball, with a few gold accents. “I told you, I’m not going to let them be rude to me. And you read the speech I’m giving. What in that sounds martyr-like to you?”

Voldemort came up beside him and glared at him in the mirror. Harry rolled his eyes at him. “Why have you switched back to English?”

“Have to practice, don’t I?” Harry gave another shrug, and finally, he hoped, settled the itchy robes fully in place, so that they wouldn’t torment him with the desire to scratch his shoulders and arse while in public. “I can’t give the speech in Parseltongue. They wouldn’t understand it.”

“You would not forget how to speak English if you only spoke Parseltongue to me.”

Harry didn’t bother responding. He was silently staring at himself in the mirror, thinking about the way he’d sat beside Voldemort in public at Justin’s trial, and the “interviews” with Skeeter in the past, and how he had behaved in his trial for underage magic in front of the Wizengamot.

He had been a victim of sorts, each time. Oh, maybe not at Justin’s trial, but if anyone had given him thought, it was only as Voldemort’s prop. They’d probably assumed he was pleased to see “justice” done, or that he didn’t want to be there but Voldemort had dragged him along.

If Harry was going to be any good at all as an advocate for more merciful laws—and maybe true democracy again at some point—then he would have to stand on his own, and show his strength.

He stepped away from the mirror and turned around. Voldemort was eyeing him in a way that said, even more than the desire flooding the bond, how much he would like to turn their day out into a day in.

“Don’t worry,” Harry said. “They’re going to have other things to think about than what language I’m speaking by the time I’m done.”

*

They made the public appearance at Hogwarts, in front of the castle, close to the lake. Harry kept his eyes turned away from the charred remains of Dumbledore’s tomb. Voldemort hadn’t let that stand long after he’d taken power, although Harry didn’t know for sure when he’d destroyed the last pieces of it.

For now, all his attention had to be on the people who were staring up at him, on top of the earthen platform Voldemort had raised, and all his memory had to go to the words he planned to recite.

His eyes swept the crowd again and again, pausing on the gaggle of redheads near the back. He had thought Bill and Fleur might be here—and they were, near the front—but he had no idea why Molly and Fred and George and Arthur were here. Maybe Percy and Ginny, too, but Harry couldn’t make them out for certain.

Harry stared for a second, and then shook his head. No. He couldn’t let it distract him. If someone did attack, then he had a plan. But otherwise, he would simply go about what he had already decided on, and not alter his plans because they had unexpected people in the audience.

Voldemort raised his wand and caused a deafening bang to rise into the sky, complete with blue and purple sparks. More than one person gasped and then fell silent. Voldemort stepped forwards, his black robes flowing around him, sweeping his head back and forth in a way that emphasized the serpentine length of his neck.

“My husband, Harry Potter-Gaunt, wishes to address you,” he said, giving a long hiss on the last words.

Harry cleared his throat as other eyes turned to him, and flourished his wand, casting a Sonorus Charm. He went slowly enough that he was sure most people recognized the spell, and more than one person recognized the holly wood of his wand. He saw frowns and murmurs circulating, and barely refrained from smiling. So his feeling that people had thought he wasn’t allowed to use magic anymore had been right.

“You know as well as I do that this marriage wasn’t my choice,” he said bluntly, making those widening eyes come back to him. “However, I went along with it because I believed it would bring peace to our world. I realize now that was a foolish, naïve belief. Just because a few people make vows doesn’t mean everyone does. And without the feeling of a majority of people in Britain that they are fairly represented and can be heard, we won’t have peace.”

“Traitor!” screamed someone near the back of the crowd. It sounded like one of the twins.

Harry turned and stared in the direction of that voice. “Oh?” he asked. “And what would you have called me if I’d refused to accept the marriage? You’d have screamed about me being a traitor, then, too, and a coward, and probably several dozen other names that I can’t think of. No matter what choice I make, someone hates me.” Harry shook his head, eyes still locked on that part of the crowd, the Weasleys’ pale faces. “So, I’ve decided that my goal can’t be making sure that people don’t hate me.”

The crowd was silent.

“I plan to provide a path of appeal for those who feel they cannot exist in peace under the new regime, but are reluctant to approach my husband because of—past conflicts,” Harry said, and exchanged a glance with Voldemort, as they’d planned. Voldemort’s eyes were bright, devouring red, but he managed to look amused enough, Harry thought. It had to be clear that no matter what, Harry didn’t plan on going behind Voldemort’s back or fighting him. “Bring your arguments, your ideas, your suggestions for improvements, your complaints, to me. There will be two days a month, the first and the fifteenth, when I’ll be available, here, for you to do that. People who are rude can’t appeal to me again for an entire year. People who try to attack me will be thrown in Azkaban.”

There was more silence, but Harry thought it was purely stunned this time. He glanced back and forth, waiting for the first objection.

There was a hand waving madly from the middle of the crowd. Harry squinted at it and snorted when he saw it holding a green quill.

“Yes, Rita?” he asked.

“Does this mean that you’re happy as the husband of the Dark Lord?” she asked breathlessly, her glasses sliding down as she tried to stand up high enough for Harry to see her face. “That you’ve accepted his protection and the deeply romantic declaration we all saw when the translation of your wedding vows was printed in the paper?”

“It means I’ve accepted the position that most of wizarding Britain thought they were forcing me into,” Harry said. He flicked his wand, and Rita’s green quill flew out of her hand to hang above their heads. Harry set fire to it with the next flick. “And it means that I’ve accepted that you can’t just write whatever you want about me.”

“What about freedom of the press?” demanded someone who probably thought they were anonymous in the flow of people.

Harry glanced up and followed Voldemort’s line of sight to where Ginny was standing. She wasn’t with her family, after all. “It was barely freedom in the first place,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “The Daily Prophet printed lies at the government’s direction, and most of you ate it up, as long as it concerned me and said what you wanted to believe. But I should say that I’ll be happy to give honest interviews, if it’s to someone other than Rita Skeeter and they use parchment and a quill spelled for honesty.”

“How can we trust them?” shouted someone who might have been Seamus Finnigan.

Harry shrugged. “It’s your choice whether or not to trust them, just like it’s your choice whether or not to appeal to me. I’m providing you an option. No one can force you to take it.”

A figure sprinted around the edge of the crowd, aiming a green-glowing wand at him. Harry sighed as they slammed against the wards that Voldemort had put up around the earth platform he’d raised, to remain invisible unless needed, and fell to the ground, knocked unconscious more effectively than with a Stunner. He didn’t know them, and he didn’t have to pretend indifference as a few Death Eaters hurried over to escort them to Azkaban.

There was silence. Harry leaned forwards a little and held as many pairs of eyes as would look at him. “I meant what I said. I’m trying to change things, but if you try to kill me, the only thing that will change for you is a few more Dementors in your daily existence.” He stepped back, and the wards flared and became invisible once more.

“I was your martyr,” Harry told them. “Your slave. Your celebrity. Your shield to hide behind. Now I’m one of your rulers. I know the change is going to be hard for some of you, but this is what you were signing up for when you told me to get married to the Dark Lord Voldemort. Get used to it.” He lifted his head, took a deep breath, and added in Parseltongue, “And never forget that I am like him in more than one way.”

It didn’t matter that they couldn’t understand it. They cowered as Harry stepped down from the platform, and fell back without trying to get near as Harry and Voldemort walked towards the Hogwarts gates.

Maybe some of those stares were accusing. Harry didn’t think he owed it to them to look around.

*

“Are you happy?”

Harry glanced up from contemplating the sea. They were in the sitting room that he had seen on their first visit, when he peered inside the house. Nagini was curled up on the floor between their chairs, asleep, and Harry had been alternating between a book on Runes, the seaside view, and a glass of wine for the last half-hour.

“The bond can’t tell you?” he asked curiously.

“Sometimes I prefer to hear the answer from your own lips.”

Harry thought about it, listening to the crashing of the sea and Voldemort’s soft breathing, the sound of the fire crackling, the swirling of the wine in his glass, the soft noise of the wind against the house.

“It’s a mixed and complicated happiness,” he said finally. “And there are plenty of things that I wish hadn’t happened. But I am happy, yes.” He shot Voldemort a smile and bent his head back over the book.

Voldemort’s happiness, when it came, felt like spring snow.

Harry smiled, and continued reading.

The End.