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lomonaaerenTitle: Rotten Ice
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: AU (James Potter defeated Voldemort), mentions of torture, suicidal thoughts, angst, dysfunctional family, canon-level child abuse, present tense
Pairings: Pre-Harry/Voldemort, mentions of James/Lily and James/OFC
Wordcount: 2900
Summary: Harry, son of James Potter, the man who defeated Voldemort, has always thought that someday, the returned Voldemort would capture him and kill him to torment his father. In a way, it’s a relief that it’s happened. Trust even this to not to go the way Harry thinks it will.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. “Rotten ice” is the name for ice that is disintegrating and is easy to break.
Rotten Ice
Harry flexes his hands on the arms of the wooden chair for a moment, and ends up shrugging. The Death Eaters have done a pretty good job of binding him with a modified version of Incarcerous that only ties up one limb at a time but still means he can’t move. He leans back and looks around.
The room he’s in is less of a torture chamber than he was picturing. The walls are blank grey stone, sure, but there are marks on the wooden floor as if furniture was there recently, and the torches flicker with red-gold light instead of some color enchantment that would make them look more sinister. There’s even a marble fireplace in the corner.
Harry wonders if he should be expecting rescue to come through it. Then he shakes his head. He knows how this will go, the way it’s gone in his dreams for years.
Voldemort returned in Harry’s fourth year after somehow getting hold of James Potter’s blood. The Man-Who-Conquered couldn’t keep Harry safe forever. Harry has always known it. He’s known that Voldemort will capture him and either keep him hostage to try and force his dad’s compliance or kill him to torture Dad.
It’ll end up being the latter, Harry thinks, staring at the blank stone ceiling. Dad will never comply with Voldemort no matter what.
Oh, well. At least it didn’t happen until Harry was seventeen. He had a good portion of life.
The door bangs open. Harry blinks and looks back at it. A tall woman in a black robe, who is probably Bellatrix Lestrange if her resemblance to Sirius means anything, stalks in and stares at him, then giggles. She turns and falls into a deep curtsey as Voldemort follows her.
Harry swallows and lowers his eyes. Voldemort looks almost exactly like the one newspaper photograph Harry has ever seen of him, which happened when Voldemort broke into the Department of Mysteries in search of something and Dad found and dueled him. Pale skin, unnaturally tall, no nose, vestigial lips, no hair. Burning red eyes.
Harry knows Voldemort is a Legilimens. He’ll read Harry’s mind to try to figure out Dad’s secrets before he kills him. Well, joke’s on him. Dad knew that could happen and has left Harry out of every conversation about the war, the Order of the Phoenix, defenses, safehouses, battle plans, Auror tactics, or anything similar.
Dad loves Harry, Harry knows that. But he loves war better.
“Leave us, Bellatrix,” Voldemort says, after a long moment of staring at Harry. He assumed Voldemort would say something before this, so that’s a bit bizarre. But Harry keeps sitting there, staring at the floor, and after a bit of cackling, Lestrange leaves.
Voldemort paces slowly towards Harry. Harry just keeps staring at the floor. Yes, he’ll have his mind read, of course he will, but now that he’s here, he can put off the pain for a few seconds.
“Do you know why I have captured you, Harry Potter?” Voldemort asks at last, in the smooth, half-sibilant voice that Dad described.
Harry blinks, surprised by the oddly civil question, but answers. “You want to use me against my father.”
Voldemort pauses. Then he says, “That is correct.” He reaches out and places his pale wand beneath Harry’s chin, tilting his face up. Harry swallows and goes with it. He wonders how much time he has left. Minutes? Hours?
He hopes it isn’t hours. He would prefer to die without torture. Maybe Voldemort will use the Killing Curse on him, and it will be over soon.
It’s not that he wants to die, exactly. It’s that he’s been anticipating this all his life ever since he found out Dad was Voldemort’s enemy, and at least when it’s happened, Harry won’t ever be waiting for it to happen again.
Voldemort studies him from close at hand. Harry wonders idly if he’s looking for a resemblance to his enemy. He’ll find it, for sure. Harry is Dad’s son, with Dad’s hair and face shape and poor eyesight. Only his eyes are his mum’s. Harry wishes he remembered her, but she died the night Voldemort invaded their house in his first body and before Dad came charging up the stairs and defeated him.
“Legilimens,” Voldemort says softly.
Harry grits his teeth as the razored power sweeps into his mind. It hurts. But not as much as it probably could have, he thinks. Voldemort won’t want to shred Harry’s thoughts or memories before he’s found Dad’s secrets.
Voldemort rifles through Harry’s memories. Harry watches them as they fly by: his Sorting into Gryffindor that he had to beg the Hat for, smiling a fake smile at Dad’s wedding to Harry’s stepmother Elinor Vane, being shoved out of rooms where the adults wanted to talk, Dad staring at him with an unhappy expression as Harry grew older, flying as Gryffindor Seeker, chatting with the Quidditch teammates who are really his only friends because most people just want to ask Harry questions about Dad…
Voldemort finds and lingers on one memory. Harry watches it play out, mildly curious. It seems odd that Voldemort would be interested in something this old, instead of something more recent, but whatever. He doesn’t pretend to understand the motivations of Dark Lords.
*
“But someday—Prongs, Harry has to learn how to fight You-Know-Who if he’s going to be a target for him—”
“No!” Dad’s hand slams into the side of the doorframe. Harry held his breath and stands still. He’ll be sent away if Dad notices he’s there. “You don’t understand, Sirius. You-Know-Who would find it too easy to get information from him.”
“Well, then teach him Occlumency!”
“Not that way! There’s nothing we could teach him that would stand up against the powers that You-Know-Who could bring to bear.” Dad’s voice lowers, and Harry leans up against the wall, straining to hear. “There’s a special—I don’t really understand it, but Albus examined Harry himself. He says You-Know-Who could learn—”
“What are you doing here, Harry?”
Harry jumps guiltily and spins around to face Remus. And that’s the end of his listening. Dad comes out with a frown and shoos Harry away “to play or something,” and then pulls Remus into the drawing room and closes the door behind him.
Harry doesn’t understand, but he’s only seven. He supposes he might understand when he’s older.
*
Harry comes back to himself to find that his mind still doesn’t really hurt, and that Voldemort is standing in front of him.
Laughing.
Harry swallows. He hopes that he hasn’t somehow told Voldemort something important without meaning to. But he doesn’t see how he could have. It’s a conversation from a long time ago whose subject Harry doesn’t even know.
“Oh, Harry,” Voldemort says softly, and the use of his first name shocks Harry so much that he meets Voldemort’s eyes. They’re bright and glittering. “Do you understand the gift you have given me?”
“No?”
“You will, someday.” Voldemort still looks immensely amused. He conjures a chair and sits in it in front of Harry, crossing his legs so like a normal person that Harry blinks in shock. “In the meantime, I wish to talk to you about your father’s second family.”
Harry knows that his face has tightened. He just nods.
“I could see in your memory that you don’t like your stepmother,” Voldemort says, his voice soft, coaxing. “Why is that? Does she treat you unkindly? I didn’t see many memories of interactions between you and her at all.”
Harry snorts. Can’t help it, even if there’s a murderous Dark Lord in front of him. “No. Ever since she and Dad got married after my first year at Hogwarts, they’ve packed me off to my mum’s Muggle relatives during the summer. They pay them and everything.”
He keeps an eye on Voldemort, waiting for him to burst out shouting “Mudblood!” or something at the reminder that Harry’s mum was Muggleborn, but Voldemort just tilts his head curiously. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if he could get it all the way upside-down, like an owl. “Why do they do that?”
“Dad says it’s less awkward.” Harry sounds bitter, he knows he does, but what exactly is Voldemort going to do with this? Write to Dad and tell him that he knows Harry and Stepmother Elinor don’t get along? “He says I wouldn’t ‘integrate well’ with my younger half-siblings, and my stepmother resents the memory of my mother.”
“So he decides you should pay the price?”
Harry shrugs and glances aside.
“No, no, Harry, do look at me, this is fascinating,” Voldemort says, which makes Harry gape at him. What, doesn’t he get enough family drama from his Death Eaters or something? “Why did he choose this? Why did you go along with this?”
“I broke all the windows in Prongs’s Place the first time he told me,” Harry says, with a certain level of satisfaction. “But Stepmother Elinor just said that was a sign I was dangerous to be around little kids and had to spend time away from them.”
He supposes it’s kind of a relief to tell all of this to someone before he dies. None of his friends really want to listen; the times he tried to tell Fred and George, they made awkward jokes and changed the subject.
No one wants to believe that heroic Auror James Potter, the Man-Who-Conquered, is kind of a shitty dad. That he loves Harry, but also loves his second wife and his children with her more.
Because they’re alive, something in Harry’s head says. And she’s dead. And he thinks that he can’t love you as much with her gone, or something.
It’s a thought that Harry’s often had before. But he doesn’t know if it’s true. It just makes some things make more sense.
It might also just be that James Potter has lost the ability to face up to his mistakes. He listened to his second wife once, and rather than admit he made a mistake when he did, it’s easier to go on pretending she’s right.
“Your mother’s Muggle relatives?”
Harry blinks his eyes and comes back to the room with Voldemort. Huh, he actually forgot that he was sitting with a man who wants to kill him. Well, in the end Harry supposes death will also be a relief because he won’t be thinking about his dad anymore.
“They didn’t treat me well,” Harry says, and it’s a relief to say that, too. “They kept me locked in a small bedroom most of the time, and they made me do chores, and called me a freak, and tried to deny me food.”
“Tried.”
“I can use enough wandless magic to open locks and go down and get food out of the refrigerator. And now that you’ve kidnapped me, I know I won’t ever have to see them again.” Harry thought Dad might try to insist Harry stay with them this summer, although he’s seventeen and of age.
Now, since Harry went into the Forbidden Forest to try and rescue a Gryffindor student supposedly stuck there and got captured, it won’t matter anymore. So many things don’t.
Voldemort grins, a sharp, disturbing smile. “And you told your father about this?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he say?”
“That he can’t have me living with him when I’m so resentful of my stepmother and her kids, and it’s not like the Dursleys beat me.”
Harry flexes his hands. The bonds tying him to the arms of the chair are starting to hurt. But again, he reminds himself that it could be worse.
Voldemort lounges back in his chair, as at home as a snake in a burrow. “What would you say, Harry Potter, if I told you that I do not intend to kill you?”
Harry blinks. “I’d tell you that my father will never give in to whatever you intend to do with me. It won’t matter if you cut me up piece by piece while he watches or keep me as a hostage for the rest of my life. He cares more about fighting this war than he does about me dying.”
Voldemort laughs quietly, a sound that peters out in delighted hissing. “It is for yourself that I wish to keep you, not him.”
“What? Why?”
“You understand me when I speak this way, don’t you?”
Harry freezes, his eyes widening. Yes, he does, but he always intended to keep that ability secret and quiet. Has kept it secret and quiet, until he met someone who could see into his mind. “I—yes.”
Voldemort throws his head back and laughs again. Harry just keeps staring. If Voldemort tortures him for disrespect, or kills him for it, then it’s no more than Harry was expecting in the first place. But really, he wants to know why speaking the language of snakes is that big a deal to the man.
If anything, Harry would have thought that Voldemort would want to kill another Parselmouth because he’d think of them as competition.
“You think that I could help you because I speak Parseltongue? I’m not that good in school, you know.”
“It is more a sign of what your speaking Parseltongue means, when neither of your parents could do it,” Voldemort hisses at him. “I will tell you someday. And I know that you have not tried in school because you have had poor instruction, and you have decided there was little point in trying when you would die young. But if I could remove the threat of hovering death? If I could say that you would live if you joined my side?”
“I…”
Harry has to fight to think that he might live. He didn’t realize, until now, how thoroughly he was resigned to dying.
But what does he have to lose, really? A family who’s already thoroughly rejected him? A father who would have given him up for lost the minute he heard Harry was captured? Friends who don’t know the real him at all, who know nothing important about him except his skills at Quidditch?
Harry licks his lips. “Would your Death Eaters torture me or kill me?”
“They do what I tell them.” Voldemort waves a negligent hand. “And I will shelter you within my protection, Harry. I mean it.”
Harry closes his eyes. It’s a bad idea. He knows it’s a bad idea.
But he’s out of better ones. He’s been captured, and Voldemort will only kill him if Harry refuses, not let him go. Or, at best, make a torture toy of him until he dies. Dad won’t mount a rescue. He spent Harry’s entire childhood telling him the war was more important than one person, and that even other Aurors had sacrificed their lives for Dad, because Dad had to live or the war would be over when Voldemort returned. Harry thinks maybe Dad would sacrifice himself for Stepmother Elinor, for little Emily and Vance, but maybe not.
And when it comes down to it, Harry wants to live. He just never thought there was a chance and there was no point in wishing for things he couldn’t have.
He opens his eyes, sighs a little, reminds himself that maybe Voldemort will kill him later when he figures out Harry is actually useless but later isn’t today, and replies, “I accept.”
*
Lord Voldemort can feel the expansion of joy in his chest, and it is hard to keep in the laughter.
A Horcrux. A human Horcrux.
Those fools never understood the priceless treasure they were raising, living with, letting go to Hogwarts without protection as if he were nothing more than ordinary boy.
They knew something was wrong, of course. It’s why they didn’t tell Harry anything, and shunted him aside from conversations about the war, because they were afraid that secrets would leak down the connection between his mind and Lord Voldemort’s. It’s why they didn’t try that hard to protect him, or get him to protect himself. Harry is a security risk whom they were too squeamish to kill because he was a child, but whom they didn’t particularly care about surviving.
They should have looked further, Lord Voldemort thinks, exultant, as he unbinds Harry from the chair and has him kneel before him. They should have realized that here is the key to the war, the child of prophecy, instead of simply deciding that because James Potter blew apart my body before the backlash of the Killing Curse could destroy it, the prophecy must have been mistaken and he was the one chosen to face me.
The prophecy was real, all along. And before him is a young man with eyes the color of poison and the language of snakes on his tongue.
A young man Lord Voldemort coveted the instant he guessed what he was and reached out with his own magic to confirm the presence of the Horcrux within Harry. A young man who could easily do more than stand at his side. A young man who could provide pleasure of many different kinds.
Lord Voldemort smiles darkly to think of it. Perhaps he will have Harry share in the pleasure of killing James Potter as well as in the pleasure of the bed.
By the time that it comes to that, Harry will likely be ready.
“Repeat after me,” Lord Voldemort hisses, and Harry nods and responds. Lord Voldemort continues to work on controlling his laughter. Potter has lost, lost the instant he alienated Harry, and he doesn’t even know it. “I will follow my lord faithfully…”
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: AU (James Potter defeated Voldemort), mentions of torture, suicidal thoughts, angst, dysfunctional family, canon-level child abuse, present tense
Pairings: Pre-Harry/Voldemort, mentions of James/Lily and James/OFC
Wordcount: 2900
Summary: Harry, son of James Potter, the man who defeated Voldemort, has always thought that someday, the returned Voldemort would capture him and kill him to torment his father. In a way, it’s a relief that it’s happened. Trust even this to not to go the way Harry thinks it will.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. “Rotten ice” is the name for ice that is disintegrating and is easy to break.
Rotten Ice
Harry flexes his hands on the arms of the wooden chair for a moment, and ends up shrugging. The Death Eaters have done a pretty good job of binding him with a modified version of Incarcerous that only ties up one limb at a time but still means he can’t move. He leans back and looks around.
The room he’s in is less of a torture chamber than he was picturing. The walls are blank grey stone, sure, but there are marks on the wooden floor as if furniture was there recently, and the torches flicker with red-gold light instead of some color enchantment that would make them look more sinister. There’s even a marble fireplace in the corner.
Harry wonders if he should be expecting rescue to come through it. Then he shakes his head. He knows how this will go, the way it’s gone in his dreams for years.
Voldemort returned in Harry’s fourth year after somehow getting hold of James Potter’s blood. The Man-Who-Conquered couldn’t keep Harry safe forever. Harry has always known it. He’s known that Voldemort will capture him and either keep him hostage to try and force his dad’s compliance or kill him to torture Dad.
It’ll end up being the latter, Harry thinks, staring at the blank stone ceiling. Dad will never comply with Voldemort no matter what.
Oh, well. At least it didn’t happen until Harry was seventeen. He had a good portion of life.
The door bangs open. Harry blinks and looks back at it. A tall woman in a black robe, who is probably Bellatrix Lestrange if her resemblance to Sirius means anything, stalks in and stares at him, then giggles. She turns and falls into a deep curtsey as Voldemort follows her.
Harry swallows and lowers his eyes. Voldemort looks almost exactly like the one newspaper photograph Harry has ever seen of him, which happened when Voldemort broke into the Department of Mysteries in search of something and Dad found and dueled him. Pale skin, unnaturally tall, no nose, vestigial lips, no hair. Burning red eyes.
Harry knows Voldemort is a Legilimens. He’ll read Harry’s mind to try to figure out Dad’s secrets before he kills him. Well, joke’s on him. Dad knew that could happen and has left Harry out of every conversation about the war, the Order of the Phoenix, defenses, safehouses, battle plans, Auror tactics, or anything similar.
Dad loves Harry, Harry knows that. But he loves war better.
“Leave us, Bellatrix,” Voldemort says, after a long moment of staring at Harry. He assumed Voldemort would say something before this, so that’s a bit bizarre. But Harry keeps sitting there, staring at the floor, and after a bit of cackling, Lestrange leaves.
Voldemort paces slowly towards Harry. Harry just keeps staring at the floor. Yes, he’ll have his mind read, of course he will, but now that he’s here, he can put off the pain for a few seconds.
“Do you know why I have captured you, Harry Potter?” Voldemort asks at last, in the smooth, half-sibilant voice that Dad described.
Harry blinks, surprised by the oddly civil question, but answers. “You want to use me against my father.”
Voldemort pauses. Then he says, “That is correct.” He reaches out and places his pale wand beneath Harry’s chin, tilting his face up. Harry swallows and goes with it. He wonders how much time he has left. Minutes? Hours?
He hopes it isn’t hours. He would prefer to die without torture. Maybe Voldemort will use the Killing Curse on him, and it will be over soon.
It’s not that he wants to die, exactly. It’s that he’s been anticipating this all his life ever since he found out Dad was Voldemort’s enemy, and at least when it’s happened, Harry won’t ever be waiting for it to happen again.
Voldemort studies him from close at hand. Harry wonders idly if he’s looking for a resemblance to his enemy. He’ll find it, for sure. Harry is Dad’s son, with Dad’s hair and face shape and poor eyesight. Only his eyes are his mum’s. Harry wishes he remembered her, but she died the night Voldemort invaded their house in his first body and before Dad came charging up the stairs and defeated him.
“Legilimens,” Voldemort says softly.
Harry grits his teeth as the razored power sweeps into his mind. It hurts. But not as much as it probably could have, he thinks. Voldemort won’t want to shred Harry’s thoughts or memories before he’s found Dad’s secrets.
Voldemort rifles through Harry’s memories. Harry watches them as they fly by: his Sorting into Gryffindor that he had to beg the Hat for, smiling a fake smile at Dad’s wedding to Harry’s stepmother Elinor Vane, being shoved out of rooms where the adults wanted to talk, Dad staring at him with an unhappy expression as Harry grew older, flying as Gryffindor Seeker, chatting with the Quidditch teammates who are really his only friends because most people just want to ask Harry questions about Dad…
Voldemort finds and lingers on one memory. Harry watches it play out, mildly curious. It seems odd that Voldemort would be interested in something this old, instead of something more recent, but whatever. He doesn’t pretend to understand the motivations of Dark Lords.
*
“But someday—Prongs, Harry has to learn how to fight You-Know-Who if he’s going to be a target for him—”
“No!” Dad’s hand slams into the side of the doorframe. Harry held his breath and stands still. He’ll be sent away if Dad notices he’s there. “You don’t understand, Sirius. You-Know-Who would find it too easy to get information from him.”
“Well, then teach him Occlumency!”
“Not that way! There’s nothing we could teach him that would stand up against the powers that You-Know-Who could bring to bear.” Dad’s voice lowers, and Harry leans up against the wall, straining to hear. “There’s a special—I don’t really understand it, but Albus examined Harry himself. He says You-Know-Who could learn—”
“What are you doing here, Harry?”
Harry jumps guiltily and spins around to face Remus. And that’s the end of his listening. Dad comes out with a frown and shoos Harry away “to play or something,” and then pulls Remus into the drawing room and closes the door behind him.
Harry doesn’t understand, but he’s only seven. He supposes he might understand when he’s older.
*
Harry comes back to himself to find that his mind still doesn’t really hurt, and that Voldemort is standing in front of him.
Laughing.
Harry swallows. He hopes that he hasn’t somehow told Voldemort something important without meaning to. But he doesn’t see how he could have. It’s a conversation from a long time ago whose subject Harry doesn’t even know.
“Oh, Harry,” Voldemort says softly, and the use of his first name shocks Harry so much that he meets Voldemort’s eyes. They’re bright and glittering. “Do you understand the gift you have given me?”
“No?”
“You will, someday.” Voldemort still looks immensely amused. He conjures a chair and sits in it in front of Harry, crossing his legs so like a normal person that Harry blinks in shock. “In the meantime, I wish to talk to you about your father’s second family.”
Harry knows that his face has tightened. He just nods.
“I could see in your memory that you don’t like your stepmother,” Voldemort says, his voice soft, coaxing. “Why is that? Does she treat you unkindly? I didn’t see many memories of interactions between you and her at all.”
Harry snorts. Can’t help it, even if there’s a murderous Dark Lord in front of him. “No. Ever since she and Dad got married after my first year at Hogwarts, they’ve packed me off to my mum’s Muggle relatives during the summer. They pay them and everything.”
He keeps an eye on Voldemort, waiting for him to burst out shouting “Mudblood!” or something at the reminder that Harry’s mum was Muggleborn, but Voldemort just tilts his head curiously. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if he could get it all the way upside-down, like an owl. “Why do they do that?”
“Dad says it’s less awkward.” Harry sounds bitter, he knows he does, but what exactly is Voldemort going to do with this? Write to Dad and tell him that he knows Harry and Stepmother Elinor don’t get along? “He says I wouldn’t ‘integrate well’ with my younger half-siblings, and my stepmother resents the memory of my mother.”
“So he decides you should pay the price?”
Harry shrugs and glances aside.
“No, no, Harry, do look at me, this is fascinating,” Voldemort says, which makes Harry gape at him. What, doesn’t he get enough family drama from his Death Eaters or something? “Why did he choose this? Why did you go along with this?”
“I broke all the windows in Prongs’s Place the first time he told me,” Harry says, with a certain level of satisfaction. “But Stepmother Elinor just said that was a sign I was dangerous to be around little kids and had to spend time away from them.”
He supposes it’s kind of a relief to tell all of this to someone before he dies. None of his friends really want to listen; the times he tried to tell Fred and George, they made awkward jokes and changed the subject.
No one wants to believe that heroic Auror James Potter, the Man-Who-Conquered, is kind of a shitty dad. That he loves Harry, but also loves his second wife and his children with her more.
Because they’re alive, something in Harry’s head says. And she’s dead. And he thinks that he can’t love you as much with her gone, or something.
It’s a thought that Harry’s often had before. But he doesn’t know if it’s true. It just makes some things make more sense.
It might also just be that James Potter has lost the ability to face up to his mistakes. He listened to his second wife once, and rather than admit he made a mistake when he did, it’s easier to go on pretending she’s right.
“Your mother’s Muggle relatives?”
Harry blinks his eyes and comes back to the room with Voldemort. Huh, he actually forgot that he was sitting with a man who wants to kill him. Well, in the end Harry supposes death will also be a relief because he won’t be thinking about his dad anymore.
“They didn’t treat me well,” Harry says, and it’s a relief to say that, too. “They kept me locked in a small bedroom most of the time, and they made me do chores, and called me a freak, and tried to deny me food.”
“Tried.”
“I can use enough wandless magic to open locks and go down and get food out of the refrigerator. And now that you’ve kidnapped me, I know I won’t ever have to see them again.” Harry thought Dad might try to insist Harry stay with them this summer, although he’s seventeen and of age.
Now, since Harry went into the Forbidden Forest to try and rescue a Gryffindor student supposedly stuck there and got captured, it won’t matter anymore. So many things don’t.
Voldemort grins, a sharp, disturbing smile. “And you told your father about this?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he say?”
“That he can’t have me living with him when I’m so resentful of my stepmother and her kids, and it’s not like the Dursleys beat me.”
Harry flexes his hands. The bonds tying him to the arms of the chair are starting to hurt. But again, he reminds himself that it could be worse.
Voldemort lounges back in his chair, as at home as a snake in a burrow. “What would you say, Harry Potter, if I told you that I do not intend to kill you?”
Harry blinks. “I’d tell you that my father will never give in to whatever you intend to do with me. It won’t matter if you cut me up piece by piece while he watches or keep me as a hostage for the rest of my life. He cares more about fighting this war than he does about me dying.”
Voldemort laughs quietly, a sound that peters out in delighted hissing. “It is for yourself that I wish to keep you, not him.”
“What? Why?”
“You understand me when I speak this way, don’t you?”
Harry freezes, his eyes widening. Yes, he does, but he always intended to keep that ability secret and quiet. Has kept it secret and quiet, until he met someone who could see into his mind. “I—yes.”
Voldemort throws his head back and laughs again. Harry just keeps staring. If Voldemort tortures him for disrespect, or kills him for it, then it’s no more than Harry was expecting in the first place. But really, he wants to know why speaking the language of snakes is that big a deal to the man.
If anything, Harry would have thought that Voldemort would want to kill another Parselmouth because he’d think of them as competition.
“You think that I could help you because I speak Parseltongue? I’m not that good in school, you know.”
“It is more a sign of what your speaking Parseltongue means, when neither of your parents could do it,” Voldemort hisses at him. “I will tell you someday. And I know that you have not tried in school because you have had poor instruction, and you have decided there was little point in trying when you would die young. But if I could remove the threat of hovering death? If I could say that you would live if you joined my side?”
“I…”
Harry has to fight to think that he might live. He didn’t realize, until now, how thoroughly he was resigned to dying.
But what does he have to lose, really? A family who’s already thoroughly rejected him? A father who would have given him up for lost the minute he heard Harry was captured? Friends who don’t know the real him at all, who know nothing important about him except his skills at Quidditch?
Harry licks his lips. “Would your Death Eaters torture me or kill me?”
“They do what I tell them.” Voldemort waves a negligent hand. “And I will shelter you within my protection, Harry. I mean it.”
Harry closes his eyes. It’s a bad idea. He knows it’s a bad idea.
But he’s out of better ones. He’s been captured, and Voldemort will only kill him if Harry refuses, not let him go. Or, at best, make a torture toy of him until he dies. Dad won’t mount a rescue. He spent Harry’s entire childhood telling him the war was more important than one person, and that even other Aurors had sacrificed their lives for Dad, because Dad had to live or the war would be over when Voldemort returned. Harry thinks maybe Dad would sacrifice himself for Stepmother Elinor, for little Emily and Vance, but maybe not.
And when it comes down to it, Harry wants to live. He just never thought there was a chance and there was no point in wishing for things he couldn’t have.
He opens his eyes, sighs a little, reminds himself that maybe Voldemort will kill him later when he figures out Harry is actually useless but later isn’t today, and replies, “I accept.”
*
Lord Voldemort can feel the expansion of joy in his chest, and it is hard to keep in the laughter.
A Horcrux. A human Horcrux.
Those fools never understood the priceless treasure they were raising, living with, letting go to Hogwarts without protection as if he were nothing more than ordinary boy.
They knew something was wrong, of course. It’s why they didn’t tell Harry anything, and shunted him aside from conversations about the war, because they were afraid that secrets would leak down the connection between his mind and Lord Voldemort’s. It’s why they didn’t try that hard to protect him, or get him to protect himself. Harry is a security risk whom they were too squeamish to kill because he was a child, but whom they didn’t particularly care about surviving.
They should have looked further, Lord Voldemort thinks, exultant, as he unbinds Harry from the chair and has him kneel before him. They should have realized that here is the key to the war, the child of prophecy, instead of simply deciding that because James Potter blew apart my body before the backlash of the Killing Curse could destroy it, the prophecy must have been mistaken and he was the one chosen to face me.
The prophecy was real, all along. And before him is a young man with eyes the color of poison and the language of snakes on his tongue.
A young man Lord Voldemort coveted the instant he guessed what he was and reached out with his own magic to confirm the presence of the Horcrux within Harry. A young man who could easily do more than stand at his side. A young man who could provide pleasure of many different kinds.
Lord Voldemort smiles darkly to think of it. Perhaps he will have Harry share in the pleasure of killing James Potter as well as in the pleasure of the bed.
By the time that it comes to that, Harry will likely be ready.
“Repeat after me,” Lord Voldemort hisses, and Harry nods and responds. Lord Voldemort continues to work on controlling his laughter. Potter has lost, lost the instant he alienated Harry, and he doesn’t even know it. “I will follow my lord faithfully…”
The End.
