![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: Ambush
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Content Notes: AU after HBP, forced marriage, established Harry/Voldemort, gore, torture, violence, dubious consent
Wordcount: This part 4300
Summary: Sequel to “Flank.” Harry said that he could become a path of appeal for those dissatisfied with Voldemort’s rule, and Voldemort’s conscience. It’s up to him to prove that, with a case brought by Ginny Weasley and continued assassination attempts challenging his resolve.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, short chaptered fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is the sequel to my stories “Retreat,” “Advance,” and “Flank,” and will make no sense without them. It should have three or perhaps four chapters, to be posted over the next few days.
Ambush
“I want to ask you a question.”
Voldemort didn’t look up from where he was reading in the chair next to the bed they shared, his legs stretched out in front of him and placed on a small stool covered in embroidered black cloth. The patterns of the embroidery were too small for Harry to see what they were. “Ask.”
“Why is your neck getting longer?”
The Horcrux bond was cold and still between them for a few moments, a pond of cracked ice. Then Voldemort put down his book and gazed at Harry. “I am pleased that you noticed.” He tilted his neck to the side, and yeah, it bent several inches more than it had the last time Harry had paid a lot of attention to it.
“It’s hard not to notice.” Harry laid his own book down—a beginner’s primer in Italian, which Blaise had given him. “Why, though?”
“Not everyone would have noticed. Not most of my Death Eaters.” Voldemort stood and prowled over to Harry, holding eye contact all the way. The bond had once again warmed, and this time slow trickles of pleasure as heavy as blood ran through Harry’s scar. “You remind me every day why you are more precious to me than a Death Eater, Harry.”
Harry maintained eye contact as Voldemort sat down next to him on the bed, running one hand over his leg. “I notice that you still haven’t answered the question,” he muttered. The sibilant hisses of Parseltongue were more familiar to him than English now. If not for Fleur’s and Viktor’s and Blaise’s visits, Harry did wonder if he might have forgotten his native language.
“I am preparing for a ritual,” Voldemort said simply. “Changes in the body are necessary before one enters it, and also as a test of one’s commitment to making the sacrifice.”
Harry felt a knife-bolt of fear pierce him, but he shook it away. He trusted Voldemort, now, enough to believe the man—being—when he said that he wouldn’t give up Harry no matter what, that he valued Harry more than all the rest of his Horcruxes put together. He wouldn’t be the sacrifice.
“No, you will not,” Voldemort said, picking up on his thoughts. He ran his palm across Harry’s shoulder, his fingers cold as the iron grate over the fireplace, and then down to Harry’s hands. “If I could catch your friend Granger, now.”
Harry didn’t bother responding. Thoughts of Ron and Hermione still ignited a storm of sadness. They had pushed him to marry Voldemort to secure the peace, and then, when they’d seen that he was settling into the marriage instead of committing to their impossible plan that he hadn’t known about of getting Voldemort to kill the Horcrux in him, they’d decided he was irredeemably evil and they had to turn their backs on him.
“I would not,” Voldemort admitted, lowering his mouth so that he covered one side of Harry’s collarbone with it. His tongue darted out, the forks on the end of it tickling Harry and making him gasp. “I would not give her so quick a death.”
“There’s my husband, always so kind and merciful,” Harry muttered in English, on purpose, and then gasped again. Voldemort’s teeth had slid into his skin, hollow fangs. Even as he watched, the punctures filled up and began to bleed.
“I leave such things to you, my dear.”
Voldemort tugged roughly at his clothes and limbs, and Harry let him arrange Harry as he liked, pulling him upwards so that his head rested against the pillows and splaying his legs wide. When he was in this kind of mood, he didn’t want Harry to tease him or push back against him or be anything more than a passive receptacle.
Passive I can do, Harry thought, and closed his eyes.
Then he swore as Voldemort bit him again, and peppered the Horcrux bond with irritation as sharp as flying icicles. What the fuck do you want? he snapped mentally.
Look at me, Harry.
Harry opened his eyes and glared. Voldemort held his eyes as he stripped Harry bare, as he conjured lubrication, as he sank into him. Harry kept his legs and arms still, as Voldemort was requesting via what felt like beams of communication traveling through thick air, but he snarled.
Yes, Voldemort whispered down the bond, stay with me, Harry, never leave me again, come with me, be with me, do not retreat, be here…
Harry reached up and clawed at Voldemort’s shoulders. It felt like trying to rip furrows in marble with his fingernails, but Voldemort hissed at him and touched him with lips and tongue and cock and hands and pulled him back, back.
That’s what you’re afraid of, Harry thought later, dazed, after the meteoric moment of their joining when all barriers dissolved between them and made them one creature. Me retreating the way I did when I was first married to you and trying to be the perfect obedient little servant.
Harry wondered how he could convey that that would never happen. He had made his commitment, made his choice. Whether or not they had peace between them, his future was at Voldemort’s side.
*
The owl that soared into the post room was more than vaguely familiar. Harry gaped at it. It was Pigwidgeon.
Of course it was. Harry couldn’t forget the happy, hyperactive little owl Sirius had gifted to Ron. As he looked at Pig hooting and zipping around the room, Harry’s eyes filled with tears. Hedwig was ensconced in the owlery of the house Voldemort had built them, and Harry visited her often, but she didn’t carry his post anymore except to a few carefully vetted people.
Harry reached for the owl.
“Hold, Harry!”
Voldemort glided into the dining room, his eyes fixed on Pig. Harry turned around and put his body between the owl and Voldemort’s wand. “Leave him alone!”
“He was an owl belonging to the Weasleys,” Voldemort said, dropping into English. Harry blinked, stunned. It was days since Voldemort had spoken that language. But he didn’t let the shock move him out of the way. “Have you forgotten the last message from them?”
“That letter was from Hermione,” Harry muttered, but he knew what Voldemort meant. Hermione and Ron had brewed a potion that was meant to kill him, even if they’d tried to make Justin Finch-Fletchley deliver it. “You can cast detection charms. But don’t kill him.”
“You are quick to accuse me of owl-murder,” Voldemort muttered, and aimed his wand.
Pig promptly darted out of the way and zoomed to another corner, then dodged another detection charm from Voldemort and reeled straight towards Harry instead. Voldemort snarled, “Hold still, you ridiculous bird,” and cast again. It missed as Pig darted up to the ceiling and flew another circle with shrill, excited hoots.
Harry clapped a hand over his mouth. “He thinks it’s a game,” he managed to choke out. Not that holding in the laughter did much good when Voldemort could feel it and everything else Harry felt through their Horcrux bond.
“He will come here,” Voldemort hissed, and cast a Summoning Charm with nothing more than a flick of his fingers. Harry wasn’t sure how he could tell it was a Summoning Charm, but he did know.
Pig flew towards the ceiling again, looped around, and also dodged that charm. Then he swooped over the table, dropped the letter in the marmalade, and landed on the windowsill, enthusiastically twitching his tail feathers.
Voldemort stared at him, and then turned to Harry. “What kind of bird is that?”
“A scops owl,” Harry said innocently, firing detection charms at the letter.
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, no, not really. I did think that you might not know. After all, they’re hardly the kind of owls the Great and Powerful Lord Voldemort would choose to carry his post.”
Harry froze a moment after he said it. Being more comfortable with Voldemort and not retreating into his own mind was one thing. Even having sex was one thing, because he had accepted not long after he married Voldemort that he wouldn’t be left alone in his own head or body. But teasing was another.
Pleasure like honey ran through his scar, and Harry cautiously relaxed. The lighter and sweeter it felt, the less dangerous Voldemort was feeling at that moment to the world around him.
“I can sense nothing from the letter. Open it, and let us see what the blood traitors want.”
Harry rolled his eyes at the blood traitor comment, but gladly reached for the letter. It was the first one he’d had in a while that Voldemort hadn’t read first, and he balanced it on his palm for several seconds before he opened it.
The handwriting inside made his breath catch, but a second later, he realized it wasn’t Ron’s. It was Ginny’s, which looked a bit like Ron’s. Probably understandable, considering their mum must have taught them both how to write, Harry thought, while his mind skittered around the meaning of the words on the page.
Dear Consort Potter-Gaunt,
I have been wronged by the Dark Lord Voldemort. I demand recompense and justice, by the laws newly established that state any Death Eater who wronged a citizen of magical Britain before or after the war can be asked for such a thing. A full trial is necessary.
I ask that the trial be held before the full Wizengamot and that you, Consort Potter-Gaunt, render the final judgment.
I also ask for a visit in person before I reveal the details of the crime.
Ginny Weasley.
Harry stared at the letter for so long that he could feel his fingers cramping around the sides. Voldemort stood up and eased forwards, reaching out to pry it from his hands. Harry slumped back against the chair and stared at the ceiling.
His mind revolved inside his skull, feeling like a Quaffle being tossed about by careless hands.
Ginny, what are you doing?
Of course, when he thought about it, Harry knew. He had stated that he would make himself available to all citizens who wanted to approach him with problems, and stand as an avenue of appeal when Voldemort made a decision they didn’t like. It made sense that Ginny would be one of the first to test it.
But this? Harry was pretty sure he knew exactly what she was approaching him about, and it went back to the Chamber of Secrets and the death of a Horcrux almost five years ago.
“Why is she approaching you?” Voldemort asked suddenly. “And why do you feel as if you are about to step off a cliff without a broom?”
Harry started and looked at him. “You don’t know? You can’t read it out of my mind?”
Voldemort continued to stare at him for long moments. Then he said, “There is a wall over those memories. I know a little, because you have explained it to me, and I can guess now what this is about. But I cannot see it.”
Harry swallowed, uneasy. What the hell? He was sure Voldemort had mentioned the diary before. If nothing else, he knew that Lucius Malfoy had been the one to let it out of his possession and that Harry had destroyed it. He’d known that before they got married.
But, more than that, how in the world could Harry have built a wall that kept Voldemort out?
Voldemort reached towards him and gently cupped Harry’s chin, turning his face back and forth. The serpentine length of his neck meant his head was weaving at the same time, tracing Harry’s movements. “What is making you so uneasy? Do you wish me to stare into the depths of your thoughts, to see those memories?”
“I shouldn’t be able to use Occlumency to keep you out. It makes me afraid that you can’t see them. Can you look?”
Voldemort’s red eyes seemed to fill the whole world for a long moment. Then he pushed inwards, and Harry realized that he was feeling the ordinary pressure of the bond, not Legilimency. “I cannot uncover them,” Voldemort said quietly.
Harry closed his eyes. He wondered if Snape had somehow managed to plant something in Harry’s mind before Voldemort killed him, some kind of barrier. But if he could do that, Dumbledore probably could have, too, and why not hide the Horcrux connection Harry had to Voldemort instead of the memories of a battle with a Horcrux five years ago? It was Voldemort’s knowledge of what his link with Harry meant that had led to him wanting to wed Harry and Dumbledore’s side losing the war.
“I will go with you to this meeting,” Voldemort said softly.
“If you do, she might not be inclined to tell me anything.”
“Far better that you miss out on the chance to hear one petition than that you be in any kind of danger.”
When Harry thought about it, he had to admit that made sense, at least from Voldemort’s perspective. He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and then didn’t know if he had said it in Parseltongue or down the connection between their minds.
Voldemort’s protectiveness came back to him, as soft as drifting rain.
*
“I don’t like it.”
“Good thing I didn’t require your opinion, then.”
Blaise rolled his eyes and picked through the plate of paella that the elves had set out for them. Harry had thought he might want Italian food when he visited, but he always said that no elves could make anything like the real thing and he preferred cuisine where he had no idea what it was supposed to taste like. Harry’s taste horizons were being expanded, at least. “Just think about it, Harry. Why talk about this now? Ask about this now? Years after it happened, and with the full legal trappings?”
“I think she’s trying to get me to admit something.” Harry rolled on his back. They were in the room that became a full Quidditch pitch when the occasion called for it, a low table on the grass to their right. The elves had placed the food there. Harry took a lazy mouthful of paella and shook his head. “That Voldemort is evil, or that this marriage isn’t going to work. That I’m a hypocrite. Something. She thinks she can confront me and make me change my mind. It’s a Gryffindor thing to do.”
“Is she right?”
Harry rolled one eye towards Blaise without getting up from his position on the grass.
Blaise was bending towards him, face quiet and serious. “Is she right?” he repeated. “Are you going to get tired of this marriage, and walk away from the Dark Lord?”
“You know I can’t, right? He’ll hold me tighter than a Gringotts vault.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Harry closed his eyes with a grimace. Blaise wasn’t the only one of his friends who might have asked that question if Harry had started talking about it, but he was the only one who would make the distinction between Voldemort holding onto him and Harry giving up on the marriage.
Harry sighed softly out and thought about Voldemort’s forked tongue, his lengthened neck for a ritual that he still wouldn’t talk with Harry about in detail, the way he delighted in torture, how he had utterly failed to corral Pigwidgeon with a spell. There were so many layers to him.
The way there are to a deep, dark, cold lake. Many people might be able to feel the layers, but no one else is going to get close enough to drown.
Harry opened his eyes and shook his head. “No, Blaise. I’m never going to give up on it.”
“Because you’re afraid of the consequences.”
“Yes. For magical Britain. For me. And for him.”
Blaise made a sharp snorting sound that indicated he’d had a mouthful of paella when Harry said that. “For him?” he asked, when he’d cleared his throat. “What does that mean?”
Harry had no idea how to explain the loneliness he’d seen in Voldemort, reaching deeper than that hypothetical dark lake. One of the reasons he held onto Harry so fiercely was that, for all that Harry was his Horcrux, he was also a being who was not Voldemort but could blend with him. Someone human and different, who hadn’t rejected him.
Voldemort had never known anyone else like that in his life.
I will not tell my husband’s secrets to my friend, Harry thought, and just shook his head a little. “I don’t like the thought of the person he would become without me,” he said simply.
Blaise seemed at a loss for words, but that was all right. Harry let the silence roll on, and on, and then Blaise cleared his throat and asked, “Want to play another game of Quidditch before you go get dressed for your appointment with Weasley?”
“Fuck.”
“Harry?”
Harry rubbed his forehead, aware too late that he’d spoken in Parseltongue. “I forgot I have to get dressed up,” he complained.
“You sounded—a lot more upset than that’s worth. Or maybe that’s just because I’m not used to Parseltongue and it all sounds angry to me. But you sounded—really upset.”
“I hate wearing scratchy robes,” Harry said, and knew he was whining. That was okay. Blaise was one of the few people in his life he could whine to. “Formal robes. They’re not me. They make me feel like I’m floating outside my body.”
A long silence. Harry was just regretting the confession—just because he could talk to Blaise didn’t make it a good idea to say something that personal—when Blaise murmured, “You didn’t feel that way when you were agreeing to marry the Dark Lord?”
“No. I didn’t like it, but it was something I could see myself doing. A continuation of who I already was. A savior. A sacrifice. Harry bloody Potter. But Harry bloody Potter didn’t wear dress robes, and he didn’t sit stiffly in front of people on a throne, and he didn’t stare at people with a blank expression like Voldemort’s always telling me to do.”
Blaise’s hand landed hesitantly on his shoulder. Harry knew why. Voldemort was beyond vigilant about other people touching Harry. He’d got used to it, because Harry had told him bluntly that he would go mad if Voldemort was the only one ever to touch him again, but he didn’t like it.
“Maybe Harry Potter didn’t do that,” Blaise whispered. “Maybe Harry Potter-Gaunt does.”
Harry blinked. He hadn’t considered that idea before, but he could feel the possibilities of it settling into his bones. Not that he had chosen to become Harry Potter-Gaunt, not exactly. Beyond the fact that he had married Voldemort under false pretenses, Voldemort had been the one to choose that last name.
But if he could think of that as just another facet of himself, rather than himself…a person who put on fancy clothes because he had to…
“Thanks,” Harry said, and smiled at Blaise, and heaved himself to his feet to play that game of Quidditch Blaise had talked about before he had to get ready.
*
“Honestly, would you stop that?”
Voldemort didn’t. He was holding Harry’s shoulders while Harry glared at himself and the formal silver robes in the mirror, and darting his tongue around Harry’s neck and collarbone and nape, every place Blaise had touched.
Scenting. He always did that, ever since he’d agreed that Harry had to be touched by more than just him. He didn’t leave his own scent (not that Harry could tell, but then, he didn’t have a forked tongue that let him smell the way Voldemort did). He just seemed to want to obsessively track down every molecule that was Harry and every one that wasn’t.
Voldemort stepped back at last, and smiled at Harry’s reflection. “You look a proper Dark Lord’s Consort.”
“I look like a berk,” Harry replied, momentarily amused at the way Parseltongue translated the insult as “weak, lazy snake.” He glanced down at his robes and shook his head again. They were nearly as bright as the mirror. Too much extravagance.
But Blaise’s advice about what Harry Potter-Gaunt might wear came back to him. Maybe this could be his armor, shielding him while he acted the part on stage.
“You look right,” Voldemort repeated, and held out his arm. Harry sighed and laid his hand on it. They marched from the dressing room to the Apparition point—Voldemort would never let someone like Ginny so near their home—and Harry reminded himself that they would land in the Ministry and he would see Ginny again shortly after that.
Calm, he whispered to himself, in internal words as subtle as the darts of Voldemort’s tongue on the air. In control.
*
Ginny walked into the room where they were meeting, a small anteroom that nonetheless had a conference table in it and a roaring fire in a hearth in the corner. She kept her head high, but Harry could see a faint tremble in her hands before she locked them behind her back.
“Hello, Consort Potter-Gaunt.”
Harry felt a sharp quiver in the middle of his stomach as he looked at her. They had dated briefly in the middle of his sixth year, and then he had broken up with her to—keep her safe. Because he’d thought he’d be hunting Horcruxes. He had had no idea at the time that what he’d really kept her safe from was Voldemort’s vengeance. Harry shuddered to think what he would have done to Ginny if she and Harry had slept together.
Voldemort shifted beside him in one of the heavy dark wood chairs. Harry slid a hand onto his thigh beneath the table and squeezed, hard.
“Hello, Miss Weasley,” Harry said politely. He was studying Ginny’s robes, which weren’t a dress set but more formal than he’d ever seen her wear. They were a dark green, and mended along the hems and the cuffs. “Please have a seat.”
Ginny glanced back and forth between him and Voldemort for a moment. “I requested a private meeting in my letter,” she said.
“No, you didn’t,” Harry said. The words of the letter were seared into his mind, he’d read it so many times. “You said a meeting in person before the trial began. That’s all.”
Ginny hesitated one more time, but seemed to realize she’d gain nothing by forcing him. She tossed her hair over her back and sat down in a chair opposite him rather than Voldemort, although the one directly across from the Dark Lord was closest to the door. “Your brother Horcrux wronged me,” she said, staring at Harry instead of Voldemort. “I demand justice.”
Harry flinched despite himself. Your brother Horcrux… When Nagini had claimed Harry as a sibling, he hadn’t minded, but the idea that he might also be a sibling to that diary, and the ring Dumbledore had destroyed, made him shudder.
He took a deep breath and got over it, because Voldemort was stirring at his side in a way that meant Ginny would be ashes on the floor soon if Harry continued being upset. “What effects did the possession have on you?” he asked hoarsely.
“I still have nightmares about the year I can barely remember,” Ginny whispered, and shuddered. She wrapped her arms around herself and turned her gaze towards the fire. “I fell behind in my schoolwork. I had to spend the whole summer studying to get back to where I should have been. My magic was permanently weakened. I was doing fairly controlled wandless magic before my first year, small charms. I can’t do any of that now. And my mind is cracked down the middle, a Mind-Healer who looked at me said. Memories disappear into that fissure, even now. I’m going to die young.”
Harry reached out a hand towards her, and then hissed in pain. Voldemort had dug his nails into the hand still on his thigh. Harry sat back with a shake of his head and turned to glare at his husband.
“I wouldn’t really have touched her.”
“It looked as though you meant to.”
Ginny was shivering at the sound of the Parseltongue, Harry realized when he turned back to look at her. He sighed and switched to English. “Do you wish us to pay a certain amount of Galleons as compensation? To pay for Mind-Healing, or experimental potions that might reverse the physical effects?”
“No.” Ginny sat up, her eyes glittering. “You promised that people could bring complaints to you your—Lord wouldn’t address.” She still wouldn’t look at Voldemort, which Harry supposed was understandable. “He promised that Death Eaters could be tried for crimes that were committed outside the war. Well, this was one. I demand a trial.”
Voldemort shifted restlessly beside him. Harry was sure he knew what Voldemort would say if he had a chance. That he was not a Death Eater, and the law didn’t apply to him.
But he knew, as well as Harry did, that the words were unspeakable unless they wanted to destroy the progress they’d made and fail the first real test of Harry’s position as a court of last appeal. It had been working all right, with minor, testing complaints that Harry could field or pass on easily. But he had always known something like this would come.
Even if he had never thought it would be from Ginny, or because of a Horcrux.
“Your wish for a trial,” Harry said, tongue thick as dust in his mouth, “is granted.”
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Content Notes: AU after HBP, forced marriage, established Harry/Voldemort, gore, torture, violence, dubious consent
Wordcount: This part 4300
Summary: Sequel to “Flank.” Harry said that he could become a path of appeal for those dissatisfied with Voldemort’s rule, and Voldemort’s conscience. It’s up to him to prove that, with a case brought by Ginny Weasley and continued assassination attempts challenging his resolve.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, short chaptered fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is the sequel to my stories “Retreat,” “Advance,” and “Flank,” and will make no sense without them. It should have three or perhaps four chapters, to be posted over the next few days.
Ambush
“I want to ask you a question.”
Voldemort didn’t look up from where he was reading in the chair next to the bed they shared, his legs stretched out in front of him and placed on a small stool covered in embroidered black cloth. The patterns of the embroidery were too small for Harry to see what they were. “Ask.”
“Why is your neck getting longer?”
The Horcrux bond was cold and still between them for a few moments, a pond of cracked ice. Then Voldemort put down his book and gazed at Harry. “I am pleased that you noticed.” He tilted his neck to the side, and yeah, it bent several inches more than it had the last time Harry had paid a lot of attention to it.
“It’s hard not to notice.” Harry laid his own book down—a beginner’s primer in Italian, which Blaise had given him. “Why, though?”
“Not everyone would have noticed. Not most of my Death Eaters.” Voldemort stood and prowled over to Harry, holding eye contact all the way. The bond had once again warmed, and this time slow trickles of pleasure as heavy as blood ran through Harry’s scar. “You remind me every day why you are more precious to me than a Death Eater, Harry.”
Harry maintained eye contact as Voldemort sat down next to him on the bed, running one hand over his leg. “I notice that you still haven’t answered the question,” he muttered. The sibilant hisses of Parseltongue were more familiar to him than English now. If not for Fleur’s and Viktor’s and Blaise’s visits, Harry did wonder if he might have forgotten his native language.
“I am preparing for a ritual,” Voldemort said simply. “Changes in the body are necessary before one enters it, and also as a test of one’s commitment to making the sacrifice.”
Harry felt a knife-bolt of fear pierce him, but he shook it away. He trusted Voldemort, now, enough to believe the man—being—when he said that he wouldn’t give up Harry no matter what, that he valued Harry more than all the rest of his Horcruxes put together. He wouldn’t be the sacrifice.
“No, you will not,” Voldemort said, picking up on his thoughts. He ran his palm across Harry’s shoulder, his fingers cold as the iron grate over the fireplace, and then down to Harry’s hands. “If I could catch your friend Granger, now.”
Harry didn’t bother responding. Thoughts of Ron and Hermione still ignited a storm of sadness. They had pushed him to marry Voldemort to secure the peace, and then, when they’d seen that he was settling into the marriage instead of committing to their impossible plan that he hadn’t known about of getting Voldemort to kill the Horcrux in him, they’d decided he was irredeemably evil and they had to turn their backs on him.
“I would not,” Voldemort admitted, lowering his mouth so that he covered one side of Harry’s collarbone with it. His tongue darted out, the forks on the end of it tickling Harry and making him gasp. “I would not give her so quick a death.”
“There’s my husband, always so kind and merciful,” Harry muttered in English, on purpose, and then gasped again. Voldemort’s teeth had slid into his skin, hollow fangs. Even as he watched, the punctures filled up and began to bleed.
“I leave such things to you, my dear.”
Voldemort tugged roughly at his clothes and limbs, and Harry let him arrange Harry as he liked, pulling him upwards so that his head rested against the pillows and splaying his legs wide. When he was in this kind of mood, he didn’t want Harry to tease him or push back against him or be anything more than a passive receptacle.
Passive I can do, Harry thought, and closed his eyes.
Then he swore as Voldemort bit him again, and peppered the Horcrux bond with irritation as sharp as flying icicles. What the fuck do you want? he snapped mentally.
Look at me, Harry.
Harry opened his eyes and glared. Voldemort held his eyes as he stripped Harry bare, as he conjured lubrication, as he sank into him. Harry kept his legs and arms still, as Voldemort was requesting via what felt like beams of communication traveling through thick air, but he snarled.
Yes, Voldemort whispered down the bond, stay with me, Harry, never leave me again, come with me, be with me, do not retreat, be here…
Harry reached up and clawed at Voldemort’s shoulders. It felt like trying to rip furrows in marble with his fingernails, but Voldemort hissed at him and touched him with lips and tongue and cock and hands and pulled him back, back.
That’s what you’re afraid of, Harry thought later, dazed, after the meteoric moment of their joining when all barriers dissolved between them and made them one creature. Me retreating the way I did when I was first married to you and trying to be the perfect obedient little servant.
Harry wondered how he could convey that that would never happen. He had made his commitment, made his choice. Whether or not they had peace between them, his future was at Voldemort’s side.
*
The owl that soared into the post room was more than vaguely familiar. Harry gaped at it. It was Pigwidgeon.
Of course it was. Harry couldn’t forget the happy, hyperactive little owl Sirius had gifted to Ron. As he looked at Pig hooting and zipping around the room, Harry’s eyes filled with tears. Hedwig was ensconced in the owlery of the house Voldemort had built them, and Harry visited her often, but she didn’t carry his post anymore except to a few carefully vetted people.
Harry reached for the owl.
“Hold, Harry!”
Voldemort glided into the dining room, his eyes fixed on Pig. Harry turned around and put his body between the owl and Voldemort’s wand. “Leave him alone!”
“He was an owl belonging to the Weasleys,” Voldemort said, dropping into English. Harry blinked, stunned. It was days since Voldemort had spoken that language. But he didn’t let the shock move him out of the way. “Have you forgotten the last message from them?”
“That letter was from Hermione,” Harry muttered, but he knew what Voldemort meant. Hermione and Ron had brewed a potion that was meant to kill him, even if they’d tried to make Justin Finch-Fletchley deliver it. “You can cast detection charms. But don’t kill him.”
“You are quick to accuse me of owl-murder,” Voldemort muttered, and aimed his wand.
Pig promptly darted out of the way and zoomed to another corner, then dodged another detection charm from Voldemort and reeled straight towards Harry instead. Voldemort snarled, “Hold still, you ridiculous bird,” and cast again. It missed as Pig darted up to the ceiling and flew another circle with shrill, excited hoots.
Harry clapped a hand over his mouth. “He thinks it’s a game,” he managed to choke out. Not that holding in the laughter did much good when Voldemort could feel it and everything else Harry felt through their Horcrux bond.
“He will come here,” Voldemort hissed, and cast a Summoning Charm with nothing more than a flick of his fingers. Harry wasn’t sure how he could tell it was a Summoning Charm, but he did know.
Pig flew towards the ceiling again, looped around, and also dodged that charm. Then he swooped over the table, dropped the letter in the marmalade, and landed on the windowsill, enthusiastically twitching his tail feathers.
Voldemort stared at him, and then turned to Harry. “What kind of bird is that?”
“A scops owl,” Harry said innocently, firing detection charms at the letter.
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, no, not really. I did think that you might not know. After all, they’re hardly the kind of owls the Great and Powerful Lord Voldemort would choose to carry his post.”
Harry froze a moment after he said it. Being more comfortable with Voldemort and not retreating into his own mind was one thing. Even having sex was one thing, because he had accepted not long after he married Voldemort that he wouldn’t be left alone in his own head or body. But teasing was another.
Pleasure like honey ran through his scar, and Harry cautiously relaxed. The lighter and sweeter it felt, the less dangerous Voldemort was feeling at that moment to the world around him.
“I can sense nothing from the letter. Open it, and let us see what the blood traitors want.”
Harry rolled his eyes at the blood traitor comment, but gladly reached for the letter. It was the first one he’d had in a while that Voldemort hadn’t read first, and he balanced it on his palm for several seconds before he opened it.
The handwriting inside made his breath catch, but a second later, he realized it wasn’t Ron’s. It was Ginny’s, which looked a bit like Ron’s. Probably understandable, considering their mum must have taught them both how to write, Harry thought, while his mind skittered around the meaning of the words on the page.
Dear Consort Potter-Gaunt,
I have been wronged by the Dark Lord Voldemort. I demand recompense and justice, by the laws newly established that state any Death Eater who wronged a citizen of magical Britain before or after the war can be asked for such a thing. A full trial is necessary.
I ask that the trial be held before the full Wizengamot and that you, Consort Potter-Gaunt, render the final judgment.
I also ask for a visit in person before I reveal the details of the crime.
Ginny Weasley.
Harry stared at the letter for so long that he could feel his fingers cramping around the sides. Voldemort stood up and eased forwards, reaching out to pry it from his hands. Harry slumped back against the chair and stared at the ceiling.
His mind revolved inside his skull, feeling like a Quaffle being tossed about by careless hands.
Ginny, what are you doing?
Of course, when he thought about it, Harry knew. He had stated that he would make himself available to all citizens who wanted to approach him with problems, and stand as an avenue of appeal when Voldemort made a decision they didn’t like. It made sense that Ginny would be one of the first to test it.
But this? Harry was pretty sure he knew exactly what she was approaching him about, and it went back to the Chamber of Secrets and the death of a Horcrux almost five years ago.
“Why is she approaching you?” Voldemort asked suddenly. “And why do you feel as if you are about to step off a cliff without a broom?”
Harry started and looked at him. “You don’t know? You can’t read it out of my mind?”
Voldemort continued to stare at him for long moments. Then he said, “There is a wall over those memories. I know a little, because you have explained it to me, and I can guess now what this is about. But I cannot see it.”
Harry swallowed, uneasy. What the hell? He was sure Voldemort had mentioned the diary before. If nothing else, he knew that Lucius Malfoy had been the one to let it out of his possession and that Harry had destroyed it. He’d known that before they got married.
But, more than that, how in the world could Harry have built a wall that kept Voldemort out?
Voldemort reached towards him and gently cupped Harry’s chin, turning his face back and forth. The serpentine length of his neck meant his head was weaving at the same time, tracing Harry’s movements. “What is making you so uneasy? Do you wish me to stare into the depths of your thoughts, to see those memories?”
“I shouldn’t be able to use Occlumency to keep you out. It makes me afraid that you can’t see them. Can you look?”
Voldemort’s red eyes seemed to fill the whole world for a long moment. Then he pushed inwards, and Harry realized that he was feeling the ordinary pressure of the bond, not Legilimency. “I cannot uncover them,” Voldemort said quietly.
Harry closed his eyes. He wondered if Snape had somehow managed to plant something in Harry’s mind before Voldemort killed him, some kind of barrier. But if he could do that, Dumbledore probably could have, too, and why not hide the Horcrux connection Harry had to Voldemort instead of the memories of a battle with a Horcrux five years ago? It was Voldemort’s knowledge of what his link with Harry meant that had led to him wanting to wed Harry and Dumbledore’s side losing the war.
“I will go with you to this meeting,” Voldemort said softly.
“If you do, she might not be inclined to tell me anything.”
“Far better that you miss out on the chance to hear one petition than that you be in any kind of danger.”
When Harry thought about it, he had to admit that made sense, at least from Voldemort’s perspective. He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and then didn’t know if he had said it in Parseltongue or down the connection between their minds.
Voldemort’s protectiveness came back to him, as soft as drifting rain.
*
“I don’t like it.”
“Good thing I didn’t require your opinion, then.”
Blaise rolled his eyes and picked through the plate of paella that the elves had set out for them. Harry had thought he might want Italian food when he visited, but he always said that no elves could make anything like the real thing and he preferred cuisine where he had no idea what it was supposed to taste like. Harry’s taste horizons were being expanded, at least. “Just think about it, Harry. Why talk about this now? Ask about this now? Years after it happened, and with the full legal trappings?”
“I think she’s trying to get me to admit something.” Harry rolled on his back. They were in the room that became a full Quidditch pitch when the occasion called for it, a low table on the grass to their right. The elves had placed the food there. Harry took a lazy mouthful of paella and shook his head. “That Voldemort is evil, or that this marriage isn’t going to work. That I’m a hypocrite. Something. She thinks she can confront me and make me change my mind. It’s a Gryffindor thing to do.”
“Is she right?”
Harry rolled one eye towards Blaise without getting up from his position on the grass.
Blaise was bending towards him, face quiet and serious. “Is she right?” he repeated. “Are you going to get tired of this marriage, and walk away from the Dark Lord?”
“You know I can’t, right? He’ll hold me tighter than a Gringotts vault.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Harry closed his eyes with a grimace. Blaise wasn’t the only one of his friends who might have asked that question if Harry had started talking about it, but he was the only one who would make the distinction between Voldemort holding onto him and Harry giving up on the marriage.
Harry sighed softly out and thought about Voldemort’s forked tongue, his lengthened neck for a ritual that he still wouldn’t talk with Harry about in detail, the way he delighted in torture, how he had utterly failed to corral Pigwidgeon with a spell. There were so many layers to him.
The way there are to a deep, dark, cold lake. Many people might be able to feel the layers, but no one else is going to get close enough to drown.
Harry opened his eyes and shook his head. “No, Blaise. I’m never going to give up on it.”
“Because you’re afraid of the consequences.”
“Yes. For magical Britain. For me. And for him.”
Blaise made a sharp snorting sound that indicated he’d had a mouthful of paella when Harry said that. “For him?” he asked, when he’d cleared his throat. “What does that mean?”
Harry had no idea how to explain the loneliness he’d seen in Voldemort, reaching deeper than that hypothetical dark lake. One of the reasons he held onto Harry so fiercely was that, for all that Harry was his Horcrux, he was also a being who was not Voldemort but could blend with him. Someone human and different, who hadn’t rejected him.
Voldemort had never known anyone else like that in his life.
I will not tell my husband’s secrets to my friend, Harry thought, and just shook his head a little. “I don’t like the thought of the person he would become without me,” he said simply.
Blaise seemed at a loss for words, but that was all right. Harry let the silence roll on, and on, and then Blaise cleared his throat and asked, “Want to play another game of Quidditch before you go get dressed for your appointment with Weasley?”
“Fuck.”
“Harry?”
Harry rubbed his forehead, aware too late that he’d spoken in Parseltongue. “I forgot I have to get dressed up,” he complained.
“You sounded—a lot more upset than that’s worth. Or maybe that’s just because I’m not used to Parseltongue and it all sounds angry to me. But you sounded—really upset.”
“I hate wearing scratchy robes,” Harry said, and knew he was whining. That was okay. Blaise was one of the few people in his life he could whine to. “Formal robes. They’re not me. They make me feel like I’m floating outside my body.”
A long silence. Harry was just regretting the confession—just because he could talk to Blaise didn’t make it a good idea to say something that personal—when Blaise murmured, “You didn’t feel that way when you were agreeing to marry the Dark Lord?”
“No. I didn’t like it, but it was something I could see myself doing. A continuation of who I already was. A savior. A sacrifice. Harry bloody Potter. But Harry bloody Potter didn’t wear dress robes, and he didn’t sit stiffly in front of people on a throne, and he didn’t stare at people with a blank expression like Voldemort’s always telling me to do.”
Blaise’s hand landed hesitantly on his shoulder. Harry knew why. Voldemort was beyond vigilant about other people touching Harry. He’d got used to it, because Harry had told him bluntly that he would go mad if Voldemort was the only one ever to touch him again, but he didn’t like it.
“Maybe Harry Potter didn’t do that,” Blaise whispered. “Maybe Harry Potter-Gaunt does.”
Harry blinked. He hadn’t considered that idea before, but he could feel the possibilities of it settling into his bones. Not that he had chosen to become Harry Potter-Gaunt, not exactly. Beyond the fact that he had married Voldemort under false pretenses, Voldemort had been the one to choose that last name.
But if he could think of that as just another facet of himself, rather than himself…a person who put on fancy clothes because he had to…
“Thanks,” Harry said, and smiled at Blaise, and heaved himself to his feet to play that game of Quidditch Blaise had talked about before he had to get ready.
*
“Honestly, would you stop that?”
Voldemort didn’t. He was holding Harry’s shoulders while Harry glared at himself and the formal silver robes in the mirror, and darting his tongue around Harry’s neck and collarbone and nape, every place Blaise had touched.
Scenting. He always did that, ever since he’d agreed that Harry had to be touched by more than just him. He didn’t leave his own scent (not that Harry could tell, but then, he didn’t have a forked tongue that let him smell the way Voldemort did). He just seemed to want to obsessively track down every molecule that was Harry and every one that wasn’t.
Voldemort stepped back at last, and smiled at Harry’s reflection. “You look a proper Dark Lord’s Consort.”
“I look like a berk,” Harry replied, momentarily amused at the way Parseltongue translated the insult as “weak, lazy snake.” He glanced down at his robes and shook his head again. They were nearly as bright as the mirror. Too much extravagance.
But Blaise’s advice about what Harry Potter-Gaunt might wear came back to him. Maybe this could be his armor, shielding him while he acted the part on stage.
“You look right,” Voldemort repeated, and held out his arm. Harry sighed and laid his hand on it. They marched from the dressing room to the Apparition point—Voldemort would never let someone like Ginny so near their home—and Harry reminded himself that they would land in the Ministry and he would see Ginny again shortly after that.
Calm, he whispered to himself, in internal words as subtle as the darts of Voldemort’s tongue on the air. In control.
*
Ginny walked into the room where they were meeting, a small anteroom that nonetheless had a conference table in it and a roaring fire in a hearth in the corner. She kept her head high, but Harry could see a faint tremble in her hands before she locked them behind her back.
“Hello, Consort Potter-Gaunt.”
Harry felt a sharp quiver in the middle of his stomach as he looked at her. They had dated briefly in the middle of his sixth year, and then he had broken up with her to—keep her safe. Because he’d thought he’d be hunting Horcruxes. He had had no idea at the time that what he’d really kept her safe from was Voldemort’s vengeance. Harry shuddered to think what he would have done to Ginny if she and Harry had slept together.
Voldemort shifted beside him in one of the heavy dark wood chairs. Harry slid a hand onto his thigh beneath the table and squeezed, hard.
“Hello, Miss Weasley,” Harry said politely. He was studying Ginny’s robes, which weren’t a dress set but more formal than he’d ever seen her wear. They were a dark green, and mended along the hems and the cuffs. “Please have a seat.”
Ginny glanced back and forth between him and Voldemort for a moment. “I requested a private meeting in my letter,” she said.
“No, you didn’t,” Harry said. The words of the letter were seared into his mind, he’d read it so many times. “You said a meeting in person before the trial began. That’s all.”
Ginny hesitated one more time, but seemed to realize she’d gain nothing by forcing him. She tossed her hair over her back and sat down in a chair opposite him rather than Voldemort, although the one directly across from the Dark Lord was closest to the door. “Your brother Horcrux wronged me,” she said, staring at Harry instead of Voldemort. “I demand justice.”
Harry flinched despite himself. Your brother Horcrux… When Nagini had claimed Harry as a sibling, he hadn’t minded, but the idea that he might also be a sibling to that diary, and the ring Dumbledore had destroyed, made him shudder.
He took a deep breath and got over it, because Voldemort was stirring at his side in a way that meant Ginny would be ashes on the floor soon if Harry continued being upset. “What effects did the possession have on you?” he asked hoarsely.
“I still have nightmares about the year I can barely remember,” Ginny whispered, and shuddered. She wrapped her arms around herself and turned her gaze towards the fire. “I fell behind in my schoolwork. I had to spend the whole summer studying to get back to where I should have been. My magic was permanently weakened. I was doing fairly controlled wandless magic before my first year, small charms. I can’t do any of that now. And my mind is cracked down the middle, a Mind-Healer who looked at me said. Memories disappear into that fissure, even now. I’m going to die young.”
Harry reached out a hand towards her, and then hissed in pain. Voldemort had dug his nails into the hand still on his thigh. Harry sat back with a shake of his head and turned to glare at his husband.
“I wouldn’t really have touched her.”
“It looked as though you meant to.”
Ginny was shivering at the sound of the Parseltongue, Harry realized when he turned back to look at her. He sighed and switched to English. “Do you wish us to pay a certain amount of Galleons as compensation? To pay for Mind-Healing, or experimental potions that might reverse the physical effects?”
“No.” Ginny sat up, her eyes glittering. “You promised that people could bring complaints to you your—Lord wouldn’t address.” She still wouldn’t look at Voldemort, which Harry supposed was understandable. “He promised that Death Eaters could be tried for crimes that were committed outside the war. Well, this was one. I demand a trial.”
Voldemort shifted restlessly beside him. Harry was sure he knew what Voldemort would say if he had a chance. That he was not a Death Eater, and the law didn’t apply to him.
But he knew, as well as Harry did, that the words were unspeakable unless they wanted to destroy the progress they’d made and fail the first real test of Harry’s position as a court of last appeal. It had been working all right, with minor, testing complaints that Harry could field or pass on easily. But he had always known something like this would come.
Even if he had never thought it would be from Ginny, or because of a Horcrux.
“Your wish for a trial,” Harry said, tongue thick as dust in his mouth, “is granted.”
