[From Litha to Lammas]: Ambush, Harry/Voldemort, Retreat series, 3/4

[lomonaaeren]

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Part Three

Harry came awake shuddering.

He opened his eyes and found himself in the bed in the room that he and Voldemort shared. His bones ached. His head ached. The Horcrux bond was bright and still and pulsing with rage.

A heavy weight lay on top of him.

Harry reached up a shaky hand. Nagini turned her head and flickered her tongue out, touching his palm.

“You are awake, my brother.” Harry had never heard Nagini sound so somber. She slid her scales back and forth in small movements on top of him, and Harry wondered if she was trying to comfort him. “Master will be pleased.”

“Has he tortured people?” Harry whispered. His throat was so dry. It felt as though someone had reached a clawed hand down it. “Has he killed them? I need to know, Nagini. I don’t want the ones I thought were friends to die.”

Nagini didn’t have time to answer before the door opened. Voldemort strode through it and landed on the bed beside Harry. Nagini rolled away with a soft hiss, and Voldemort took her place on top of Harry, arranging himself and winding his arms around Harry.

Harry felt a sharp prickling and shifting of emotion inside the Horcrux bond, and he knew what they were after a moment of concentrating, even though he’d never felt them there before. Desperation. And grief.

“I’m here,” Harry whispered in Parseltongue, since he thought using English right now would probably set Voldemort off. He reached up and grasped Voldemort’s shoulder, holding him gently the way he’d held Nagini. He couldn’t move his other arm from Voldemort’s wild hold. “I’m alive.”

Voldemort tightened his grip. Harry waited. He needed answers and wanted to know how many people Voldemort might have tortured, including Bill and Fleur, but he had to wait. Voldemort needed certain things right now probably even more than Harry needed those answers.

“You were almost not,” Voldemort said. This time, the Horcrux bond was so thick with emotions that Harry couldn’t tell what they were. It would have been like trying to separate one strand of water from another in a river.

“I know,” Harry whispered helplessly.

“You were almost not,” Voldemort repeated, and drew back enough to stare into Harry’s eyes. “What have you done to me, Harry Potter? Before today, I had not felt grief in six decades.”

Harry shook his head. He really didn’t know. And if Voldemort didn’t understand what tied them together by now, then Harry didn’t. “Um. My bones hurt. My throat hurts. Water?”

Voldemort turned his head and hissed out a command, one of his hands clenching in the bedsheets. Harry stared as a glass of water floated wandlessly towards them and landed on the bed beside his face. Voldemort picked it up and tilted it slowly so that it flowed down his throat instead of choking him. Harry hadn’t even realized until then that his head was propped up on a pillow instead of absolutely flat in bed.

He tasted a cool potion inside the water, and sighed as the pain vanished from his bones. Then he looked up and met Voldemort’s gaze.

It was like staring into the sun. Harry had to look down again.

“You were almost…not.”

And then one emotion did separate itself from the others inside the bond. It was intense, freezing anger, the anger that might lie in the cold blackness of space. Harry clutched at Voldemort’s shoulder again, but Voldemort didn’t seem to be paying much attention. His head was lowered, his mouth resting against Harry’s neck, and he was hissing.

“I will kill them. I will destroy them. I will make them wish for death.” His hand tightened in Harry’s hair, and he abruptly tilted Harry’s face up again and locked their eyes together. “And I will torture you if you tell me not to do so.”

Harry took a deep breath. His ribs were starting to ache from Voldemort’s weight, but he would still rather have had him this close, and subject to Harry’s influence. “No, you won’t.”

“Will I not?” Voldemort’s voice was as soft as boomslang scales.

“No. You promised that you wouldn’t torture me. Not for any reason. And if you did, if you went back on your word and made me unable to trust you, then you know you would suffer a lot worse than grief.”

Voldemort’s eyes widened, and the bond turned crystal-blue with astonishment. Another emotion that Voldemort might not have felt in six decades, Harry thought, panting, staring up at his husband, except presumably for other times when Harry was involved.

Like when he was blasted out of his body to become a wraith, or when I escaped from his resurrection in the graveyard—

Harry laughed despite himself. Voldemort shook himself and hissed, “How can you laugh? You almost were not.”

Harry studied Voldemort. A fine tremor was running up his limbs, and that, more than the bond, told Harry what was wrong. The bond told him what Voldemort was feeling, after all, not the reasons for those feelings.

Voldemort was terrified of death. To him, what could have happened to Harry was the worst thing that anyone could have endured, and he didn’t know why Harry could experience anything other than that when talking about it.

“It’s absurd, is all,” Harry said. “Everything that brought us to this point. That you killed my parents, and I’m here with you. That you tortured me in the graveyard, and I’m here telling you that I know you won’t torture me again.”

Voldemort waited one more moment, staring at Harry as unblinking as any snake. And then he canted his neck to the side and gave a soft hiss of submission, looking away from Harry’s eyes first.

“You are right. I would not.”

Triumph flooded Harry, as sweet and cold as the potion. Lying here helpless, the victim of a curse and a betrayal from someone he’d once considered a close friend, he had made Lord Voldemort back down.

Harry swallowed. “What’s happened? How long was I unconscious?” At least Voldemort talking about “today” implied it hadn’t been long, and therefore the damage, whatever it was, might still be limited.

“I was unable to capture Ginny Weasley.” Voldemort’s words were packed with anger the way a winter road was packed with snow. “I am not sure why. I have the other members of the Weasley family in the dungeons of a safehouse, as well as some of the Wizengamot members who did not die in the immediate attack.”

“Have you tortured them?”

Voldemort stared at him. “Yes.”

Harry breathed out. Of course he had. But at least if he still had them, he hadn’t killed them. Voldemort would have seen no use in keeping corpses around. “Did you cause Fleur to lose the baby?”

“I looked into the minds of her and her husband. They did not know about the attack. The only thought that the female Weasley had been acting oddly. I did not torture them. But they will not leave until I have claimed a price for your life.”

Bill and Fleur were all right. They hadn’t been part of it.

Harry twisted with relief catching at his insides like a barbed hook, and snapped, “How can you claim a price from people who were never in on the plot to end my life?”

“Because you were almost not!”

Voldemort roared the words, the sharp hisses of Parseltongue accenting them in a way that they would never have been in English, and Harry stared at him. Voldemort slid off the bed and began pacing. The lights of the room caught on the gleam of scales under his skin. His tongue darted out, aimed at Harry more frequently than his face was.

Holy shit, Harry realized suddenly. He can’t even say the word “died.” That’s how bad it is.

Voldemort spun around abruptly and stalked back to the bed. He knelt on one knee beside Harry this time, hand flattened over his chest. His heart, Harry realized a second later, which was fluttering frantically. Harry didn’t have the temptation to look away from Voldemort now. He wasn’t sure that anything could have made him look away.

“You are the only thing that I look forward to,” Voldemort whispered. “The only thing that makes it possible for me to rule and not simply take revenge until all magical blood on this wretched island has been spilled.” His hand shook, and the Horcrux bond howled, as if it couldn’t even contain the sick rage pouring through Voldemort. “You are the only reason I know grief again, the only reason that I have felt something like happiness. And they tried to take you from me. Yes, they shall pay, Harry. All children of their blood shall pay. All the thoughts in their minds shall pay. All the bones in their bodies shall pay. All the blood in their veins shall pay. I shall claim my price in blood and pain, and perhaps, then, I shall be content.”

Harry put his hand over Voldemort’s. He wished he could lie to himself and say that he didn’t know what he was feeling. And surely, it would be normal to say that. To not know which of the flood of emotions pouring through him was his own, which was an echo of Voldemort’s, which was based in hysteria and which he might stop feeling soon.

But he knew.

He hated what Voldemort had done. He wished it had never happened. He wished the attack in the courtroom had never happened. He wished Ginny had never betrayed him.

But part of him was…

Flattered.

Incredibly flattered that Voldemort cared this much about him. That someone did, when other people in his life seemed to have decided that his life had no utility if he didn’t spend it attempting to destroy Voldemort.

“I will try to save some of them,” Harry hissed back. “You know me, Voldemort. You wouldn’t—” He fumbled for a word. He settled on, “Desire me if I was any other way. If I was more like you.”

“I wish you would claim your own price. They owe it to you many times over.”

Harry swallowed, because, yes, part of him agreed, and part of him was fucking tired of denying that he’d like to see people suffer the exact same way he’d suffered. Probably the same part of him that had once dreamed of making enough money to come back and buy all the houses on Privet Drive and fill them with people who would laugh at his relatives.

But life didn’t work like that. Revenge didn’t work like that. The Dursleys were never going to understand the error of their ways. Neither were the Weasleys or the Order or the members of the Wizengamot.

Especially because Harry knew that in many ways, at least, the Weasleys and the Order and the Wizengamot hadn’t made a mistake. Voldemort was a dictator. Harry had done what he could to soften that, but in the end, maybe that was only a pretty cloth stretched over a gaping wound.

But he thought he was still allowed to feel bitter that, instead of trying to destroy Voldemort themselves, instead of spending time and energy and Galleons and lives rebelling against him, all they could do was look to Harry to do it. Because they were still too afraid of Voldemort to take him on themselves. Because they all thought it was Harry’s job.

What would they do if I had died and Ron and Hermione hadn’t found the Horcruxes? Harry wondered, not for the first time. Spend the same amount of money and time trying to raise me from the dead so I could save them again?

“I would not.”

Harry blinked, jolted out of his racing thoughts. “What?”

Voldemort draped his neck over Harry’s shoulder and rubbed his cheek against Harry’s. The motion stunned Harry silent. “I would not desire you if you were different. If you did not stand against me when you are on your back in bed from the Bone-Melting Curse, if you had not loved them enough to come to my bed.”

Harry turned his head and closed his eyes, his cheek against Voldemort’s, the skin under his rough with the blossoming scales.

*

“Fix him.”

George’s voice was harsh and demanding, since Harry had walked through the door of the small cell first, but it dried up when he saw Voldemort following. Harry turned and stared at Fred. He was under a blanket on a tiny pallet, twitching with motions Harry knew. Residual Cruciatus exposure.

Harry didn’t say he couldn’t. He didn’t say that Voldemort would only have tortured them if he had found some knowledge of Ginny’s plan in their minds. He turned to George and said, “Why did you decide to kill me instead of going after Voldemort?”

“That’s what you want to ask? When he tortured Fred?” George was yelling, the veins on either side of his neck standing out.

“When your sister almost got me killed? Yeah.”

“Fred’s suffering from the Cruciatus! No one’s treated him! He needs painkilling potions, potions to regenerate his nerves—”

“Funny, no one gave me that after I suffered the Cruciatus,” Harry said, and he made his voice as cruel as he could. He wanted to hurt George, but he also needed him to wake the fuck up and realize that he didn’t have any power here, and if he irritated Voldemort with threats, then Fred was going to get worse, not better.

George shut up, his eyes wild. Voldemort put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, his fingers spread wide, and pushed words down their mental bond.

Is that true? You received no treatment after the way I cursed you in the graveyard?

I didn’t know there were any specific potions for it, no.

Voldemort’s hand retreated, and the door on his half of the Horcrux bond shut. Harry had no idea why, unless the reminder that he had tortured Harry himself was too much for him. Well, he would have to work it out by himself. Harry looked straight at George and forced his voice to be calm as he said, “Answer me. I could see rebelling against Voldemort. I could see you never giving up and fighting against his regime until he died. But killing me first? What the fuck, George?”

“You’re keeping him alive!” George’s hand collided with the edge of the pallet behind Fred’s head. Fred shook and moaned. George snatched his hand back and stared at Harry with angry tears glittering in his eyes. “That’s what Ron and Hermione told us. They said you had a soul connection that kept him alive. So for him to die, that needs to go first. And they said that you—that you were—”

George’s eyes darted away. Harry, his blood roaring with shock, still managed to reach back and grab Voldemort’s wrist before he could point his wand at George. What could be worse than revealing Harry had to die?

“What?” Harry whispered. His lips were numb. He licked them and felt a small cut spring open, stinging. It reminded him that he was alive in the scant moment before Voldemort’s wand darted around Harry’s shoulder to heal it. “Tell me what they said.”

“They said you were making him more human.” George was speaking through gritted teeth now. “More popular with some people, because you were making them think he was just a —a regular married bloke who wants to spoil his husband. We can’t allow him to become popular. It would make everyone complacent, and it would make them not wish to fight back. Fuck, we have enough trouble getting them to do that now!”

Harry blinked. Huh. That made more sense than he’d suspected.

And it meant that Hermione and Ron had fully accepted that his death wasn’t just part of defeating Voldemort, but a political necessity. It was part of the world they wanted to build after Voldemort’s death. This was about winning the war and making the British magical world over in their own image, not the death of a madman.

Harry sighed. It felt good, in a way, to let his last connection to Ron and Hermione go, as if he had decided a poisoned limb could finally be amputated.

“Did you really think killing me in public would work?” Harry asked softly. “That getting all these people to do it with Voldemort in the room would be the best solution?”

“We didn’t know he would capture and torture the lot of us,” George said bitterly, bowing his head, hair tangling in front of his eyes. “We forgot that he’s a madman as well as murderous.”

Voldemort hissed. Harry still couldn’t tell what he was feeling. He pressed backwards with one shoulder against Voldemort’s chest, and said simply, “Well, fucking remember it for next time.”

“You’re letting us go?” George’s eyes darted back and forth between Harry and Voldemort.

“We are not,” said Voldemort.

“That’s to be decided,” Harry said. He had no idea what the Weasleys’ ultimate fate was going to be. He did know that it wouldn’t be decided right now, because there was no way that Voldemort would simply cast a Killing Curse at them now and be done with it. He wouldn’t want them to go through that painless a death. He faced George and repeated in English, “That’s to be decided. But really, George, this is—this is stupid.” He waved his hand angrily. “I mean, sure, your motivations make sense, but your actions? You’re incredibly stupid. I mean it. Attacking me in public, when Voldemort was right there?”

“Ginny said it had to be that way!”

“Since when is Ginny a fucking war strategist? Since when do you just blindly listen to her?”

The cell was silent then, except for Fred’s soft panting moans and George’s rasping breath. Harry pushed back, harder, against the cold wall of Voldemort behind him. He couldn’t feel Voldemort breathing. He could still feel nothing through the half-shut Horcrux link in his mind.

Harry felt as lonely as though he stood by himself in the vastness of space.

“She said it had to be that way,” George finally whispered. “She said that it would—that seeing you die in front of him would be what hurts him the most. She said that it’s not just that you’re making him look better in the eyes of the world or keeping him alive. She said that he—he comes as close as he can to loving you, and we had to break him. Strip him of control. She said it would be easy to defeat him once he’d fallen back into madness.”

Harry stared at George in silence. He supposed that made sense, too, why Ginny had wanted to go through the whole farce of a trial. She had wanted to break Voldemort as thoroughly as he’d broken her. It was a personal vengeance.

Harry snapped his head away as cold fingers caressed his throat and shaped a collar for a moment. He had to leave. Voldemort would probably open the Horcrux bond again if they were alone, and Harry needed that—

He pulled himself up on sharp reins.

And you want Fred and George to be safe and alive. You want that, too.

He’d forgotten. For a moment.

Harry wondered how much of a monster he would become, not for the last time, and said, “Thanks, George.” He turned to leave the cell.

“Harry?”

Harry paused, and heard nothing from George or Voldemort for long moments, only those shattered whimpers from Fred.

“I wish you’d died when they didn’t treat you for Cruciatus.”

Harry walked out without answering.

*

Harry swallowed the last bite of golden bread with strawberries. Voldemort had watched him obsessively (but what other word would there ever be to use?) as he ate, and said only that they would talk, and he would open the Horcrux bond again, when Harry had eaten a full meal. Harry put the plate aside and stared at Voldemort expectantly.

Voldemort nodded slowly. His fingers toyed with a strawberry. He hadn’t eaten much, himself, but Harry knew better than anyone that he would have kept up his strength by eating at some different time. After all, the Cruciatus was a magically powerful spell.

I hate that I know that. I hate thinking like this.

But it was what he had to do. Harry folded his arms. “All right. I ate the full meal that I promised you. Tell me what you think I need to know.” It had to be something about the attack, but Harry didn’t know what. Maybe Voldemort had wanted to wait to tell him the full list of casualties until Harry was full.

In fact, Voldemort had made Harry drink an anti-nausea potion before he’d led him to the table. It would make sense that he didn’t want Harry to throw up if he was going to tell him something disgusting.

“It has nothing to do with casualties.”

Harry gasped as the Horcrux bond opened again. Rage was there, and tenderness, the two plaited together. Voldemort had wanted to torture George for what he had said as they were leaving the cell, Harry knew now, but he had refrained, because it would make Harry upset.

But that wasn’t the only thing he felt the rage about. There was something more.

Whatever it was, it promised to absorb the conversation completely once Voldemort brought it up. So Harry took a deep breath and rushed in with what he had to say before Voldemort could speak. “Don’t do that again, please.”

“Don’t do what?”

Harry met his eyes and spoke in Parseltongue for the first time since the dungeons. “Leave me alone. Please. Don’t.”

Voldemort’s face shone. He reached across the table to caress Harry’s hand, back of his fingers against the back of Harry’s fingers. “I will not.”

Harry closed his eyes and drifted in the middle of that reassurance. He shouldn’t. He was a bad person for doing it.

But all those facts were so many dry reassurances, words painted on a wall, and nothing to the feeling of Voldemort’s mind entwining with his.

Harry finally shook himself free of it, and murmured, “What is it that you have to tell me?”

“I looked into the minds of everyone I found,” Voldemort said softly. “I found some kind of knowledge of Ginny Weasley’s plan in most of them. None of them is an Occlumens, and they could not have hidden secrets from me. I found what she said, what she commanded them do. But I found no knowledge of how she could have survived the magic I unleashed at her, and no knowledge of where she is now.”

Harry sighed. “So the torture didn’t really work except as punishment.”

“And vengeance.” Voldemort caressed Harry’s hand, this time with his fingertips against Harry’s knuckles. “There is more. What this means is that either she has powerful helpers who are completely hidden from us, people who would know how to give her shields that would survive my power—”

“Do you think Dumbledore could still be alive?” Harry blurted without even thinking about it.

“No.”

The absolute certainty in Voldemort’s words made Harry blink at him. Obviously the way Dumbledore had died was at least partially a setup, given that he’d known Voldemort knew Harry was a Horcrux, and that Snape, who had killed Dumbledore, had been loyal to him instead of Voldemort. “Why couldn’t he be alive? In hiding?”

Voldemort’s lips parted, and a tide of glee filled Harry’s mind with honeyed starlight. “Because I am a necromancer, my own. One of the first things I did after the attack was call up Albus’s spirit to see what knowledge he might have had. If perhaps he had dispensed instructions to Miss Weasley or given her protections that none of the others knew about. He had not, and oh, Harry, he is dead. And tormented by the knowledge I have given him.”

Harry nodded slowly. Yes, all right, that would have done it. “So you think that there’s someone else? Other members of the Order of the Phoenix, maybe?”

“I have all the members of the Order,” Voldemort said carelessly. “But there is another problem with that scenario. If they had such shields and protections, why would they not have given them to all members of the Order instead of only Ginny Weasley? When she did not even fight, but fled? Or used them themselves to attack me?”

Harry frowned. “Okay. But what’s the other possibility you mentioned?:

“She was right.”

“She, uh. She was?”

“Not in general, my own.” Voldemort’s fingers slid between Harry’s, his fingernails like shining glass. “But that your death would break me into pieces smaller than any Horcruxes? That I love you? Yes.”

Harry felt as though someone had struck him with a cloud. He leaned towards Voldemort, staring back, while those words echoed in him and leaped back and forth and carved new grooves into his soul.

He loves me. He really does.

Maybe some of those emotions he hadn’t known how to identify in the Horcrux bond were love. Just nothing Harry could call by that name in anyone else.

He let his hand rest on Voldemort’s and opened his mouth. Voldemort reached out and pinched his lips shut at once, shaking his head.

“Speak it to me when you mean it, when you have thought about it and it is not an automatic return. When you feel it.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah,” he said croakily. “Okay. But—but what’s the significance of her being right?” With effort, he lashed his mind back onto the trail it was supposed to follow.

“How did she know that? No one else I interrogated today thought it for themselves. They only believed it because she had told it to them. Where did she gain the knowledge? How could she be right about something that not even your friends Weasley and Granger believed? How could she have gained such intimate knowledge of me, particularly with her memory problems and barely remembering the year that she was possessed?” Voldemort stroked Harry’s hand again. “The other possibility, and the infinitely more likely one, is that that was not Ginny Weasley.”

“What?” Harry stared at him. “You think that was someone using Polyjuice in the courtroom? Or an illusion?”

“No, Harry.” Voldemort’s lips widened in a smile, and rage and tenderness stirred like a sandstorm in the back of Harry’s mind. “That was my Horcrux wearing Ginny Weasley’s skin.”