[From Litha to Lammas]: Ambush, Harry/Voldemort, Retreat series, 5/5

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last part of “Ambush,” but I plan to write one more story in the series.

Part Five

Harry saw the Horcrux bond falling away before him as a long tunnel, which became the heart of a blazing star, which became the sound of screaming, this time heard from the inside instead of the outside the way he had heard Voldemort’s screams.

And he was in—

He had no idea what to call it. Voldemort’s mind? His soul? A combination of both? The spiritual plane where Voldemort had described throwing his own spirit to meet with the Horcrux wraith?

What mattered was that Harry had no trouble telling the corrupted diary wraith from the piece of Voldemort that was his husband.

Harry struck directly at the sense of wrongness, the sense of youth, the scent that was like the scent of someone else’s body and sweat. It appeared to catch the diary wraith by surprise. It went rolling away from him, and then Harry saw the world around him darken as the wraith apparently built a battlefield out of memories.

They were in the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry forced himself to his feet, panting. It at least felt like he had a body again, whether or not he did. He folded his arms. He looked like himself, not the twelve-year-old version he had thought he might, but the statue of Salazar Slytherin loomed over him, and puddles decorated the floor, and in one corner lay the diary, pulsing malevolently.

“If there is no basilisk here, how are you going to defeat me?” asked Tom Riddle’s voice, and the shade poured of the diary and smiled at him.

Harry wondered what the point of the smile was, if Tom was trying to charm him or covering fear. “If there’s no Ginny Weasley to drain here, how are you going to survive?” he asked, and took an easy step forwards. “I defeated you once. I can defeat you again.”

“This time, I will destroy you,” Tom said, and shook his head slowly enough that he didn’t disturb a curl of the hair on his perfect forehead. “How my elder self came to care for such a weak, pathetic shadow as you—”

“You know I’m a Horcrux too, right? It had to do with that. Certainly why he wanted to marry me.” Harry thought carefully about what he might be armed with here. Memories had built this place, but he didn’t have to play by all the memory’s rules. Tom had already broken them by taking Ginny away.

Tom clucked his tongue. “A Horcrux in a living body can’t be protected the way one in any object can.” He turned and began to speak in Parseltongue to the statue, and the statue’s mouth began to open.

Imagine what I can to protect myself, Harry thought firmly, and dug a hand into his robe pockets. He wore the same robes he had for most of the day sitting with Blaise and Mrs. Zabini, and he had more than his wand in there. Voldemort had insisted, in case something went wrong.

Something like this, Harry thought, and as the basilisk slithered out of the mouth of the statue, he flung his Invisibility Cloak over his head and disappeared.

Tom turned around and started, turning his head slowly back and forth. Harry hoped that Ginny had never written in the diary about the Cloak, or at least that thoughts about it hadn’t been uppermost in her mind when Tom lived there. He eased backwards and drew his wand, concentrating carefully on memories of several months ago.

“What do you wish me to destroy, master?” the basilisk hissed. Harry swallowed. He had forgotten how much deeper and more bloodthirsty its voice was than Nagini’s. He wished Nagini was here.

“The boy that was here a moment ago. You can smell him.” Tom was frowning as if mildly put out, but Harry didn’t think he’d imagined that one of Tom’s hands was clenching down at his side, as if he had a second wand to draw. “Find him and kill him.”

“Yes, master.”

The basilisk began to move in a slow slither, aiming at the far side of the Chamber where Ginny had been in reality. Harry closed his eyes and leaned back behind one of the pillars. The basilisk would have to turn carefully to get past obstacles and come after him, and he would hear it moving.

All the while, he kept concentrating, on everything from the words spoken in the memory to what it had been like to run for his life.

“I cannot find him, master,” the basilisk said a few minutes later, jolting Harry out of his concentration. Harry flexed his hand open and shut, making sure to keep his eyes closed. Just because the basilisk was having trouble—maybe because of the Cloak, maybe because of the water in the Chamber—didn’t mean that it would keep having it. Harry had to be prepared. He had to be ready.

“You will find him,” Tom spat. “Lower your head closer to the floor, you useless snake.”

The basilisk hissed in something that might have been aggravation, but did so. Harry took a slow, deep breath, checked the memory one more time, and decided that he wasn’t going to recall any more important details.

Good luck to me.

Harry spun out from behind the pillar, aimed his wand under the Cloak, and spat aloud, because there was no way that he was going to chance trying this incantation silently. “Fiendfyre!”

The fire that flowed out of his wand was so intense and bright as to be horrifying. Harry immediately felt the spell grab onto his magic and pull. He hissed and fought back, yanking on the flames, forbidding them to spiral out of control and burn everything in sight as they wanted, forbidding them to turn back on him, telling them to form into basilisks of their own, and harpies, and phoenixes. The inferno obeyed sulkily, but seemed a lot happier when Harry told it to burn the basilisk and Tom as much as it liked.

Streams of fire, banners of brilliance, snapped out towards Tom and the basilisk. Tom fell back with a shout and a shield. The basilisk reared up and opened its mouth, staring directly into the eyes of a fiery phoenix.

Of course, Harry realized after a moment. It probably doesn’t know the thing isn’t alive, and it’s used to being able to just stare at something and have it die—

And that was as far as Harry could go with that thought, because the basilisk turned a little and he knew he would die himself if he met its gaze. He rolled on the floor, Cloak pulled over his head, and heard the moment when the fire flared out and encompassed the basilisk. The basilisk did not scream aloud, but said in Parseltongue over and over, “Pain, pain, pain,” and Harry heard the furious grinding noise of it writhing on the stone floor of the Chamber.

And then the noise of its hissing was gone.

The Fiendfyre turned and lunged towards Harry. Harry scrambled to his feet, panting, and clenched one hand down on his wand, thinking over and over again about how much he wanted to control it. There was a long hiss that bore no resemblance to Parseltongue, and the flames settled at his feet.

Harry stared out over the head of a fiery sphinx, into Tom Riddle’s eyes. He wore no expression at all.

And then he abruptly dropped the semblance of the Chamber, and his human form, and surged towards Harry as the kind of dark wraith that Harry had seen leave Quirrell when he died.

Harry forced the Fiendfyre to rise up in front of him. The wraith slipped through the fire as if it didn’t exist, and the darkness slammed into Harry’s mind.

And further darkness descended.

*

Harry didn’t know where he was, but he floated in the middle of a blackness as absolute as the Fiendfyre had been bright. He could feel nothing, and the only thing he could hear was the voice of Tom Riddle.

“You are dead.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Harry said, and tried to roll over or push himself off something or grip his wand. Nothing happened. The endless darkness continued, and so did the drifting. Harry tried his best to hold back his panic and strained his ears for any sign of his enemy. He was still sure that he would know the difference between Tom Riddle’s voice and Voldemort’s, and be able to hold back from attacking his husband.

“You have no way out of this. I have encompassed you in me. I have possessed your mind, and shortly I will follow the tunnel left open by your own Horcrux back into your body, and possess that. How the world will rejoice over the death of Lord Voldemort, never realizing that the best of him stands in the body of the Boy-Who-Lived.” Tom laughed dryly. “The destiny that your friends hoped would be fulfilled will no longer be out of reach. How long can I fool them after I call them back from exile, I wonder?”

Harry tried to send out a wave of magic in the direction of the voice. Nothing happened except Tom laughing again.

“Your husband was a fool to think that he could seek me out on the spiritual plane and destroy me.”

Harry was ready to agree with that, but he saw no reason to speak his agreement aloud. He floated in the darkness and tried to reason out a course of action he could take. No magic, no wand, and he didn’t know Occlumency. He was useless at this kind of mental combat.

But he had defeated the basilisk in Tom’s mockery of the Chamber. And there had to be a reason that Tom had put him there first, instead of here. Had he just used the time in the memory of the Chamber to possess Harry?

If that’s the case, then he’s already won and there’s nothing I can do, Harry thought grimly. So I might as well behave as if it isn’t true and I can still defeat him.

“Nothing to say for yourself, Harry Potter? I must say, you have an interesting mind. So chaotic and vulnerable. I didn’t dare spend too much time in it when I slipped in to obscure your memories of our battle, in case my elder self noticed my presence, but now I think I shall enjoy…rearranging some things.”

Harry let out a long, slow breath. There also had to be a reason that Tom was talking on and on, even if it was only because he liked the sound of his voice.

And then Harry realized something. Tom had talked of possessing his mind, and then his body.

He had said nothing of Harry’s soul. And Harry’s soul, from what Voldemort had told him, was conjoined with a Horcrux, and therefore with Voldemort’s soul. Certainly Harry had a more profound connection with Voldemort than any of his other Horcruxes did.

There had to be a way to pull on that connection, to find Voldemort or use the shard of Voldemort’s soul and Harry’s whole and unviolated one to fight Tom. Or both.

“I wonder how long I should let this darkness persist,” Tom said dreamily. “Long enough to drive you mad? I could make eternity seem to pass here for you in the span of no more than a few minutes for myself, and still have no time at all go by in the real world, before I go to possess your body. Reality is what you make of it, here.”

Harry would have smiled if he still had lips.

Reality is what you make of it.

Harry had called Fiendfyre because he’d thought he could. He’d had his Cloak with him in the Chamber because he’d thought he did. And he had thought, just a moment ago, that he had a whole soul plus an extra piece.

Tom Riddle was a severed piece of soul, no more than a wraith.

Harry thought of Nagini, of the way she had once coiled atop Narcissa Malfoy and threatened to eat her, and of his husband’s long neck. He could feel substance settling around him, and the substance made him into a serpent. A constrictor. A great anaconda.

Harry reached out through the darkness, thinking of the similarity between the piece of Voldemort’s soul embedded in his own and the wraith, and wrapped himself around Tom Riddle, around the drifting piece of the diary Horcrux, and began to crush him.

Tom Riddle screamed, and began to thrash.

The pain shuddered through him. Harry had never felt anything on this level, but the closest had probably been the times Snape had used Legilimency on him. He had no body to ache. The pain simply transformed him into more pain.

The moment Harry had the thought, he felt his grip on Tom slipping, and Tom snarled in triumph. Harry promptly imagined himself with heavy, long coils again, and the size of his soul as so much greater than Tom’s, and went back to his strangling.

Tom howled and fought. He scratched Harry with imagined claws, and bit him with teeth that made the hot blood run out into the darkness around them. Harry felt him transform himself into a snake, a venomous one, and he bit Harry again and again.

Harry simply reminded himself that this was a combat of souls, on a plane that wasn’t physical, and it didn’t matter how much damage he had suffered himself. Preventing Tom Riddle from possessing Harry’s body was more important than anything else.

Even if he died in the process. Even if he did that before he ever found out what had happened to Voldemort’s soul.

The struggle went on so long that Harry began to feel his memories slipping away. He wondered if he had ever grown up with the Dursleys, and not this darkness full of thrashing and roaring noise. He wondered if he had walked the corridors of Hogwarts and learned to wield a wand, and not simply been here all this time, soul magic and the magic of snakes filling his head. He wondered if he had been married to Voldemort—

Yes, Yes, I was.

Harry couldn’t forget that long tongue wrapping around his wrist, or the way Voldemort’s neck wove when he was eager, or how he had destroyed Harry’s enemies in the Wizengamot, or how he looked at Harry as though he was the center of the universe. When other memories became faded shadows, those still stood forth, bright as knives edged in diamonds.

He turned and scraped them against Tom, not sure what he was doing, not sure if this was the best thing to do, but knowing that it made Tom scream, and that was surely a step in the right direction.

And then something else touched him, joined the battle. It was a cold, flowing stream of power, and Harry gasped and grabbed hold of it. He had no idea what it was. Perhaps Mrs. Zabini had been able to get a ward inside his head or Voldemort’s body and this was the prelude to kicking Tom out.

Fear not, Harry. I am here.

The cold power more fully manifested, and Harry swallowed as he felt it pouring over him. Voldemort, it had to be. Harry had never felt that kind of relentless anger, dancing on the edge of madness, from anyone else.

You are finished, Tom.

Tom started to say something else, something that was in a gabbled mixture of Parseltongue and a language Harry had never heard before, but he never had the chance. Voldemort rippled, or so Harry had the sense of his movement, and ripped Tom apart.

The scream was endless, then, reverberating as much as Voldemort’s anger, and Harry fell down into silence and knew nothing for a time.

*

He opened his eyes to light. He turned his head, and discovered that he wasn’t back in his body. Or if he was, Voldemort or Mrs. Zabini had moved him into a room he had never seen before.

That made him decide he was probably still in the combination of mental landscape and spiritual plane where he had fought Tom. Voldemort wouldn’t have permitted Mrs. Zabini to take him out of the house, and Harry knew every room in it.

Slowly, he sat up, staring around. The room was bright and covered with what seemed to be a sheath of white marble, cold and lifeless. The light came from above the ceiling. Harry looked up, but saw no source for it.

“My own.”

Harry blinked and scrambled around on his knees, wondering how he could have missed seeing Voldemort. He gave a sharp shout of shock when he saw him, or the representation of him here, and stuffed a hand in his mouth.

Voldemort stared back at him. His body was naked and covered with black and oozing cuts. The scales that had appeared under his skin had been replaced by patterns of bruises that alternated with patches of bare bone. His arms and legs were broken. Harry edged towards him, eyes darting back and forth from wound to wound.

He finally looked at Voldemort’s face. Harry didn’t know how he could be alive or conscious—or what passed for it here—but those red eyes were the only things that were unhurt. And locked on him.

“Finish it,” Voldemort hissed.

“What are you talking about?” Harry said warily. He kept looking at the wounds because there was no way to ignore them, but his attention was always drawn back to Voldemort’s eyes. Cold and clear, not furious the way he’d expected. “You need me to bring you the rest of the way back? You’re too weakened from ripping Tom’s spirit apart?”

“I am weakened,” Voldemort agreed, and his tongue darted from his mouth. It had been cut almost in half, Harry realized, the forks dangling as separate pieces for most of its length. “But I will recover in time. These are mental and spiritual wounds, not physical ones.”

“Then I don’t understand—”

“You could destroy me now. Finish what your friends wanted you to do. Please Dumbledore.”

Harry blinked twice. He sat where he was, and watched the rise and fall of Voldemort’s tattered chest.

“I thought you wouldn’t be able to die,” he murmured at last. “Not as long as you had one Horcrux to sustain you.”

“I ripped apart a piece of my soul. You felt how I did it. You could do it to me, and I would be gone. And the Horcruxes would never be able to come to life on their own, unless someone found them and fed them as Weasley fed the diary. It is unlikely to happen. I hid them too well. You would have time to hunt them down in any case. And you now know how to destroy them in a way that does not involve basilisk venom. I saw you call it.” Voldemort’s voice had a strange tone of pride. “You could do it, Harry. You were forced into this marriage without a choice. I know it. I am one of the people who forced you. Make your choice. Destroy me.”

Harry sat there with his hands on his knees—or the sensation of his hands on the sensation of his knees—and stared at Voldemort. He had no idea what to say. His mind was as blank as the walls of this place, wherever they were.

It was true. He had been forced into the marriage. He would never have chosen to lose his friends, to sleep with Voldemort, to spend most of his time alone with him in Malfoy Manor, to become a ruler of Britain. To have Voldemort kill the Malfoys and torture his friends and kill Snape. To stop hunting Horcruxes and become a captive one instead.

He could get everything back, with one stroke. Ron and Hermione would probably accept that he had been playing a long game and only pretending to go along with Voldemort, no matter how much it personally cost him, so that he could get close to him and destroy him. He would be the hero of Britain again, the darling savior. The magical world would be free again. Stupid laws like the ones Voldemort had passed requiring extremely torturous deaths for certain crimes could be overturned.

And all he had to do was kill.

“You are taking an oddly long time to decide, my own,” Voldemort whispered. “Why is that? Are you afraid?”

Harry didn’t know that he felt anything. He was too full of thoughts to feel anything. He stared at Voldemort while the thoughts tumbled through his head.

He had to do to Voldemort what Voldemort had done to Tom Riddle. And he was sure he probably could do it. If he could summon the same kind of hatred and cold power that Voldemort had used when he wasn’t wounded in the same way, he could do it.

Harry closed his eyes.

“Harry?”

The voice was Voldemort’s, of course, speaking in cold, smooth Parseltongue. But it could have been Ron and Hermione’s. It could have been Dumbledore’s. It could have been Sirius’s, pleading from beyond the Veil, pleading for Harry to give his death meaning.

And then Harry did feel something, welling up so powerfully inside him that it was like trying to contain an oil spill in his soul.

I’m the sacrifice, Again.

Ron and Hermione hadn’t had to kill someone they had lived with, had looked in the face, had eaten meals with, had walked beside for months. Had slept with. They’d intended to have Voldemort use the Killing Curse on Harry to slay the Horcrux, and they’d sent Justin with the potion when they’d planned the assassination attempt on Harry. Most of the Weasleys had wanted him dead without being in the Wizengamot courtroom. Dumbledore had had every chance to kill Harry and apparently save the world, but he’d held back.

None of them had wanted to become a killer. None of them had wanted to dirty their hands. Because that should be left up to Harry.

And Voldemort.

Harry closed his eyes and whispered, “I’m fucking sick and tired of living for the greater good.”

“Harry?”

Yeah, I had no choice, Harry thought. So I’m going to make one.

He opened his eyes, stood, and walked across the bright room to kneel beside Voldemort. Voldemort watched him without expression now, except that his eyes were burning, burning. Harry laid a hand over the pulsing in his chest that he knew indicated Voldemort’s heart—in this world, probably the center of his magic and his life.

“Come on,” Harry said softly. “Let’s go home.” And he gathered Voldemort close, and willed himself back into his body.

The last thing he heard before the room dissolved around them was Voldemort sighing his name.

*

Harry turned around and stood still. Voldemort was standing in the doorway of the bedroom in their house that was Harry’s alone, staring at him.

Harry swallowed slowly and crossed the room to him, staring as hard as he could. Voldemort wore a pair of black robes open in the front. There was no trace of a wound on his chest. Harry had known there wouldn’t be. Mrs. Zabini had reassured Harry, after he’d opened his eyes and seen her face, that the injuries Voldemort had taken were the sort that would give him missing memories, irritable moods, and the like. Nothing physical was wrong with him.

She’d said that, and then Stunned Harry. When he woke up, he’d been back in his own room, and he’d seen the house-elves and Blaise and Mrs. Zabini since then—and Fleur and Bill, whom Voldemort had apparently ordered released from their cells. Bill had touched his shoulder, pale and shaken. Fleur had hugged him without a word. Her child had survived.

But he hadn’t seen Voldemort. If not for the low pulse in the back of his head, down the Horcrux bond, Harry would have thought his husband had spent those days unconscious.

Harry thought he understood why. Voldemort had been vulnerable in front of him. That was something Tom Riddle had never been able to tolerate, and Voldemort still carried a fragment of that same soul.

By saving his life, I think I destroyed what we had.

Now here was his husband, neck weaving back and forth and eyes fixed unblinkingly on Harry, but the Horcrux bond still dim and silent.

“I would have made the same decision,” Harry blurted. Voldemort’s neck stopped moving. “If I’d known that you would hate me for seeing you vulnerable, I still would have made the same decision. I didn’t want to kill you. I didn’t want to do what everyone else wanted me to do just because they were too frightened to do it themselves. And I didn’t think you were serious about wanting me to kill you, either.” Harry took a deep breath. “So I would do it again. But I’m sorry you hate me for it.”

Voldemort’s eyes widened. Then he surged into the room and seized Harry’s shoulders. Harry winced as he slammed into the bedpost, but he kept staring stubbornly into Voldemort’s eyes, and pushed mental words at him down the Horcrux bond. Open the bond. You owe it to me to let me see what you’re feeling.

Voldemort opened it, and Harry bent double under the sun that lit up the center of his chest. Pride, and greed, and desire, and trust, and—

Yes. That was love, so all-encompassing that Harry felt it like blisters on his skin. Voldemort pulled back a little and closed part of the bond, and Harry was left shaking and panting in the wake of it.

“No one has ever chosen me,” Voldemort whispered to him, curling his neck around Harry’s shoulder. “Not as I am. They chose my power, or the war I was waging, or the chance to torture and kill. Not me. I—had to come to terms with it. I am sorry that it took me so long.”

And before Harry could react to that properly, Voldemort began nudging him towards the bed.

They had rarely slept together here. That was the point of heaving separate bedrooms as well as one they shared when they felt like it. But Harry was more than willing to kiss Voldemort, that strange lipless mouth that he had come to want, and drag his robes off. He was already shirtless underneath, and only needed to remove his socks and pants.

Voldemort shed his black robes with a roll of his shoulders. He was naked, then, and Harry dragged him closer with impatient hands, spreading his legs and arching his hips.

Voldemort murmured what sounded like the usual spells, but Harry didn’t feel the usual sensations. Slickness on his cock, not his arse. He blinked his eyes open and stared at Voldemort in confusion.

Voldemort tilted his head and reached out and back and down, and sank onto Harry instead of the other way around.

Harry gasped without noise. There were no words for this, not in English or Parseltongue. Voldemort was coldness around him, quickly warming, and tightness, and red eyes that didn’t let him go, and moving hips in continuous rolls and loops of motion that turned the words that would have come out of Harry’s mouth into useless mutters and sparks and huffs.

I have never done this with someone. You are the first. You are the only.

The words burst in Harry’s mind like fire, and he nodded and reached up and clutched Voldemort’s hips and tried to say something that would tell Voldemort how much he understood and appreciated the gift. But what he said was, I love you.

It didn’t take long for him to come. Voldemort followed right behind him, shuddering, and his wonder was like melting hail in the middle of the bond.

*

Afterwards, Voldemort curled as close as he could around Harry, lapping him in his limbs the way an anaconda would in coils, and twisted beneath him so that barely any of Harry touched the bed. Harry leaned his head on Voldemort’s chest and listened to the steady beat of his heart.

He didn’t mean to ask it, but the thought welled up in his head, irresistible. Did you kill Fred and George? The others?

Voldemort’s arm was wound about Harry’s shoulders, his hand resting over Harry’s collarbone. He said at once, calm in a way that Harry had never heard, No. I have not tortured them. While I cannot simply let them go for what they tried to do to you, I will not hurt them again. We will work out something else to do with them.

What—what the hell.

It would hurt you.

I—yeah, it would, but you never cared about that before.

Now I do.

Harry felt his eyes burn with tears. Voldemort curled closer and closer still, more than ever like a great snake, and hissed aloud, “What has distressed you?”

“You love me enough to listen to what I want,” Harry breathed. “Do you know how rare that is?”

Voldemort twisted and laid his cheek alongside Harry’s, although it should have been impossible with the position they were in. “Now I do.”

Harry swallowed and clutched Voldemort’s arm. The next thought, one he would have had trouble putting in words but no trouble sharing down their bond, was what other Horcrux wraiths might be out there. He couldn’t lose Voldemort to them, not now.

Dumbledore destroyed only one other, Voldemort murmured. The ring. Yes, that wraith might be hiding somewhere. We will hunt and destroy it. And then I will destroy the others, save for the ones that reside in you and Nagini.

Harry curled harder and harder, closer and closer. Voldemort hissed soft nonsense in his ear and flattened his hand over Harry’s heart.

Ron and Hermione would get what they wanted after all, Harry thought, or part of what they wanted. The Horcruxes were going to be destroyed. Voldemort would release prisoners he had taken. And he would—repeal laws he had passed? Moderate his rule?

If that is what you want, Voldemort whispered, and his desire ignited like a sun under Harry’s breastbone again, the desire to do what Harry wanted. I will argue with you when something puts you in danger or when it would make us look weak to our enemies, but I will do what you want in matters such as these. What does flaunting my power matter? Making people afraid?

It—it mattered a lot.

It does not now. You have taken their place.

Harry closed his eyes. There were no words for this now, for the sun that was burning between them, except the ones they had already spoken. Voldemort loved Harry as he had once loved power.

They had made their choices. And this was what they had chosen.

The End.