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lomonaaerenTitle: To Play the Knife’s Edge
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Voldemort
Content Notes: AU starting in the middle of DH, angst, references to past violence and character death, arranged marriage
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. After his wand was broken, Harry decided that the Horcrux hunt could never succeed, and if Voldemort was going to win, what the world needed most was him softened. So he offered a peace treaty, with marriage, to Voldemort—in as pure a faith as he could.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” one-shots, for a prompt by Amelie26, which is essentially the summary. Note that this is the prologue to a much longer story, which I may write someday. It goes AU after Harry’s wand is broken and before Ron returns, and will have two chapters.
To Play the Knife’s Edge
Harry sat in the center of the tent, staring at the two items that lay on the blanket in front of him. His shattered holly wand, to the right. The locket Horcrux, to the left.
“Harry?”
Harry glanced up with a wan smile for Hermione, who looked so worried that Harry thought she might burst into flames in the middle of the tent. “I just need to think, Hermione. Just to be alone for a while.”
“All right.” Hermione hesitated, eyes on Harry’s broken wand. “I—I’ve been looking through some of the books we brought with us, Harry, and I can’t find any way for a wand to be repaired.” Deep breath. “But that doesn’t mean a charm doesn’t exist!”
“I’d like to think, Hermione,” Harry said, as gently as he could.
Hermione squeezed his shoulder once, also gently, and then turned and walked out of the tent. Harry felt a little guilty as the flap fell shut, but reminded himself that she knew Warming Charms, and that thinking wouldn’t take him long.
Not when he’d done most of it last night.
He turned back to the wand and reached out to touch the splintered wood, gently. The phoenix feather felt warm under his fingers, but Harry knew it was only an illusion. The wand was broken, and nothing could bring it back. Given that Ollivander had disappeared, who knew if Harry could even get another one?
I won’t do any good against Voldemort without a wand.
Then Harry turned and stared at the locket Horcrux, which might have been a large part of the reason that Ron left. But even if it wasn’t, and that just came down to Ron’s homesickness and hatred of what was happening, they still hadn’t come up with a way to destroy it that didn’t involve basilisk fangs. And there was no way they could sneak into Hogwarts with Snape there as Headmaster.
Harry closed his eyes. The conclusion sat and stared him in the face. But he barely wanted to say it even to himself.
We have to ask Voldemort for peace.
Part of Harry rebelled at the notion, mostly because it didn’t seem like it would work. Voldemort was insane. How would he respond to an offer of a peace treaty? By tearing up the letter and laughing about it with his Death Eaters, most likely.
But against that, Harry laid the bare truths he had come to accept. He and Hermione—and Ron, if he ever returned—had no notion of how to destroy the locket with weapons they could access. They had no clues as to where the next Horcruxes were. Harry was without a wand, which meant he was helpless even if Voldemort had no more Horcruxes. He could borrow Hermione’s wand, sure, which would make her even more of a target, or he could try to steal one, which would be bloody difficult to do when he was wandless himself.
Harry had toyed with the idea of just offering himself up to Voldemort in exchange for peace. But that would mean Voldemort would kill him and go on living, just as insane as before, and Ron and Hermione would be left with the problem of hunting down Horcruxes they didn’t know about and destroying them with weapons they didn’t know about.
Plus…
Harry wanted to live.
He clenched his hands next to his knees, even though he kept his eyes shut. He wondered if that was a reprehensible, cowardly desire.
But, well, plenty of people in the rest of Britain wanted to live. Ron and Hermione did. The Weasleys did, which was why they weren’t out there openly opposing Voldemort. All the people who were keeping their heads down in the Ministry and going along with what Voldemort wanted were doing it so they could live.
Why should Harry be the only one who had to sacrifice his life? Particularly when it wouldn’t do much good anyway?
If he lived, if he offered himself in marriage, then Voldemort would be bound by the vows to not commit genocide and mass torture. Harry was going to insist on that. In return, he would deliver the locket and what he knew about the rest of the Horcruxes, which honestly wasn’t much.
And he would recommend that people lay down their wands against the Death Eaters.
Harry shuddered and opened his eyes. It was a terrible bargain. But it was the only way he could think of to buy time to reduce Voldemort’s insanity and influence him in some way. Hermione’s books from Grimmauld Place said wedding vows tied the spouses together into one unit, which meant that Harry’s priorities would have a mental and magical effect on Voldemort.
And his on you?
Harry grimaced. Yeah, that was the sticking point. But he did think that if he went into this with good faith, then he would manage to have his way. That was another thing the books had said, that the very same vows that would keep the spouses from fighting each other would make them prioritize their common good. And at the moment, Harry had a hell of a lot more of their “common good” on his mind than Voldemort did.
He stood and walked to the tent flap. Hermione immediately turned around, her eyes big. She was shivering a little in spite of the shimmer of a Warming Charm around her.
“I’ve decided,” Harry said quietly. “We need to steal a camera, so that we can take a picture of my wand and the locket and send it to—Riddle, along with a request for peace.”
*
“I’m not insane.”
Hermione gave him a doubtful glance. Harry shifted in the ropes that bound him, and stilled with a sigh when Hermione lifted her wand in his direction. She had not taken the announcement about them needing to reach out to Voldemort with a peace proposition well.
“That’s not you, Harry,” she said now, for at least the fifth time since she had Stunned him a few hours ago. “You fight until the bitter end! You don’t give up! I think You-Know-Who is influencing you, somehow…”
“Yeah, I know it’s possible, but would he really want peace? Or would he just inspire me to do something stupid like go challenge him to a duel so he could win the war?”
“If he doesn’t think he can defeat you—”
“Who’s shivering in the middle of the woods in a tent right now and who’s snug and secure in Malfoy Manor, Hermione? Come on.”
Hermione bit her lip several times in a row, not seeming to know what she was doing, until a little trickle of blood crept down her face. “We owe it to people to protect them,” she whispered. “We owe it to them to keep fighting.”
Harry felt as though he were a cup, overflowing, but what came out when he opened his mouth was bitterness. “And what are they doing, huh? Keeping their heads down, pretending they don’t know Muggleborns are being arrested right now, enabling Umbridge, doing what the Death Eaters tell them—”
“They’re scared!”
“We fucking are too! But we’re out here doing something about it!”
Hermione lowered her eyes. “And you think sending a surrender offer would be doing something about it?”
Her voice was an angry whisper, but there was something else in it. Harry cocked his head. She sounded—tempted.
She’s scared, too. She’s starving and cold. She wants this war to be over, and that might finally have worn down her conviction that we need to keep fighting no matter what. Maybe she was even arguing because she thought I would expect it.
“It’s more than anyone else is doing right now,” Harry said, keeping his voice as calm and steady as possible. “You know that. And you know what that book you found says. That he and I would be bound together if we got married. I could influence him. He would influence me, but I’d count on you to keep me tempered.”
“And Ron?”
“If he ever bloody comes back, sure.”
Hermione made a little twitchy motion, but didn’t say anything. And then she abruptly twirled her wand, and the ropes fell away from Harry. He brought his arms forwards with relief, eyeing her cautiously as he rubbed his wrists.
“You’re right,” Hermione said, her words tumbling over each other like rocks in a stream. “You’re right. I don’t have any ideas how to destroy them or stop him. I don’t know how to get you a wand. We might as well try this because no one else is trying anything and because nothing we’re trying will work.”
By the time she finished, tears were bright in her eyes. Harry lunged towards her and hugged her. Hermione clung back.
*
Stealing a camera was the hardest part, once he’d convinced Hermione.
Hermione was the one who finally searched through the books from Grimmauld Place and found the spell that enchanted magical photographs to move. Then they just put on a Disillusionment Charm, walked into a Muggle shop, and carefully took a camera. Harry felt a painful tug in his chest as he realized that the reason he knew that would work was because Colin Creevey had had a Muggle camera and had told Harry excitedly in second year about a spell that would develop the film and enchant it to move.
I’m doing this for him, too. For all of them.
They had to steal film, and they stole plenty, because Hermione had to cast the charm several times to get it right. But when she finally did and took a picture of Harry, they enchanted it and watched as Harry smiled at the camera, then tried to duck out of the frame, glancing at them over his shoulder.
Hermione took the picture of the broken wand and the Horcrux, with Harry sitting behind them, his hair swept to the side and his scar prominently displayed. Then Harry sat down to write the letter.
The offer.
The surrender.
*
To the Dark Lord.
(Harry had decided to begin that way since he didn’t know if Voldemort would like Harry using any name, and this sounded more respectful than You-Know-Who).
As you can see, I have reached the point where I am ready to surrender. I have one of your Horcruxes, but I am willing to return it to you and tell you what I know about the others if you will agree to the following conditions:
*No genocide or mass killing of Muggles or Muggleborns
*No mass torture
*To marry me under the Rite of Alcyone no later than a month after treaty negotiations have concluded
*Not to harm me during these treaty negotiations
(Harry and Hermione had argued about the wording of that last condition for a long while, but they’d at last agreed that it was better if they didn’t ask Voldemort not to harm her or Ron. They would be stretching his patience thin enough as it was).
With these conditions fulfilled, I await your pleasure.
Harry Potter.
They sent it with an owl that Hermione sneaked into Diagon Alley to Confound, and they waited, and they hoped.
*
Pain roared through Harry’s scar like a waterfall.
He rolled on the floor of the tent, his hands clasped around his scar, screaming. Hermione was shaking his shoulder and yelling into his ear. He knew that, with one part of himself, but the rest was very far away, holding a letter in one trembling hand and feeling death close a great hand around him and rip away his security.
My Horcrux. My Horcrux!
He cast the letter and the photograph into a wooden box spelled such that no one but him could open it, and rushed out the door. His people followed him, babbling questions, but Lord Voldemort had no time for them. He fixed his eyes on the horizon and Apparated to a certain cave that only he knew of.
The locket must be a fake. They discovered the nature of the Horcruxes but not its hiding place.
When he came to the cave, when he crossed the lake of Inferi, when he discovered that the locket in the cave had vanished, his rage was boundless. Harry screamed once and passed out.
*
“Are you all right?”
Harry gave Hermione a wan smile. He’d come back to himself almost two hours after the painful episode with the vision from Voldemort, and found that Hermione had been cleaning blood from his scar with muttered charms. It apparently hadn’t stopped bleeding the whole time he was unconscious. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Convince me of that.”
“He received the letter and the photograph. He was upset.”
“Go on.”
“He went to where the locket was originally hidden, because he thought we’d found out what the Horcruxes were but we didn’t have the real one. And then he found out that the locket was gone. He believes we have it, all right.”
Hermione shut her eyes and sat there so silently for a minute that Harry wondered if she was going to say anything ever again. Then she nodded and opened her eyes. “So he’s on his way?”
“He doesn’t know where I am right now. I do believe that,” Harry added, when Hermione grabbed her wand tightly. “But he’s going to respond to the letter. And I don’t think he’ll accept right away—he’ll just want to kill me—but he will accept.”
Hermione waited as though she thought someone else was going to show up and explain the situation a different way. Then she nodded and reached into her expandable bag. They’d given up on morals in a few different ways, enough to steal peanut butter and some other food when they were among the Muggle shops. “Come on. You need to eat.”
Harry tore into the food like a werewolf and tried not to think about the ways that Voldemort would probably try to kill him when he got used to the fact of the marriage. If he would accept the marriage in the first place. If he wouldn’t just send an owl and try to trace it back and then hit Harry with a Killing Curse to the face.
All they could do was wait.
*
The black eagle-owl found Harry when he was walking around the tent early the next morning, trying to give Hermione some privacy to shower and himself some privacy to think. He started when the bird soared towards him, wings utterly silent.
Harry sorely missed his wand as he dived and rolled, and the owl missed his arm, where it had seemingly intended to land. It made a hissing, irritated noise, and landed on the branch of a tree nearby, staring at him.
Harry took a deep, slow breath. There wasn’t much doubt who had sent the letter, and he—
Well, he didn’t have a wand to try to cast detection charms on it and see if it was a Portkey, or poisoned in a way to make him drop dead. He backed towards the tent, never taking his eyes off the owl.
“Hermione?”
Hermione burst out of the tent, and Harry turned his head away so fast he gave himself whiplash. “Honestly, Harry, I’m not naked,” Hermione snapped, and then fired the first detection charm at the bird.
The owl screamed at them, wings spreading as if it would fly at their faces, but remained still and let Hermione’s spell wash over it. Hermione squinted in its direction, her lips moving for a moment. Harry bit his own.
“What is it? Does it have something on it?”
Hermione concentrated for a moment more, then shook her head, wet hair dangling around and slashing at her face. “Just the letter.” A second later, she made an irritated noise and cast a Drying Charm in the general direction of her head.
Harry slowly approached the eagle-owl. It stared at him, but didn’t move away. In fact, the more he looked at it, the more he thought he knew it.
“You’re Malfoy’s owl,” he whispered. This was the bird that had delivered so many packages of sweets to Draco Malfoy at meals. “Right?”
The owl twisted its head away as though refusing to say yes or no and held out its leg. Harry took the parchment with steady fingers, but they were shaking by the time he got the twine undone.
The parchment looked as though the words had been burned into it, scored, instead of written, and they were the dark red of ink. There were only a few lines, and a small portrait at the end, somehow enchanted onto the paper, of a snake wrapped around a pale wand.
I will meet with you. Six-o’clock three nights hence, in the front garden of Malfoy Manor. My word you will come to no harm—for that evening.
The rest of the letter was a detailed list of Apparition coordinates.
Harry breathed shakily and handed the letter to Hermione. She read it, several times, as if thinking the words might change if she looked at them for a little longer, and then stared at him with a face that Harry knew to be as pale as his own.
“We have a beginning, then,” she said, and her words fell into the silence and were lost.
*
Harry closed his eyes, then walked through the front gates of Malfoy Manor.
The evening was dark and cold and silent around him. Frost seemed to ring between the earth and the stars. Harry was horribly aware that this was the first time he’d confronted Voldemort without a wand, even if some of the other times, his wand had been taken away.
But bringing Hermione’s wand would have made it seem like his story of the wand being broken was a lie. So Harry clasped his hands behind his back and kept walking towards what looked like a throne in the distance.
It was a throne, of what seemed to be a single gleaming mass of ebony, set up under a large, embracing tree with flat green leaves that had to be enchanted. When Harry came to a halt with his footsteps crunching the last of the snow in front of the throne, a glowing ball of light sprang into existence, hovering over the tree and casting sharp shadows into the distance.
Harry bit back a cry. Voldemort was sitting there with Nagini twined around his shoulders like a huge ribbon, her face so close to his that it looked like Harry was facing a man with two heads.
“Harry Potter,” Voldemort said.
“Lord Voldemort.”
Harry wondered if he was supposed to bow, but, well, he didn’t really want to. And Voldemort might think Harry was mocking him, or giving the wrong impression, about how Harry was going to be the subservient one in this marriage. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Voldemort watched Harry with his fingers rapping against the arm of the throne. Harry waited, unnerved. He’d expected yelling or immediate demands for the Horcrux. Or maybe a Cruciatus, honestly. Voldemort had to have a reason for this silent waiting, but Harry didn’t know what it was.
Is he just waiting for me to break and tell him what he wants to know?
At last, as if he thought that Harry might not break after all, Voldemort said, “Tell me how you acquired the locket.”
Harry clenched his hands harder behind his back and kept his voice as neutral as possible. People’s lives depend on this. You can’t go on shouting in rage and hatred. “Before Snape killed Dumbledore, Dumbledore found out the location of the cave where the locket was hidden. He managed to drink the potion and take the locket that was there, but it was a fake—”
“Do not lie to me!”
The savage pain in his scar nearly made Harry fall to the ground, whimpering. But he held his head up, teeth gritted, and reminded himself that it didn’t compare to things like watching Sirius or Dumbledore die. “It was,” he insisted. “The one we found there was. We found the real one in the Blacks’ old house.”
“You are lying.”
But this close, Harry could sense Voldemort’s emotions even through the pain, and he could feel the tremor of doubt. He shook his head. “No. It turned out that Regulus Black discovered what your locket was, and he stole it. Kreacher, his house-elf, said that Regulus lent him to you to test the trap, but Regulus told Kreacher to come back home. In the end, Kreacher was the one who took the locket, and he kept trying to destroy it, but he didn’t know how. Then a member of the Order of the Phoenix stole it from the Blacks’ house and sold it on. We found the real locket around Dolores Umbridge’s neck in the Ministry.”
He paused, but Voldemort didn’t accuse him of lying again. He stared at Harry with wide eyes, a look that made him seem almost human. Nagini was as still as bone.
“You are telling the truth.”
Harry still couldn’t easily tell the difference between Parseltongue and English, but he did feel the shift this time. It was more about the weight of Voldemort’s voice, something about how his words struck the air, then how it sounded. Harry swallowed. “Yeah.”
Voldemort’s fingers relaxed and clenched on the throne. Then he said, “Why did you choose to come to me and offer your surrender?”
“It’s the only thing that I thought might spare some people.” Harry met Voldemort’s eyes. Honesty, he had to use honesty, and not just because Voldemort was a Legilimens and would be able to tell if he lied. “If you agreed to marry me, then I might save some Muggleborns and so on from dying or being tortured.”
Voldemort was silent for long moments. Then he said, “You were seeking my other Horcruxes.”
No point in denying it. “Yes.”
“To do what with them?”
Harry met his eyes, and the pain clawed at his mind, but it was the pain of Legilmency, nothing he hadn’t put up with when Snape was “teaching” him. “To destroy them, and make you mortal.”
“This is the reason that Dumbledore died as he did. This is the quest that he left you with.”
Harry didn’t know that for certain, but he also thought that he didn’t have to. It was enough that Voldemort believed it. He nodded.
“Tell me what Horcruxes you are aware of.”
“The diary. The locket. A ring that Dumbledore destroyed—”
The pain that lanced through Harry then was pure, uncomplicated. He staggered and would have fallen if something hadn’t wrapped around his legs to keep him upright. He looked down and saw that it was Nagini. She lifted her head and gave him the flattest and coldest stare he’d ever received.
“Continue,” Voldemort said. His hands were claws on the arms of the throne, but he didn’t seem interested in hurting Harry anymore.
“Probably Nagini,” Harry said, not looking down at her. He thought he felt the flicker of a tongue against his leg anyway. “A cup belonging to Helga Hufflepuff. An artifact of Ravenclaw’s, but I don’t know what it is.”
Voldemort tilted his head back and forth, like a thoughtful snake. Then he said, “And why did you believe that there were this number, and not more?”
“Because seven is the most powerful magical number. And this way, there would be seven pieces of—your soul.”
“Hm.” Voldemort rapped his fingers on the throne arms again, and stood abruptly, gliding over to Harry. Harry swallowed and forced himself to hold still. He had come here, and if he didn’t trust Voldemort’s word not to harm him, then everything was all over anyway.
Voldemort stuck his fingers beneath Harry’s chin, turning his face back and forth. Then he asked, “How do you think your friends will react to this marriage? The masses in the Ministry who count on you to save them? The remains of the Order of the Phoenix?”
“I think they’ll hate me.” Except maybe Hermione, but that wasn’t a complication that Harry wanted to get into right now.
“And yet, you will go ahead anyway. Ever the noble martyr.”
Harry swallowed and shook his head a little, despite the way that Voldemort’s hand was still beneath his chin. “Not really. I realized that I wanted to live, not die a noble death. That’s why I’m suggesting this marriage.”
“Despite the fact that I killed your parents? That I tried to kill you?”
Harry swallowed again. He knew it was stupid that he felt able to be most honest with his prophesied enemy—but he could. Voldemort and Nagini were the only ones who could understand what he was saying right now, and they wouldn’t report it to anyone who would care about it.
“My mum and dad died a long time ago. I’ve—felt more and more like that since the Horcrux quest began. There’s nothing I can do to bring them back, and it seems like there’s nothing I can do to avenge them, either. At least maybe they would be happy if I’m still alive, because that’s what they sacrificed their lives for? That’s all I can think.”
Voldemort laughed softly. The sound was pure frost, and Harry shuddered and barely resisted the temptation to wrap his arms around himself. But Voldemort stepped back and moved his hand, calling Nagini from Harry’s legs. She coiled up Voldemort’s shoulders and put her head next to his face again.
“It seems that we have more in common than I had thought,” Voldemort hissed, while Harry fought back the temptation to tell him that they were nothing alike. “I accept.”
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Voldemort
Content Notes: AU starting in the middle of DH, angst, references to past violence and character death, arranged marriage
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. After his wand was broken, Harry decided that the Horcrux hunt could never succeed, and if Voldemort was going to win, what the world needed most was him softened. So he offered a peace treaty, with marriage, to Voldemort—in as pure a faith as he could.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” one-shots, for a prompt by Amelie26, which is essentially the summary. Note that this is the prologue to a much longer story, which I may write someday. It goes AU after Harry’s wand is broken and before Ron returns, and will have two chapters.
To Play the Knife’s Edge
Harry sat in the center of the tent, staring at the two items that lay on the blanket in front of him. His shattered holly wand, to the right. The locket Horcrux, to the left.
“Harry?”
Harry glanced up with a wan smile for Hermione, who looked so worried that Harry thought she might burst into flames in the middle of the tent. “I just need to think, Hermione. Just to be alone for a while.”
“All right.” Hermione hesitated, eyes on Harry’s broken wand. “I—I’ve been looking through some of the books we brought with us, Harry, and I can’t find any way for a wand to be repaired.” Deep breath. “But that doesn’t mean a charm doesn’t exist!”
“I’d like to think, Hermione,” Harry said, as gently as he could.
Hermione squeezed his shoulder once, also gently, and then turned and walked out of the tent. Harry felt a little guilty as the flap fell shut, but reminded himself that she knew Warming Charms, and that thinking wouldn’t take him long.
Not when he’d done most of it last night.
He turned back to the wand and reached out to touch the splintered wood, gently. The phoenix feather felt warm under his fingers, but Harry knew it was only an illusion. The wand was broken, and nothing could bring it back. Given that Ollivander had disappeared, who knew if Harry could even get another one?
I won’t do any good against Voldemort without a wand.
Then Harry turned and stared at the locket Horcrux, which might have been a large part of the reason that Ron left. But even if it wasn’t, and that just came down to Ron’s homesickness and hatred of what was happening, they still hadn’t come up with a way to destroy it that didn’t involve basilisk fangs. And there was no way they could sneak into Hogwarts with Snape there as Headmaster.
Harry closed his eyes. The conclusion sat and stared him in the face. But he barely wanted to say it even to himself.
We have to ask Voldemort for peace.
Part of Harry rebelled at the notion, mostly because it didn’t seem like it would work. Voldemort was insane. How would he respond to an offer of a peace treaty? By tearing up the letter and laughing about it with his Death Eaters, most likely.
But against that, Harry laid the bare truths he had come to accept. He and Hermione—and Ron, if he ever returned—had no notion of how to destroy the locket with weapons they could access. They had no clues as to where the next Horcruxes were. Harry was without a wand, which meant he was helpless even if Voldemort had no more Horcruxes. He could borrow Hermione’s wand, sure, which would make her even more of a target, or he could try to steal one, which would be bloody difficult to do when he was wandless himself.
Harry had toyed with the idea of just offering himself up to Voldemort in exchange for peace. But that would mean Voldemort would kill him and go on living, just as insane as before, and Ron and Hermione would be left with the problem of hunting down Horcruxes they didn’t know about and destroying them with weapons they didn’t know about.
Plus…
Harry wanted to live.
He clenched his hands next to his knees, even though he kept his eyes shut. He wondered if that was a reprehensible, cowardly desire.
But, well, plenty of people in the rest of Britain wanted to live. Ron and Hermione did. The Weasleys did, which was why they weren’t out there openly opposing Voldemort. All the people who were keeping their heads down in the Ministry and going along with what Voldemort wanted were doing it so they could live.
Why should Harry be the only one who had to sacrifice his life? Particularly when it wouldn’t do much good anyway?
If he lived, if he offered himself in marriage, then Voldemort would be bound by the vows to not commit genocide and mass torture. Harry was going to insist on that. In return, he would deliver the locket and what he knew about the rest of the Horcruxes, which honestly wasn’t much.
And he would recommend that people lay down their wands against the Death Eaters.
Harry shuddered and opened his eyes. It was a terrible bargain. But it was the only way he could think of to buy time to reduce Voldemort’s insanity and influence him in some way. Hermione’s books from Grimmauld Place said wedding vows tied the spouses together into one unit, which meant that Harry’s priorities would have a mental and magical effect on Voldemort.
And his on you?
Harry grimaced. Yeah, that was the sticking point. But he did think that if he went into this with good faith, then he would manage to have his way. That was another thing the books had said, that the very same vows that would keep the spouses from fighting each other would make them prioritize their common good. And at the moment, Harry had a hell of a lot more of their “common good” on his mind than Voldemort did.
He stood and walked to the tent flap. Hermione immediately turned around, her eyes big. She was shivering a little in spite of the shimmer of a Warming Charm around her.
“I’ve decided,” Harry said quietly. “We need to steal a camera, so that we can take a picture of my wand and the locket and send it to—Riddle, along with a request for peace.”
*
“I’m not insane.”
Hermione gave him a doubtful glance. Harry shifted in the ropes that bound him, and stilled with a sigh when Hermione lifted her wand in his direction. She had not taken the announcement about them needing to reach out to Voldemort with a peace proposition well.
“That’s not you, Harry,” she said now, for at least the fifth time since she had Stunned him a few hours ago. “You fight until the bitter end! You don’t give up! I think You-Know-Who is influencing you, somehow…”
“Yeah, I know it’s possible, but would he really want peace? Or would he just inspire me to do something stupid like go challenge him to a duel so he could win the war?”
“If he doesn’t think he can defeat you—”
“Who’s shivering in the middle of the woods in a tent right now and who’s snug and secure in Malfoy Manor, Hermione? Come on.”
Hermione bit her lip several times in a row, not seeming to know what she was doing, until a little trickle of blood crept down her face. “We owe it to people to protect them,” she whispered. “We owe it to them to keep fighting.”
Harry felt as though he were a cup, overflowing, but what came out when he opened his mouth was bitterness. “And what are they doing, huh? Keeping their heads down, pretending they don’t know Muggleborns are being arrested right now, enabling Umbridge, doing what the Death Eaters tell them—”
“They’re scared!”
“We fucking are too! But we’re out here doing something about it!”
Hermione lowered her eyes. “And you think sending a surrender offer would be doing something about it?”
Her voice was an angry whisper, but there was something else in it. Harry cocked his head. She sounded—tempted.
She’s scared, too. She’s starving and cold. She wants this war to be over, and that might finally have worn down her conviction that we need to keep fighting no matter what. Maybe she was even arguing because she thought I would expect it.
“It’s more than anyone else is doing right now,” Harry said, keeping his voice as calm and steady as possible. “You know that. And you know what that book you found says. That he and I would be bound together if we got married. I could influence him. He would influence me, but I’d count on you to keep me tempered.”
“And Ron?”
“If he ever bloody comes back, sure.”
Hermione made a little twitchy motion, but didn’t say anything. And then she abruptly twirled her wand, and the ropes fell away from Harry. He brought his arms forwards with relief, eyeing her cautiously as he rubbed his wrists.
“You’re right,” Hermione said, her words tumbling over each other like rocks in a stream. “You’re right. I don’t have any ideas how to destroy them or stop him. I don’t know how to get you a wand. We might as well try this because no one else is trying anything and because nothing we’re trying will work.”
By the time she finished, tears were bright in her eyes. Harry lunged towards her and hugged her. Hermione clung back.
*
Stealing a camera was the hardest part, once he’d convinced Hermione.
Hermione was the one who finally searched through the books from Grimmauld Place and found the spell that enchanted magical photographs to move. Then they just put on a Disillusionment Charm, walked into a Muggle shop, and carefully took a camera. Harry felt a painful tug in his chest as he realized that the reason he knew that would work was because Colin Creevey had had a Muggle camera and had told Harry excitedly in second year about a spell that would develop the film and enchant it to move.
I’m doing this for him, too. For all of them.
They had to steal film, and they stole plenty, because Hermione had to cast the charm several times to get it right. But when she finally did and took a picture of Harry, they enchanted it and watched as Harry smiled at the camera, then tried to duck out of the frame, glancing at them over his shoulder.
Hermione took the picture of the broken wand and the Horcrux, with Harry sitting behind them, his hair swept to the side and his scar prominently displayed. Then Harry sat down to write the letter.
The offer.
The surrender.
*
To the Dark Lord.
(Harry had decided to begin that way since he didn’t know if Voldemort would like Harry using any name, and this sounded more respectful than You-Know-Who).
As you can see, I have reached the point where I am ready to surrender. I have one of your Horcruxes, but I am willing to return it to you and tell you what I know about the others if you will agree to the following conditions:
*No genocide or mass killing of Muggles or Muggleborns
*No mass torture
*To marry me under the Rite of Alcyone no later than a month after treaty negotiations have concluded
*Not to harm me during these treaty negotiations
(Harry and Hermione had argued about the wording of that last condition for a long while, but they’d at last agreed that it was better if they didn’t ask Voldemort not to harm her or Ron. They would be stretching his patience thin enough as it was).
With these conditions fulfilled, I await your pleasure.
Harry Potter.
They sent it with an owl that Hermione sneaked into Diagon Alley to Confound, and they waited, and they hoped.
*
Pain roared through Harry’s scar like a waterfall.
He rolled on the floor of the tent, his hands clasped around his scar, screaming. Hermione was shaking his shoulder and yelling into his ear. He knew that, with one part of himself, but the rest was very far away, holding a letter in one trembling hand and feeling death close a great hand around him and rip away his security.
My Horcrux. My Horcrux!
He cast the letter and the photograph into a wooden box spelled such that no one but him could open it, and rushed out the door. His people followed him, babbling questions, but Lord Voldemort had no time for them. He fixed his eyes on the horizon and Apparated to a certain cave that only he knew of.
The locket must be a fake. They discovered the nature of the Horcruxes but not its hiding place.
When he came to the cave, when he crossed the lake of Inferi, when he discovered that the locket in the cave had vanished, his rage was boundless. Harry screamed once and passed out.
*
“Are you all right?”
Harry gave Hermione a wan smile. He’d come back to himself almost two hours after the painful episode with the vision from Voldemort, and found that Hermione had been cleaning blood from his scar with muttered charms. It apparently hadn’t stopped bleeding the whole time he was unconscious. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Convince me of that.”
“He received the letter and the photograph. He was upset.”
“Go on.”
“He went to where the locket was originally hidden, because he thought we’d found out what the Horcruxes were but we didn’t have the real one. And then he found out that the locket was gone. He believes we have it, all right.”
Hermione shut her eyes and sat there so silently for a minute that Harry wondered if she was going to say anything ever again. Then she nodded and opened her eyes. “So he’s on his way?”
“He doesn’t know where I am right now. I do believe that,” Harry added, when Hermione grabbed her wand tightly. “But he’s going to respond to the letter. And I don’t think he’ll accept right away—he’ll just want to kill me—but he will accept.”
Hermione waited as though she thought someone else was going to show up and explain the situation a different way. Then she nodded and reached into her expandable bag. They’d given up on morals in a few different ways, enough to steal peanut butter and some other food when they were among the Muggle shops. “Come on. You need to eat.”
Harry tore into the food like a werewolf and tried not to think about the ways that Voldemort would probably try to kill him when he got used to the fact of the marriage. If he would accept the marriage in the first place. If he wouldn’t just send an owl and try to trace it back and then hit Harry with a Killing Curse to the face.
All they could do was wait.
*
The black eagle-owl found Harry when he was walking around the tent early the next morning, trying to give Hermione some privacy to shower and himself some privacy to think. He started when the bird soared towards him, wings utterly silent.
Harry sorely missed his wand as he dived and rolled, and the owl missed his arm, where it had seemingly intended to land. It made a hissing, irritated noise, and landed on the branch of a tree nearby, staring at him.
Harry took a deep, slow breath. There wasn’t much doubt who had sent the letter, and he—
Well, he didn’t have a wand to try to cast detection charms on it and see if it was a Portkey, or poisoned in a way to make him drop dead. He backed towards the tent, never taking his eyes off the owl.
“Hermione?”
Hermione burst out of the tent, and Harry turned his head away so fast he gave himself whiplash. “Honestly, Harry, I’m not naked,” Hermione snapped, and then fired the first detection charm at the bird.
The owl screamed at them, wings spreading as if it would fly at their faces, but remained still and let Hermione’s spell wash over it. Hermione squinted in its direction, her lips moving for a moment. Harry bit his own.
“What is it? Does it have something on it?”
Hermione concentrated for a moment more, then shook her head, wet hair dangling around and slashing at her face. “Just the letter.” A second later, she made an irritated noise and cast a Drying Charm in the general direction of her head.
Harry slowly approached the eagle-owl. It stared at him, but didn’t move away. In fact, the more he looked at it, the more he thought he knew it.
“You’re Malfoy’s owl,” he whispered. This was the bird that had delivered so many packages of sweets to Draco Malfoy at meals. “Right?”
The owl twisted its head away as though refusing to say yes or no and held out its leg. Harry took the parchment with steady fingers, but they were shaking by the time he got the twine undone.
The parchment looked as though the words had been burned into it, scored, instead of written, and they were the dark red of ink. There were only a few lines, and a small portrait at the end, somehow enchanted onto the paper, of a snake wrapped around a pale wand.
I will meet with you. Six-o’clock three nights hence, in the front garden of Malfoy Manor. My word you will come to no harm—for that evening.
The rest of the letter was a detailed list of Apparition coordinates.
Harry breathed shakily and handed the letter to Hermione. She read it, several times, as if thinking the words might change if she looked at them for a little longer, and then stared at him with a face that Harry knew to be as pale as his own.
“We have a beginning, then,” she said, and her words fell into the silence and were lost.
*
Harry closed his eyes, then walked through the front gates of Malfoy Manor.
The evening was dark and cold and silent around him. Frost seemed to ring between the earth and the stars. Harry was horribly aware that this was the first time he’d confronted Voldemort without a wand, even if some of the other times, his wand had been taken away.
But bringing Hermione’s wand would have made it seem like his story of the wand being broken was a lie. So Harry clasped his hands behind his back and kept walking towards what looked like a throne in the distance.
It was a throne, of what seemed to be a single gleaming mass of ebony, set up under a large, embracing tree with flat green leaves that had to be enchanted. When Harry came to a halt with his footsteps crunching the last of the snow in front of the throne, a glowing ball of light sprang into existence, hovering over the tree and casting sharp shadows into the distance.
Harry bit back a cry. Voldemort was sitting there with Nagini twined around his shoulders like a huge ribbon, her face so close to his that it looked like Harry was facing a man with two heads.
“Harry Potter,” Voldemort said.
“Lord Voldemort.”
Harry wondered if he was supposed to bow, but, well, he didn’t really want to. And Voldemort might think Harry was mocking him, or giving the wrong impression, about how Harry was going to be the subservient one in this marriage. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Voldemort watched Harry with his fingers rapping against the arm of the throne. Harry waited, unnerved. He’d expected yelling or immediate demands for the Horcrux. Or maybe a Cruciatus, honestly. Voldemort had to have a reason for this silent waiting, but Harry didn’t know what it was.
Is he just waiting for me to break and tell him what he wants to know?
At last, as if he thought that Harry might not break after all, Voldemort said, “Tell me how you acquired the locket.”
Harry clenched his hands harder behind his back and kept his voice as neutral as possible. People’s lives depend on this. You can’t go on shouting in rage and hatred. “Before Snape killed Dumbledore, Dumbledore found out the location of the cave where the locket was hidden. He managed to drink the potion and take the locket that was there, but it was a fake—”
“Do not lie to me!”
The savage pain in his scar nearly made Harry fall to the ground, whimpering. But he held his head up, teeth gritted, and reminded himself that it didn’t compare to things like watching Sirius or Dumbledore die. “It was,” he insisted. “The one we found there was. We found the real one in the Blacks’ old house.”
“You are lying.”
But this close, Harry could sense Voldemort’s emotions even through the pain, and he could feel the tremor of doubt. He shook his head. “No. It turned out that Regulus Black discovered what your locket was, and he stole it. Kreacher, his house-elf, said that Regulus lent him to you to test the trap, but Regulus told Kreacher to come back home. In the end, Kreacher was the one who took the locket, and he kept trying to destroy it, but he didn’t know how. Then a member of the Order of the Phoenix stole it from the Blacks’ house and sold it on. We found the real locket around Dolores Umbridge’s neck in the Ministry.”
He paused, but Voldemort didn’t accuse him of lying again. He stared at Harry with wide eyes, a look that made him seem almost human. Nagini was as still as bone.
“You are telling the truth.”
Harry still couldn’t easily tell the difference between Parseltongue and English, but he did feel the shift this time. It was more about the weight of Voldemort’s voice, something about how his words struck the air, then how it sounded. Harry swallowed. “Yeah.”
Voldemort’s fingers relaxed and clenched on the throne. Then he said, “Why did you choose to come to me and offer your surrender?”
“It’s the only thing that I thought might spare some people.” Harry met Voldemort’s eyes. Honesty, he had to use honesty, and not just because Voldemort was a Legilimens and would be able to tell if he lied. “If you agreed to marry me, then I might save some Muggleborns and so on from dying or being tortured.”
Voldemort was silent for long moments. Then he said, “You were seeking my other Horcruxes.”
No point in denying it. “Yes.”
“To do what with them?”
Harry met his eyes, and the pain clawed at his mind, but it was the pain of Legilmency, nothing he hadn’t put up with when Snape was “teaching” him. “To destroy them, and make you mortal.”
“This is the reason that Dumbledore died as he did. This is the quest that he left you with.”
Harry didn’t know that for certain, but he also thought that he didn’t have to. It was enough that Voldemort believed it. He nodded.
“Tell me what Horcruxes you are aware of.”
“The diary. The locket. A ring that Dumbledore destroyed—”
The pain that lanced through Harry then was pure, uncomplicated. He staggered and would have fallen if something hadn’t wrapped around his legs to keep him upright. He looked down and saw that it was Nagini. She lifted her head and gave him the flattest and coldest stare he’d ever received.
“Continue,” Voldemort said. His hands were claws on the arms of the throne, but he didn’t seem interested in hurting Harry anymore.
“Probably Nagini,” Harry said, not looking down at her. He thought he felt the flicker of a tongue against his leg anyway. “A cup belonging to Helga Hufflepuff. An artifact of Ravenclaw’s, but I don’t know what it is.”
Voldemort tilted his head back and forth, like a thoughtful snake. Then he said, “And why did you believe that there were this number, and not more?”
“Because seven is the most powerful magical number. And this way, there would be seven pieces of—your soul.”
“Hm.” Voldemort rapped his fingers on the throne arms again, and stood abruptly, gliding over to Harry. Harry swallowed and forced himself to hold still. He had come here, and if he didn’t trust Voldemort’s word not to harm him, then everything was all over anyway.
Voldemort stuck his fingers beneath Harry’s chin, turning his face back and forth. Then he asked, “How do you think your friends will react to this marriage? The masses in the Ministry who count on you to save them? The remains of the Order of the Phoenix?”
“I think they’ll hate me.” Except maybe Hermione, but that wasn’t a complication that Harry wanted to get into right now.
“And yet, you will go ahead anyway. Ever the noble martyr.”
Harry swallowed and shook his head a little, despite the way that Voldemort’s hand was still beneath his chin. “Not really. I realized that I wanted to live, not die a noble death. That’s why I’m suggesting this marriage.”
“Despite the fact that I killed your parents? That I tried to kill you?”
Harry swallowed again. He knew it was stupid that he felt able to be most honest with his prophesied enemy—but he could. Voldemort and Nagini were the only ones who could understand what he was saying right now, and they wouldn’t report it to anyone who would care about it.
“My mum and dad died a long time ago. I’ve—felt more and more like that since the Horcrux quest began. There’s nothing I can do to bring them back, and it seems like there’s nothing I can do to avenge them, either. At least maybe they would be happy if I’m still alive, because that’s what they sacrificed their lives for? That’s all I can think.”
Voldemort laughed softly. The sound was pure frost, and Harry shuddered and barely resisted the temptation to wrap his arms around himself. But Voldemort stepped back and moved his hand, calling Nagini from Harry’s legs. She coiled up Voldemort’s shoulders and put her head next to his face again.
“It seems that we have more in common than I had thought,” Voldemort hissed, while Harry fought back the temptation to tell him that they were nothing alike. “I accept.”
