Chapter Text
After a few minutes, Harry carefully moves out of his crouched, gargoyle-like pose to sit criss-cross on the luggage rack instead, holding in a sigh as he resigns himself to enduring the rest of the train ride in utter boredom. He’d snuck into the Sixth Year Slytherins’ compartment under his Invisibility Cloak hoping to catch Malfoy bragging to his little sycophants about whatever he’d been up to at Borgin and Burkes a few weeks ago, not to listen to said sycophants gossip about their own summers and the Slug Club while Malfoy sat a little apart from them in silence, appearing to bloody meditate or something.
All he had said after Harry snuck in behind Zabini was, “I have been tasked with something important and need to think over final details of the plan one more time to prepare, so do be quiet, or at least as quiet as you lot can manage.” Harry felt a buzz of something like nerves then, or possibly excitement, but true to his word Malfoy seemed to retreat to somewhere inside himself while his friends shrugged off his strange behavior and moved a little further down the compartment to talk quietly amongst themselves.
Zabini had deliberately not modulated his voice much as he snidely insinuated that Draco was merely sulking about not having been invited to the Slug Club meeting, but the other boy gave no reaction and the other Slytherins quickly lost interest.
“Do you reckon it’s a task from…Him?” Goyle asks now in a poor attempt at a whisper, but Crabbe in an uncommon show of good sense just elbows him roughly in the ribs and the conversation moves on again.
Parkinson drifts away from the group back to Draco with such a starry-eyed expression that Harry wants to retch. “Whatever it is must be very important to our cause,” she says to him sweetly, “but surely you needn’t focus on it so hard now that you can’t relax a little until after the feast?”
She reaches up as if to pet Malfoy’s hair, only to yelp as the boy suddenly grabs her wrist before her fingers can make contact. Harry jumps a little too.
“Keep your hands to yourself and do not attempt to distract me again.” Malfoy’s tone is mild but with an undercurrent of something that makes eerie tingles shoot up Harry’s spine. Before he can determine what that something is, Malfoy releases her hand and turns to face the wall ahead of him again, either not noticing or not caring about the affronted and hurt look Parkinson gives him before getting back up to sit with the rest of the group again.
As they near the castle, everyone gets up to put their school robes on, Malfoy included. He is the last to leave the compartment, Harry’s heart thudding like mad in his chest as he appears for a second to look up close to where Harry sits, the corner of his mouth barely twitching in a way that looks as if he’s about to smile before he turns and walks out, carelessly leaving the sliding door open behind him.
Harry sprints back to his own compartment as soon as Malfoy’s footsteps are far enough away, hurriedly opening his trunk and tossing his own robes on over his baggy T-shirt and jeans since there is no time to change into the rest of his uniform. His friends must have gotten off the train already, so he ends up in a carriage with some wide-eyed Third and Fourth Years he judiciously ignores on the ride up to the school.
The others are already sitting at the Gryffindor table like he expects when he enters the Great Hall. Ron groans and Hermione rolls her eyes when he explains to them in an undertone where he’d gone on the train. They still don’t believe anything is really going on even after he tells them word for word what little he heard Malfoy say, convinced instead that he must have been putting on some kind of tough act to impress his friends and make them believe he knew more than he did. It stings as much as it had when they dismissed his concerns earlier in the summer as well.
He doesn’t know how to explain to them the strange, confused feelings he had experienced during the train ride, different even from the exhilaration and suspicion he felt when he’d followed Malfoy into Knockturn Alley before. He’s too embarrassed to admit to anyone that a few times he had almost felt afraid of the other boy, especially in those brief seconds they had been alone in that compartment together.
Unable to help himself, his eyes seek out the other boy at the Slytherin table, but he nearly startles at the sudden realization that Malfoy is already looking at him. Even worse, bizarrely, Malfoy smiles when they make eye contact. This smile is small but confident and perfectly at ease, and unlike any he has ever seen Malfoy give anyone before, much less himself, yet something about it is also familiar in a way that sends his heart hammering again. He forces himself to look away as the sorting starts and tries not to fidget, troublingly certain he’ll still find those eyes on him if he dares to look back again.
When he does finally dare to glance up again, soon after the feast starts, Malfoy is nowhere to be seen. Harry tells himself he’s just gotten up to go to the bathroom or something, ignoring the slight headache that’s starting to form from how tightly wound he’s been for the past hour or so, and mechanically eats, barely tasting his food and not participating in Ron’s animated debate with Ginny, Seamus, and Dean about which Quidditch teams they expect to make it to finals or Hermione’s discussion with Neville about Snape’s appointment to the Defense position. Speculation about Dumbledore’s blackened hand comes up as well, but Harry does not tell anyone he already knew about it since he joined the headmaster on his visit to Slughorn because he isn’t really listening.
A knot of tension in his shoulders loosens as they near the end of the main course and Harry chances a look again, just as Malfoy returns to his seat and grabs something small to eat with quick but elegant bites before it can all disappear to be replaced by dessert.
Oddly, it reminds Harry of how he used to eat when he first started attending Hogwarts, still not used to the idea yet that the food in front of him wouldn’t be snatched away until the designated mealtime’s end. Maybe because he knows he could still eat that fast and efficiently now if he wanted to, making it look just as casual and effortless and not like he’s trying to eat quickly to avoid undue attention on himself, a skill never forgotten no matter the number of years he’s stopped having to worry about going hungry.
Malfoy slows down now that he has as much time as everyone else to get through the final course, and Harry looks down again before anyone can ask him why he’s so fascinatedly watching the Slytherin boy delicately glide his fork into a slice of cake in front of him. He’s able to enjoy his own treacle tart a bit more now that he doesn’t feel so quietly anxious about the other boy’s whereabouts, though he still wonders what he could have been doing to be gone for so long.
As everyone turns in to their dorms for the night about half an hour later, he deliberates on what to do next. The reasonable course of action would be to go to bed like everyone else, obviously. He heads upstairs while Ron and Hermione and the Fifth Year prefects corral the younger students to their respective rooms, but does not start changing into his nightclothes yet. Now that Malfoy is out of his sight once more, his uneasiness from earlier has returned tenfold. He doesn’t care what his friends say, he knows that something peculiar is going on with him. He should tell Dumbledore in the morning, even if he has no concrete evidence to go on. At least he can say ‘I told you so’ later if the headmaster ignores him too and Harry turns out to be right.
Or, Harry muses silently to himself, he could go tell Dumbledore right now.
Before he can talk himself out of it, he’s already putting the Invisibility Cloak back on and grabbing the Marauder’s Map to hastily stuff into his pocket. More concerned with getting there quickly than with running into anybody, he doesn’t take the map back out until he’s made it most of the way to his destination already, after he spots Mrs. Norris slinking down one of the corridors ahead of him.
After checking the immediate vicinity around him, he instinctively looks at the Slytherin dormitory and frowns when he realizes that one name is notably missing. His eyes dart frantically over the rest of the map until they return to his original destination, where his feet are still carrying him as he traces the familiar route from memory. He freezes—not just his feet, but every muscle in his body, his breath, the blood in his veins.
There is a second dot in the headmaster’s office next to Dumbledore’s. The name floating above it is not Draco Malfoy.
Harry doesn’t think anymore. He just runs.
The smart thing, he will acknowledge later, would have been to run to fetch a professor, any professor. Not that it would have done any good, done anything at all other than maybe add another unnecessary casualty to the night’s tally.
The adrenaline pumping through his body now does not allow for forethought. It just takes him where he thinks he needs to be, against all logic or reason or sanity. Having not much further to go, he skids to a halt moments later in front of the gargoyle guarding Dumbledore’s office. Frantic, bordering on hysteria really if he’s honest, and a little overheated and out of breath, he doesn’t notice that the hood of his cloak has been blown back from him breaking into a dead sprint as he shouts the names of random sweets at the immovable statue.
The wall behind it slides open with the slow rumble of grinding stone, revealing the hidden staircase and a figure already standing behind it. A figure that looks like Draco Malfoy and casts a silent ‘Petrificus Totalus’ before Harry can finish getting out the “Expelliarmus!” readied on his lips.
A cushioning charm prevents Harry’s head from cracking open on the stone floor as he falls backwards, with arms stiffly plastered against his sides and a low swoop of terror in his stomach which, absurdly in this moment, brings back old guilt of the time he, Ron, and Hermione did this to Neville in their First Year, now with newfound understanding of how awful that experience must have been for him. In hindsight, it’s lucky he hadn’t been hurt, having landed on one of the plush rugs covering the floor of the Gryffindor Common Room.
The “boy” on the stairs comes to stand over him, carefully feeling out where exactly Harry’s legs are with his feet before crouching low just over his thighs, that far too pleasant smile back as he undoes the front of Harry’s cloak to reveal the rest of his body underneath.
“Well, hello again, my dear,” says Not Draco Malfoy in Draco Malfoy’s voice, only now that he’s listening for it, Harry can tell that the way he speaks is subtly off, a different manner of catching on particular sounds and emphasizing others than Draco’s usual haughty tone, all brought out in a smooth, charming drawl he has not heard since he met a very different sixteen-year-old about four years ago.
The person hovering above him now is not technically that same sixteen-year-old either though, even if they have the same name according to the map still clenched in his frozen fist—even if he sounds more like himself now, like that boy he used to be, than he has any of the other times Harry has encountered him as an adult since then. He’d sounded madder, erratic and prone to unpredictable rage, all those other times before.
Harry never thought he’d miss the high, cold, crazed snarl of Lord Voldemort just barely holding himself together for an over the top villainous monologue. He never thought he’d be more terrified of the man Tom Marvolo Riddle should have been before his insanity took over.
And he knows that this is the real Voldemort, not another weird mirage person like the diary Tom Riddle had been, and not just because he’s actually physically present either. He knows because now that they’re close and it’s perfectly obvious to him that Harry already knows who he is, the connection between their minds is thrown open again when it had been closed off and muted. He must have been actively Occluding himself all this time before so Harry wouldn’t figure him out sooner and alert someone.
“I cannot begin to tell you how overjoyed I am that you’ve spared me the effort of burning away that hideous portrait to get to you by coming to me instead. Again,” he adds with a quirked brow that is also out of place on the slick, pointy blond’s face. He brushes the back of curled fingers over the boy’s cheek. Harry would flinch away if he could. “How tempting you made it to take you right there on the train, if only I didn’t have other tasks to accomplish first.”
Gently he rests the tip of a wand—Dumbledore’s wand—against Harry’s forehead. “Confundo.” Harry shudders and blinks as he is unpetrified a moment later, unable to react properly and moving only sluggishly like he actually had hit his head as the Invisibility Cloak is eased off his shoulders and the map and his wand taken out of his hands. The boy…man…whatever smirks as he looks over the parchment. “Barty told me about this ingenious device when you lent it to him an—oh. Now this is interesting.”
He stands up quickly and pulls Harry to his feet as well, making the boy’s head swim even more in dizziness. He puts Harry’s Cloak on himself, then petrifies the boy once more and before he can fall again pulls him in close so they are standing next to the wall together, back to chest, the Cloak just barely large enough to cover them both as he wraps it around Harry as well.
The effects of the Confundus are still dissipating when someone else rounds the corner only moments later, so it takes a second for Harry to recognize Snape, striding purposefully and carrying a flask of what looks to be some kind of healing potion. “Acid Pops,” he barks at the gargoyle, disappearing up the moving staircase as soon as it is revealed to him.
“Interesting,” Voldemort says again, still sounding like Malfoy but again with that ominous undertone he’d heard when the man spurned Parkinson. “I believe we are about to find out where our double agent’s true loyalties lie, Harry darling,” he whispers right against the boy’s ear. Harry cannot shiver like he wants to. The arms around him shift, squeezing a little tighter. “Let’s see what he does when he finds what I’ve left up there.” All Harry can do is blink, which does nothing to get rid of the sudden moisture springing to his eyes.
What he does is return down the stairs less than two minutes later, the other Heads of House and three Aurors Harry recognizes as members of the Order but cannot name for the moment in tow behind him, all of them with varying expressions of alarm, horror, and grim determination on their faces.
Voldemort Stuns them all at once with a single wave of his wand. The delighted boyish giggle Harry hears a second later is unnatural to his ears even if it is still in Malfoy’s voice.
He leaves Harry leaned against the wall with a sticking charm, pulling the Cloak off and putting it over his arm like a coat, and now gazing at the wand still in his hand with something akin to childish wonder. “Do you suppose it always worked that brilliantly for him as well, or is it because of…?” He stretches his arms out a bit as if to put the wand and the cloak over his other arm on display, turning his hand a little to also show off a strange cracked ring Harry hadn’t noticed before. He wasn’t wearing it on the train or at the Welcoming Feast earlier that Harry can recall. “Ah, but you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you, darling?”
His voice is beginning to crack now, his hair darkening, and he appears to be growing taller as well as his face shifts with the telltale signs of Polyjuice wearing off. Wordlessly, he sweeps the wand over himself and Malfoy’s Hogwarts uniform changes into a longer, simpler but elegant set of dark wizard robes. Were Harry able to physically react, he might gasp in shock as Voldemort’s features settle into those of a man rather than a serpentine monster, except for his vivid red eyes.
Voldemort crooks a finger under Harry’s chin even though he is still frozen, considerately leaning down since the boy’s head cannot be tilted upwards to make eye contact. “Not what you were expecting, I imagine,” he says, his voice finally matching his mannerisms and style of speech once more—which is to say, a somewhat deeper version of the rich, relaxed drawl Harry remembers from when he was twelve. His smile on his actual, real mouth is also unfairly, distressingly roguish. “But I trust you’ll keep this between us for now, won’t you, dear?” He winks at Harry before turning away then, that devilish fucker.
With another wave of his wand and a muttered incantation, he is the dread, ghostly pale, bald and noseless Lord Voldemort that Harry remembers from last spring. McGonagall, Flitwick, and Sprout are all bound together with cords shot out of his wand, then Snape is bound as well but separately from the rest. The three Aurors are killed one by one without ceremony or a single twitch of emotion on the monster’s face.
Turning back to Harry now, Voldemort encases him in a shield spell he’s never seen before like a strange, shimmering soap bubble, the Petrificus finally releasing again as he also floats. Immediately Harry tries to push through it and yells at the bastard, but his voice echoes back at him in a way that makes him think he probably can’t be heard from the outside and the shield pushes back against his hands and limbs like a silky, unpoppable balloon. The unconscious Snape is also made to float, though without a shield, and the two of them trail through midair on either side of the Dark Lord as he stalks through the halls of Hogwarts with no further attempt to disguise his presence.
They arrive at the Room of Requirement, and Harry’s stomach drops again when he sees a small army of Death Eaters waiting inside amidst piles of junk and random curios scattered throughout the room. The Dark Lord ignores their scraping and bowing to make a beeline for Bellatrix Lestrange.
“Bella, you will not be joining the others in the raid after all. I have a special assignment for you.” The brief glimmer of disappointment in the madwoman’s eyes is rapidly replaced by one of obsequious idolatry from one sentence to the next. “Return to the manor and take this traitor with you down to the cellar,” he orders, passing the floating Potions Master along to her. “You are not to use Cruciatus as I need his mind intact, but feel free to play as much as you like otherwise.” The glamour also affects his voice, Harry realizes, making it high and sibilant once again.
“Harry and I will also be returning to the manor shortly,” Voldemort continues. Despite knowing it’s fruitless, Harry instinctively tries to batter his fists against the shield again upon hearing this. A few of the Death Eaters laugh at his attempts, Bellatrix the loudest and cruelest among them. “He will not be placed in the cellar, however, and to reiterate one of my previous orders, my time alone with him is not to be disturbed. Is that understood?”
The woman utters a reverent, “Yes, my Lord,” and gives him a deep bow. At a gesture from the Dark Lord, she turns around with Snape in tow and walks into a tall wardrobe, vanishing with the Potions Master into its deceptively cavernous depths.
Voldemort turns to address his other followers. “The rest of your orders are the same as before,” he tells them. “Remember, these are teachers and children. Capture and incapacitation as necessary are the only goals. Target the professors and upperclassmen first. The younger students should pose little to no threat to you and will most likely fall in line as their elders and figures of authority are brought to heel. Torture as a last resort only if you absolutely must. Kill only if you are left with no other option. Do not disappoint me.”
At another gesture, the remaining Death Eaters all bow as one and file out of the room into the school proper, intent upon wreaking havoc through its halls as their Lord commands. As the last one leaves, Voldemort drags Harry floating along into the same wardrobe Lestrange and Snape disappeared into.
They come out on the other side of another vanishing cabinet in Borgin and Burkes, the very one he ended up in on accident once a few years ago. Voldemort keeps the shield up around Harry but tugs him down into his arms to Disapparate with him moments later.
They are now in the foyer of a large, opulent mansion, giving Harry some opportunity to look around while he floats alongside the man once again as they head upstairs. There’s nothing visible to hint at where they actually are, but it’s clearly a pureblood family’s mansion, he can easily guess whose. He lets himself wonder idly if the real Draco had been one of the masked Death Eaters unleashed upon the school only minutes ago, mostly because it feels safer than thinking about what’s going to happen to him now.
He is pulled into a ridiculously large bedroom/personal sitting room from the looks of it, the type of furniture he’d expect in the former at the east end of the room and a set more suited to the latter at the west, which is the side they enter from. In the center between both is a massive circular parlor table with strange symbols etched roughly into the lacquered wood and withered black flower petals scattered over the top, candles and unusual looking crystals also arranged in a haphazard looking pattern all the way around the outer rim.
Before he does anything else, Voldemort takes Harry’s Cloak and a gaudy glittering tiara, of all things, out of an expanded inner pocket of his robes and sets these aside atop an out of the way dresser. Harry might make a joke about Voldemort’s new fashion sense if he wasn’t effectively silenced within the bubble and also more terrified than he’s ever been before in his life, even in this man’s presence. They may not teach much about dark rituals at Hogwarts, but Harry knows enough to recognize the staging of one when he sees it.
His worst suspicion is confirmed when he is made to lay in the center of the strange table setup, easily large enough for all of his limbs to sprawl akimbo across its glossy top. An unfamiliar incantation is muttered from somewhere near his head, and the candles all flare to life at once at the same time that the shield around him finally “pops” out of existence, but Harry finds himself unable to do little more than squirm in place and cannot sit up, his wrists and ankles affixed to the wood securely as if they have been tied down.
He is able to turn his head away and cringe this time when Voldemort steps into view above him, peering into Harry’s eyes upside down, and trails his fingertips in a mockingly gentle caress over the boy’s cheek again. A soft whine escapes Harry’s throat before he can stop it. The glamour is gone now and Harry bizarrely wants it back, preferring the monster which he feels is a truer representation of the twisted soul within than the handsome man gazing down upon him now.
“Wh-what the hell is this?” he asks, the first words he has been able to speak and have heard since this nightmare began, not liking the waver he hears in them either but again unable to help it.
“A correction,” Voldemort answers softly as if that explains anything. The smile he gives Harry now is hatefully kind. “One which will benefit us both, as you’ll soon find.”
Then, as he had with the Invisibility Cloak, he opens the front of Harry’s school robe and splays it open while leaving it on him, but pinches the collar of his hand-me-down shirt between a finger and thumb and with another whispered incantation unravels the whole thing, leaving Harry’s chest and stomach uncomfortably bare and exposed.
When he wordlessly summons a silver dagger into his hand, Harry starts to shake and, fuck it he can’t help it and doesn’t care that it’s humiliating anymore, also begins to cry a little.
Instead of laugh or mock him as Harry would expect, Voldemort wipes some of his tears away and shushes him in a surprisingly soothing voice. “Hush now, it’s alright. This isn’t for you. In fact the process for you should be entirely painless.”
Voldemort then punctures the pad of his own pointer finger with the tip of the blade, only a barely visible tightening around his eyes demonstrating that not only does the Dark Lord still bleed, he also can still feel pain himself.
He begins to draw patterns in his own blood that Harry can’t make out at this angle directly on the boy’s skin, occasionally digging the tip of the blade into his finger again when the flow stutters and stops being as smooth to write with.
“Would it be cruelty or kindness to explain to you what I’m actually doing, I wonder?” Lord Voldemort says, the question quiet and rhetorical. He meets the boy’s eyes again, the smirk he gives now almost playful. “An abbreviated version then,” he decides. “The secret to my immortality, Harry, lies in a series of rituals I discovered when I was about your age. To put it plainly, it involves tearing out a piece of my own soul and putting it into a new vessel.”
Before Harry can really even process the horror of what he’s hearing, Voldemort shatters him with another one. “I discovered over this summer, through means I’ll explain another day, that when I tried to kill you that Samhain night when you were a baby, I accidentally tore out another piece and made you into one of these vessels. That is why you gained some of my power and why this mental connection between us has existed ever since. It is not a mere mental connection, but a spiritual one.”
Harry sucks in a deep, shuddering breath and wishes he could claim not to comprehend what the man is saying, that he doesn’t instantly, intimately understand and know it to be true as soon as the words are put out there into the world, unable to be taken back and hidden from him ever again.
“Does that mean…” He swallows, trying not to speak too loudly as if that could ruin the peculiar, uneasy peace between them. “Are…are you trying to take it back?” The smile Voldemort gives him now is mean. He must have sounded too hopeful as he asked.
“No, my darling, I am not.” The pet names, the cute endearments Harry’s been trying not to read too deeply into all night and pretending not to hear, batter intrusively at the forefront of his thoughts now with another ominous suggestion he does not want to understand but feels his mind hurtling toward faster than he’s ready for anyway.
“For obvious reasons, this ritual was not performed that night, when my soul instinctively claimed yours for its new home.” Harry shudders again. Voldemort continues to draw on his bloody torso and ignores it. “That piece of me has been clinging onto you like a man dangling over the edge of a cliff all this time, unmoored and ever in danger of falling, especially when we are near since it recognizes me as its original host and gets….confused, let’s say, about which direction it wants to be pulled in. The purpose of this ritual, my Harry, is to anchor it in place so that it can never leave you.”
“No,” Harry breathes, trying once again to squirm to get away, or at least to buck the hand on his torso off and smear the blood around in hopes that it might disrupt whatever it’s supposed to do.
Unfortunately, Voldemort actually seems to be done with his drawing now and lifts his hand away before Harry can rub against it to mess anything up. “As I said, it benefits you too.” He licks away the remaining blood on his finger and heals it. “You’re very vulnerable at the moment. When this is done you will effectively be immortal as I am, and impervious to most methods of harm. If anything, perhaps you should be grateful I’ve decided my desire to have you outweighs any potential inconvenience to keeping you around.”
Harry squeezes his eyes shut tightly and tries not to openly sob. Gone is his Gryffindor bravery in the face of these utterly abhorrent things the man above him is saying. “You can’t.” His voice cracks. “I don’t…I don’t want any of those things! I’m not you!”
“Nor will you be,” Voldemort reassures him, as if this is what Harry has been worried about. In all honesty perhaps it should have been, given that Voldemort had tried to possess him at the Department of Mysteries not so long ago. But if anything, this seems like a worse form of possession that the Dark Lord is hinting at now. At least the other way left open the possibility of sinking into oblivion and not having to consciously live out what’s coming himself.
To confirm the worst of all of his fears, Lord Voldemort continues, “You will still retain your own personality, although you may find yourself rather more…amenable and receptive to me than you are currently, going forward.” He’s going to scream. Oh god, he’s going to be sick, and then he is going to scream, louder and harder than he ever has while under Cruciatus.
Except that when his throat tenses up to start, Voldemort puts him under a silencing charm, ultimately taking this last freedom away from him as well. His jaw drops as the feeling of it tears out of him anyway and chafes his throat raw even without any sound to pierce both of their eardrums open. Because he can’t hear it, he can’t drown out the hushed, intent chanting Voldemort has begun or the dark, subaudible hum that starts up in the crystals surrounding him but eventually feels more like it’s vibrating within him instead.
Harry thrashes about as wildly as he ever has under Cruciatus in a desperate, hopeless bid to escape, only his head kept still by long-fingered hands cradling it between them and passively catching the tears that slip out of the corners of his eyes within the lines and creases of gentle palms. It doesn’t hurt, just as Voldemort promised. Physically, it doesn’t feel like anything is happening at all.
And then, after what feels like hours but in reality is perhaps only about ten minutes, almost as soon as it began, it stops.
One second he’s thrashing, screaming, crying, and the next he gasps, the candles around him all flaring impossibly brighter in that one held breath until, on his next exhale, they flicker out all at once in a puff of fragrant smoke. Harry slumps back against the table, feeling boneless, head spinning like it had under the Confundus about an hour ago. Was it even an hour ago? So much has happened already so fast.
He feels almost like he’s floating again even though he can still feel the table pressed against his back. Long-fingered hands delicately adjust his glasses which had gone askew over his face from all his writhing and jerking about. He blinks dazedly up at the ceiling. He thinks he was upset about something being done to him, something more unforgivable than an Unforgivable, but he can’t muster the feeling back now.
Slowly he comes down from this weightless feeling, comes back into himself, becomes more aware of his body and the discomfort of his awkward sprawl across the table, more aware of fingers carding through his hair and another tracing the shape of his scar on his forehead, making him shiver.
He blinks up again, meeting the eyes of the man staring back at him. Voldemort smiles and it’s a small, confident, perfectly at ease thing, familiar as the color of his eyes and the warm drawl of his voice as he says, “Welcome back.”
Harry huffs a shy, somewhat rusty sounding laugh and responds, “Hello again.” A callback to how he was greeted earlier in the evening that makes both of their smiles get just a bit bigger.
His wrists and ankles come unstuck from the table, the crystals and candles all vanished away with the wave of a wand, and then Voldemort is helping him sit up and scoot to the edge of the table, where he dangles his feet over the side and lets them sway a little in tandem. Voldemort stands in front of him, hands braced on the table and bracketed on either side of him, almost but not quite close enough to be touching his hips.
“How are you feeling?” Harry shrugs. “Still feeling like yourself?” Voldemort clarifies, and then smirks. “Not feeling like Crucioing and/or murdering everyone who annoys you or plotting world domination?”
Harry snorts and shakes his head. Leave it to Lord Voldemort to self-deprecate about his own homicidal tendencies and still not sound even the least bit ashamed about them. Harry might actually be appalled if it were anyone else.
“And you still like Quidditch more than your classes?”
“Hey!” Harry protests, jabbing a finger at the man’s chest. “Not all of them, just some.” He rolls his bottom lip into his mouth to wet it. “Okay fine, maybe most of them, but look, not all of us can be evil geniuses plotting, as you say, world domination.” Harry might have said more, but the hands that bracketed his hips have now crept up to holding them and resting against his thighs.
Voldemort stares intently at him without any of his previous humor, eyes hooded and just waiting, it seems, for a reaction to gauge. One of his fingers strays up a little from the top of Harry’s jeans, brushing lightly along the bared skin of his side. Harry shivers, chasing the feeling.
“Could…could you, um…” He’s not sure what he’s trying to ask for actually, if he’s angling for more or angling to get away. He squirms, and crinkles his nose when the movement makes him more aware of some tightness along his skin where the tacky blood has started to dry, and soon enough if it’s left there much longer will start to flake and itch. He leans back slightly and gestures over his torso with one hand. “Could you do something about this? It’s, uh, starting to feel kind of gross,” he says, punctuating the statement with a sheepish laugh, inviting the older man to laugh along with him at his awkwardness.
Voldemort does not laugh or change expression at all, still looking at him intently as one hand slowly drifts up over the boy’s stomach and up to his chest, with a muttered Scourgify vanishing away the blood as it goes. The hand does not leave when its job is done, remaining splayed out there over the center of his chest. The edge of his thumbnail scrapes gently over a sensitive patch of skin just below Harry’s nipple.
Harry sucks in a shaky breath, which appears to be the kind of signal the man has been waiting for. Leaning forward, he doesn’t wait for any kind of spoken permission before putting his mouth on Harry’s, nipping at the boy’s bottom lip and taking advantage of the ensuing gasp to slip his tongue inside. The kiss tastes faintly like blood and chocolate. Harry wonders if that means his own mouth tastes a little like treacle tart to Lord Voldemort.
The hand on his chest glides over to his side, deliberately skating over his other nipple and tweaking it lightly as it goes to elicit another full body shudder. The other hand squeezes his thigh and pulls suggestively outward, an unspoken suggestion to part his legs which Harry obeys, groaning into the kiss when the man presses his own hips forward into the space that has been made for him.
Harry’s fingers curl around the table’s edge, unsure of where else to go as the kiss deepens. His hips push upward to meet the other man’s and the hands on him suddenly grip tighter.
Breathing a little less steadily than before against Harry’s mouth, Voldemort pushes Harry’s robe back to hang off of one of his shoulders, his lips following in a biting trail of kisses soon afterwards, down the boy’s neck and over his exposed shoulder. Harry’s hands fly up to the man’s sides and hold on for dear life as he’s tugged closer by the other arm snaking around his back, a hand trailing goosebumps along his skin and feeling out the knobs of his spine.
His mouth is taken by the older man’s again, hard, almost too rough. His robe is pushed the rest of the way off so Harry is left sitting there only half-dressed, panting, both aroused and nervous about the hardness he feels grinding against his own, knowing where this is leading if they don’t slow down or take a breath.
“I-I’ve never…” he manages when his mouth is freed from another wrenching kiss so Voldemort can suck vivid red marks over his collarbone before moving up to the hollow of his throat. The sound that comes out of Harry then is high-pitched and sounds almost pained. He can’t speak again until that greedy mouth finds a new target, latching tongue and teeth over the other collarbone now.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for—” Voldemort stops immediately to grip the hair at the back of his head, blood-crimson eyes too close as they look into his own.
“You are,” he says darkly, voice roughened, also breathing heavily. Harry’s glad at least that he’s not the only one so obviously affected by what they’re doing.
“O-okay.” Voldemort rewards this answer—not that it was a question—with another deeply consuming kiss which, despite the ritual he finished only minutes ago, feels very much like he’s trying to suck his soul back as well as Harry’s like a bloody dementor would.
He pulls at Harry’s legs in a way that clearly conveys the boy is meant to wrap them around his waist. Only when Harry does so does he break away from the kiss and lift the boy up, then carry him over to the bed. Harry bounces a little when he is dropped onto the mattress, giggling out of giddiness and nerves.
“Take off the rest of your clothes.” Voldemort is still watching him with an intense gaze, already working on the buttons at the collar of his own robes.
Harry kicks his shoes off before shimmying out of everything else, carefully not looking up or dwelling on his own self-consciousness.
The hand returns to his chest, pushing him to lie back. Harry’s breath catches again as a nude Dark Lord climbs into bed with him and settles in between his spread thighs, kissing him again and unhesitating in his touches as appreciative hands trail over newly bared skin. Harry is honestly too overwhelmed to do much beyond lie there and take it as he is eagerly caressed and groped and tasted, but the older man seems not to mind the lack of immediate reciprocation, content enough for now with Harry’s passivity and acceptance.
His glasses come off at some point as well to be put away on a side table. The rest of the world around them blurs and Lord Voldemort becomes his only point of focus, the only thing he can clearly see. As it should be, he suspects the older man would say if Harry were to mention this out loud, though he must know it anyway since the satisfaction thrumming between them through their anchored bond seems to shiver happily and grow.
Oil-slicked fingers eventually slip down below and spread apart his cheeks, and Harry keens the first time one of them rubs insistent pressure against his furled hole. He hadn’t even noticed the man summoning a bottle or anything, not that it matters as the tip of a finger dips inside, spinning the rest of his thoughts away into immaterial sparks of light.
After only a little prep time with two digits, hardly enough for Harry to get used to the sensation and decide whether he likes it or not, the Dark Lord abruptly pulls them out and adjusts his and Harry’s positions on the bed so that he is sitting up with his back against the soft pillowed headboard and the boy is straddling his lap.
As Voldemort merely sits there and watches him expectantly, Harry realizes that he is no longer being granted reprieve to passively lie still and let everything happen to him. He is expected to participate after all in his own deflowering. Harry licks his bottom lip and swallows.
Heart thudding, Harry places his hands on the man’s broad shoulders and lifts himself up. The Dark Lord ever so helpfully wraps his fingers around the base of his own dick to hold it in place so all Harry need do is lower himself onto it without trying to awkwardly reach around and keep it steady himself.
Harry whimpers as he lets gravity do the work and the tip slowly starts to sink in, the stretch of his rim burning a little and bringing a dark flush to his face that Voldemort’s eyes drink in greedily. He instinctively tenses and pulls back up a couple of times, but the Dark Lord doesn’t chastise or lose any patience with him. He actually seems to enjoy the accidental tease as he continues to watch Harry through hooded eyes, licking his lips, and his own cheeks turn a little pink as well.
Harry is strangely captivated by it, this evidence that even as he keeps himself still for now, his lover is by no means an impassive or unmotivated participant. It makes it easier for Harry to let himself sink a little lower, both of them hissing as the tip finally pops fully past the tight ring of muscle.
As he sinks further down and his lover’s cock steadily fills him, Harry’s mouth drops open on an awed moan. Voldemort’s free hand drifts upward over Harry’s chest once again, the other hand letting go of himself to grope Harry’s arse cheek, fingers digging in enough to make divots in the plump flesh there and pull down to help him finish his descent faster.
As soon as he’s fully sheathed inside, the hand on Harry’s chest drifts up further over his shoulder and to the back of his neck, pulling his head down for another long kiss. As their lips part, Voldemort whispers against his mouth in Parseltongue, “Good boy.”
Harry’s reaction appears to surprise both of them. He whines, lifts himself up until just the tip of the man’s cock is still sheathed inside, then drops all the way down again far more rapidly than the first time. Both of them groan aloud as Lord Voldemort bottoms out in him again. It feels so amazing that he immediately does it again. And again.
As Harry starts riding his dick much more enthusiastically than either of them expected at first, Voldemort latches teeth and tongue over his neck again and sucks another livid mark there. Then another on his shoulder. Down lower, over his chest, letting his teeth tug gently at one of Harry’s nipples as he passes. Harry is going to be littered in bruises and bites by the time they’re finished tonight. The realization makes him moan again and clench harder around the cock buried inside him.
Eventually he has to slow down to catch his breath, so Voldemort takes control again. He tips Harry backward without pulling out, knelt over him again as he keeps pounding into the smaller body beneath him without pause.
“My Harry, my soul,” he breathes against the younger man’s ear. With a choked off cry, Harry comes, the Dark Lord tumbling after him into his own orgasm soon after.
He doesn’t pull out until he’s gone too soft to stay buried within him anymore, their joined breathing no longer ragged and labored by that point. Another Scourgify, now tired sounding, gets rid of most of the mess a few minutes later.
Lord Voldemort, victorious, tucks the Boy Who Lived into bed beside him, holding and keeping him close.