The Volturi and Voldemort
Summary: Brief Harry Potter/Twilight crossover covering Aro's interactions with a few wizards. Intended as more of a prompt for other authors than a stand-alone fic.
Fandoms: Twilight and Harry Potter
Date Written: Sometime before September 20, 2011.
Rating: G… for once. I think so, at any rate.
Word Count: 1,248
Disclaimer: The Twilight and Harry Potter series belong to Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling, deathly-hallowed be her name, respectively. I am neither of the aforementioned two ladies, and so I have neither right nor legal claim to the respective universes; I only own this fanfiction.
When Lord Grindelwald offered a truce between his regime and theirs, the Volturi accepted, understanding that while they would dominate wizards in what they considered a 'fair' battle, they were rather inflammable. In return, he made a pact with them that, if they lent their aid to his cause, he would provide wizards to them, both dissidents to be devoured and carefully-picked supporters to be turned; Aro, insatiable with curiosity, agreed.
Unfortunately, in 1945, Lord Grindelwald was deposed before he could take advantage of the destabilization caused by the fall of the human Hitler, courtesy of the English wizard Albus Dumbledore. Even more unfortunately, the new Light-Lord-in-all-but-name had a terribly inconvenient sense of morality, one reminiscent of Carlisle's; Aro went so far as to joke about Dumbledore and Grindelwald perhaps having been lovers in better days, and the wizard's involuntary reaction, imperceptible to human eyes – oh yes, he was good, very good – but discernible to vampires', confirmed his jest as reality. It made Aro rather thankful that Carlisle, being possessed of no other powers than – perhaps – truly extraordinary self-control, was content to wander around in America, preaching his woefully misguided philosophy to any nomad who would listen, rather than putting his creed into action and marching on the largest organized human-abattoir in Europe.
That aside, Dumbledore's disapproval resulted in no other wizards or witches daring to make a deal with the Volturi for some time. Rumors emerged of a few that had tried, but had met a variety of interesting obstacles, such as being turned into a literal marble statue for a few months and placed in a park frequented by incontinent pigeons. Aro resigned himself to wait for a time; after all, one did not live for over fifteen hundred years without acquiring quite a bit of patience.
As it turned out, he only had to wait a few decades, a pittance compared to the time he had spent waiting for some of his schemes to come to fruition. A wizard named Tom Riddle, a would-be Dark Lord and a sworn enemy of Dumbledore's, came to them, wishing to acquire some of their venom for his own use. He empathetically did not want to be turned; while of course he was most impressed by their strength, speed, endurance, and immortality, he did not wish to obtain those traits at the cost of being a godlike pile of kindling, as he crudely put it in his own mind.
Ah, yes; his mind. Riddle exhibited extreme derangement, delusions of grandeur, and bloodlust more appropriate to a newborn vampire than a supposedly-human wizard. What had caused this, Aro could not find out, as Riddle used the fortunately-rare Wizarding technique of Occulumency to shield all but his surface thoughts. However, despite being unable to get a good reading on Riddle, Aro decided that he would not waste a perfectly good opportunity, and consented to give Riddle venom on the condition that he reported back after using it, and described the results of his experiments. They sealed the deal with a handshake, and Riddle was escorted out by a near-battalion of Volturi guards; as Aro watched him go, he decided to put out more propaganda on the fearsomeness of werewolves and how very afraid vampires were of them, so that, with any luck, wizards would take the hint and forget about their far more… readily accessible vulnerability to fire. The combustibility of vampires had never entirely passed out of Riddle's thoughts during the entire visit.
Riddle's experiment was really quite marvelous, as it turned out. He combined the venom with the blood of Indian nagas, juices of the thought-extinct Heliopaths, and various lesser ingredients obtained through obscure magical rituals, then infused the entire concoction into his own body seven minutes after completing its mixing. He had not even bothered to make a test batch to try on some unwilling victim; his faith in his own abilities was both spectacular and dumbfounding. Luckily for him (although he would have said it was not luck, but skill), he survived the transformation, which lasted three full weeks rather than the typical three days (the thought of which made even Aro, with all he had seen in others' memories throughout fifteen hundred years, wince), and returned to the Volturi.
The venom that he had used granted him heightened speed, skill, reflexes, and resistance to magical attacks of the non-fiery kind, in addition to, of course, effective immortality; the naga blood enhanced his tie to snakes at several magical levels; finally, the Heliopath juices protected him from fire (an excellent touch, Aro thought, though almost a necessary one). The lesser ingredients provided miscellaneous benefits, but none of the same magnitude – indeed, a good deal of them were stabilizing agents and agents to stabilize the stabilizing agents, so that he did not explode in a blazing burst of scales, venom, and goo midway through the transition. (There was no particular reason why there should have been goo, but, in the experience of those wizards and witches whose minds Aro had read who specialized in Potions, spectacular magical accidents tended to involve goo. There was no known reason for that, either.)
Unfortunately, for all that Aro had to admire Riddle's genius, his formula possessed two significant downsides. The first was the negative effects of the physical changes; the combination of the venom and the naga blood had left him a hideous, fish-belly-white, crimson-eyed, freezing-cold snake-man, ruining him in the eyes of those who gave disproportionate weight to one's looks (and, as any vampire knew who wasn't a mindless savage, that included the vast majority of humanity), and the Heliopath juices, though shielding him from the effects of fire so long as his magic functioned properly, would react disastrously and fatally with the venom if anything happened to significantly disrupt the flow of his magic through his body – or, to put it more crudely, there wouldn't be enough left of him to sweep into a dustpan.
The second was that the change, whether from physical shock or side-effects of the dangerous brew, eroded what control he had over his behavior, bringing his insanity into the open and making him more violent than ever. Aro seriously doubted he would succeed in his conquest of the Wizarding world, though his numerous telepathic talents would enable him to do serious damage before he inevitably fell. Having already expended so much of whatever luck he was born with, Riddle would doubtless die in a humiliating, bizarre fashion, such as botching a spell while trying to put down a toddler. Well, Aro had to admit that was unlikely, even by Wizarding standards.
At any rate, Aro was glad to see the back of him when he exited Volterra for the second and final time. He had served his purpose; he had provided quite a bit for Aro to think about regarding new and ingenious ways of changing humans. Making a venom cocktail, his goodness…
Perhaps it was time to rouse himself and go about some active recruiting in the Wizarding world, rather than waiting for them to come to him. Time marched on, after all, and those who did not adapt ended up like the Romanians, sulking their way back and forth across Europe and griping to young, impressionable vampires about their long-departed days of glory. Aro had no intention of following in their dusty footsteps.
And who knew? Perhaps it was time to make in-roads to the East… He always had wanted to see China…
Author's Note: I was inspired to write a HP/Twilight crossover by Branwen777's stories. The worlds are surprisingly compatible, actually, if you assume that the vampires and wizards live in separate hidden societies and respect each other's Statutes of Secrecy, so Harry doesn't hear much about the Volturi (not being a vampire himself) and Bella isn't cleared to learn about the Wizarding world until she herself becomes a vampire. Sanguini's description ("tall and emaciated with dark shadows under his eyes […]") actually isn't incompatible with the Twilight vampires, if you take into account that Harry describes people sparsely, compared to Bella, and doesn't notice the attractiveness of other men – except for Tom Riddle, of course, whom Harry inevitably describes as "handsome" whenever he appears in a scene, but he's beside the point.
At any rate, as I said in the summary, this story is intended more as a writing prompt for fellow potential crossover-writers than as a stand-alone story, demonstrating one way that the Twilight world could intersect with the Harry Potter one. The Twilight world is wider than the Cullens and Forks, after all. Why not take advantage of that?