Lure of the Anglerfish
Words: 2,678
Pairing: gen, Harry/Voldemort (but is it really?)
Beta: exarite
Warnings: implied eating of people (its really up to the reader...), character death
It is dark around him, but somehow Harry finds that he can still see as clearly as if it were broad daylight. There are trees, dark and gargantuan and swaying in a breeze he cannot feel, making Harry feel impossibly small. Is he a dwarf, an insect? He cannot tell, if only because there seems to be nothing around him that proves the possibility one way or another.
It is dark, but not pitch black. The light is odd—a deep purple that Harry isn't sure really exists in the natural world, and maybe it doesn't. It isn't the light of any sun that he knows of. But then Harry remembers galaxies through a telescope as he sits at an open window, remembers the glow of the universe, and maybe it is the dark of stars and incredible spaces instead.
There's a humming in his ears. It starts off light, almost like the soft sound of water lapping at a shore, but it grows and grows as he stands, motionless. It sounds like nothing Harry knows, and yet it touches the heart of him as if it was an arrow, and Harry the target.
He feels oddly whoozy and yet alert all at once. It's like his body is not his own but his mind is still awake, aware, and unable to do anything but scream. The humming grows louder, louder until it's filling his ears and his head and it's not a humming at all, not any one sound but a multitude of voices, all singing. It's the songbirds of the wildest jungles and angry cats meowing late at night outside his window and his own heartbeat, familiar as the back of his hand and louder than a drum. It's a secret whispered to him by his first lover and the heaviness of the stars, so ancient that they have seen whole worlds live and die, tragedies rise and fall, and remained the uncaring observant without ever changing themselves. The all-knowing bystander.
He feels faint, but his feet remain firm on the ground. He can see his fingers trembling with a pain he cannot feel, but the sound is so loud and so beautiful that he can't think of anything else. He used to be able to hear his blood, he thinks. He used to be able to hear himself breathe. Now he's shouting words he doesn't recognise for reasons he doesn't know, and he can't feel even the barest impression of them in the air.
It hurts, in an odd way. Not in the way his nails hurt biting at the skin of his palm, or the way his teeth hurt leaving indents on his lip. It hurts the way desire does, like an aching in his soul to do something, be something, except he doesn't know what. And the feeling fills his head like fog, like the fire in his body leaves his mind to billow with grey smoke. His chest claws out at him for it, desperate and painful, and then Harry wakes.
He still sits in his seat, the eternal dark of space before him. The silence is oppressive after all the noise, a weight on his chest that Harry wonders is even real. He probably hallucinated the entire thing, all the noise and the aching and the want, but he doesn't want to believe it's anything other than an extremely vivid dream.
He's not going crazy.
But now that he sits, the endless void before him, he can't help but focus on the fading need, the vaguest impression of the song that filled his entire being just a split second ago. He wonders at it, at how his mind could possibly have conjured something so incredibly complex and heavy. He thinks, briefly, that it must be real then, but discards the thought harshly a second later. The clock reads midnight. Day two.
He is not going crazy.
The seconds tick on.
Sometimes—and he doesn't quite know how often—he replays that moment in his head. It doesn't happen too often, or at least he likes to think so, but time is so very strange in space that it might be hours or days and Harry wouldn't really know except for the tiny blinking clock on the dashboard. Either way, there is nothing much to do while still floating in deep space, so Harry often finds his mind wandering to the panic and pandemonium of the ship's end.
He remembers, most vividly, Hermione's wide brown eyes as she pushed him into the shuttle.
They haunt him. He imagines what he could have done, how he could have helped if she'd just let him stay. For a while he even hates her a little for doing this to him, for sentencing him to a small eternity in isolation, but he can't keep the ire alive. He loves her, and he knows she loved him. What she did, it was out of that love, out of desperation. He can't hate her for caring
He can hate himself though. Although he likes to imagine how he could have saved them all, he knows—like a deep but unshakeable fact, that he too would have been rent to pieces if he hadn't escaped. If he hadn't been saved. He remembers the hulking figures, covered in impenetrable armour, decimating them like they were mere dolls. He remembers Ron screaming and shooting a gun, his eyes alight with violent rage and the overwhelming need to survive.
His target had only laughed at him.
He remembers the look in Ron's eyes when he knew he was going to die, the hopelessness, the horror. He was alive, aware, even as they ripped his arms from his torso with unimaginable strength. Harry tried to go to him, screamed please please and I'm so fucking sorry but Hermione was surprisingly strong as she pushed him into the pod and locked him in.
He remembers, most vividly, her wide brown eyes. She had never looked so lost as she had then.
He tries to call for help, of course. Messages upon messages go out, SOS signals, radio signals filling the space he passes through like a duck's trail in water. It doesn't work, nobody comes for him, and by the time three days have gone by Harry is paranoid something else might find him instead of help. Three days in and he thinks about the bastards that jumped onto their ship, that murdered everyone in sight like they weren't people, like they didn't matter.
Like they hadn't been everything to Harry.
The Erebus had been a research craft, the experiments on board so secret that nobody knew the full scope of them except perhaps Hermione, and even then it wouldn't have been legally. Harry had been in data collection, recording numbers and charting radiation day in and day out to pass on to the next person along the chain. What had they been researching, he wonders now, that motivated someone to launch an attack on their craft?
Would they still be after him?
So after three days, he reduces the number of messages sent out to once a day, because although he's afraid of being found by the wrong people, he's even more afraid of being left here all by himself to starve to death.
And then he wakes up to eyes, red and malicious, watching him.
Before the events of that day Harry had seen a man die only once before, that too in zero-g. He hadn't known him, a stranger on the wrong ship, but what Harry remembers about it isn't his face as he died, or even his murderer. The man's throat was cut like it was butter and not flesh, and the blood that rushed from the wide open gash did not fall. It did not pool around his prone body like in a movie, did not soak into his clothes like water, like proof of his life draining from him. The blood had rushed out into the air in little, perfectly round drops, never falling, a multitude of scarlet beads in the space between them.
Harry remembers thinking it was oddly beautiful and yet wrong in some instinctive way. He remembers staring, frozen, as red covered the space between his eyes and the dead body like it was a veil, a curtain of beads. There had been a desire to reach out and touch just one drop, see if it would shatter like glass or explode like a little bomb of life.
The first thing those people had done was turn off the gravity in the ship. Harry can't help but wonder if Ron's blood still floats in the air like that.
Sleeping is a strange feeling when there is no sun to regulate it. He sleeps when he is tired, wakes when he has nightmares, and often he looks out of the windows of his little pod and wonders which it is he's currently experiencing. He doesn't know the difference anymore.
When he sleeps, he dreams of space. There is something so inherently terrifying about such a large, unknown amount of space, about isolation—the best way to deal with it, or the only way to deal with it is to pretend he is actually getting somewhere. He fears insanity more than death these days, because death is inevitable. He doesn't want to lose himself in this emptiness too. He fears, sometimes, that he already has.
Sometimes he feels skin against his own, breath against his mouth, another life close enough to reach out and touch. It makes something needy burn inside him. His eyes need to see, his hands need to touch. He needs to hear, needs it to be proven to his mind beyond all else. He isn't going mad, he isn't, there is someone there, he can feel it—
And then he feels something cold and alien curling around his body like a python around prey, the sudden feeling of fear! alarm! attack! makes him feel like he's blinked, and seen the Reaper's scythe on its downswing just as he opens his eyes once more.
He eats sparingly. He doesn't know why—he's going to die here either way, why elongate his own suffering? But it feels worse somehow to not try, like he's cheating Ron and Hermione and Neville and all of the people back on the Erebus. Like he's stomping on their memory, their pain, their lives.
He doesn't want this. A part of him wants to scream it at Hermione, "why did you sentence me to death this way, what did I do to deserve this," but Hermione isn't here.
He wonders if they'll ever find his body.
The dates tell him he's been in deep space for five days. His water is running out, his food is all but gone, and the radars pick up no land masses large enough to land on for decades.
He doesn't sleep, but lays in some kind of sleepless haze. His neck hurts and he itches for movement, but he feels so weak and faint he doesn't even think he can lift his head from it's rest without collapsing.
When he looks into the stars he sees galaxies a million, trillion light years away, and wonders if anyone lives there. Even in this new age of space travel, humans have found no other life in the universe, and Harry wonders if maybe they just haven't looked in the right places. If ghosts have been there, unseen but real, and they've just been so self-centred that they've expected some sort of loud welcome.
Perhaps they've just failed to look in the quiet spaces.
Every time he turns away from the universe before him he can swear to something, a flash of white close enough that it could have brushed the metal of his pod, a hand so long and inhuman it sends shivers down his spine. He hears a thousand voices, all talking at once, pushed into one throat. He hears the secrets of life and death and space and earth whispered so quietly he can't make out the words but only feel their age, or screamed so loudly that he feels like his eardrums have burst with the force of it.
Sound doesn't travel in space. Harry isn't hearing anything. But his eyes seek out the source, the constant singing, the shouting, his mother's voice as she laid him to sleep, Hermione yelling go, run, the click of Ron's gun as he undid the safety. He must be going mad, but it feels so real.
And Harry allows himself to think, 'perhaps it wouldn't be so terrible if I did go mad.'
There is something out there.
All doubt as to his sanity has been ripped away from him. The creature outside his pod haunts him, presses it's ghastly, inhuman face up against his windows when he's not looking before flitting away like a fish in water the moment he turns. Its eyes are hellfire, or perhaps that's starfire, two suns pushed into the shape of irises and set into cold, harsh stone. It seems immense, its skin white and its numerous scales glittering with the light of stars—a sight to behold. It is ugly, and yet it is also the most beautiful thing Harry has seen in his short life.
He sees it from the corner of his eyes, its mouth open, knives for teeth and beasts hiding in the shadows of its pupils. It sings its haunting lullaby, both loud and quiet, but no, that isn't quite right. It sings a eulogy, a song of Harry's life. It sings for Harry's death, calls him closer with every foreign word and inescapable note, and he is so tired.
It keeps him awake. His eyes are sore, his body heavy, but he can't sleep for the incessant noise. He tries speaking with it, screaming and banging the windows when it doesn't react, begging like he'd die without it. The creature just flits back and forth, winding its long body around his little pod like it's funny to see him losing his mind.
He wants to wring its slender neck until it's a bloody mass of red. He wants to bite it until it acknowledges his existence, until it looks scared and not so fucking smug, until it opens its mouth to beg—
He wonders if it bleeds red like Harry, or if its blood is the black vacuum of space.
It takes him a long time to put his suit on—longer than he wants to think about. His hands tremble and shake so hard that it takes him at least an hour to step into the rigid outer layer. By the end he is exhausted. He finds it hard to focus on much else except how tired he is, but the creature outside croons its song and Harry is hooked, and he is irritated. He has to follow, has to drown in it or kill it or something.
When he steps outside it is without a safety lead. The thing, its face flat, its eyes eager, watches him come closer like a crocodile waiting for just the right second to pounce. When it reaches up to his helmet its fingers are more alike to sticks, so thin they look like a firm grip could snap them. Harry's eyes trail down, watching the lines of its torso morph into the strange shape of its tail, the end arrowed like the devil's might be.
Perhaps this is the devil.
He thinks oh, how stupid humanity has been, how egotistical as the fingers push at his helmet, as it twists the glass to undo it. He thinks it smells like death, feels like death, and it's like a thick sludge worming its way down his throat, choking him. He reaches his fingers to its throat, the tube-like shape so sweet, so weak. The monster's teeth are sharp and pointed and long, for eating people Harry thinks.
'For eating me.'
And then the helmet comes off, and all he sees is hellfire.