Misericordia
Summary: What would you give fate for your true salvation, your soul mate? A bored Voldemort, two decades into ruling a Dark Europe, is contacted by the tired fates, and learns that Harry Potter, the bones of whom his empire is built upon, was his – is his destiny. They send him back to Voldemort with a single condition: if he wishes to keep his twin flame, he must destroy his empire, the Dark Kingdom Harry Potter died to make.
Warnings: LVHP; other pairings have yet to be determined. Homosexual relationships. AU. Fate. Liberties with characterisation. HP, two decades into the future of a Voldemort wins world.
M because I am paranoid.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, nor do I wish to; I have no desire to be hunted down by lawyers, or worse, Voldemort.
Prologue: Eternity
In his hands, Voldemort holds eternity. He is, after all, invincible, and this shows; he rules the world with the sort of fearless command only an invincible man can do.
But he is also bored in the way only an invincible man can manage.
He forgets the difference between content and resigned, between clear and blank. He carries a dictionary with him, now, something he never had to do even as a student; he could never afford one and he was a genius, a genius with no need for a dictionary.
And he has the definitions memorized and committed to memory. He knows the typeface of the words, sees that little spot where a comma should be but isn't, could replicate every dip and line of the print and reword the definitions a thousand different ways.
He is, after all, a genius.
Still, he can't help but feel that the bloody editors made a mistake in listing blank and clear as synonyms of each other. Just as he can't help being mad that all those years ago, he let an ostensible agent of fate write his path for him, tell him that a boy just like himself was born. A mirror, he had thought; a threat, a rising Dark Lord.
Now, so many years later, Voldemort knows he does not need fate. He is a Dark Lord, by Salazar, and has transcended death; he regrets the child lost so many years ago, dead at his hand.
It is silly, that now Voldemort thinks of the triumph upon which his kingdom is founded. But now he has all the time in the world – no, everything in the world, and cannot find anything better to do with it than reflect.
Voldemort sweeps out of his palace intently, a blaze of black; he turns sharply into his elf-maintained gardens, which are ablaze with life. Everything in the garden is the bright unnatural green of the Avada Kedavra; and as Voldemort tells himself constantly, his favourite colour has nothing to do with Harry Potter and everything to do with power.
A shimmering green ripples like sealight across the glossy white surface of the gardenias in the sunlight; he catches the gardenia closest to the fence with his fingers, the one on the bush that will never rot, and walks through the archway that cuts itself through the boxwoods.
He steps over ivy that has sprawled out onto the path with a fluidity that speaks to how often he has walked this walk, and he closes the archway with a careless wave of his yew wand, and advances to the centre of the wide space. The shrubbery that boxes the area in looms tall above him and his nose is filled with the sweet but not cloying scent of white-green roses.
But he thinks of one thing, and one thing only. His eyes don't catch anything in the wonderful garden as he murmurs in snake's tongue, "Harry Potter."
And suddenly, before him, resting on a mound made of earth, is Harry Potter's body.
He has always told his followers that he burned the body of his enemy and burned the ashes 'till the Boy-Who-Lived was nothing but a ghost, something that would fade into legend and stain the yellowing pages of history with a spectre of himself.
But the truth is that Voldemort could never quite find it in himself to desecrate the shell of a star, or to let time take it.
He reaches out a reverent hand to ghost over the peaceful face. He has wrapped the body in an incredible number of stasis spells, but every time the Dark Lord looks at him, he is newly amazed.
He sees Harry Potter in his dreams when he snatches sleep from the cold, clammy fingers of insomnia. Voldemort never forgets or oversees anything; but he can admit that it is only now that he can fully appreciate the flash of fire that sparked in Harry's eyes as he looked to the Dark Lord, awaiting his death.
Every night (he has ceased to measure days in hours; a night is a night if he sleeps) he watches the boy die again, sees how the Avada Kedavra lit up his eyes like supernovas as he laughed a laugh that was the rest of the breath in him, all of the fight and fire, and fell. How his eyes were burning burning and the way the newly dead boy's eyes fizzled through his eyelids and seared Voldemort's fingers as Voldemort pulled them over his eyes and asked Narcissa Malfoy to take the body away because in death Harry Potter was almost as beautiful and unnerving as he had been in life.
But his laughter rang out and shook the trees like a strong silver wind; he could not order Narcissa Malfoy to drag that away. The lingering laughter was a collection of everything in the life of Harry Potter – love, light, friendship.
But in its echoes the Dark Lord could hear the whisper of a warped laugh, a cobweb on which was pearled woe, death, glory that died unborn.
And he understood, in that moment, that Harry Potter was some painful mixture of what reflected in his crystalline mirth and the shadow that fell upon it; that woe and love and death and light had clasped together and formed the Boy Who Lived Laughing and Died Laughing where they touched each other.
He comes here every patch of blank time he can find, driven to this place by his dreams (and only his dreams, he tells himself firmly. Only his dreams.) And as he does during his every visit, he brushes Harry's eyelid up, and the other, and like this, the Dark Lord can believe that the boy is alive. Harry's eyes are still the supernatural bright they were when he died, clear – not blank, clear – and green flecked ebony.
Voldemort has seen that strange pattern crop up in the variegation of his hostas. He tells himself it's a coincidence, easily writes off the hours spent in dark rooms hunched over parchment after parchment filled with botanical genetics – which is not so hard to do when you are a victim of an empty eternity.
His newfound obsession with a long dead boy is easier to accept when he sits besides Harry's body; for the thought of him being obsessed is easier to grasp, like the silly Muggle idea of a heaven, and he can pretend to be such a fool here, where only Harry can see him.
He traces Harry's scar with a finger, for the moment content to accept that it is a gesture hopelessly reverent, demonstrating how neatly ensorcelled he is, by a boy who was godly in life and carved into a villain in death. The burning contempt Voldemort once held died with this boy, when the body was absent of a soul and all the triumph that should have been there was not.
He caresses his finger across the crest of Harry's bow lip. When he is not busy dreaming of Harry's death, he dreams of Harry's lips, which is strange for a man who no longer has libido.
Voldemort was born without a romantic bone in his body, but he was born a man, yes; even so, he stopped visiting others' beds completely – for he would never share his own – decades ago.
He tells himself it's just not appealing to him anymore, that he doesn't have time, that nobody (alive, anyway) is worthy.
As he finds it, his reasons seem to follow a gradient; his first statement is a no-truth, his second is a half-truth and the last statement is a full-truth. (He's begun to think of things in terms of levels of truth rather than levels of deceit.)
But he dreams of taking fiery, lovely Harry Potter to bed – his bed – and spreading his pale, lithe Seeker's body on his Slytherin green silk sheets, of kissing his mouth.
He remembers his first, and only, kiss: a drunk Bellatrix, and in vivid detail; he still feels her coarse dark hair scratching against his face, her lips chapped and dry, her hot, wet tongue pushing against his lips at the thought of kissing.
He killed her for her subservience, though she was normally terribly loyal to him, for daring to kiss him. He finds no pleasure in the thought; at worst, he can only think of people trying to slip him poisons or bite his tongue, and at best, he cannot appreciate the slobber of saliva into his mouth.
But in every bit of sleep he snatches, he dreams of kissing Harry Potter, taking Harry Potter to bed and being tender when Voldemort wanted nothing to do with him when it was possible, when he lived.
He puts around Harry's still shoulders one of the many black velvet capes Narcissa Malfoy gave him so many years ago. For his consort, she'd said, and at the time he scoffed to himself, expecting that Narcissa thought that her sister would fill that position (for all that Voldemort deigned to never touch the woman; or anyone, really), but later realizing upon opening her gift that Narcissa, perceptive woman, somehow knew about his strange obsession with Harry Potter.
But it isn't an obsession. It isn't.
Harry Potter's face laughs at him in all its death.
Author's Note: This has been sitting in my writing folder for a bit. I'm not sure where to take this, even though I know where it's going, and if it'll be a long or relatively short fic.