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Part Four
"I still don't understand what the fuck you mean by that," Harry hissed as he watched Voldemort pace slowly from one wall to another. They were in their shared bedroom, with Harry lying on the bed while Voldemort was constantly moving. His neck wove back and forth, and he was more snake-like than ever.
Harry hated that that distracted him with how hot he found it.
Voldemort glanced at him, and down the bond poured a shining tide of smugness and desire. But he said in a crisp voice, "I did not forget that your memories of the triumph over the diary Horcrux had been obscured. I did not do that, no one else could have done it without my being aware of it, and you certainly did not. You are not talented with Occlumency."
"Yeah, tell me something I don't know," Harry muttered, memories of fifth year clanging through his head.
"I should have made Severus suffer so much more before he died," Voldemort said wistfully. "But I went back and looked at them when I knew what I needed to pierce the obscuring, and I saw what you did not. Shall I show you?" He held out his hand, and a Pensieve shimmering in black and silver catapulted across the room and landed on a small platform that stood in the corner near the bed and which Harry had wondered about the purpose of. It held the Pensieve's base perfectly.
"You took my memories out of my head?"
"Only copies of what I saw there."
"When did you even have time to look at them?"
"When we were at dinner tonight," Voldemort said, giving him an odd glance, as if Harry should have expected that.
Harry opened his mouth, but ended up shaking his head. "Fine. Let's see them."
Voldemort beckoned with one hand, and Harry stood up and walked across the room to him. Voldemort promptly took his wrist and held it cradled in both hands as he lowered his face towards the Pensieve. Harry took a deep breath and followed, although he privately thought that Voldemort could have just told him what it was he'd seen instead of making Harry live through the basilisk battle all over again.
This is after the battle, my own.
Thank fuck for that, at least, Harry thought grumpily, and then he was standing on the floor of the Chamber, next to the sprawled body of the basilisk, and watching his twelve-year-old self stab the fang down through the diary.
Voldemort hissed what was not exactly words, but a general sense of approval. Harry hadn't been aware until recently that Parseltongue could convey that. Harry glanced at him. "Why would you be happy about that? It was me destroying one of your Horcruxes."
"It tried to hurt you." Voldemort glanced at him. "And as we now know…look!"
Harry snapped his eyes up and away from the fading of the shade, his own tremendously tired face, and Ginny's still, pale body. In one corner of the Chamber was an odd, wavering motion. For an instant, Harry thought he was seeing the smoke from a fire, but no fire was burning here—
He gasped. The shape resolved, and he saw the black smear as it fled into the air and up through the pillars of the Chamber.
"A wraith," Harry whispered. "The Horcrux became a wraith, like you after the night when my mum killed you."
He felt an odd absence, and realized with a jolt that it was the absence of fear. He no longer feared talking to Voldemort about this, no longer feared death or torture at the hands of his husband no matter what he said or did.
It was freeing and dizzying and odd. Harry put that aside.
"I did not know that was what would happen to a destroyed Horcrux," Voldemort murmured, head canted to the side as he watched the wraith fly higher and disappear. "Of course, my main thought was that no one would ever destroy them at all. I suppose I should have taken some warning because of what happened to me as a result of that night in Godric's Hollow, but I did not."
The memories abruptly ended, and Harry found himself standing beside the Pensieve with his wrist still clasped in both of Voldemort's hands. Voldemort caressed his arm, up and then down, long, sweeping, hypnotic motions that made Harry hard.
Harry swallowed and ignored his own desire, staring at Voldemort. "And what do you think happened? Did it immediately come back and possess Ginny? Has it always been in her for the last few years?" He couldn't find the voice to speak his greatest fear. Is that what I touched? Is that what I kissed?
"I do not know about timelines," Voldemort said calmly. He was radiating something down the bond, though, and Harry grasped and recognized it after a moment. Smugness that Harry now felt disgusted by touching and kissing someone else in the past. "It might have come back immediately, and probably only found a home in her magic because of the fissure that she mentioned, a place where it could hide. But no matter when it arrived, it was dormant, and would only slowly have regained strength."
"So then what did it do?" Harry switched to English, needing some distance from his own emotions again.
Voldemort caressed his wrist one more time and released it. "When it had gained that strength, it flew free. It came to you and hid your memories so that I would not view them and see the wraith departing. When that happened, I do not know, but I think it recent. And then it returned to Weasley, possessed her fully, and concocted this plan to destroy us."
"Why, though?" Harry demanded. It was the one thing that had been bothering him the most since Voldemort's announcement that Ginny was basically a Horcrux in human skin. "It—I mean, it is that angry I destroyed it? Or is it angry that you're focusing on me instead of it? Did it want to be the—the most important Horcrux to you?"
He gabbled the words, aware that he was blushing. Voldemort laughed softly and seized his wrist again, this time bowing his head and holding Harry's eyes. He shot his tongue out to lick Harry's wrist. His tongue was so long that it wrapped fully around the bone twice. He held it there, pulling, caressing, and Harry knew his face was on fire. Hell, so was the bond.
Voldemort let him go at last, mercifully, and moved a little backwards, tilting his head. "You should remember my first and greatest desire was escape from death, Harry, and now my greatest is for you. But the Horcrux does not share that, of course, having been made long before you were born.. And it is already immortal. So its next desire is for—"
"Power," Harry whispered. "It wants to be the ruling Lord Voldemort."
Voldemort nodded once, "It thinks me weak and soft. It understands that I have fallen in love with you, something which Ginny Weasley would have been incapable of understanding on her own. That both infuriates it and makes it believe it would be easy to defeat me. Kill you, and I would fall apart."
"I mean, uh." Harry breathed through his embarrassment and arousal. "You were doing a pretty good rendition of it in the Wizengamot courtroom."
"I will not let you go."
"I mean, I didn't think you would?"
"I would not have let you die."
Harry just nodded silently. The probable immortality he had himself as Voldemort's Horcrux was something he didn't like to think about very often. "And it was protecting Ginny?"
"Yes. It has entwined itself so thoroughly with her that it is essentially no longer simply a wraith possessing a human body. It is both material and spirit, both at once and neither, flickering back and forth on both levels in a constant dance. My magic, meant to shred a merely human form, had no effect on it."
"Can it, uh, leave and mess around with my memories again? Or with yours?"
Voldemort laughed open-mouthed, giving Harry a glimpse of his long gullet. "It would never have dared touch mine. But the answer is no. It has chosen its form and is anchored there, and thinks, after killing me, that it would be easy to transform its new host body into the one it wanted." He shrugged, a rolling motion that went much further back in his body than a normal human's would. "So now I must destroy it."
"Can you just alter your magic to go after the spirit and the material at the same time?"
"No, not without a ritual that would take months to build, and we do not have the time. It will try its best to incite another attack on you before then. I will meet it on the spiritual plane instead."
Harry stared at Voldemort. Voldemort looked back, his eyes calm but his body vibrating with power. Harry waited for more, but Voldemort said nothing, and the silence built and built.
"That sounds dangerous," Harry whispered at last.
"Yes. It will be. It will involve casting my spirit out of my body and forcing the Horcrux's spirit from its host to become a wraith again. Then we will meet as wraiths. And I will destroy it."
Harry sucked in a harsh breath and switched to Parseltongue, ignoring the way Voldemort's eyes lit. This was about something more important than what language he used. "How do you know that you're going to win? It—it has more experience being a wraith than you do."
"Oh, does it? Did I not have thirteen years of wandering bodiless, and one of possessing a body in a much less complete manner than it has done?"
Harry still didn't know how they could sit here and talk about this and not have Voldemort lunge and destroy him. But then, he didn't know how Voldemort had spoken of loving Harry earlier that evening and not—
Been destroyed by it.
"And the experience makes the difference?"
"It does." This time, Voldemort bent over to use his lipless mouth and not his tongue on Harry's knuckles. "But there is also the chance that it could get into your head the way it did once before, or come down the Horcrux bond and use that to possess you, once forced back into the wraith state. That is why I shall arrange protection for you before the battle begins."
"I don't like the sound of that," Harry said, deliberately switching back to English again.
"I am afraid, my dear," Voldemort said, while the Horcrux bond rang and chimed, "that you do not get a choice."
"Um. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Zabini."
Harry held out his hand hesitantly to Blaise's mother, who was apparently going to protect him and watch over Voldemort's body at the same time, while Voldemort was engaged in spiritual combat. Mrs. Zabini took his hand and gave him a half-bow and a small smile.
"You as well, Harry Potter-Gaunt," she said, with a slighter accent than Blaise had.
Milla Zabini was a tall, dark-skinned woman with braided hair just barely peering out from underneath a golden headscarf. Her fingernails were long and had an odd glossy sheen to them that wasn't any particular color, and her eyes were silver and blazing. Harry glanced at Blaise, and found him watching his mother with pride.
"My mother is the foremost Warding Expert in the world," Blaise said, when he saw Harry looking at him. "She can create wards that extend anywhere and in any number of directions. Even across dimensions, if necessary." His chest puffed out.
"And on the spiritual plane?" Harry asked, because he had to. Even if Voldemort had called her here for a reason, and they stood in the crystal-walled ritual room that Harry had never had cause to enter before.
"Yes, indeed." Mrs. Zabini laid down a grey satchel she had been carrying over her shoulder, and opened it. Harry blinked as she began to scoop out what looked like a cluster of Potions ingredients from inside it. He recognized rose petals and unicorn tail hair and thestral tail hair and several other things, but he had no idea what she was going to do with them. "I shall build a barrier that shall hold you safe, including your mind, from any invasion, and protect your Lord's body."
Harry nodded slowly, looking at Voldemort. He smiled back at Harry. Harry didn't smile. He accepted that he had no idea how to fight the Horcrux and that it had to be stopped, but he didn't like the idea that Voldemort was going to—to leave his body completely and battle it as a wraith.
"My thanks, Milla," Voldemort murmured, and Mrs. Zabini opened both her hands and bowed her head.
"You are most welcome, my lord," she murmured, and her fingers curled in towards her hands and tapped on her palms, once.
Harry stared with an open mouth as all the ingredients scattered out of her hands and into the air, forming a barrier around them. It wasn't a solid barrier, not that it could be when it was formed of things like flower petals and hair, but a brilliant one built in zigzags and random patterns that dissolved just when Harry thought he'd understood them. And as they settled into place, surrounding Harry and Voldemort and Mrs. Zabini and Blaise in wider and wider rings, Harry felt as though something else had been shut outside. Some noise he hadn't noticed he was hearing until it stopped. He blinked and looked at Voldemort.
"Yes, indeed," Voldemort said back to him. Blaise twitched a little at the sound of Parseltongue, but Mrs. Zabini, deep in building her wards, didn't appear to notice. "She has shut off the influence of the outside world."
"Can we…still get air?" Harry asked, and Voldemort laughed softly in delight. Blaise twitched again.
"Not in that way, my dear. Only things that Mrs. Zabini shall permit cross the wards, and that includes air and light and food."
"Oh. Okay."
A second later, Mrs. Zabini raised her head and slashed one hand diagonally in front of her. A strong, deep chime rolled through the room, making Harry start. It was as close to an audible representation of Voldemort's pleasure through the Horcrux bond as he thought the world was ever likely to come.
"It is done," Mrs. Zabini said softly. "No one and nothing I do not permit shall cross these wards until you have returned to your body, my lord."
"My thanks," Voldemort repeated, and then turned and lay down in the middle of the wooden floor. Harry stared at him.
Come back safe, he sent down the Horcrux bond, and then wondered why he was bothering. Shouldn't he be hoping Voldemort died in this battle? So the world would be free and—
Well, no, then it would have an insane Horcrux to contend with. I think Voldemort's still the lesser evil.
Voldemort stared at him with red eyes that devoured his every movement, and in which Harry thought he was learning to see love the way Voldemort was learning to feel it, and nodded. I promise you, I shall.
And then he closed his eyes, and was gone. Harry gasped aloud at the loss, and with anger that Voldemort had promised he wouldn't close the Horcrux bond again and had forgotten his promise, until he realized there was a low pulse still existing in the back of his mind. Voldemort had left the smallest part of himself behind, enough for Harry to feel they were still connected. Harry swallowed and stepped back towards one of the chairs Voldemort had arranged in the room before Mrs. Zabini arrived.
"Blaise tells me that you have a remarkable life story, Mr. Potter-Gaunt," Mrs. Zabini said, and sat down across from him, with Blaise taking the chair between them. "Perhaps you can share some of it over breakfast?"
Mrs. Zabini's life story was pretty remarkable as well—apparently her "dead" husbands were mostly men who had vanished behind her wards in some way that would protect them from relentless enemies, and part of the way those wards were enacted was with a marriage ceremony—and breakfast and then lunch were delicious. Harry swallowed the last of his sandwich and looked over at Voldemort's body, lying motionless on the floor.
He had been motionless for hours. Harry didn't like it. Only the pulse in the back of his mind, in a rhythm a little slower than Harry's own heartbeat, had persuaded him to accept it at all.
"I don't understand what you feel for him."
Harry started and glanced over at Blaise. He was staring at Voldemort, but his eyes darted back to Harry. Harry blinked. "I—don't think anyone does." He was certainly not going to explain the Horcrux bond and the way he had almost spoken words of love to Voldemort last night to Blaise. Blaise was a friend, but not that close.
Ron and Hermione. Once, I could have told Ron and Hermione.
But then Harry shook his head. No, he couldn't have. They wouldn't have accepted it. Words of love for Ginny? Sure. Words of love for Voldemort? No, he would have been deluding himself, or possessed, or corrupted.
Even though words of love for Ginny would also have been words of love for Voldemort, in a way, Harry thought with dark hilarity.
"You married him to stop a war." Blaise's eyes and voice were both solemn. "I don't know anyone else who has that amount of courage."
"I'm the only spouse he would have accepted." Harry rolled his shoulders, uncomfortable. "It's not—it doesn't have that much to do with peace, really. Not, not in the way other people think." It was the only thing that had made their marriage possible in the first place, of course, the Horcrux and what it caused Voldemort to feel for Harry. Otherwise, it would just have been a marriage in name only, or legal, sanctioned rape.
I wish Ron and Hermione could at least have admitted that's what they thought they were doing to me.
"That does not diminish your courage."
Harry looked down and away. He didn't think he could deal with—with someone who seemed to understand and how to speak with him about that understanding, when his best friends in the whole world hadn't.
Why was it so impossible for them?
"Thanks," he whispered.
Mrs. Zabini shifted in place, and Harry turned to her with some relief. She had always intervened in some way, usually with a story, when the conversation had got too heavy in the past few hours, and he wouldn't mind it now.
Voldemort screamed.
Harry whipped around. Voldemort's body was arching and wriggling in the middle of the floor like he was a snake cut in half. The screams came out of his mouth in a steady stream, with no pauses for air.
Harry tried to fling himself off the chair. One of Mrs. Zabini's hands gripped his shoulder, and Harry was suddenly unable to lift his arse off the seat.
"What is wrong?" he snapped, twisting. "What is happening?" He slid into Parseltongue on the last words, and saw Blaise's eyes go wide, but Mrs. Zabini must have understood the gist, because she answered.
"I do not know. He should not have been able to bring the enemy back here, and it should not have been able to intrude, and he should not have been able to return until he had won…" Her eyes went distant, and the rings of objects drifting around them shifted back and forth. Harry saw patterns forming and reforming, faster than even the runes that had used to shine in Madam Pomfrey's diagnostic spells above his bed in the hospital wing.
Voldemort continued to scream. Blaise put his hands over his ears. Harry wished he could, but he wished, more, for the screams to stop.
Mrs. Zabini's eyes abruptly became bright again, and she lifted her hand. Harry tried to get out of the chair, but she swung around to face him and snapped, "This is very important, you will listen to me. Is the enemy our lord is fighting another part of his soul?"
"Yes," Harry choked out, unable even to pause to think about how much Voldemort would hate anyone learning about his Horcruxes. He reached out frantically to the pulse in the back of their bond. It was slowing, dimming.
Mrs. Zabini said something that was probably a curse in Italian. "I cannot keep out pieces of the same soul without having some exposure to them and knowing what I am warding against," she said tightly. "It is so close to the soul that dwells in his body that it has slipped past my wards, because they thought it was him. It has followed him back and has forced him from the spiritual plane into his body. It is fighting him there."
Harry's mind leaped to a conclusion that he didn't think he was smart enough to really understand, but also didn't doubt. "And it has more experience being a combination of wandering spirit and flesh than he does, because he didn't blend his spirit with his body in the same way it did," he whispered, his lips numb. Bloody Voldemort. He was overconfident. "It'll kill him."
"Most likely."
"Can you build a ward inside his body?" Harry blurted. "Between the piece of soul that's supposed to be there and the attacker?"
Mrs. Zabini spread her hands helplessly. "Again, not without knowing the piece of soul first when it was separate and being able to distinguish between them. I only know what is going on because I can feel two flickers of soul. But they are too similar for me to tell them apart. I would stand a fifty percent chance of expelling our lord from his body."
Harry took a long, slow breath.
She can't tell the difference because she doesn't know the feel of Voldemort's original spirit.
But I do.
Harry reached out, lunging into the Horcrux bond, gripping it.
And flinging himself down it, holding onto the pulse that powered it, and through the bond that ran to Voldemort's mind, Voldemort's soul, and into the middle of the raging battle.
