Warning: horror so if that squicks you skip this…entire chapter.
.
After they get to the countryside manor, James and Harry meet the Dark Lady that Voldemort is doing business with and get a lot of cheek pinching and cooing. Tom stays in the back to escape it all.
"Pity," the Dark Lady says in a heavily accented Czech, so heavy actually that Harry doesn't really register it until the conversation has already moved on and it would be strange to bring it up again.
Voldemort and the Dark Lady have a short conversation in straight latin of all hollow smiles and niceties before she leads them to a short hallway with three rooms and leaves in a hurry.
Voldemort's peaceable expression drops back into his neutral, sharp-eyed glare and his wand unsticks from the holster spell on his forearm, snapping out from his sleeve to cast some spells for detecting eavesdropping charms and such.
James runs around ducking into the rooms with Harry peeking over his shoulder, finding a double bed on the left, a single in the middle and twin singles in the right room. It's all absolutely ostentatious but not in red and gold. James would be tempted to change it up but they're only staying for a day.
"The Ministry here is giving her followers a bit of trouble," Voldemort explains as he tucks his wand away again. "It's late regardless so I'll be meeting her in the morning. You three head to bed. James, do not sneak around unless I give you the go-ahead. Tom, you'll go with him when the time comes because James doesn't understand the difference between valuables and amusing trinkets."
Harry splutters. "Wait, you brought us here to steal things?"
"It's very clear she won't join me but she's stalling. I might as well get something useful out of this wasted trip," Voldemort says casually.
James slings an arm around Harry's shoulders. "Technically Tom will be the one stealing, not me, so I think it's fine."
"James, I really-"
"Sci~ssors, pa~per, rock!" James yells and throws out paper.
Harry, just instinctively reacting, does scissors.
Tom also did paper and he doesn't know what he's playing for but he wants to win.
"You and me to a room then," James tells Tom. "Grab your bag, I want the left bed near the window."
Harry looks like he's going to protest the rooms but James has already taken off excitedly to explore his new room.
Tom shrugs and follows because this is a new place and he's wary of the Dark Lady trying something, especially with the way Voldemort is reacting – which makes James an excellent meat shield because he's very loud and liable to wake Tom if something happens.
Voldemort, of course, takes the left room with the biggest bed. Harry sadly troops into the middle room.
James wakes up in the middle of the night to Harry calling his name and blearily puts on his glasses, squinting at the white blur outside the crack in the door.
Too tall. Arms too long. Pinpricks of light for eyes.
James shrinks back into the mattress, a nauseous feeling rising up. "T-Tom?" he calls hesitantly. "Tom, are you awake?"
"Jaaamessss," Harry's voice says. "I ha-ave a presssent-t."
"It's not my birthday," James tries. "I think it's Voldemort's, go give it to him."
There's a stuttering gasp, wet and gurgled, then a blink and the figure is gone.
James grabs his wand just out of instinct and flips off the blanket, leaping across the gap to land on Tom's bed because he is freaking the fuck out, only to scream.
Tom is lying on his side facing away, facing the bubbling tentacle creeping up from the crack between the bed and the wall, the end splayed open and covering Tom's mouth. Tom's eyes are open, wide, staring up at James as he lies paralysed.
James is still screaming as he severs the tentacle and vanishes it before casting a stomach pumping medical spell, meant to be used for alcohol poisoning.
Tom throws up as the tentacle flails and slithers back down.
"Tom!" James cries, fumbling through several spells for everything from poison purging to a simple renenverate because Tom is clearly struggling to push himself up, movements flailing and weak. "Tom, fuck, what the fuck-"
James turns and sees a face staring out at him from under his bed, tilted sideways and bleached white with twitching fingers for hair and three rows of teeth as its circular mouth opens wide like a leech.
Tom surges up, grabs his wand from the table and throws them both off the end of the bed. His eyes snap to the face in the dark space underneath and he flicks his wand, James' entire bed slamming up into the ceiling and cracking the plaster from how strong the spell is.
The face is connected to a fleshy, deflated body sprawled out over the ground and Tom transfigures the bottom of the bed to spikes before it rams back down and pierces through the creature.
James frantically does the same to Tom's bed except when it lifts, the mass of tentacles is sticking to the underside and James panics, flinging the entire thing out of the window with a crash of glass and crack of the wooden frame.
Tom casts two spells out of the now shattered window, one grease and the other a flame and the bed, with its occupant, bursts into a raging bonfire so violently Tom and James lean back from the heat that washes over them.
The door slams open and Harry stands there, splattered in blood. "James! James, you're okay."
"No I'm fucking not!" James yells back.
Tom wheezes, dragging himself up and aiming his wand out of the window at the elongated figure now standing there, the one James saw from the doorway. It's too tall, only the jagged collarbones and below in view, arms stretching below the bottom windowsill.
It slowly starts to tilt, to see inside.
"No, no, no!" James shrieks, grabbing Tom in one hand and Harry in the other before running out of the room and barrelling down the hallway.
Tom is staggering because he hasn't recovered, and Harry is tripping slightly because he's looking back over his shoulder. James kicks open Voldemort's door and the edges come away stringy like melted cheese.
Voldemort jerks up with wand in hand and James leaps onto the bed, grabbing Voldemort around the middle and tucking his legs in because the space under the bed is fucking terrifying. "The face was - and the thing standing outside, it's outside - it's chasing us-!"
Harry jumps onto the foot of the bed, tumbling over Voldemort's legs. "A nest - the whole ceiling was covered, looked like children but they moved like - like-!"
Tom scrambles up onto the mattress beside Voldemort's pillow, up on his knees and clutching his hair. "I was - it paralysed me - I was asleep and then just, it was, it was-!"
Voldemort, even snapped awake, is not slow. He very quickly comes to the conclusion that his wards are down since the children got in, and that they were clearly using spells and that should have woken him up even if it was three rooms down.
Voldemort also realises his room is smaller than it was before. He mutters a spell and the illusion peels away to reveal heaving walls, ceiling, the floor, pinkish red and pulsing through with veins of vascularized, bright red blood, sticky and dripping with something viscous.
It was trying to digest Voldemort while he slept.
There are things chasing them while they run through the thicket of trees around the holiday house, blurring between trees, silent, watching.
The four are just spinning in circles because there's a barrier line and Voldemort made a portkey but it doesn't work and Tom can apparate but only to the place he just left from. Harry can't send his patronus past the barrier and James doesn't even try as Prongs because that would leave Harry alone.
They don't have anything but their pyjamas and wands, a protective barrier flicked onto their bare feet because transfiguring shoes would take long enough that the creatures would catch up.
James and Tom are running at the front, clutching each other's sleeves because James is terrified of being alone and Tom is clinging right back because he always keeps a backup plan. Tom is also absolutely giving zero fucks about pretending to be a good boy and is wielding avada kedavras with great precision.
James is panicking and has just descended into absolute chaos because his brain has stopped. He sticks two creatures together literally face to face, sinks another up to their head in the ground, summons creatures when a tree is between them so they go slamming into the bark, shrinks a few into ankle-height goblins, and transfigures one into fish that flops sadly in the dirt.
Harry is running slightly behind and bobbing back and forth between just straight up destroying anything that gets too close to James or just casting mild stunning spells because he doesn't know what these things are, and he doesn't want to kill them, but he doesn't want them to get close enough to be fatal to James either.
Voldemort is at the back, slowed because he's testing the creatures. He's throwing out cutting hexes and blasting curses, tripping jinxes, observing if the creatures have bones to break, blood to spill, if they have an immunity to spells that target the mind or soul.
Harry raises his wand to shield James and Tom from a creature that reaches down from a tree overhead but Voldemort's offensive spell collides with his and it connects their wands in a stream of light.
"Why are you so strange?" Voldemort snaps.
"You're a part of this problem too!" Harry screams back because he's not taking any shit right now.
Voldemort drops the connection spell and just hurls the creature away with wandless magic, straight through a tree.
"Are you a Dark Lord or aren't you?" Harry complains. "Fucking deal with this already!"
"I'm thinking," Voldemort barks back.
"Think harder!" Tom yells over his shoulder.
"I've never been interested in illusionary magics!" Voldemort admits in frustration. "I can't remember enough of the stupid book I read it in." With his mastery of occlumency, everything is sorted very neatly in his mind but he doesn't have an edict memory, things have faded.
Voldemort scowls and he has no expectation the children will know but explains to them anyway. "It's a glamour ward, closed because there's an end barrier. The creatures are part of the insidious inner rune chain, they're reality-based illusions so they can hurt you but if we kill them they just reform."
Harry jumps over a hand reaching out of the ground. "Did you read this before or after Tom?"
"I have no recollection whatsoever," Tom grits out, setting a nearby creature on fire.
"Oh, we used that for a prank once," James pants tiredly. "An open ward instead. Changed everyone's uniform to Gryffindor." He wheezes weakly. "It was funny."
Voldemort skids to a stop and a ring of fire bursts from his wand, throwing back the creatures and burning a massive ring into the thin forest. James goes sailing back through the air, Tom half dragged along before the pull rips them apart and Tom tumbles to the ground.
James comes to a sudden halt mid-air with his feet dangling and Voldemort grabs his chin to keep him still. James throws up occlumency shields just purely on instinct and Voldemort ploughs right through, flipping around until he finds James and three other Gryffindor boys sitting on the grass near the Black Lake, sketching out a prank idea.
James is the one planning the runes with the rat, the werewolf and the Black heir are the ones to sketch out the glamour ward the runes will be set into. James knows nothing of the full ward but Voldemort catches onto a thread of thought about calling Sirius, which becomes calling Black, and follows it along to the mirror James knows Harry carries.
"Call Black on the mirror, the book is Glamours and White Lies by H.R. Elmat," Voldemort demands of Harry and drops James, summoning the three children into a protective silver bubble and bursting into dark mist himself, sailing straight up where the bubble follows just as the creatures leap from the tree tops over the ring of fire.
James groans weakly in pain where he's flopped at the bottom of the silver sphere, starbursts of white clouding his vision even when he closes his eyes. Harry on his knees over James' torso and trying not to crush him even as Harry digs for his mirror in his pyjama pants, struggling between being upset at Voldemort for hurting James and waiting to accuse him after they're not being chased.
"What's the mist spell?" Tom demands, legs tangled up with James' and half falling into Harry's shoulder.
"Determination and deliberation," Voldemort's voice echoes from the mist that circles the bubble, firing off spells at the gathering crowd below. "No destination necessary."
"Are you talking about apparition?" James says, blinking blearily.
Tom diffuses slowly into mist before solidifying again, another two tries and he's in the air, pushing against the top of the sphere before his hands stick out, scrambling at the walls as he drops suddenly, then takes off again in a more stable form.
Harry and James stare because Tom just learned a spell in seven seconds flat and that is not something a normal person does.
Voldemort allows Tom passage through the sphere and Tom bursts forth, spiralling down and massacring all the creatures below in large-scale, violent bursts of magic because he is tired and sick and grossed out and so done.
Harry's head snaps down when the mirror shakes slightly.
Black makes a grumbling noise. "Harry? You okay?" He squints and sees spell fire being thrown around behind Harry, past the light silver sheen. "Ugh, who's trying to kill you now?"
"Find a book, Glamours and White Lies by H.R. Elmat, James said you used it before to change everyone's uniforms to Gryffindor," Harry blurts out in a rush. "We're stuck in a glamour ward, find the book as fast as you can. Glamours and White Lies by H.R. Elmat."
"It's a closed ward," Voldemort calls out. "It has to be the counter for a closed. Get a rune dictionary too, one that has insidious sigils."
Harry repeats the order as the mirror view is shaking rapidly because Black jumps out of bed and darts through his house.
Harry drops the mirror on James' chest and tries a simple expelliarmus. It isn't reflected back inside the sphere so he starts throwing down spells as well.
Every so often Voldemort will release a devastating spell that obliterates everything below like a tidal wave -the manor is already nothing but a crater and the earth is scorched- but the creatures only reappear faster and multiply quicker until it's a surging moshpit of too many limbs below and they start to form a human pyramid, clawing at each other to reach the wizards in the air.
It takes five minutes for the creatures to develop flying capabilities because reality-based glamours suck.
It also takes five minutes for Black to floo into the Black Ancestral House because he's still blood and it can't bar him, walks straight past his young dad and into the library where he summons a few books with a simple accio, then walk back out past a still frozen Orion and floos away.
"Merlin's beard, man," James laughs as he watches this through the swaying mirror in Black's hand, just barely catching Orion's dazed shock. "The sheer balls on you!"
Black winks at the mirror with a smirk as he comes tumbling back out of the floo, dropping several books on the ground then drops to his knees too, grabbing the main book and starts frantically flipping through it until he finds a double page spread of a complicated octagonal ward. "Found it!" He grabs the mirror and holds it over the book, trying to be as steady as possible.
"He found it!" James calls out to everyone and startles when a hand phases through the sphere over his shoulder and snatches the mirror away.
Voldemort solidifies standing on top of the silver orb, mirror in one hand, murmuring under his breath and he draws deep purple lines in the air with his wand. He cuts some parts out with sharp flicks of his wand, the untethered magic fading into nothing while Voldemort refills in the empty lines.
With their powerhouse distracted, Harry and Tom are frantically trying to keep up while not interfering with each other's hits, syncing and falling out rapidly until they're perfectly in rhythm as they blast the creatures back - aiming mostly for wings that are stretched out eyes, or feathers made of tongues, occasionally a bloated stomach that seems to be keeping a creature afloat.
"This won't work," Voldemort hisses, eyebrows furrowed in frustration even as one of Harry's spells sails past close enough to ruffle his hair. "Find me a west stability rune for out-of-plane bending."
Black, flipping through the rune dictionary with his other hand for insidious sigils, starts rapidly flipping backward because saw that somewhere. "Here, Mannaz and Inguz."
The mirror view switches and Voldemort tsks. "No, I need an amplifier to use Mannaz."
"Teiwaz behind a reverse Raido," Tom argues.
"That's not a stabiliser, it's an in-plane bend," Voldemort snaps.
"It corrects the out-of-plane," Tom snarls.
"Dagaz in the south to anchor it," James tries.
"Oh, that's going to hurt," Voldemort mutters but finishes the octagonal ward.
The deep purple lines pulses and flex, splitting into three dimensional lines before bulking out into complicated glowing runes surrounded by shadowy shapes of pyramids and cubes shoved together in angles it should not be able to form, in increasingly complex ways as it grows.
Voldemort throws Tom back into the silver protective orb and then just drops inside himself.
The blast wave hits.
The waitress gives them a sideways glance as she drops off another jug of table water. Understandable, since they're all in pyjamas, barefoot, covered in dirt and leaves, some blood.
Voldemort has slumped down in the booth, head tipped back onto the backrest with a conjured wet towel over his closed eyes, three empty cups of coffee in front of him. Tom opposite is slumped forward, elbows on the table and just staring down into his pancakes.
Harry is sitting beside Tom, slowly chewing toast, eyes fluttering shut and head bobbing up and down as he tries to stay awake. Opposite Harry and next to Voldemort is James, cheerfully sipping his milkshake and halfway through his bacon and eggs already.
"And I'm still screaming by this point," James is telling the mirror behind a privacy ward. "Which, like, is basically my defence mechanism because it called Harry into the room."
Black is sprawled over the floor where he discarded the books, managing to stay awake -though certainly not as preppy as James- because he at least got some sleep and didn't need to sprint around madly for nearly half an hour total while throwing around spells, currently nibbling on biscuits and just enjoying being with James.
"And then the weird tall person is standing at the broken window," James continues. "So I just grab Harry and Tom and run to Voldemort's room - and may I just say, he got it easy compared to the shit we went through."
"You got that right," Tom mutters.
Harry mumbles something and finally loses the battle, sliding sideways until he falls asleep on Tom's shoulder.