Chapter Text
Chapter 3 – Answers Do Not Always Bring Light (day of battle)
The world resolved itself and Harry could breathe again.
He fell to his knees and dragged in air in great, heaving gasps. His head was swimming; his stomach swirled with nausea. Nausea from the unexpected apparition. Nausea from the heavy feeling in his core—the ghostly echo of Voldemort’s hand curled tight around his soul. He was going to be sick. He was—
Focus.
There was cool marble underneath his hands and knees. He curled his fingers against it, digging his nails into the floor until the nail beds sparked with pinpricks of pain. He was alright—well, he most certainly was not alright, but he was alive, and he was not going to be sick.
He felt eyes on the back of his neck.
Harry’s spine stiffened. So Voldemort had watched him have his little freak-out, had watched him struggle to regain control over himself. He had just—watched. Silently. It set Harry’s teeth on edge. He didn’t understand.
“Get up.” Voldemort’s voice came from Harry’s left, the tone cool and even.
A frisson of fear ran down Harry’s spine. But whatever came next, he wasn’t going to face it on his knees. Clenching his jaw, he slowly climbed to his feet, pushing through the heaviness in his core. If he focused, if he concentrated on the weight inside him, he could feel where it trailed out from him towards Voldemort; a strong, intangible chain dragging him down, down, down –
No.
Standing, swaying on shaking legs, he found Voldemort had apparated them into the dark, deserted foyer of Malfoy Manor.
The cold marble staircase was as imposing as it had been the first time Harry had been here, not so long ago. The same thought occurred to him again: this place wasn’t a house, wasn’t somewhere people lived—it was a mausoleum. A tomb. And it was empty—there were no Death Eaters to be seen; the foyer was oppressively silent, giving no indication of where they’d gone after disapparating from the Forest.
Voldemort reached out and twisted his hand in Harry’s collar, ignoring Harry’s violent flinch. His fingers were ice-cold on the back of Harry’s neck. Voldemort said nothing, but started towards the stairs to the dungeon, with Harry forced to stagger alongside him to keep from falling over.
When they reached the stairs, the ones Harry knew led to the dungeon, Voldemort used the hand at Harry’s neck to shove him down the staircase.
“No—”
Airborne, Harry shouted, reaching out wildly to try and grab onto something and found nothing—he crashed to the bottom of the staircase. He hit the ground so hard the breath was knocked out of him. Winded, his ribs aching, he lay crumpled on the ground, his shoulder and hip throbbing. No—his shoulder didn’t just throb; something was very wrong.
Get up.
He groaned, ribs aching, and slowly rolled onto his back. Voldemort calmly descended the staircase towards him, robes fluttering in his wake. The Devil descending into Hell. Hades descending to the Underworld.
Voldemort’s red eyes glittered with malice. “You’ve been keeping secrets, Harry,” he said quietly. Menacingly. Disdainful. He stopped and looked down at Harry, crumpled at his feet, like Harry was a cockroach he wanted to step on. Loomed tall enough to block out the light at the top of the stairs—light which seemed so very far away, now.
Get up. Get up.
He groaned again, rolling onto his knees and getting his hands under him. Slowly, knees creaking, he pushed himself up through the ache in his shoulder, through his bruised ribs, through the heaviness in his core. He stood in front of the door to the dungeon, head raised and shoulders straight, and—ignoring how his hands were shaking—looked Voldemort right in the eyes.
Standing in front of Voldemort, the fear swelled in a violent crescendo, constricting his ribs like a vice. He couldn’t breathe; blood rushed in his ears, almost deafening.
But fear had never stopped him before.
Harry spat in his face.
Voldemort didn’t flinch, even when flecks of spit splashed against his jaw, splattering off where the spit landed on his collar. Instead, he tilted his head and regarded Harry with an unreadable look. Well—not unreadable. It was almost fond.
Harry’s magic curled under his skin questioningly. He shoved it back down, heart pounding.
The air grew impossibly heavy; the moment strung out between them, the silence broken only by the blood rush in Harry’s ears, the pounding of his heart.
Then Voldemort’s face closed off, and the anger was back.
SMACK.
Voldemort’s backhand was vicious; the force of it knocked Harry sideways.
He stumbled against the wall, stunned, the right side of his face a line of fire. It hurt. With one hand supporting himself against the wall, Harry lifted the other to touch his face; the skin was hot under his fingers.
He glanced up. Voldemort was wiping the spit off his jaw with the sleeve of his robe, his expression furious enough that Harry felt sweat prickle all over his body in a wave. Regret cinched his chest tight. He felt—empty. Hollow. Shouldn’t have done that.
“So defiant,” Voldemort hissed. He raised his wand, and Harry flinched backwards. Teeth bared in a sneer, Voldemort wordlessly flicked his wand at Harry.
The spell hit Harry as hard as he’d hit the bottom of the staircase, sending him flying through the air through the open dungeon door. He hit the far wall of the dungeon with an audible smack, the force of it reverberating through his teeth, his head sparking, and once more crumpled to the ground.
He was numb. His face, limbs: numb. He was—he felt out-of-focus. Floating. No. Pain tethered him to his body. This was real. Real. He tried to breathe; coughed wetly. Everything ached, his ribs spiking with every breath. Something wasn’t right with his shoulder. His head felt fuzzy—he must have cracked it against the wall.
He couldn’t see—no, he could see, but not well. He must have lost his glasses. He squinted through the ache in his head, trying to make out any shapes in the shadows of the dimly-lit dungeon.
Suddenly hands twisted in Harry’s shirt, dragging him upright. He lashed out wildly, struggling against their hold, but his head was still murky and his limbs didn’t want to cooperate. Red pinpricks of light flashed in his eyes. This definitely wasn’t good.
Voldemort dragged him to his feet, his grip tight in Harry’s shirt, and shoved his back against the wall. This close, even without his glasses, Harry could clearly make out Voldemort’s face, contorted into something ugly and furious.
“My soul,” Voldemort snarled in Harry’s face. He slammed Harry’s back into the wall, jarring his shoulder. Harry groaned, his shoulder lighting up in hot sparks of pain. Something black flickered around the edges of his vision. Don’t pass out. He could taste blood in his mouth. Don’t pass out.
Abruptly, Voldemort’s face shifted into a manic smile, lit from within with something Harry hadn’t thought him capable of feeling. “My soul,” Voldemort repeated softly, elated.
Harry flinched when Voldemort lifted one of his hands to Harry’s face, but with Voldemort holding him to the wall there was nowhere to go. Voldemort’s fingers lightly brushed across Harry’s cheekbone; he trailed his fingers down Harry’s face, smearing through something hot and sticky on his cheek. Blood.
His traitor magic reacted to the softness like it had never experienced tenderness before, reaching out to curl around Voldemort’s fingers as if to hold them there. His soul—sung.
Harry felt nausea coil in his gut. This was wrong; everything about this was wrong, wrong, wrong—
“You will tell me everything,” Voldemort said softly, hypnotically, his eyes still locked onto where Harry’s magic curled around his fingers.
Harry found his voice. “I won’t tell you anything.”
Stop shaking. He clenched his fists.
“It’s not up to you, anymore,” Voldemort said. He let go of Harry and stepped back to the middle of the dungeon.
Harry stumbled a bit to keep his balance, shooting a hand out against the wall to catch himself. “What does that mean?” he bit out. Wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong–
“I think you know what it means,” Voldemort said. “And if not, then you will. You will understand completely, in the end.”
A chill went down Harry’s spine. Because while he didn’t understand everything, he understood enough to know that he shouldn’t still be alive right now, and the fact that he was still alive was not a good sign of things to come. Dread weighed him down like lead, heavy enough to make him sway on his feet.
He wished, not for the first time, that Dumbledore had told him. That Dumbledore had given him more than the bare bones of a doomed hunt for Horcruxes; that Dumbledore had even tried to help him figure out what all of this meant.
Harry wished he hadn’t been alone when he’d learnt the truth.
Voldemort watched him come to this bitter realisation with an almost hungry look on his face, as if he was feeding off Harry’s despair.
Rage flared, bright and sharp in his chest. Harry’s thoughts weren’t his own anymore; his feelings weren’t his own anymore. His soul felt heavy; the weight of it anchored his feet to the floor. Well, not to the floor—it was like a heavy chain was wrapped around the very core of him, trailing along the ground until it stopped, trapped beneath Voldemort’s foot.
Harry wanted to scream in fury. He wanted to hit something; wanted to hit Voldemort, wanted to hit himself. He wanted to curl up in the corner and hide his face. He wanted—
He didn’t know what he wanted. He was a fucking mess.
Voldemort’s eyes glittered, relishing Harry’s internal turmoil. “Such anger,” he murmured, twirling his wand in his hand. “I can see how it tears at you. There will be time for anger, Harry. There will be time for despair—yes, I can feel that, too. You think you can hide it from me? My own soul?” He bared his teeth at Harry in a semblance of a smile, all bright fury. He looked unhinged. Suddenly, again, his face creased into something tender. “My soul,” he repeated, in that same soft, wondering tone. Almost gentle. “There will be time for anger. There will be time. But now,” Voldemort continued, his tone cooling, his expression hardening, “is the time for answers. Legilimens.”
His wand flashed out; Harry flinched back, but again there was nowhere to hide—the spell hit him straight on, and the world shattered again.
No—
Harry reached desperately for anything, absolutely anything, that he could use to focus his mind – but then, he’d never been any good at Occlumency. At the time, when he’d been having those lessons, Snape had provided a convenient outlet, a convenient target for Harry’s anger and frustration. It had been all too easy for Harry to blame his failure on Snape’s teaching, on Snape’s hatred for him.
But the truth was—Harry’s head was a mess at the best of times. He’d never been able to summon the focus he would have needed to produce even an elementary Occlumency shield. And now—tired and wrong—his head had never been more chaotic. He scrabbled at the edges of his mind, trying to pull together some kind of wall, some kind of barrier, but he may as well have been sweeping water.
It was embarrassingly easy for Voldemort to push his way in. Easier even than it had been in the Forest, less than a half-hour ago. Because Voldemort didn’t just use Legilimency. And maybe – maybe, even if Harry had been the world’s most accomplished Occlumens – it would not have mattered.
Because now that Voldemort knew that Harry was a Horcrux, he had another way in. And Harry couldn’t block him, couldn’t keep him out, because Harry was a part of Voldemort.
His soul was Voldemort’s. And soul recognised soul.
And yet—
And yet, Harry gritted his teeth and pushed through the mess in his head, pushed past the ache in his shoulder, and shoved. Shoved at Voldemort’s magic where it drilled into his skull. Faintly, he could hear himself groaning with the effort. He shoved with everything inside him—with the rage, the anger, the fear, the despair.
And it did nothing.
Voldemort’s magic slipped under Harry’s like a snake through grass, agile and nimble and unhindered. Because even if Harry could stop him at the surface level of his mind, there was no way for Harry to keep Voldemort from simply diving down into his soul and attacking his mind on both fronts.
Harry knew it. Which meant Voldemort knew it.
Voldemort laughed, high and cold and cruel. It echoed in Harry’s head the same way it echoed around the dungeon, ricocheting off the inside of his skull hard enough to make his teeth ache.
“You can’t push me out, Harry,” he said, gleeful. “We’re way past that point, now—don’t you understand? Your soul is mine, and I own you. I—own—you!”
He stepped forward, one hand curling in Harry’s collar again, holding him up against the wall; in the other, Voldemort kept his wand trained on Harry’s skull, the Legilimens unbroken but unnecessary.
Harry could feel the delight Voldemort was taking in this. Voldemort’s joy spread through him like fire, bright and warming. He could feel it inside his head; inside his soul. It made him sick.
He clenched his jaw harder, teeth grinding. Get out! Get out—get out get out—
But it was useless. Voldemort dove in and out of Harry’s memories like they were a river, the water offering little resistance. He pushed forward with manic determination, pointedly drilling through Harry’s pitiful attempts to keep him away from what he was looking for—how Harry had found out he was a Horcrux.
Voldemort scoured his mind, pulling out every second of Snape’s memories that Harry had seen in Dumbledore’s Pensieve and combing over them with intense scrutiny. Through their connection, Harry could feel Voldemort’s anger growing—it felt like thousands of tiny pinpricks, building and building with every second of memory until Harry’s skin was crawling with it.
Each time Harry would recover slightly and try to push Voldemort back out, Voldemort ripped back into him with such ferocity it would leave Harry gasping, fresh blood dripping from his nose and ears, stunned back into numb permissiveness.
And he could do nothing but watch. Watch Voldemort take and take and take everything Harry had been trying so hard to hide. Watch Voldemort see Harry’s undoing—the realisation that he, too, would have to die for Voldemort to do so. The prophecy. Watch Voldemort finally, finally understand that Harry was the last of his Horcruxes; watch him understand that the rest were gone and he was as close to mortal as he’d been in decades.
Voldemort’s anger filled Harry like poison, hot and nauseating. He swayed in Voldemort’s hold, the wall at his back and Voldemort’s hand at his collar the only things keeping him upright.
Time stretched and contracted strangely. It felt like it took hours; it felt like it took seconds. However long it took, it was eventually over. Voldemort withdrew from Harry’s mind with a violent upwards motion of his wand; the Legilimens broke, and Harry fell to his knees.
Harry gasped in air like he’d been drowning, wheezing. Blood rushed in his ears like a hurricane. On his knees, he braced his arms on the floor as his stomach swirled with an overwhelming rush of nausea. He swayed, his vision blurring, dizzy. His head—hell, it was like being drunk. He wouldn’t—he didn’t—
Oh, no.
The nausea suddenly swelled and Harry retched violently, bile spewing onto the floor. Acid burned up his throat, sparking tears in his eyes. His stomach cramped painfully, and the next wave of nausea left him keening in pain, tears mixing with the blood dripping from the end of his nose.
He felt—violated.
Scrubbed raw from the inside.
He rested his forehead on the cold stone of the dungeon floor and squeezed his eyes shut. This isn’t happening. This isn’t real. He was having a nightmare and if he concentrated hard enough he would wake up in the Gryffindor dormitory and everything would be alright.
But then fabric brushed against the floor by his ear and the world rushed back in, loud and painful and impossible to ignore. And here he was, weakened and drained at Voldemort’s feet. The acrid and sour smell of bile filled his nose. The ache in his shoulder seemed to magnify to the point of cruelty; something was very wrong.
And there, under his skin: the intangible chain between his soul and Voldemort’s felt stronger than ever.
He suddenly felt very hollow.
Harry opened his eyes and lifted his head from the ground. Voldemort’s feet were inches from his head; for a split second he was frozen in fear, gripped with an irrational flash of memory that sent him back years and years to when he’d been on the ground in a similar position and his cousin had kicked him in the side of his head.
He squeezed his eyes shut again and pushed the memory from his head. It was a lot easier to do when Voldemort wasn’t in there.
“The old fool was smarter than I’d thought,” Voldemort said. His voice was strangely dry; hoarse.
Harry couldn’t read the tone; he didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know what any of this fucking meant. Please, let this be some stupid, terrible dream.
“But not smart enough,” Voldemort continued. Now he was disdainful. Harry could hear—no, feel—it, could feel the disgust Voldemort felt for Dumbledore. For a brief moment, it felt like cold sleet against his skin, like sideways rain. And then it was gone. “And it’s not a mistake I intend to repeat.” His footsteps retreated away from Harry; he was pacing the dungeon.
Slowly, Harry pulled himself off the floor, hand gripping the wall for support. His head swam and the barely-relieved nausea threatened to make a reappearance, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed it down.
Voldemort stalked along the wall of the dungeon, beside the door, seemingly deep in thought. He looked up as Harry stood, the red of his eyes shocking and malevolent. Harry felt pinned to the wall by the intensity of Voldemort’s gaze; his breath came shallower, and he pressed himself back against the wall under the scrutiny.
Wait.
There: something hard poked into his side.
Oh.
Oh—you bloody idiot. How had he forgotten?
His wand, miraculously unscathed.
He barely thought about which spell he would use. He yanked his wand from his pocket and braced himself against the wall. Drawing on every bit of energy he had left, he yelled:
“EXPELLIARMUS!”
His magic responded instantly, any semblance of control giving way to raw, panicked power.
Voldemort’s eyes widened as the red spell crackled through the air, lighting the dungeon with a shocking red tinge. He raised his own wand but wasn’t fast enough—the Elder Wand was wrenched from his hand and sent spinning through the air. Voldemort was blasted backwards, skidding back towards the door to the dungeon; Voldemort’s hand, hastily thrown out against the wall, was the only thing that stopped him from falling over.
Harry caught the Elder Wand, his hand closing around it as it fell through the air. It felt like it weighed a tonne; he pulled it to his chest before he dropped it.
They stood, braced against the walls at opposite ends of the dungeon, tension crackling in the air between them. Harry could taste it on his tongue like electricity.
Harry stood straight, his blurry vision narrowing, blood rushing in his ears. He raised his wand, swaying slightly in a poor imitation of a duelling stance. His hand shook; hell, he was shaking all over. Voldemort’s anger crawled over his skin, prickling like millions of tiny pieces of broken glass. His head was a mess; he could barely think straight—what now? What now?
He was still so shaken, shaken to his core—
“Ah,” he whimpered, involuntarily, surprised by the sudden tightening of Voldemort’s grip on his soul. He hadn’t forgotten about it—it would be impossible to forget about it—but it had faded, somewhat, into the sea of pain and shock until it was barely discernible from the rest of it all.
Now, he could feel Voldemort reaching out through their connection, through the hold he had on Harry’s soul, and it was wrong and sick and twisted and it scraped at the inside of him like nails on a chalkboard.
“Stop it,” he said quietly, adjusting his grip on his wand. He clutched the Elder Wand tighter to his chest with his other hand. Sweat prickled on his forehead. “Stop it.” He licked his dry lips, nausea threatening to swell again.
From across the room, Voldemort looked at him with an intensity that burned. Harry could feel Voldemort’s grip on his soul tightening; it was becoming harder and harder to breathe.
“Give them to me,” Voldemort said softly, dangerously. His tone was a warning.
Harry laughed mirthlessly; breathlessly.
“Give the wands to me,” Voldemort repeated slowly, emphasising each word.
Voldemort’s red eyes bore into his with an intensity that made Harry’s chest tighten, a chill running down his spine. Harry had never seen him look like this—this intense focus. Harry’s heart started to beat harder, loud in his ears, the world fading out around the edges.
What was this?
When Voldemort spoke again, he spoke—very deliberately—in Parseltongue.
“Give them to me.”
And—
the world
—slowed.
Oh.
The words were not just words; they were a command.
Harry didn’t just hear the command spoken aloud in the dungeon; he felt the command sink through to his bones. It thrummed through him, a wave of compulsion that set his teeth on edge and shook him to his core.
And that was where the command settled over him—his core.
What—
What was this?
He swayed on his feet, his bones vibrating with something terrible and immense. Voldemort’s magic wrapped around his limbs like a wet sheet, sinking into his skin, hot and viscous. Harry didn’t know this magic. This wasn’t anything he’d been taught at school. This wasn’t anything he’d read about in books. This was—
His own magic seeped out, unbidden, coiling against Voldemort’s magic where it pressed down against Harry’s skin. He could feel Voldemort’s anger as a weight on his spine, heavy and smothering. And it wanted Harry to do something—it wanted him to give Voldemort his wand. Harry’s magic wanted him to obey.
No. He would not.
Voldemort’s jaw clenched, and he pushed his will harder, pressing it down on Harry like a heavy stone on his shoulders. Crushing. Colossal.
Give them to me.
The command echoed in his core, loud and present and impossible to ignore, like static in his brain. The pressure in his head was enormous, but the pressure in his bones was greater. He felt his wand hand sparking with small electric shocks, like when his cousin had held his hand around an electric fence when they’d been small children.
Voldemort bared his teeth, curling his hands into tight fists. Harry felt like his entire body was suddenly crushed from all sides, like someone had gripped him in a giant hand and squeezed. He struggled to breathe; he couldn’t breathe.
He whimpered, the sound loud in the silence of his struggle with Voldemort’s will. His magic strained, desperate to obey. Harry scrabbled at the edges of it, trying to pull it back into the core of him. Desperate to fight back. He trembled under the pressure, his bones vibrating under crawling skin.
Give them to me.
NO!
Harry faintly noticed something dripping from his nose. Gritting his teeth, he tasted copper.
Voldemort snarled, and the bottom of Harry’s stomach dropped out; to his horror, he could feel the muscles in his legs tightening, preparing to take a step towards Voldemort.
Harry was reeling. He couldn’t—he didn’t know what to focus on—how could he fight this? It was worse than the Legilimency. It was inside him; inside his head, inside his soul, in the very core of him. And yet, it was all around him, a physical force crushing him from the outside in, his lungs tight like a vice. What is this?
And in the end, how hard he fought barely seemed to matter.
One shaking step; then another. Closing the space between them.
And then Harry was right in front of Voldemort—
—and he was offering Voldemort the wands.
Voldemort looked down at him, breathing hard, his eyes bright with focus and the edge of something else. Pain, maybe. Voldemort’s breath came in tight, shaking gasps, but he seemed to brush it off and ignore it, reaching out his arm towards Harry.
He took the wands from Harry’s unresisting hand, and that was it.
Abruptly, Voldemort dropped his hold on Harry.
Harry reeled back, off-balance, and fell to the ground. He caught himself on his hands and knees, cold against the stone dungeon floor. His shoulder throbbed. He felt empty, like whatever Voldemort had just done had hauled his insides out and spilled them across the ground.
“What was that?” Harry rasped, choking down copper—blood. He raised his head, staring up at Voldemort with wide eyes. “What did you do to me?”
Still breathing hard, his chest visibly rising and falling, Voldemort’s lips slowly curled into an incredulous smile. His eyes were wide with the edge of disbelief and something else. “I didn’t know it would work,” Voldemort said quietly.
“What did you do?” Harry snarled again, his anger barely enough to conceal his fear. His heart was pounding in his chest. This was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. Shaking. He was shaking. His skin felt tight; hot. Wrong-wrong-wrong. He wanted to scream. He wanted to curl into a ball and sob and shake apart. He wanted to hit something until his knuckles bled.
He couldn’t move. His soul felt so heavy.
Slowly, almost wonderingly, Voldemort raised Harry’s wand.
Harry’s own wand, turned against him. And Harry knew it would work; knew it wouldn’t make a difference whether Voldemort used Harry’s wand or his own.
Soul was soul.
“Crucio.”
Pain.
Harry screamed. His arms gave out and he dropped to the floor, curling himself into a tight ball. He clenched his jaw shut, but the screams still escaped through his gritted teeth as he rocked back and forth on the ground, burning—
—and burning—
—and burning—
Eventually, it stopped.
Harry stayed curled up on the ground, shaking. He shuddered with the aftershocks.
Voldemort’s footsteps echoed off the walls, coming from somewhere behind Harry’s back.
“I can feel your fear,” Voldemort said, almost wonderingly. “Do you know that? I can feel how terrified you are. I’d always wondered—you seemed so fearless, those times we faced each other before—but now I know. Now I know.”
Harry could only breathe in shallow, shaky gasps, loud in the silence; his heart was pounding so hard his whole body throbbed with it.
The footsteps stopped right behind Harry.
Voldemort’s boot pressed down on his collarbone, forcing Harry to roll over onto his back to avoid any more pain to his aching shoulder. He laid there, pinned to the ground, glaring up at Voldemort, his jaw clenched so tightly it felt like he could break teeth.
Voldemort looked down at him. “I know you now, Harry Potter.” His thin lips spread in a slow smile. “And you are mine.”
He held out Harry’s wand, one hand wrapped around each end; his intention clear.
Harry’s stomach dropped. He lurched upwards, but he was pinned down to the ground; he jerked under Voldemort’s boot, desperate to reach his wand.
“No, no, please –”
SNAP.
The snap of his wand breaking reverberated through his bones like Voldemort had snapped his spine.
He cried out wordlessly, a nonsensical expression of loss. His wand—his wand, snapped, splintered. Gone. His wand, which had seen him through years and years of magic, years of duels and battles…gone. And maybe it was the horror of the situation, of the understanding that he should be dead and he wasn’t because—because… But hearing the wood of his wand splinter as it was snapped in two hit him hard; hit him harder than being thrown down the stairs or into the wall, hit him harder than the Cruciatus.
He looked up at Voldemort through tear-blurred eyes, fury turning his fear to cold, silent rage. And maybe he’d been angry his whole life, but it was nothing compared to the wave of hatred that swelled in his chest. It filled him like poison, like salt. He could taste it on his tongue.
Voldemort’s eyes glittered, and Harry knew he was revelling in the sea of Harry’s anger; knew Voldemort could feel every crashing wave. While it had loosened, Voldemort’s grip on his soul hadn’t relinquished—Harry could still feel it. It sat inside him like a stone, heavy and unmoving. And around it, he burned with fury.
He glared up at Voldemort from where he was still pinned to the floor. “Just kill me,” he snarled. Just kill me and finish this.
“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Voldemort said, thoughtful, his eyes fixed on Harry’s. “I can feel that, too, you know. I can feel how you truly... You thought it would be easy? Well,” he said, leaning forwards, the added weight to his foot on Harry’s collarbone making Harry groan in pain. “War is never fair. You of all people should know that. A boy fighting an old man’s war. And the old general had you fighting on one, lone front—he should have known better than to rely on a single play. Because if that plan fails, you’ve got nothing to back it up. And you lose.” He gestured with the broken halves of Harry’s wand. “And that’s where we are now, Harry. Your little—sacrifice play? It’s over. There’s no escape, now. You know I will never let you go.
“I need to keep you safe. You are my soul, after all.”
Harry thought of Nagini in the Forest, trapped in her glowing cage for protection, and his fury wavered. He suddenly felt very hollow.
Voldemort stepped off his collarbone; Harry gasped at the shock of release, the rush of blood sending sparks of pain across his shoulder. Voldemort looked down at him, and again there was that sick, wrong look of elation. Harry’s skin crawled with sharp prickles—he wasn’t sure if it was the aftermath of the Cruciatus or something else. Something deeper. And yet: Harry’s magic reached for Voldemort, straining against Harry’s hold on it. Please, it said. He used the little strength he had left to shove it back down. No.
“You don’t understand yet,” Voldemort murmured, and he was almost fond. “But you will. And when you do… We will do great things together.”
A shiver ran down Harry’s spine.
Terrible, but great.