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It all started, probably, when Harry was twelve years old, deep in a damp and creepy chamber - hidden for centuries under the castle he called his home. It started when, still in a too young body to fully understand, Harry looked straight into Tom Riddle’s eyes. The once calming brown of his irises shined for a single moment when they met, and the boy-who-lived shuddered under his gaze. He felt the chamber, big and empty and hollow and truly, truly frightening, become more narrow, almost like its walls were collapsing, closing off to keep him and Tom from ever escaping. Or maybe, maybe it was just the blood loss. Whatever.
Harry felt the silver of Godric’s sword in his palm before his rational mind could ever figure out that yes, he now was holding a legendary sword not at all different from Excalibur (he read about it in a book, one of the few times he managed to enter the public library just at the edge of Little Whinging). His knees were wet and cold, his bones ached , and his head was thumping. His sweaty palm tightened around the hilt of the sword, and all stilled when Tom looked down at him, his open expression becoming one of horror and disgust. Harry thought, then, in simple words for his still simple twelve year old mind, that anger never really suited Tom’s face. He had graceful traits, delicate and severe at the same time, that made him look like royalty. The arched brows, his almond-shaped eyes, and even the straight nose and the paper-cutting jaw, all inspired a sense of worship. It was soul shattering for Harry, that too many times was grabbed by furious hands - evil, evil hands - and dragged to the Church on Sunday morning, clothed in Dudley old stuffy clothes, to pray to a God he didn’t believe in. How could he? When said God never showed up when they beat him until he coughed up blood, until he passed out in his own vomit, until he felt the cold hand of death around his throat? How could he believe in him, when he never stopped the evil hands and the evil laughs?
So, finding his faith when he was knee deep in a cold chamber, surrounded by the echoes of phantom snakes, with the almost-dead body of his best friend's sister for company, was a bit disconcerting. And yet, Harry felt the need to abandon the sword and link his hand to pray . Because maybe God didn’t exist, but Tom was there, and he was beautiful and so very dangerous. He tasted like poison, like the sharp edge of a knife.
But Harry was only a child, he was in pain, and he was beyond terrified. So he grabbed the sword and killed a centuries old basilisk, and then he stabbed the diary, never looking away as Tom crumpled on the floor and screamed . Something dark and twisted cried inside Harry, if in joy or in horror, he couldn’t tell, when the perfect face contorted into a mask of pure pain. When Tom was nothing more than a mess, wet and whimpering at his feet.
Years later, Harry would ask himself if that was what it felt like to cast a Cruciatus. If the torture curse was so sweet on the caster lips, like it was watching Tom breaking while the basilisk poison spread on the pages of the diary and consumed him like black liquid fire. When Tom was no more, Harry let out a sudden cry, and found himself with tears rolling down his cheeks. Ginny was still asleep beside him, but he couldn’t find the force to check. He crawled, trembling and bloody, to the destroyed diary, and howled keeping it close to his heart. Because he just killed a soul. Because he liked it . And because he found his faith inside brown eyes and in screams of pain.
That night, when he was safely tucked inside the infirmary, under the strict protection of Madame Pomfrey, Harry kept crying. Nothing inside him felt stable anymore. He was in pieces, and didn’t know how to mend them back together. He prayed, then. Prayed that maybe Voldemort was still out there.
And what scared him the most, was not knowing if he wanted to find him to kill the monster, or if he wanted the monster to kill him.
So, when Harry was fifteen, no one should have been surprised - really.
It went like this.
After the whole chamber charade, the young Harry Potter grew up, slowly and surely, knowing full well that something in his mind wasn’t right. After he saved Ginny, and really someone should’ve picked up the signs right there when he didn’t even ask if she was okay once released from the infirmary - small things began to change. He was still happy, he loved to laugh with his friends and despised Malfoy and everything he stood for, but he knew deep down that his soul wasn’t so light anymore.
He kept dreaming, because it wasn’t really nightmares, about Tom. About his face, his alabaster skin, and his eyes that followed him into the dark corners of his mind. But mostly he dreamt of his screams, and woke up with a saccharine sweet taste on the tip of his tongue, like he just ate the most delicious candy from Honeydukes. When he was back with the Dursleys, beaten half to death and locked inside his small bedroom, Harry asked himself if he - maybe - was going crazy. Because no one that thought himself as good should find torture that appealing. Still, even when he recognized that yes, maybe he was somewhat a bit of a psycho, he never confessed to his sin. Not to his friends, to which he kept writing about daily things and future prospects for his third year at Hogworts - not to Dubledore once the year effectively began. What if, once they learned that reliving the torture and death of someone didn’t count as a nightmare to him, what if they made him leave the wizarding world? What if… what if they decided he was a dark lord in the making, and killed him? He didn’t want to die. Not yet anyway. And that should have been another sign, the fact that he was more scared of being killed and not of becoming a dark lord. But whatever, Harry wasn’t analyzing that too deeply.
So he kept his darkest desires protected close to his chest, inside his ribcage, just beside his heart, in the most secured and precious space - and went on with his life. Sometimes he still cried for Tom. Sometimes he searched for him in the crowd of students. The curve of his brows in a seventh year Hufflepuff, the arch of his lips in a sixth year Slytherin. At breakfast, lunch and dinner, half-listening to his friends rambling, he searched and searched, cataloguing faces and traits to mentally construct a collage of Tom. To find again the spark of desire in his heart. Was that what believers wanted when they went to Church and listened to the mass? They too went about their lives searching God in the faces of strangers? They too had a void inside, devouring and scorching hot, that begged to be filled - because faith wasn’t enough, and memories weren’t either, and Harry wanted to grab Tom and eat him , to bathe in his blood and drink from his lips because nothing was ever going to be enough.
He wanted to cup his face between his hands and crush him, kill him, and mourn him - again and again until the void inside him stopped burning.
The epiphany got to him between a piece of toast and a sip of pumpkin juice. He wanted to kiss him too, to feel his tongue, to reach inside his chest and grab his heart because it belonged to him.
Oh.
Was all that Harry thought, and then he went on with his day like nothing at all happened, and he didn’t just realize he was so attracted to Voldemort that the prospect of eating his flesh was erotic and not disturbing.
Yes, maybe someone should have picked up the signals.
He wasn’t even trying to keep the secret!
During one of the first lessons with professor Lupin, the new DADA teacher, they were put against their deepest fears. Not the safest thing to do to a group of traumatized thirteen years old, but at least it was an interesting lesson. For the whole hour it took for the Gryffindors to try and cast Riddikulus! Harry’s mind kept going over the possibilities. What was his boggart going to be? Maybe a Dementor - they were creepy, and whenever one was close, he heard his mother scream before being murdered. Maybe the Dursleys. It would be fun - after all the magical creatures, the clowns and the spiders - to just have a normal suburban family get out of the closet. At least, maybe then someone would figure out the abuse and stop him from going back every summer. Or maybe it would just become a narrow cupboard shrouded in darkness, with nothing in it beside bloodied sheets.
Lupin was talking about something, and then he called “Harry Potter?”, and Harry went to face the boggart. In another reality, Lupin stood before him and the boggart took the form of a full moon - in another reality, Harry was grateful because he didn’t want to give that much ammunition to his classmates, to let them know about his deepest fear.
But Harry was different here, he was not quite right, and he was quicker than Lupin. The boggart changed. His flesh melted, and he floated for a second too long. All his classmates inhaled, feeling that what was happening was not normal. A boggart shouldn’t take that much time to find his form. Even Lupin stood back, wand raised and ready, while Harry’s boggart kept shifting. Eerie screams echoed in the DADA classroom, faint and distant like an angelic chorus, and then the light outside dimmed, and the floor became wet and shiny under the body of Tom Riddle. The boy was pale and had blood around his mouth. But Before Harry could do anything, Tom shifted his vacant eyes on him and hissed: “I will never forgive you, Harry Potter. You will have to kill me, again and again, until I die.”
Harry felt like crying. No one dared move, no one made a sound. The Slytherins were watching, horrified to find the boy on the floor with their house insignia on the robes. Lupin was just frozen on the spot. Then, Harry raised his wand. It wasn’t right.
Tom was better than the boggart imitation. His hair was shinier, his eyes were warmer. His voice was deeper. He didn’t feel fear then, watching Voldemort reject him, just a deep disgust for the creature that managed to get him all wrong. How dare it soil his memories like that?
“Riddikulus.” he calmly said, and the scene changed. Harry himself was straddling Tom’s body, and he had a basilisk fang in his hand. He stabbed Tom, and stabbed him again, until the boggart-Harry was covered in blood. And then the creature gargled, a wet and disturbing sound, and died leaving only a dark scorch mark on the floor.
In the unsettling silence, Professor Lupin said: “I think you just made the boggart kill himself.”
No one ever spoke of that ever again. Not his classmates, not the Slytherins, not Lupin. No one went to the boy-who-lived and asked him what on earth was wrong with him. Hermione and Ron tried, but Harry shrugged away their questions with a well placed “It just was what happened in the Chamber, so nothing new!” and never looked back. If they thought he was crazy, well, they were right.
Dumbledore never stood a chance. He didn’t even try to keep Harry outside the tournament, and so it was kinda his fault the Dark Lord came back. Voldemort was certainly smart, but the Light-side of the war made everything easier for him. Harry almost laughed, almost , while Wormtail chanted the ritual to resurrect his lord. Because really, they never even tried to stop Voldemort .
In first year, all they had to do was keep secure a damn stone, and Dumbledore's idea of secure apparently was instructing the teachers to design some silly trials that a couple of first years could solve under a lot of stress. The only thing that stopped Voldemort from getting the stone on day one was Quirrel stupidity, and that, in Harry’s opinion, was an auto-goal. Then the basilisk. Surely an old and wise wizard like Dumbledore would recognize the signs of a deadly-giant-snake inside his castle, surely? Maybe he never took Care for Magical Creatures. Third year, while knowing of Sirius innocence (he was the one that cast the bloody Fidelius charm and made Wormtail the Secret Keeper, for Godric’s sake), instead of telling the Order and Harry the truth - so to not cause mass panic and maybe, maybe find a way to help him and figure out what he wanted in Gryffyndor’s Tower (and so, capturing Wormtail efficiently), he just got them limited time-travel and a stupid plan. The Dementors and Lupin almost made Voldemort’s job a lot easier.
Anyhow, Harry - while Wormtail grabbed his forearm and cut open his flesh to gather a bit of blood - felt the sudden urge to laugh and laugh. To let the whole Wizarding world know that he was insane, that his soul was broken and mended with pieces of Voldemort like Frankenstein’s Monster. Wanted everyone to know that keeping him together were screams and pain of a tainted man that gave him a piece of himself, and in time, that piece changed and molded to Harry’s needs. It became less like a mirror fragment, stabbed into him, and more like a long thread sewn inside him. His only way back to sanity.
Harry was probably dying. If not from the blood loss, surely from the Acromantula venom that was burning his way up his leg. Or maybe from the concussion. Or maybe from a thousand more causes that he forgot about. He just wanted them to know how much they failed him - or maybe, how much he failed them. Like a modern Icarus, Harry flew too close to the darkness. So what if he still dreamt of Tom’s screams? So what if he woke up in the middle of the night, drunk on pain and sweet poison on his lips, with a wet patch in his pants because he wanted to have him ? Tom was beautiful. Harry wanted to kneel before him and pray to his altar and offer him everything .
The cauldron bubbled and vanished, and in the center of the graveyard stood a tall figure - a pale man in his early thirties, with dark brown hair, messy and undone around his face. High cheekbones and a sharp jaw, and deep red eyes the colour of fresh spilled blood. Harry looked at him, following the curves of his muscles and the shadows on his skin. The dip of his hips, the heavy form of his cock, the long legs that were made to sin.
Too soon, Tom was again robed and clad in dark black, his long fingers twisting the yew wand, pale like a naked bone. Harry swallowed, his throat dry and his tongue full and expecting. Voldemort was better than sixteen year old Tom Riddle. He was full in a way only a man could be, powerful, and nothing like the scared boy he once was.
“What will we do with you now, Harry Potter?” the Dark Lord asked, slowly advancing towards him. He almost floated, while his long gown crawled on the damp grass like a shadow or a snake. Stood face to face, Harry forgot the pain, the blood loss, the poison in his leg. He forgot he was still bound to the gravestone, the ropes tight and bruising his skin. Voldemort smirked cruelly, and touched a finger on his forehead.
Maybe Harry should have screamed. Maybe.
Instead, Harry closed his eyes and shuddered . The fleeting tendrils of pain invaded his mind and his flesh, grabbed at his bones, but staied quiet. Awaiting for an order that never came. The boy-who-lived threw back his head, a moan stuck in his trachea, incapable of escaping the dark wetness of his mouth. Voldemort’s hand went still, and Harry opened his eyes.
He was so close.
Deep red, like the cruciatus , like the expelliarmus , met the poison green of the killing curse. Maybe someone should have picked that up - that they really were a mirror of eachother. Symmetrical images, always fixed in every universe.
“What.” Voldemort hissed, his velvet voice going straight to Harry’s crotch.
Then, the teen smiled. Smiled! In front of the Dark Lord!
“You’re hot.” parseltongue rolled off his lips, soft and sweet. Voldemort took a step back, the ropes that kept Harry suspended faltered and he fell with a thud at the feet of the man he worshiped. In a split second, Harry grabbed his wand. “I’ll bow before your throne, my Lord.” and then with a flick of his wrist he cast “Accio Cup and Cedric’s body.” and he was pulled to the beginning of the maze with the Dark Lord face crumpled in confusion burned in his retinas.
Once again, he spent the end of the year crying himself to sleep. Cedric was a good guy, he didn’t deserve to die. When he wasn’t crying, he was wanking himself raw to the memory of Voldemort’s naked body and his screams always echoing in his mind.
It was no surprise that no one ever tried to take him away from the Dursleys. Even now that he was almost fifteen, they still beat him and locked him inside the small room with bars at his window. They still made him cook, clean and weed the garden. They yelled at him and hit him with belts and racks whenever he woke up screaming - seeing Cedric dead at his feet. If no one noticed that Harry was so broken he wanted Voldemort to fuck him dead, yeah, maybe no one noticed the Dursleys abused him.
When the two Dementors cornered him and his cousin, Harry didn’t even flinch in surprise when his Patronus came out as a beautiful and towering basilisk.
The trial was a farce, and his fifth year began as per usual - with a DADA teacher out for his blood. Go figures. He was tempted to grab some parchment and his owl and send a letter to Voldemort, begging him to, quote on quote “just take him if he wanted to have him, pretty please, all this foreplay was unnecessary”. He never did, though. He kept his head low, biting his lips until he tasted copper to stop himself from responding to Umbridge’s taunts. She wanted to humiliate him, making him admit that there was no Dark Lord. His friends kept trying to make him fight back, to say, loud and proud, that yes - Voldemort was back, and they needed to fight. Harry just wanted to scream “I want him so bad you would never believe me Professor!”
Once again, he never did. He took the detentions without screaming, even when his hand kept trembling for hours, even when he barely had feeling in his fingertips, even when he knew the nerve damage would never heal again. I must not be arrogant . Was permanently etched on his skin.
And Harry was sick. Because when he kept writing line after line, feeling the torture gnawing at him piece by piece, he could only think of Tom. Tom in the chamber, screaming when Harry stabbed the diary, when the basilisk venom burned him from the inside. He tortured Tom . And he was now the victim. And the pain was so blinding, his tongue was tasting sweet again. This is what he felt? He asked himself. And the screams echoed again. He smelled damp mold in his lungs, felt the cold water of the chamber seep into his trousers. He endured the torture like Tom did, because it was another thing to remind of him. Another thing they had in common.
Harry was sick. Caressing the words on his hand, incapable of grabbing his drink with his left without causing a mess, he tasted sugar sweet on his tongue and the void inside him burned.
He knew Sirius was not in danger. The vision was not right.
Just like his boggart, something was wrong with his godfather. His face was somehow off, his hair a shade too dark, his eyes way too bright. As soon as he woke up on the floor of the Great Hall, a small crowd watching him, Harry knew Voldemort sent him a fake dream to lure him to the Ministry. But why? He needed him for something. And the thought sent a fierce hotness down his guts. Voldemort needed him.
Harry wanted to cry. Wanted to pray. He sat and then stood, and grabbed Ron and Hermione.
“We need to go to the Ministry. It’s a trap, but… I need to go there. Please.” he said, grabbing his cloak. His two friends stood at the door of the dormitory. They knew something in Harry was not right. But they were loyal, and so they made their way to Umbridge’s office.
The Ministry was empty and cold. The long, dark alleyways invited them in, and Harry went willingly, tracing his steps to the door he kept dreaming about. He hated that door a lot, because if he was dreaming of it, he wasn’t dreaming of Tom. Scoffing, the boy-who-lived opened it, and kept going until he found himself in a big room filled to the brim with glass orbs. Prophecies.
Does he have a prophecy? Then why am I here? Hermione sent a Patronus to Dumbledore. Ron quietly grabbed his wand. But Harry just kept going, looking around, searching for his name. For Tom’s name.
When he found it, ten masked men apparated all around, and the sickenly-sweet voice of Lucius Malfoy invited him to grab it.
“Do you not want to know what it says? You just have to take it, and then give it to me.” he said. Hermione screamed “No!”, but it was too late. Harry, standing on his tiptoes, grabbed the orb.
“I will listen to it. And then I will give it to you.” he said. Under the mask it was impossible to tell what expression Malfoy Senior had, but no Death Eater tried to stop him, so it wasn’t that bad. Closing his eyes, Harry took the orb in both hands, and then he hissed: “Speak to me.”
A pale light spread from the prophecy, impalpable like a silver mist in the moonlight. Small particles of dust, suspended in the mist, made new and beautiful constellations, and the dark ceiling of the room became the cold of the universe. Harry floated, his hair and clothes dancing around him like he was submerged, and invisible hands kept him afloat. The screaming in his head became stronger and stronger, a multitude of voices amplified by their own echoes, until it was too much. Until they broke the surface, and pulled him under.
Harry felt water in his lungs, and the deep voice invaded his mind with the force of the cosmos.
Shame. It said. His scar burned . His blood boiled. He convulsed on the floor, still grabbing the orb. Shame , the voice continued, for thou no fate speaks anymore.
When he came back, the silence was heavy and encompassing. He just knew Ron and Hermione were alive. The Death Eaters were still as statues, and a dark robed man towered above him. Harry focused on him, discarding the pain that still burned in his blood. Red eyes looked back.
He wanted to scream, maybe he did. Tom was waiting, face firm and mouth inviting, his hands free and no trace of the yew wand - secured somewhere in his robes.
“Your pain called me” , parseltongue sounded so perfect coming from him, Harry felt tears coming to his eyes, and the burning sensation concentrated in his lower abdomen.
“There is no prophecy.” he answered, and then, slowly, he got up and showed him the orb. Once glimmering and full of light, it now was nothing but a dead husk, dark mist filled it, waves of a night sea, and no voice came from it.
“How?” Tom wasn’t mad. His tone curious, his eyebrows raised. Harry wanted nothing more than to stand again on his tiptoes, grabbing the collar of his robe, and lick his mouth with the flat of his tongue. Taste the sweat off of his skin like syrup, bite into him to feel his pulse and his tendons and his flesh. Wanted nothing more than to kneel under his robe and stay there for all eternity. He blinked.
“Because I cannot be the boy foretold.” he didn’t know where that came from, his mouth moved against his will. But he knew it was the truth. Voldemort, once again, asked:
“Why?”
In that moment, the whole Order of the Phoenix apparated into the Ministry, and curses and shields and jinxes and hexes started flying. The orbs all around fell to the ground, shattering in a deadly snow of glass. Voldemort raged, and Harry once again thought that anger was not menat to be on his face. He raised the yew wand, pale like his skin, and shouted avada kedavra again and again. Someone grabbed Harry, but he didn’t move. He watched Tom.
The fight moved. They ran, Tom flying, dark and cloaked in shadows. They fought and fought until they reached the atrium, where Dumbledore was waiting. Even the Death Eaters stopped to watch the two greatest wizards of their time duel eachother. Dumbledore cast, and Voldemort deflected with nothing more than a flick of his wrist.
Harry smiled to himself, and shouted: “ That was so hot, Tom!”
For a split second, Voldemort stilled, then erected another shield to deflect some curse sent his way.
“Stop distracting me!” he responded, but Harry felt exilarated. He wasn’t the boy from the chamber. He wasn’t scared, or alone, or dying. He wasn’t a diary, a fragment of himself.
Harry’s soul sang . The thread keeping him together was thrumming with power, and filled him with so much life.
“I wish you would stupefy me into bed if you know what i mean!”
Voldemort gave him a look, then kept fighting. Green and red and pure white shooted from his wand, while Dumbledore cast shield after shield and made the statues move. Tom sent a nasty spell that made the marble crumple, and Harry’s knees became weak.
“Oh yes Daddy!”
At that, Voldemort actually stilled and looked at him. Almost got hit with a stupid jelly-leg jinx Sirius cast, for he was way too distracted.
“Stop it!”
Harry grinned, and behind his back, he cast a protego to deflect the jinx.
“Voldemort, it is time you surrender!” Dumbledore tried then, advancing while calling to him the water from the fountain. But Voldemort did not hesitate. Silently, he pulled at the air, and all the windows and doors and glass broke - a huge cloud of deadly shards controlled only by his fingers danced over their heads. At that, Harry had to grab the wall to keep himself standing.
“You can wordlessly summon me anytime.”
Voldemort groaned. He groaned . No one seemed to notice their banter, or at least, maybe they thought Harry was trying to distract him. Which… he actually was, but for very, very wrong reasons. He was drunk on adrenaline, and it seemed that the soul piece inside him reflected the power of Voldemort, because Harry never felt so full . He tried to hold in a moan, slipping to the floor. He was not himself, not anymore. He was just an extension of him . Just an object, a tool. The thought didn’t need to be so bloody erotic.
The glass rained on Dumbledore, and the old wizard cast some invisible shield, transforming every piece in soft and flowy sand. If it wasn’t so deadly, it could’ve been beautiful. But Voldemort was stronger, in a young body, with young blood in his veins. With Harry so close to him, so tentalizing with his nervous power - and he grabbed it, taking it for himself, using it to crush Dumbledore.
“Kneel to me. Surrender now, Albus Dumbledore, surrender to my power. Kneel to me!” he shouted.
Harry, thankfully - he thought - was already on the floor because he wanted to faint.
“I’ll kneel to you Tom, i’ll kneel to you and suck-”
At that, Voldemort almost let his wand fall, turning his head to look at him so quickly he almost got himself whiplash.
“Potter!” in his east-London accent, his name was so much better, Harry decided. Everyone then looked at him, following the Dark Lord’s voice. Even the light-side. Voldemort then added, smirking in a way that should’ve been illegal. Probably was, since he was a dark lord and all that. “Stop it darling, you’re making me blush.”
In his mind, Harry replayed darling, darling, darling like a mantra.
“Vold-” Dumbledore finally broke from the spell and managed to get up on his feet, but Harry was quicker. Like all those years ago with Lupin, he didn’t let the headmaster finish his sentence. He was tired, he was high, he felt his body in pieces and wanted hands on him to put him back together. Wanted tongue and teeth and saliva and cum. He wanted to forget himself. The battle went on for too long.
“For fuck’s sake Tom, just take me with you!”
The Dark Lord lowered his wand, but he was far from defensless. Even when the light-side immediately started shouting spells, magic just frizzled against his shields, while Voldemort watched - his red eyes deep into the green of Harry’s.
“Well, since you asked so nicely.”
Then he clapped his hands, and a wave of darkness filled the space. Voices were drowned out, screams faded, nothing remained. Cold hands grabbed Harry by his hips, strong hands kept him against a firm body. A sweet, sweet voice murmured nonsense in his ears. Harry grabbed at the black robe, put his lips on the warm juncture between neck and shoulder, mouthed at the skin, hot and wet.
“Take me with you, my Lord.”
“If you so wish, Harry.”
When the darkness fell, Death Eaters and Order members alike found themselves standing in the atrium. Alone. The Dark Lord and Harry Potter disappeared, and no one knew what to do about it.
“Now what.” Sirius’ voice filled the silence.
“Honestly? I don’t even know.” Lucius responded.