Chapter Text
Harry Potter’s body remained in St. Mungo’s for several years following the dementor incident in Little Whinging. His cousin's heart had given out after a couple of hours without a soul, but Harry didn’t have that luck. He wasn’t quite dead, but he certainly wasn’t alive. All of the light operating his body was gone.
No one really knew where a soul went after a Dementor’s Kiss. There were theories, but those were based on the sort of dangerous, esoteric magic that got people killed. While the loss of such a major celebrity set off a surge of academic interest in soul magic (resulting in eleven cursed souls and one horcrux, among other things), there weren’t any risky attempts at bringing him back.
Harry’s body remained in a nice, soft chair by a big window in his own private room, courtesy of the Minister of Magic himself. Meanwhile, his soul was going through the long, torturous process of being digested by a dementor. That was the assumption, at least.
The reality was that dementors couldn’t digest souls with bits of horcrux in them. The one that caught Harry tried very hard anyway. It masticated Harry's sense of humanity and made him face the crushing, all-encompassing, cold indifference of the universe and all the horrors filling its darkest corners. At least until the dementor choked on a sharp edge and spit him out, but it took several years for that to happen.
Meanwhile, Voldemort retrieved the prophecy. He wondered about the meaning of living while the empty husk of his enemy survived, but decided against any rash decisions. Allowing the boy to languish in government-sponsored luxury served his purposes well enough.
He ran Dumbledore out of Hogwarts with hardly a fight; the old man was too useless and cowardly to do anything but run. The school and the Ministry fell easily, allowing Voldemort to set his sights on world domination.
There was no rush. It was better to ensure all of Britain bowed to him first. The Order of the Phoenix still tried to lash out from time to time, although Voldemort knew there was talk about giving up for good, due to his Inferi army. His military grew with each fallen enemy.
Ruling the British magical community could be as time consuming or simple as he pleased. He inserted his most trusted followers into key roles, so he was able to leave and indulge in simple pleasures, such as accompanying teams of Death Eaters to recruit corpses for his army. He was doing that very thing when a report came in from the Forbidden Forest.
A large black eagle landed on an awning overhead, a shining silver vial tied to its leg. Voldemort uncapped the vial and breathed in the mist it contained, and a brief message played out before his eyes.
Headmaster Barty Crouch Jr stood in front of a lower Death Eater, who provided the memory Voldemort was now watching. Barty stated the Forbidden Forest seemed to be under attack. His eyes were wide, darting back and forth with frantic concern as he described a mysterious scourge sweeping through the forest, killing everything in its wake. Thankfully, the scourge had stopped at the perimeter of the wards wrapped around Hogwarts.
Voldemort waved his hand in front of himself, fanning away the memory. Hogwarts was a key element to his dominion over Britain. If someone sought to oppose him, they might begin there. Obviously, his wards were too strong to penetrate, but this was a threat. A ring of death around his well-maintained grounds didn’t speak well for the totality of his power.
And so he detached his vision from his body and crossed a great distance in an instant, looking over the woods, but that didn’t tell him much. All he could see was a wide swath of trees had died without obvious cause, and the blight was spreading, slowly wrapping around the perimeter of his wards. What should have been a deep and verdant overgrowth in the height of summer had turned withered and black.
Voldemort skimmed his consciousness along the living trees on the warded side. And then, close to where a cluster of professors were examining the blight, a bolt of energy cracked behind his eyes. Startled, he pulled his focus back into his body.
The dark alley he’d stepped into while his Death Eaters worked was empty, but he didn’t feel alone. Something was off. There was a peculiar tugging somewhere in his chest, like a butterfly thrashing against a spiderweb, a sputtering candle flame. He could feel it under his skin and creeping along the magic in his veins.
“Who goes there?” he hissed out loud, and, shockingly, felt the struggle of a weaker will attempting to overtake his own. The invader actually believed it could seize his body. If a greater offense was possible, Voldemort was too distracted to imagine it.
Considering the way it flailed around in his mind like a cornered animal, it was obvious the invader knew nothing of Legilimency. Voldemort changed his mindscape to a prison of pure black void, a replication of being lost in space, drifting aimlessly forever between the stars. The emptiness was so complete it would drive anyone to madness if they didn’t retreat immediately.
He felt the invader’s resulting shudder, the way it stopped moving completely to turn cold, and still, and abruptly disconcerting. There was no attempt at leaving, which would have driven it into the many traps Voldemort had prepared decades in advance. It only floated there as if perfectly at ease.
‘Finally,’ Voldemort thought, in a private corner of his mind, ‘something interesting.’
He’d been waiting for a challenge. What he really hoped for was a competent magician, ready to learn from him or become a worthwhile rival. It had been several years since the Ministry folded to his reign, and while there were still pockets of rebels to deal with, not one person he met so far could compare to his strength. It was terribly uninspiring.
This intruder could rip the life right out of the sprawling entity known as the Forbidden Forest, down to each root and vine and claw. The fact that it was unfamiliar with the mental arts meant it wasn’t human; any well-trained witch or wizard would have a rudimentary ability.
The most likely explanation was that it came from the plane where the dead and other such things existed. It could be some malignant tangle of astral waste, or even a lesser demon with capacity for thought and communication. He hoped it was the latter—he could think of several potions that called for a demon heart. The death energy radiating off its consciousness was overpowering, which was further evidence that it couldn’t be a human. Voldemort would have been aware of any upstart necromancers close to Britain.
And it had begun to move. It spread through Voldemort's mind—black and malignant and fascinating. Eventually, he trapped it between his hands, like a school of minnows slipping through dark water.
And he was met with the brightest, most blinding light.
Harry thought it was all over when the dementor sucked the soul right out of his body, but he had a lot of interesting revelations since then.
The Kiss had been terrible, of course, marking the culmination of all his failures. He couldn’t save Dudley, just like he couldn’t save Cedric a few weeks earlier. He tried to fire off a Patronus when the dementors attacked, but he dropped his wand, and no matter how hard he shouted the incantation, the spell just wouldn’t work.
His soul was freezing and sharp on the way out, and it cut his throat, his sinuses, and it burned through his nose and tear ducts and out his mouth, rushing into the dementor like an ice storm. Harry failed to stop it, just like he failed to stop Voldemort from resurrecting, and everything was hopeless and continued to be hopeless for the rest of eternity.
That was how it was supposed to go, anyway. As it turned out, something about his soul just didn’t work with dementors. It ate him up, tearing the life out of his body and into something transitory and horrible (Hell, it was Hell, the churning pit of captured souls inside that monster was the closest thing to perdition that Harry could fathom), but it couldn’t digest him.
After a while it finally managed to spit him out, and Harry was flung someplace between life and death.
He recognized his surroundings. The dementor had been locked into a torture of its own as it dealt with Harry, not that he knew that. Harry’s soul-plus-a-soul had trapped the creature in place, like a blackish smear, a permanent shadow hovering somewhere over Little Whinging. It was freed the moment Harry ejected out into the world, and it fled, leaving him alone in a big, empty field.
It took him a while to get his bearings. All he could perceive was that it was Earth, but it was faint. He couldn’t see or hear or feel, since he didn’t have a body, but he could detect his own plain sentience as well as all the life in the space around him. Some places had more, and he eventually realized that the big stretch of faintly glowing fog was ‘down’. Each individual blade of grass appeared distinct and shining, if he paid attention. Fascinated, he drifted closer, and wondered if he was a ghost.
Maybe another ghost could tell him. The only ones he knew about were at Hogwarts, and this field was so far from the castle, giving the flat and gray-ish impression of the area outside Little Whinging. It was the place where his soul had been taken from his body and burrowed into with cold, impossibly terrible fingers again and again, until he was nothing but fear and despair and—
Something very bright and very fast collided with him, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air. There was a tremendous push as he was jarred into motion, as something else was shoved out and left behind with tremendous force. He screamed, and the sound came out sharp and grating.
He was inside a bird. It had intersected with him in mid-air. Flailing, he only managed to catch the wind on pure bodily instinct, and then he was flying.
Flight came easily to a bird, no matter whose spark kept its life alight. He soared over something familiar—it was home, it really was, the laws of magic had dictated that place as his home, he knew that, but he also knew he wasn’t the same person who once lived there with his horrible relatives. Not anymore. Now he was a bird, and he didn’t have to think about what terrible thing happened to him to make that change. He was free and flying, and he’d fly all the way to Hogwarts if this body let him.
It didn’t. He overexerted himself and ended up dead in a field after a few days of constant flight. Back in his original, bodiless self, he lingered near the bird’s corpse until he latched onto the fox that came to eat it.
This wasn’t an ideal way to travel to Scotland, but it could be worse. Animals couldn’t move nearly as far in a day as the Hogwarts Express, but the fox was better suited for the trip than anything else Harry encountered. Bounding through the wilderness day after day was incredible, especially with the ears and nose of a fox.
He quickly came to understand that life was a cycle, and death an inevitability. An inevitability that happened to taste very good. A rabbit could feed him for days, and the thrill of stalking and taking down a bird or, once, a wounded fawn, was better than anything from his previous life. All he needed was speed and daring, and he had enough of that to spare. He could strike, and take, and he could enjoy the feeling of the sun on his long, slender legs, and how the stars would sing to him in a way they never once spoke to a human.
The most fascinating dreams greeted him every night. Memories from before the incident—which he did not think about. He dreamed of Hogwarts and Quidditch and a strangely familiar man in thick, hooded robes, who sat on an immense throne made of shadow and bone, who never quite turned to look at him. The man's magic was just like Harry’s, and it represented safety and an undeniable sense of home for some reason Harry couldn’t quite explain. He supposed that had to be someone from his past, someone who had once been very important to him.
And so Harry had two goals: he’d make it to Hogwarts and talk to the ghosts, because—and he struggled to remember this fact the more time went by—they might be able to explain what happened to him. And then he’d find the man on the throne. Something deep down told him that would solve everything.
The fox died a short way inside the Forbidden Forest. Harry walked right into an Acromantula trap and was ripped out of his body as a horrifying amount of spiders rushed him. His untethered soul flew into one, taking over its body entirely by accident. Terrified and dizzy with grief, he fought to control eight different limbs and scuttled away.
The forest was not kind to outsiders. He tried to cross a river and was immediately swept away, unable to gain footing with such unwieldy legs. It carried him for hours, until he was snatched up by some massive, terrifying eagle, which slaughtered him, ripping his soul into its body. Counting on what little experience he’d gained from his brief time as a bird, he flew to the treetops to try and catch his bearings.
This was exhausting. It seemed that changing bodies took a lot out of him, and each death was so painful. But Hogwarts was visible on the horizon over the long stretch of trees, so he let his new body fall asleep up there, if only to let his soul recover before the final stretch.
He woke up on the ground, once again untethered in the muted gray between the living and dead. The eagle was really massive, he thought, bobbing helplessly in the forest air. The body probably starved to death while he tried to regain some energy, but whatever he’d gotten back was long gone, and he wasn’t sure how he’d move unless a strong wind or another animal came by.
It took a while, but he eventually floated into a tree and thought he might as well see what that kind of body was like, and he quickly realized the root system would take him all the way to the castle. It was as fast as driving, and if he had legs he would have kicked himself for not thinking of this sooner.
He didn’t realize he cut a trail of death through the forest as he traveled, because he had no reason to look back. Trees withered in his wake, scorching a path of rotting trunks and dead roots up until he smashed into the Hogwarts wards, which refused to let him any closer to the castle.
He supposed he should have expected some kind of protection. For the first time in ages, he wondered what was actually going on in the world. Everyone was probably in a panic over how dementors could just go around and suck the souls out of people, all while a resurrected Dark Lord ran rampant.
That… that was what he’d left behind, right? It seemed so separate, like he’d borrowed the memories from a previous life.
There was a group of people there at the edge of the wards for some reason, patrolling the boundary and acting like they were waiting for something. Harry couldn’t actually see while he possessed the trees, but he could feel them. Over a dozen human-shaped lives stood out in stark comparison to the forest, which was so alive on one side and so…
Why did everything behind him feel so quiet?
He needed a better look. Jumping from the root system he’d been using like a highway, he attached himself to a person leaning against a yew tree, because he had no idea he always killed his hosts.
It felt so good to be in a human body again. The limbs were all familiar, the muscles responsive and strong. His magic shifted into a comfortable shape, and he could even feel a wand strapped in an arm holster. Feeling at ease for the first time since he’d left the fox, he skimmed his awareness across the shared nervous system. There was some resistance when he nudged into the mind, but that went away with a pop.
And… there was something about this body that reminded him of the man in his dreams. Something about the magic embedded in the left arm. Curious, Harry focused on it.
And he was met with the brightest, most blinding light.
Hello?
Voldemort blinked hard, rising to his feet when he realized he’d fallen on the floor. He picked up his wand, ignoring the little voice piping through the forefront of his mind like a song stuck in his head (Hello? What’s going on? Can you hear me?) and considered several important things:
This entity had killed half the Forbidden Forest and breached Hogwarts’ wards. It had gotten past his Occlumency shields. And its presence felt so remarkably familiar, like they knew each other.
All of these things were impossible. Intriguing, and impossible.
Also, it seemed to be speaking English, which was unheard of when dealing with wild spirits. Its voice was growing increasingly shrill, echoing through Voldemort’s carefully-organized mind palace. He’d taken decades to build the place with advanced Occlumency, creating a fully three-dimensional structure in which he could move about and organize his thoughts, all to conduct grand works of magic with only the limitations of his imagination. And now this thing was fouling the place with its unseen presence.
“Tell me, intruder, did you truly expect to overcome the will of a Dark Lord?”
Shockingly, the creature responded by attempting to wrest control of Voldemort’s body again. His limbs very nearly twitched from the effort, but he remained immovable.
“Must I continue to wait until you’ve fully exhausted yourself?”
The being showed itself then, standing in the grand, all-white room where Voldemort stored his surface-level thoughts. It appeared as a rough sketch of a human, made of eerie green light, its magic following the inherent shape of its soul.
It seemed a necromancer had slipped past Voldemort’s notice. He supposed that was not entirely outside the realm of possibility. This one didn’t look terribly impressive, though they certainly felt like a necromancer. They were cold, and far too still, and looking directly at them flared old and sinister discomforts. Being in close proximity to death never sat well with Voldemort, though he tolerated it unflinchingly, and had studied the art for himself.
The stranger looked helpless. Voldemort supposed he shouldn’t discount what they had done to the Forbidden Forest, regardless of their current pathetic state. According to the reports, nearly half the trees had died within the past few hours. They didn't look very powerful, but Voldemort had a reason to keep them alive for now. He could use a necromancer to continue adding to the Inferi army while he tended to other things.
“You’re not… ah, I don’t… Do I know you?” the necromancer said, taking a few steps backward.
How curious. Voldemort tilted his head to the side, wondering. “What is your name?”
The necromancer flinched. Instead of answering, they then rolled onto their hands and knees and, surprisingly, turned into a fox and ran away. Voldemort let them go. He’d find them later.
He returned to his day. Opening his eyes, he inspected the muggle alley. The four Death Eaters had returned—three volunteers of unremarkable rank and Rodolphus, who enjoyed gathering bodies for the Inferi army as much as Voldemort did. It really wasn’t necessary for Voldemort to oversee these outings, but the simple fact of the matter was that he enjoyed the work. He liked to see the muggles firsthand, to ensure their bodies were fit for a role so much higher than their birthright.
The Death Eaters had stacked three paralyzed bodies close to Voldemort, the gentle rippling of a Notice-Me-Not deflecting any undue attention from the crowded muggle street close by. Voldemort approached the pile, his sudden motion making his followers jump.
Magic kept Voldemort’s bare feet impervious to the blood and dirt on the ground. He looked at the bodies for a moment, noting that they all seemed to be intact, when he felt a peculiar tickling behind his eyes.
“Three.” Voldemort didn’t bother looking at Rodolphus when he addressed him. “Did the rest of the vermin evade you, or were you being particularly selective today?”
“My Lord, I—”
“Go.”
The Death Eaters hurried off to find more, and Voldemort spoke aloud. “Do you see anything interesting?”
The necromancer’s alarm shot down his spine, annoyingly affecting his own body. It was followed by a resounding silence.
“Did you kill him on purpose?” Voldemort then prompted, impatient.
The silence turned into a frantic buzzing. “Kill?”
Speaking to this person verbally was quite like dealing with Quirrell so many years ago. The intruder’s voice hummed somewhere in the back of Voldemort’s throat, like it was instinctively trying to speak with his vocal chords. Of course, he did not permit that, and shoved the consciousness into the back of his skull where it could whisper through his thoughts. Experience had shown him this was the simplest method of communication.
Once the intruder was properly positioned, Voldemort answered. “You invaded the body of one of my people in the Forbidden Forest. Surely you recall tearing out his life as you departed.”
Harry knew panicking wouldn’t help. Deep down, he knew he pushed the souls right out of those animals when he controlled them. He’d known it and didn't want to. That kinship he’d formed with the fox, falling asleep together under the starry night sky, running through fields of heather, it was just a lie he’d invented to keep himself focused.
Exactly how many trees had he cut through? How far did those roots extend? So many animals had lost their habitats, too. He’d killed so much and it’d been so easy. Not to mention the person he’d inhabited for mere seconds, and that popping sensation when he shoved them out.
At least he was sharing a body with someone who wouldn’t let him do that again, but this person didn’t seem particularly great, either. Harry was pretty sure he saw a pile of bodies on the ground in that brief moment he managed to use their eyes. And as much as he avoided looking, there were a lot of frightening things filling this person’s mind.
Their mind was unlike anything he’d ever imagined. Itwas structured like an actual building, kind of similar to Hogwarts except everything was very wide and white and empty. Sterile. He had no doubt there’d be no hiding from this person, not in such a carefully-organized place. It was actually very impressive, and something about it made Harry feel… safe. Like he found a place where he could finally rest, as long as he didn’t look behind most of the doors.
It was because he had no doubt this was the person he dreamed about. This figure looked just like him, all tall and draped in thick black fabric, but he seemed odd, a bit tense, like he hadn’t been expecting Harry (this whole time Harry had been operating under the assumption he was being called, so that was a disappointment). At least the man seemed like he’d understand what Harry had experienced. This was someone who would listen.
“Am I dead?” Harry had been wondering for a while, and finally had someone to ask.
The man shifted somewhat. It was hard to tell where exactly he was looking, thanks to the engulfing hood and robes. “We should speak elsewhere.”
Just like that, Harry was nudged out of the room and found himself looking through the man’s eyes. There was a split-second view of what looked like a city street before the man apparated away, bringing them into a big cave. Water surrounded the small, rocky island where they stood. Due to the sheer gravity of the place, Harry got the impression the water was very, very deep.
And there was something else. Something… moaning. Harry couldn’t quite see where it was coming from.
“Hi, can you hear me?” Harry asked, his voice resounding nonverbally against the man’s mind, who hummed in greeting. “Who are you?”
“I expect you have a great deal of questions. You’ve been gone for such a long time.”
Harry paused, waiting for more since that hadn’t been much of an answer. He scanned the peripherals of their shared eyes. The cave was dark, and the air felt damp and cold. He couldn’t see much, but he had the feeling there was something moving behind them. “Where are we?”
“A sanctum, of sorts.”
He turned around, and Harry realized they were practically face-to-face with a zombie.
Once, what felt like a million years ago, Dudley had thrown a fit when some horror movie had come out, insisting his parents buy him a copy on video tape, even if Aunt Petunia insisted it would only give her precious Duddykins nightmares. Still, she relented, and Harry watched the movie from the top of the stairs while Dudley hid his face behind his hands and Piers laughed as the actors were torn apart.
(And then Dudley had been killed by something so much worse.)
This creature looked exactly like one of those monsters, all rotten and hungry, and the man faced it unflinchingly.
“...Sanctum?” Harry repeated.
“Yes. A hidden place, where I may study the necromantic arts without interruption. I expect your apprenticeship was held somewhere similar.”
“Um.”
“A catacomb, perhaps? Or a sewer, if your master was particularly lacking in taste.”
Harry wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about. Apprenticeship? Master? He didn’t… He remembered his journey, running through the wilderness as a fox. He remembered the dementor. He remembered a school, and friends, and suffering at the hands of his family. But there was someone, wasn’t there? Some influential and awful man with a great deal of power. Maybe that had been his master.
“He truly doesn’t know. How curious,” the man murmured. He paced away from the zombie, looking out over the murky water. “Then I will help you remember.”
With that, Harry’s mind was pulled apart, like the man drove his fingers into Harry and separated him like a pomegranate, all the memories popping out in tart little seeds. Harry could have sworn he saw the man pick up each seed and squeeze them, blood red juices running down slim, pale hands. And then eyes as bright as those seeds met Harry’s, dancing with a sort of mad brilliance.
“Well then. Isn’t this quite the surprise?”
There was a new tension strung through the man’s whole body, even though he spoke with such a mild tone. Harry could tell by the angle of his shoulders, the tightness of his jaw. He could also guess the man really didn’t want him to notice how uncomfortable he was. Which was funny, seeing as how Harry was the one who should have felt uncomfortable. His mind had just been pulled into pieces while a zombie watched, after all.
“So, I take it we know each other," Harry said.
“Yes,” the man replied promptly. “We do. You previously thought of me as your enemy.”
Harry waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “Okay, and what did you think of me?”
“Nothing. A mere child is not worth my attention.”
Something about that felt like a lie. “Right. Okay, so I’m sure my name is Harry, but I think if you were my enemy, I’d remember your name, too.”
“I am Lord Voldemort,” he answered, as if it were some grand proclamation.
It did ring a bell. It made something inside Harry shudder, but that wasn’t much worse than how he felt when he focused on the zombie. The tension stringing through Voldemort’s shoulders tightened even more. He almost seemed offended that Harry wasn’t freaking out.
“I offered an alliance with you, once. When you were very young,” Voldemort continued. "Much too young to understand what I could give you."
“Oh.”
This was really uncomfortable. They were getting dangerously close to making Harry think about the dementor, which he avoided at all cost. He locked his attention on the zombie instead, and the longer he looked, the more he got sucked into the knowledge that this was a dead thing taking up a shape, and… well, he’d seen death before. Plenty of times. He’d seen his own dead mother and father circling around Voldemort and encouraging Harry to fight.
“Right, and that alliance offer was after you killed my parents.”
“Yes,” Voldemort replied without hesitating. “I killed the Potters. And I intended to kill you as well. I will not pretend otherwise."
There were a few other zombies close by. Harry hadn’t noticed them at first, but their presence was undeniable, lurking just beneath the water. He could feel them, sort of like a smell. The air tasted thick and rotten on Voldemort’s tongue, but even beyond that, Harry could sense the death around them. It was everywhere. They were deep underground, in a place for the dead, standing in the center of this deep water like Chiron stepping out of the ferry. This entire planet was filled with death because that was just… it was just nature.
Wasn’t it kind of beautiful, in a way, that these bodies could take shape again, even after their life had fled?
Voldemort was talking again, but Harry couldn't pay attention to that. He found it quite hard to pull his attention away from the blank nothing filling the rotten holes that once held eyes. The longer he looked, he almost thought he could see the animating force keeping one upright. He wanted to get a better look at it, and then—
Voldemort staggered to the side, almost slipping off the side of the rocky island into the water. He caught his balance at the last second, which Harry got to observe from a new vantage point.
“Are you alright?” Harry asked, concerned, because he kept killing things when he left their bodies. Unfortunately, his new mouth couldn’t quite form words without a tongue, and the question came out in a garbled wail.
Voldemort's eyes locked on Harry’s new body, and a look of—what was that? Revulsion? Some expression crossed his flat, pale face, which had been exposed when he fell and lost his hood. He looked like a monster, all serpentine and frail, with skin like tissue paper stretched over bloodless flesh, and yet, there was a terrifying kind of grace to him. He wasn’t at all what Harry imagined.
“That is a much better place for you,” Voldemort declared after a moment. “Where did you learn to do this?”
Harry wanted to answer that it was easy, that he’d done it by accident, but the wavering noise forcing its way out of such a dry mouth didn’t convey much. The whole body felt so drawn-out, so strained. It kind of hurt if he let himself settle into the bones and muscle, so he hovered there, half in and half out, like a flickering candle.
Worst of all, Voldemort was looking at him with a peculiar expression that didn’t look entirely friendly.