Chapter Text
Grief lingered through Number Thirteen Grimmauld Place's halls like the thick layers of dust upon the windowsills. Harry ran a finger across one, gathering grey upon the tip of his finger and grimacing.
This place was impossible to clean, even with Mrs Weasley leading the charge. And now, without anyone living here but him, it was so easy to leave it alone and let it fall further into disarray. Hermione said the state of the house was a reflection of his mind. Ron said the house was so full of dark magic that it just didn't like Harry.
Harry didn't care about either of their opinions of the place – the ease with which he fell back into a dreary life wherein he wasn't a slave anymore, but still unwanted and burdensome was somehow comforting. Familiar, in some kind of sick way.
After Voldemort's defeat, he wasn't needed anymore, not really. Reclusiveness suited him in a way, especially when it meant he didn't have to return to Hogwarts and help with the reconstruction, discuss his life story with reporters, or stand by Kingsley's side during political reform. It was sickeningly selfish, but it was easier to give in to that part of him that didn't want to be out there – fighting the next battle, taking up the hero mantle he never wanted.
But there was another part of him, one that made him bite his knuckles until they bled, scratching at his chest and his hands, digging crescents into his cheeks as his body curled up, unbidden, and his breath came in rapid, hare-like bursts until black spots filled his vision. And that was the most powerful part, the part that steered him away from Hogwarts, from the Ministry, from even passing the front door of Grimmauld.
And he hated it, hated how fragile and weak it made him, to feel an instinctive need to grab his wand, to clutch at his robe sleeves so fiercely they wrinkled because he couldn't trust anything but himself, outside was unsafe, he was going to die–
Children played outside, kicking a can like a football, and Harry realised, not for the first time, that he'd never had an experience like that. When he was that young, a primary schooler, round-faced and with impossible hair plastered down with Aunt Petunia's latest remedy, he spent his free time running from Dudley and his friends, or doing chores.
The window panes were dirty, covered in grey dirt that never seemed to come off no matter how much he'd scrubbed. He breathed hot air onto the window now, used his sleeve to rub it off, but it made no difference. The whole scene felt like a flashback in a film, breakable, separate from him in a way that felt so fundamental. Was Harry broken, lacking, because he'd never had such an innocent experience?
The window seat chilled his legs to the bone, a wash of cold flooding the room.
Maybe he was. Maybe the Dursleys had truly messed him up. With them out of his life, with his forgiveness as they parted, Harry thought he'd be fixed, that he wouldn't still carry their treatment across his mind and body. But it hadn't gone away, it hadn't erased its mark as if it was never there and instead scarred him as prominently as his forehead.
Harry inhaled long and slow, felt his ribs stretch under the strain and wondered why he thought such when everyone else wore their childhood upon their actions. Harry had even forgiven Draco and his family, terrible as they were, but that didn't mean Draco didn't call him, Hermione and Ron horrible things as a child, things he'd been taught by his parents.
Why would Harry be an exception to this, when he was as human as the rest of them? Why couldn't he place himself on the same level as everyone else in his life? What made him different?
He stared at his hands, at the deep pink lines across his palms, and traced them with his eyes. They told him nothing.
When he slept, dreams came in floods and left everything covered in debris. Remnants of the past flittered through his mind like thousands of brutal, beastly butterflies. Green featured prominently.
Harry wished he was younger, still had the ability to forget his dreams within moments of waking. Instead, they clung to his mind like hundreds of grasping inferi. Some of them more than others.
Voldemort was alive during the night, immortalised through Harry.
If only he would stay dead.
But Voldemort wasn't a merciful Lord, as he liked to tout to his disobedient followers – but he was a Lord all the same, ruling Harry's nightmares from upon a throne and Harry was but a helpless soul on a leash, unable to escape those talons as they wrapped around his throat and carved into his forehead.
It wasn't normal, he thought, clawing at his sheets and gasping for air like a fish out of water. It wasn't normal to dream of your mortal enemy so frequently, so vividly.
His room was still dark, still covered in those muggle pin-ups and still full of who Sirius used to be. Harry hadn't changed it much, if at all, since he'd moved in permanently. It felt too much like desecration, like he was besmirching Sirius' memory. This was, after all, the closest Harry could get to a grave for him.
Once he caught his bearings, he eased back down again, about to close his eyes and try to fall back to sleep, but there was something off, something that made the back of his neck erupt into prickles and his palms sweat. He reached for his wand, but panic was seizing his throat, freezing him in place. A tall, dark shadow loomed over him, unnaturally long fingers diving for Harry's wrists and pinning them in place – his wand just out of reach.
He cursed, tugging wildly at the captor, but those hands were deceptively strong, holding firm no matter how much he struggled.
"Let me go," Harry bit out, but the creature above didn't listen. If Harry weren't so blind, perhaps he could figure out what was attacking him, but the man's head was a pale blur, nothing more than a featureless face upon black.
If he could manoeuvre right, he could manage to get his wand– but it was like his attacker knew his every thought because his wand was halfway across the room before he knew it, clattering uselessly onto the floor. The man hadn't even moved a finger.
"The Veil–" the creature spoke, and his body contorted forward, folding like a piece of paper, and in one hollow moment, Harry imagined he could hear bones grinding together, slow and graunching like millstones. His stomach roiled, adrenaline hitting hard enough after so long that he was dizzy from it. "It calls us–"
Harry froze, cold washing over him. The voice was painfully familiar, one that haunted Harry through his nights like a curse, dogging at his feet and commanding the attention only he could give. He couldn't push the name past the lump in his constricting throat, couldn't do more than clench his fists and grit his teeth.
"Harry Potter." The way his name fell out of Voldemort's mouth – because who else could it be, what else could it be but another nightmare? – steeped in familiarity, one small island in an ocean of uncertainty, ran down Harry's spine like a million tiny spiders. "The Veil calls you."
He closed his eyes but the grip around his wrists didn't ease, those hissing breaths didn't leave his ear, didn't fail to rustle his hair so slightly that it tickled, itched.
"Don't try and hide from me," Voldemort said, digging the sharp point of his nails in, stabbing pin-pricks into Harry's skin. "I am still here. I am still inside you."
But his voice was fading. He was–
Harry gasped, breathing stale air into his lungs as he'd never breathed before. He rolled onto his back, loss and hatred and self-loathing crawling over his skin like a fetid disease.
Voldemort was dead. Voldemort was dead from his very hand, killed by his own magic, his own curse. Harry still carried it on himself, bore Voldemort's murder across his shoulders like Atlas carried the world – though perhaps that was lending too much importance upon himself. This was his cross to bear, and his friends helped make that possible. Better him than them. Sometimes, when Harry was feeling particularly selfish, he wondered what his life would be like if Neville had instead been chosen by Voldemort, had instead bore the scar on his forehead and the monikers bestowed upon him.
Harry didn't like to think of how his stomach turned, not out of guilt but jealousy, didn't like to think about how he ached impossibly, beyond his bones and through his heart, how incomplete he felt when he dared breach all those complicated feelings about Voldemort the person instead of Voldemort the villain.
Whenever he dreamed of Voldemort, they were often repetitions of past events – of high laughter and green and wicked fangs and translucent skin. Rarely did they verge from the mould, and even rarer were they based upon nothing.
In fact, Harry wasn't certain he had dreams as such at all. Always, Voldemort followed a structure despite his unhinged lack of structure in his real life. He was archetypical.
And Harry was ashamed to admit it, but he found it hard to adjust to this change. He had grown used to a routine, waking up to the same thing every day, to falling asleep to the same thing every night.
Perhaps he should've expected this – Voldemort was predictably unpredictable, and this should've been engrained in Harry's knowledge, in his handling of the memory of Voldemort. His mind would choose to switch things up when he was getting comfortable, like a cat playing with its food.
His wand wasn't under the pillow. It was easy enough to summon it to his hand, but the way his heart unfroze the moment he held it proved just how shaken he'd been. Harry sighed, grimacing when it came out stuttered, and rolled out of bed.
Harry wouldn't be sleeping again for the rest of the night.
His day passed in an unfamiliar haze, full of anxiety he hadn't felt for years. Uncertainty lingered in each cup of tea, in his stale sandwich for lunch and a slice of cake with faded icing for dinner. He hadn't left the house for food in weeks, and each day it was getting harder and harder to tell himself that he could wait a little longer.
The library was unused, the doors squeaking violently on their hinges as he pushed forward. The room was a treasure trove of information, all of which felt overwhelming and exhausting. Despite the way his muscles ached, fatigue lining his bones in lead, he stopped at the first shelf and skimmed titles. These bookshelves were ridiculous – floor to ceiling, ornate and wood so dark it was black. Each snake carving, of which there were many, had eyes inset with emeralds and scales so fine they were invisible until Harry peered closely at them. And the dust. Gods, the dust was horrendous; it seemed with each step he kicked up another cloud, and with each title he had to clean off a thick layer of dust with his sleeve before it was legible.
There was no rhyme or reason to the order of books on the shelves – authors beginning with Z were next to those with G, and books about potions sat beside ones about blood sacrifice. Harry could spend days in these aisles, skimming book titles and hoping any stood out.
His first day walking through the library was resoundingly unsuccessful. Nothing talked of souls, of soul bonds. The Veil was equally elusive, and though he found one titled Through the Veil, it turned out to be nothing more than a book on ritualistic cannibalism as a marriage ceremony.
With his appetite more miserable than usual, he went to bed without dinner. Not that there was much left to eat anyway.
Voldemort didn't show up.
Not the first night or the second.
But by the third, Harry knew his good fortune had come to an end. He woke, lungs frozen in his chest, heart racing. And the way Voldemort's hand curved around his jaw, fingernails biting into the skin of his cheek in comparison to the gentleness of his palm against Harry's throat made his stomach sink, his shoulders tense. Voldemort's touch felt like a promise.
"What you seek isn't titled so simply," Voldemort spoke like a dementor, frigid, rasping, high. And the way the warmth leeched from Harry's bones the longer he sat, collapsing Harry's chest under his weight was reminiscent too.
Harry's eyelids weighed heavily and he couldn't bring himself to open them, didn't have the sheer willpower required. His clammy palms reached for the hand around his throat, but they did nothing – Voldemort was powerful even in death. His hold on Harry was ceaseless.
Voldemort hissed, lowered himself further onto Harry's chest. His ribs protested profusely, bowing under pressure, stabbed with the sharp points of Voldemort's own. "Our souls are intertwined; without me you are nothing."
His mouth hovered just above Harry's, and he couldn't even recoil before Voldemort disappeared, taking a stench of rot and decay with him. Harry shot up, gasping, collapsing back down again.
Everything was related to the soul, to their souls, always.
Despite spending a week straight in the library, he simply couldn't find a book with the information he needed. Harry searched through each book he found, but none offered more than the slightest hints towards the soul.
"I could provide it," Voldemort's voice whispered, a hallucination certainly, but one Harry still froze at. His words eased into Harry's brain like a breeze, layering itself across his mind like honey.
Voldemort was knowledgeable, but he wouldn't offer this to Harry so readily. Not when Harry could gain the ability to sever his tether to the mortal plain. He was weak, dependent. But Voldemort would never allow himself to be exploited.
Hermione was an option. She came to mind the way one remembered a long-forgotten holiday, or an old, kindly neighbour. Harry hadn't thought of her in months. Guilt crashed over him like a wave, like a sharp gust of wind. But they didn't deserve to have his nightmarish hallucinations bearing down on their shoulders as they did his own. They were happy together, preparing to have a child last he'd heard, and he was… left behind. Stuck in his own fog without a way out.
But it was better this way. He would find a way to deal with Voldemort himself because it was the only way he could.
"You hold me here, Harry Potter," Voldemort said, rot thickening his breath. His bones cracked like they broke, like sticks underfoot as he resettled himself, and the very air seemed to bleed fatigue as Harry suffered under Voldemort's weight across his diaphragm, those long, impossibly sharp fingers digging pinprick nails into his neck. he would be bruised later, but it was hard to think about that when everything blurred his mind with panic and fear.
Harry's tongue lay thick and swollen in his mouth, bloodied where he bit it just as he'd begun to wake. He wanted to say something, but anything he tried to speak was garbled, jibberish. He felt like a child.
Despite knowing Voldemort as intimately as he knew himself, he would always have the aspect of a boogeyman, a monster under the bed, one of those horror characters Dudley had been so briefly fascinated by until they had been banned by Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon. And it was this aspect that fell so heavily on Harry these horrible, frozen mornings. He was paralysed, defenceless, and Voldemort had all the power. There was no way to escape Voldemort, no way to talk his way out of the situation, to pull up his wand and protect himself. There was just Voldemort, his words and his body, and Harry's weakness.
"Every breath you take," Voldemort whispered, and his lips almost grazed Harry's, bloody eyes dilating, "Every beat of your heart– They sustain me; you sustain me."
Harry's skin crawled with something unseen, like thousands of invisible bugs, and Voldemort finally let go of his neck, let him breathe for a blessed few seconds.
Voldemort wouldn't kill him. Certainty boiled in Harry's gut like a geyser, abrupt and sudden, and his skin tingled in relief.
"You're quite slow, aren't you?" Voldemort bared his teeth, and they too were bloody, like his gums were bleeding, and fingers opened Harry's mouth gently, prying his lips apart until his jaw loosened enough to let them in. Voldemort ran his tongue across his teeth, spitting into Harry's mouth without hesitation. He wanted to gag, to spit it out, but he couldn't move enough to do so. It was slimy, metallic, disgusting. Harry wished he could grimace.
"Taste me," Voldemort said, pushing Harry's chin up until his teeth clicked. His slitted pupils were circular now, blown as they tracked Harry's lips and hardness pressed against Harry's stomach. He shuddered internally. "Taste my reality."
Voldemort's saliva stuck with him throughout the day, the sliminess, the metal and mould sinking into his gums and tainting his sensitive skin with rot and disease. Everything he tried to eat tasted worse than it really was and he couldn't stomach more than a few bites.
Hermione came to mind again – Ron too – and with Voldemort growing bolder, their company was looking awfully tempting. Even talking over a pot of tea was more appealing than staring at these gloomy, cobwebbed walls and haunted halls. The longer the day went by, the more the itch formed under his skin to just… leave. Freedom sat behind an old wooden door and Harry's anxieties, and today both seemed like such small hurdles that he overcame with little fanfare.
He got dressed, brushed his teeth for the first time in months, and messed around with his hair until it looked a little less like he'd just rolled out of bed.
Walburga stayed quiet behind her curtains. The muggle children he watched playing sometimes were gone, probably in school, and the street was empty without them. Harry didn't need to lock the door behind him – magic kept it perfectly secure – but he did so anyway.
It had been so long since he'd last apparated that he thought briefly that he'd forgotten but his body swirled away, into the compressing tube that apparition always felt like, and he arrived wholly on Ron and Hermione's doorstep.
Harry knocked and his palms moistened, heart speeding up under his ribs. He should've called ahead, should've sent a note with an owl (what owl? He doesn't have an owl.) or something, anything. His fingers clutched at the sleeves of his robe, tugging at them like they'd protect him from this crushing, overwhelming fear. He was about to leave again when Hermione answered, pushing her hair off her face and carrying a little brown baby on her hip.
"Harry! Ron, it's Harry!" she exclaimed, ushering him in. He tucked his wand back in his robe pocket again, ignoring the way Voldemort's voice whispered about holsters and wand care.
His mouth tasted of decay as he smiled, returning her welcome with a nod. Every day, Voldemort seemed a little less like he was just in Harry's head. He wasn't solid, wasn't visible to Harry's eye, but his voice was always there, following him, berating him, criticising him. Never praise – Voldemort couldn't give praise to save his life – and wouldn't bother giving it to Harry anyway, not when he was so useless like this. Harry's mouth wouldn't come clean.
This trip wasn't about souls – it was about self-assurance, grounding himself in reality when his own was a personal little hell he'd carved out for himself. Even the least social of people need contact with others.
And it wasn't like he was going to barrage them with his concerns anyway. He could cope. He could deal with it himself.
"How have you been?" Ron asked when Harry reached the living room and wasn't that a shock; Ron was wearing an apron covered in flour, a child wobbling at his heels. Had it really been that long?
Harry waved his hand absently, "Getting by, you know how it is." But from the look of it, Ron didn't know how it was. There were family photos on the mantle piece. Harry's gathered dust.
Harry found a seat, watching as the kids were taken into the kitchen by Hermione. Ron had baked cookies, and he placed a couple on the table now. They were still warm, and Harry hadn't eaten anything so rich in so long. His stomach ached. Half of it sat on his plate, untouched.
"Buy yourself food, Harry Potter. It's appalling."
Harry tuned him out.
"Good. That's good." The silence felt like unnavigable ground. They didn't know how to talk like friends anymore.
"So, what have you been up to?" Harry asked, but it was pretty clear. The evidence of it lay across the floor in animated soft toys, in the muffled voices in the kitchen and in the splotch of flour across Ron's nose.
"I take care of the kids while Hermione's working." Ron scratched his nose, then wiped it. "It's hard work, you know. Never really realised until I did it myself."
"Yeah."
Conversation died like a bellyflop.
"You can't even talk to your own friend properly."
Harry wished Voldemort knew how to shut up.
Harry picked at his fingernails and sought a way out of this trap he'd made for himself. He couldn't remember what he and Ron used to talk about, gone in the flurry of emotion that coated all of the war, and even pre-war. He didn't remember how to be a person anymore.
It felt like any words he said would come across wrong, that Harry's existence didn't really fit in here.
He was the odd one out. He was the leftover, the extra piece.
And it felt like Harry was looking through the world from the perspective of the boa constrictor in the tank back in the Zoo. He was the one that didn't fit, and people came to view him, his spectacle. But he didn't even have a spectacle of a life anymore, he was no circus. He was just a recluse, afraid of leaving his house on a good day.
Ron picked up a cup of tea, taking a sip. Harry didn't even see him make it.
Time slipped by him at a startling rate. A stream his fingertips couldn't reach while everyone else swam past.
"What about you?" Ron asked, and this was what Harry had secretly feared. All he had was Voldemort, his aborted research attempt, and how the kids across the street played kick the can.
"I'm–" Words seemed to freeze in his throat. Or perhaps it was a lack of them. Either way, his throat felt like it was clenched in Voldemort's icy grip, his chest still. "I'm thinking of redecorating."
The lie sat heavy on his tongue, but Ron didn't notice. And that was the worst part.
"It seems like your friends don't know you as well as you thought."
Voldemort's words felt like an anchor in a world drifting away from him, and Harry didn't know how to feel about it.
"Yeah? Grimmauld is bloody gloomy, mate, it's about time."
"Yeah." His stomach turned as he nibbled his biscuit, sugar tasting like dirt on his tongue.