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He that toucheth the corpse of a man, and is therefore unclean seven days—
Numbers 19:11
Easy is the digging, far easier than he might have thought. The soil gives way easily and soon the shovel hits something a bit more solid—thunk!—and he knows he’s finally arrived. The shovel is taken aside. More careful work now, this excavation; he uses his hands, fingernails digging into the soil, loamy and gritty, loose stone mixing with dead roots and dead grass. On and on and on, until the casket’s fully there in front of him now.
People had wanted to burn the corpse afterward, but Harry put his foot down. He had thrown everything he had at the argument: an unmarked grave in a location that only he knew; no corpse of Tom Marvolo Riddle shall burn, he declared, daring them to go against the Chosen One, and his body shall remain intact.
A thought, careless and ignorant of its own weight, flickers through his mind: Did he know, even then, what he was going to do? Did this sick wanting already take root in his bones?
Then again, when hadn’t it? It’s been so long since this overwhelming want that he’s accepted it as part of life, but then he remembers—no, that’s not right. It’s not always been there.
It’s just been there long enough that it feels like it has.
Leaning forward, he lowers himself down, down, until he’s finally resting against the wood. It’s a simple coffin Harry made. Tom Riddle wouldn’t have liked it, would have wanted something grand and imposing: black marble, perhaps, ornamented with pietra dura; decorative curlicues curling around like snakes on the trunk of a yew tree; imposing gemstones, the ones that would bankrupt a family; expensive and noble and everything that the younger Tom Riddle never had but must have wanted at some point, in that cold and dreary orphanage.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, his hand running down the wood grain, thumb stroking the flat of the lid. “This is all I can do.”
There had been no other choice: Harry had been explicit about what he wanted. I’ll handle everything, he had said, brimming with too much ambition that outstripped his capabilities. All he knew was that he didn’t want them to burn Voldemort’s corpse. He could handle the details later.
Yet later came—the weeks of research (which he did alone, because he doubted Hermione and Ron would approve of his plans) on how to make land unseen and unknown, Fidelius charms and rituals to make an area Unplottable, followed by the logistics: the cottage in the Hebrides, the spellwork, the materials, the burial—and later came even so, until it culminated into the ever-present now.
Now is this: Harry’s fingertips ghosting over the wooden coffin he made, so desperate for any kind of contact that he’s had for the longest time. He clenches his eyes shut, and he can’t help himself. He moves just a bit forward, a bit more, and sweet friction grazes his groin. A moan leaves his lips, stark against the night air, and he thinks that maybe he’ll be alright with this. Maybe the madness will finally stop and leave him.
But his hands have wills of their own, and soon they’re stroking the edges of the lid, fingertips already testing the weight of it, as if to uncover the coffin even as his weight keeps it pressed down. This is the closest he’s ever been and still he’s not close enough. It’s not enough. How can it? Every night since the battle of Hogwarts, he dreamt of Tom Riddle, and he dreamt of the Tom Riddle he met when he was twelve, and he dreamt of the Tom Riddle whose past he watched unfold when he was sixteen, and he dreamt of the Tom Riddle that could have been and might have been only if somebody was there to love him—
You cannot help, Dumbledore had said.
Should Harry have tried harder? Should Harry have questioned or asked or done anything at all?
“I’ll make it better,” he coos, and he imagines himself now no longer talking to handsome Tom Riddle but to the raw, wounded creature he had seen in King’s Cross.
Harry should have taken the poor creature in his arms and gone—not back, but somewhere else, somewhere better: a world that would have been worthy of Tom Riddle, would have loved him and brought him up, would have embraced him with such passion that he would never again seek to destroy himself, to mutilate his soul—
Whoosh! The lid slides open. He’d been moving too vigorously, the realisation painting his cheeks a flush he’d deny having.
Now that it’s open, though, why should he close it? It’s there. He’s there: perhaps not the sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle who had opened the chamber, or the Tom Riddle he watched grow up in the Pensieve, or the broken thing he saw in that place of nothingness—
Harry sees, for the first time in what seems like an eternity, the completion of his soul. Sixteen years he had carried Tom Riddle inside of him, and he didn’t even know. If only he did, perhaps it would have been so different. Perhaps he might have looked at those slit of crimson and that snake-like nose and reacted not with horror but with love.
It is love, what he feels. He knows that now. He knows that better than his own name, better than his own self. Sixteen years, he thinks. That’s how long their souls have been intertwined, Tom Riddle nestled so deep in him that he never once knew—like breathing, Harry realises. You don’t realise it until you need to do it.
He didn’t realise until he was empty, until the adrenaline left him and he was all hollowed out. He thought it had been the battle, or the war, but time passed and people moved on and he’s still standing there, still at the point in time where he’s looking at Riddle and he’s one years old and eleven and twelve and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and—
Now he’s all alone.
No, now, he isn’t.
Harry reaches out and his hands cup Voldemort’s face. So thin, he thinks. Harry would have made him eat. Harry would have cooked for him and made him meals and maybe Voldemort would close his eyes and enjoy it. Maybe Voldemort would even allow Harry to feed him by hand, and Harry would be so careful, so tender. He’d bring the spoon to Voldemort’s thin lips and maybe Voldemort would approve, would close his eyes and let out a pleased little hum—
Fuck, Harry thinks, reaching out to caress those bloodless lips. How long has it been? Voldemort’s body had stayed intact, and Harry hasn’t even cast a Stasis Charm or anything of the sort. Perhaps it’s all that Dark magic, he muses, but all he thinks of now is how, on the telly as a child, he watched a documentary on the uncorrupted body of Saint Bernadette playing on one of the BBC channels. He’d been left alone in the house while the Dursleys went on their Easter trip, and he’d been thankfully allowed run of the house as long as he promised to be good. He’d been flicking through channels until he saw her and he thought she’s beautiful.
Harry looks down at Voldemort’s corpse, and he thinks you’re beautiful.
It’s a strange thought to have. It’s not something he would have thought while Voldemort was alive, but it is something he can allow himself now while looking at that sallow face, that form of a corpse.
“You’re beautiful,” he says to that body, uncorrupted by time or rot.
Tom Riddle had always been beautiful, of course. He had known that even before. He had been guilty about it before, hand reaching downwards to wrap around his weeping cock, but now there is no more guilt.
Now there is no more shame.
Harry’s hand traces downwards, ever downwards. His fingertips trace a path down the column of Voldemort’s throat, thumb pressing down on the swell of the Adam’s apple that now lies so still, unmoving. He remembers how Voldemort used to talk—his voice had been so soft, so quiet, so utterly unexpected from a man who proclaimed himself (and had been proclaimed by others) to be a Dark Lord—and he likes the silence now, the stillness, just as much as he longs for the memory of the man’s words.
Mine, the man screamed at him once, in that time that he did not understand what he was and what Voldemort was and what they were.
“Yours,” he murmurs, and he understands now, his lips brushing against that slender flesh. Too thin, he thinks again, but just right.
For anyone else, it might have been too late, but they had always been different. They had never been normal. Harry had been too young to understand it, and Voldemort too broken, but right here, right now, like this—Harry, wiser; Voldemort unable to do anything but receive the love Harry’s finally learned to give—is perfection itself: just two bodies meeting at long last.
He goes down, down: lips raining kisses on that bone-white flesh, those too-pale nipples. His tongue flicks out to taste, and it’s not the same, not exactly, but he thinks of the vision he received of Voldemort at Riddle House. Who will milk Nagini? Voldemort asked then, and Harry had researched it in the time after the battle, wallowing in his loneliness and in his memories. He had searched the ritual and the potions and the way that Voldemort sustained himself in that terrible time.
I need feeding, Voldemort had said, every few hours.
For sixteen years, he carried Tom Riddle inside of himself. “Didn’t I feed you?” he murmurs, teeth marks around Voldemort’s pale nipple, his thumb flicking the other one. “In my own way, didn’t I feed you?”
He never knew. Sixteen years, and he had been something almost like a mother to the sliver of soul that was Tom Riddle: nurturer and host and safe haven, through the cupboard and through Hogwarts which was the only home ever known by two boys already broken before having arrived at the castle.
“I didn’t know,” he confesses, and then he’s caressing that face again. “If only I knew.”
If only haunted his days after the Battle of Hogwarts. His friends thought him haunted by the cost of victory. Ginny had been patient, but that kind of love they had wasn’t enough for this. They had loved each other with a world-weary sort of love, one that experienced loss and knew they were forever changed by it. That sort of love could survive grief, survive depression, survive anything except—
Madness. Harry knows he’s gone mad, in that sort-of abstract way that makes the realisation seem more like a homecoming than a curse. If only, he said, and where his friends heard the sigh of longing for a better victory, one that might have taken fewer lives to achieve, then who is he to correct them? Who is he to say that his sigh of longing was for the fact that they won at all?
So he had withdrawn, and time passed, and time passes, and he had given up. I have given you years of my life, he thought, and that was when he knew: when he thinks to himself, he is not thinking to himself.
He is thinking to Voldemort.
Tenderly, he leans down, and he places his lips against that slack mouth, so easily manipulable. There is no trace of Tom Riddle now in the inhumanity that is Voldemort, but there is still a kind of beauty there that death has brought out. Harry could appreciate, now and only now, the starkness of it, the cold sublimity, the profundity of something altogether unnatural and powerful and inevitable.
Those lips, when he kisses them, are so soft. He lets out a little hum of pleasure, then, his body moving a bit to find a better angle, and his cock is swelling, and he’s raining kisses all over Voldemort’s face and jaw and neck. He can’t stop himself: he’s grinding against that serpentine body, hardness straining against his jeans, and then—
Finally, his hands reach lower, lower, and his fingers wrap around Voldemort’s cock. It’s flaccid, of course, but Harry doesn’t mind. Like this, he can explore Voldemort languidly, allowed to take his time, to discover for himself what he might have had in another life.
No, he thinks, corrects himself, it’s what I’ll have in this life.
After all, why should death be a barrier? Why should their relationship be defined by the normal laws of nature when they themselves had been unnatural? Harry had two souls inside of him where there ought to have been one, and now he’s just one and singular and alone.
Poor orphan boy, wanting a family, never knowing he already had his soul’s dearest companion within him.
Poor orphan boy, he thinks, looking at what had once been Tom Riddle, fingers enclosed around that length. He had thought of this some nights before, though he’s long since lost track of time, to the point that some nights could be mere weeks before or perhaps entire years altogether. Green eyes rest on that flaccid length and he pumps his fist, once, twice, before he’s lowering himself down even further, further—
“I could have been your family,” Harry says, before closing his mouth around Voldemort’s cock.
The taste is strangely clean. Of course it is. Harry had washed his body before burying it. It’s almost clinical, really: lips wrapped around that cock, tongue swirling around the head. Hesitantly, as if he might still hurt the man, he nips the length of it with his teeth, imagining the kind of sound Voldemort might have made but also greatly enjoying this lack of reaction, the stillness, the way he could do anything and Voldemort can just take it.
He goes down deeper, no longer experimenting with nipping at the length of Voldemort’s cock but just letting himself suck on it for a while. It’s big and heavy on his tongue, and there’s drool leaking now from the corner of his lips. Truth be told, his jaws ache a bit—Voldemort’s big, inhumanly so, like the rest of him—and he’s gagging now and choking on spit and Voldemort’s cock and there’s still plenty more to go.
For a while, Harry just lets himself enjoy it. His tongue licks at the wrinkle of skin, his lips pursing around that tip before taking as much as he could into his mouth and throat once more. This is for you, he thinks to Voldemort. All of this is for you. I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier. If only, if only, if only—
He gags, almost throwing up, and he realises he’s taken Voldemort too deep. He hasn’t had practice before—there’s no one else to practice with, and besides who could measure against the Dark Lord? So, almost unwillingly, Harry withdraws, and he feels sorry and rotten that he can’t do this for Voldemort, can’t even take the whole length of him in his mouth—
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, his voice worn-out by the way he’d taken Voldemort in his throat. “I’ll learn. I’ll do better. I’ll practice, I promise.”
Like a child, he thinks, suddenly ashamed. Voldemort knew him as a child: he had been there in front of Harry’s crib when he was a baby, and he had raised his wand to kill Harry. Once, the thought of it would have made Harry angry—after all, Voldemort killed his parents in the same night—but Harry had grown up without his parents, had never known them.
He had, however, grown up with Tom Riddle in his soul.
“You should have taken me when I was a baby,” Harry whispers, hands coming up to unbutton his shirt. “Instead of killing me, you should have taken me. I was just there, defenceless, ripe for the taking—”
But if Voldemort had taken him, he wouldn’t have had the soul-sliver in his head. He wouldn’t have been like this. He wouldn’t have known he lost something so very integral to his definition of himself and weighed himself after and found himself wanting, wanting, wanting—
“It’s so unfair,” Harry says, his voice a childish whine against the night. “It’s just so unfair.”
His hands, taking off his shirt, his trousers, his pants; Voldemort’s cock, pinned under his thighs; Harry had already prepared himself, had known what he was going to do, had wanted so very badly to finally be one again, be whole, be fixed and full and to have Tom Riddle nestled within himself again after so long, so long—
“Sixteen years,” he sighs, wrapping his hand around that cock once more. “Sixteen years you’ve been inside of me.”
And now Harry’s so empty, and he tried with his fingers and he tried with some toys but nothing could fill him up. He tugged at his pathetic cock thinking of Tom Riddle and thinking of Voldemort and all he knows is that, under the yew tree he’s planted, there is his promise of salvation.
He’s getting his salvation now. He will not be denied.
Harry’s fingers, still wrapped around that cock, fisting it as if it might swell up—and he lets himself reflect, only for a bit, that if Voldemort’s big now, he must be bigger when he’s aroused—but failing.
“I’ll finally be complete,” he murmurs, as he hovers over Voldemort’s corpse. He looks at the man now, and his heart swells with so much love, so much that he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s made himself mad over it. He’s fucking a corpse over it. He’s lost himself to it and to them and to the terrible wondrous beauty that has been their connection which has been—Harry is realising now—his whole life.
His whole life. One man had been the anchor and the ground and the foundation and the ideal and the Polaris and the telos of his whole fucking life.
Now the man was gone, and all that’s left is his corpse, and the world expects him to move on but this corpse here is his whole life.
“We’ll never part again,” he murmurs. “After this, I’ll take you to the cottage and we’ll have breakfast together and we’ll be together forever. In another life, I would have kept you alive. I would have been your human Horcrux while you shattered this world into eternity—”
It’s a bit difficult, trying to manouvre the cock into his hole, but Harry finally manages it. A whimper leaves his lips, high-pitched and needy and long-awaited and finally, finally, finally—
The tip of Voldemort’s cock slips out, and Harry whines, frustrated. The sound cuts through the night air, and the branches of the yew tree sway to the barely-there nightly drafts of wind. He feels it almost like a caress through his hair and he wonders if maybe Tom Riddle would have caressed his hair, if Voldemort would have had the Dark Lord taken him as a baby.
He huffs out a breath, and he tries again. His hand reaches downwards, and his fingers wrap around that length once more. He positions himself over and above that cock and his fingers are still wrapped around that length as he sinks downwards. The tip of it breaches his hole and it’s exquisite. The stretch of it is painful—Voldemort’s so big—but Harry cherishes it and loves it and he’s sinking down even more, even further, and it’s so much better than his fingers, so big and making him feel so full..
“I love you,” comes out of his lips, unbidden and unpractised. Yet now that it’s out of his mouth, he feels foolish for even having hesitated. Yes, he realises now, he loves Voldemort. He always did. Voldemort had been the voice in his head when he was little that consoled him as he was stuck in his cupboard. He had been the handsome Tom Riddle that broke his twelve-year-old heart. He had been the poor orphan boy sitting on the edge of a bed, lonely and friendless and having been so relieved at the revelation that he was special.
Harry should have taken that mewling thing in King’s Cross and taken it back or forward or backward or anywhere. Harry would have been the perfect father and mother. For sixteen years, Tom Marvolo Riddle had been inside of him, ever since he was just a baby. That soul-sliver had grown up alongside him and Harry had nourished it with his hopes and fears and wants and everything, everything.
But this is all he can give now: pleasure to a corpse that cannot feel it. Yet Harry will give it anyway, precisely because it is all he can give.
Voldemort’s cock nestles deep inside of him the way Tom Riddle’s soul might have, and Harry’s moaning, so unbearably full again, complete and no longer missing his own self. Our self, he thinks. Mine. Ours. Yours.
We even look something alike, sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle said, and Harry hilts Voldemort deep inside of him and he lets out a keening sort of sound.
“V-Voldemort,” he sighs, hands roaming everywhere, fingers caressing the man’s face, that jawline, those pale shoulders, those ribs sticking out. “You feel s-so—ahh—good.”
He will always be sorry, he thinks, but it’s okay. This is all he has now, and it will have to be enough. It has to be. Voldemort’s cock, so deep inside of him that when his hands touch his abdomen, he thinks he might feel the man there, the shape of his soul traced through his abdomen; the shape of the man inside of him massaging his prostate, stretching him so wide and filling him up so full that he thinks he will never be empty again.
“Tom,” he lets out, his voice a keening sound that cuts sharply though the night. It surprises even himself: the high-pitch of it, the neediness of it, the use of the name Tom.
Harry covers his face, fingers splayed out to cover red cheeks. “S-Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t stop his motions, too lost in the pleasure, too shameless to even think of trying to stop. “I know you don’t like—nngh—being called T-Tom—ahh!”
There, that angle: Harry grinds against Voldemort’s cock, fucking himself deeper into the man’s length—he really is so big, Harry’ll be feeling this for days and days—and he just loses himself in the feeling of Voldemort filling him up, sliding in and out of his hole, the friction of the movements, the glide of his cock, the way the tip of Voldemort’s length hits his prostate and makes him shiver and keen and—
“Tom,” he mewls again, and he thinks of Tom Riddle, sixteen years old and stuck for fifty years in a diary. He thinks of Tom Riddle, eleven years old and sitting on the edge of a bed and waiting to be told he’s special. He thinks of Tom Riddle, fifteen years old and having just murdered his father and his grandparents. He thinks of Tom Riddle, fifteen or sixteen, asking Slughorn about Horcruxes. He thinks of Tom Riddle, twenty-something and having to suffer the presence of Hepzibah Smith. He thinks of Tom Riddle, middle-aged, come to Hogwarts to ask for a job. He thinks of Voldemort, terrible and snakelike and great and wondrous and inevitable. He thinks of that crying thing in the corner of King’s Cross. He thinks of this corpse, uncorrupted and beautiful even in death, especially in death—
Harry cums, hole clenching tight around Voldemort’s cock, his own dick climaxing without even being touched. Pearlescent ropes of cum now decorate Voldemort’s torso, the man’s pale skin somehow still many shades lighter than the fluid. Harry’s body loosens, relaxes; his brain quiets down, the static finally going away and dissolving into a peace he had not known ever since he realised he was made incomplete. He collapses against Voldemort, mouth crashing against those pale lips in a ghost of a kiss he’s too overwhelmed to follow up on but which he hopes would please Voldemort enough.
Unbidden, a giggle leaves his lips. He realises, too, that Voldemort’s cock has slipped out. No matter how big it is, gravity’s done its work. Harry would have to research how best to make love to his darling Tom, will resort to spells and potions if he must.
All he knows is that he won’t deprive himself of this ever again.
“No,” he says softly, and he tilts his head up and looks at Voldemort’s face. “We will never deprive ourselves of this ever again.”
It feels right. It feels like wholeness. Harry’s tired of being singular, and now he doesn’t have to be. Now he can be Harry-and-Voldemort; he can say our and us in place of I and my.
“We’ll never be alone again,” they say, and it is like coming home.
It is like waking up: their eyes opening and seeing, for the first time in a long time—