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Harry opened his eyes and keened; the wide slash in his abdomen had come with him into his dreamscape, as had all the pain that came with it.
“My, my Harry, which of mine did that?” Voldemort tutted, voice light and dangerous.
Harry’s eyes slid upwards, his face was pale and shone with sweat. Attempting to manage the pain, Harry counted the dark wooden beams that held up Voldemort’s fortress.
In these late stages of the war, Voldemort spent the majority of his leisure time in this unplottable location. Harry and Hermione had pored over different tomes trying to uncover the loophole that would allow Harry’s dream access to extend into the waking world, but no such luck.
It was old, mostly made of stone, and always, always he woke beside a roaring fire. Hermione had laid out architectural examples before him and he was able to say with certainty that it was an old Scottish castle. Truthfully, he had known that since the moment he first dreamed there-- it was a feeling. Voldemort’s Keep had the ancient magical signature that Hogwarts had, except every corner was tinged with darkness. Where Hogwarts’ element of unknowability was playful and daring, Voldemort’s Keep was unknowable and very clearly did not wish to be known.
“Bellatrix c-caught me in the middle of apparating. Not the first time she’s tried that one, actually,” Harry’s chest twisted in grief as he thought of Dobby; he screwed his eyes shut against the pain of it.
Nearly every evening since just before Harry turned fifteen, he had gone to sleep and woken up in the glow of Voldemort’s hearth. Dumbledore had theorized it was another element of their bond growing stronger; an unintended side effect of Voldemort taking Harry’s blood in the graveyard.
Speaking of blood, it was now seeping significantly through his torn shirt.
When cold hands carded through his hair, Harry jolted horribly. He was too weak to get up, and Voldemort gripped his shoulders, preventing him from shifting away.
“Le-let go,” Harry slurred in alarm. He had dreamed while injured before, half-starved in his days at the Dursleys… but this was new. New as in really bad and weird and hurts a lot. This was the closest he’d been to death in the dreamscape.
Best he could remember, he’d passed out from the pain into Hermione’s arms. It happened to be late enough to catch Voldemort asleep, too, Harry supposed. Voldemort would never kill him, but he’d yet to shy from hurting him, over and over and over.
“Shh, Harry,” Voldemort hissed lowly in his ear. The hands anchoring him in place had moved again, were gently carding through his hair, which was growing out now. It had been singed clean off in a battle six months ago when Crabbe Sr. shot off an uncontrollable bout of fiendfyre. Harry had dodged the worst of it, but Voldemort had been so angry that night, it allegedly took him 8 hours to torture Crabbe to death.
“What are you doing?” Harry gritted out, trying to pull himself together.
“Relax, I’m going to heal you.”
Nothing makes Harry tense up more than being told to relax. Harry began to explain this to Voldemort but—
But as he strained his muscles he felt a familiar pain; not of freshly wrent flesh, but the piercing ache of stressing muscle and tendon that has just been knotted back together. Harry dropped his attention from the dark lord still petting him to trace the arc of the knife wound, and feel the flesh as it knitted itself back together under his touch. He pulled his hands away, dripping with blood, only to watch the blood disappear from hands and breast with a wandless, wordless scourgify. The foamy tickle of the magic is inimitable.
How odd, Harry thought, to feel such an innocuous light spell dance across him, forged and tinged with the dark magical signature that was unmistakably Voldemort’s.
The last inch of the wound closed, and Harry sighed deeply in relief, unable to prevent the tension in his body from unspooling. It was one of the few times in his life he’d ever been touched so gently, so.. possessively.
Harry pulled away with effort, rested his head on the arm of the sofa and watched Voldemort hover above the couch, expression unreadable.
“You’re being nice tonight,” Harry commented. Voldemort huffed lightly, and attempted another pet. Harry ducked his head; an old, well-practiced motion that came back as easily as remembering how to ride a bike.
“Why not give in to me, my horcrux? Come live away from these dark and desperate battles,” Voldemort whispered.
“Nice try,” Harry replied— no heat in it, anymore. This was the same argument they’d had for nearly four years. Ever since Harry had pulled his cloak from his shoulders in the Forbidden Forest, and Voldemort lifted all of Dumbledore’s answers from Harry’s mind with a single glance.
Harry had once asked him why, how he’d known to take the time to look into his mind that night when he was seemingly poised for victory. Voldemort, frustrated, admitted he knew Harry too well. Knew that the anguish and resolve on his face wasn’t for him.
“You just want the full power of the Deathly Hallows, knowing full well I wield two. Who’s to say once you have ultimate immortality you won’t just kill the inconvenient horcrux who was stupid enough to deliver them?” Harry pointed out.
“Lord Voldemort rewards bravery,” he hissed.
“The first time you said that to me you were a wraith living on the back of Quirrel’s head, and somehow, it inspires even less confidence now,” Harry said wryly.
Voldemort turned from him at last, stepping away to gaze out the window at his darkened estate.
A little more gently, Harry said, “You know my terms.”
The Dark Lord gripped the sill, “Harry, you’re tired. My magic protects you from death, but this… you’re slipping. You’re my final horcrux, the one I never intended. I know Dumbledore had his grand plan, but it’s unspooled spectacularly,” Voldemort turned to face him, “I will not allow you to win, but I cannot let you die.”
“How many have died to prevent your mad venture? I won’t surrender and see my parents die in vain,” Harry responded firmly.
“Your parents died so that you would live. Would they really want to see you choose death after their sacrifice?” Voldemort said.
“You know better than to speak for the dead. And you have no right to speak for them when you were the one who forced them to make that choice,” Harry was cold, but not angry.
The man sighed, dropping his head into his hand.
The noseless, monstrous visage had been somewhat healed by the reabsorption of his untethered soul pieces, but soul magic left its marks. Tom Riddle was restored to the age he was when he created his first horcrux, but his skin was paler and more aged than it should have been. His aristocratic nose had returned, but his eyes remained blood red slits. His hair had returned, thick and dark, but it hung oddly. It had been curious to watch Tom Riddle grow along with Harry, both of them shedding the gangliness of youth to inherit the solidity that came with becoming men.
Full grown, though Harry was still short, and his beard still patchy.
Full grown, though Tom’s eyes reflected in the dark, and his heart beat slower than it should have.
Voldemort himself had shed his physical vanity long ago, in favor of the intellectual. He had often proclaimed this to Harry in the Snake Years, as Harry privately called them, before the Battle of Hogwarts and Voldemort’s reabsorption of most of his soul.
When Voldemort had regressed to sixteen year old Riddle, the first thing he did was cast a complex system of glamours to restore his snakelike visage. Harry poked fun at this exactly once, until Voldemort conceded that a sixteen year old leader didn’t exactly inspire confidence, which was sobering for seventeen-year-old rebel leader Harry Potter.
Harry was the only one to see this new Tom-form, as glamours did not translate in dreams. For a few months, Harry had suspected it was a trick to let his guard down, but the smallest details of Voldemort’s growth and change convinced him that this was not the case. Puberty was too complicated and awful to really be worth the time and effort to falsify, really.
The part of Harry that he didn’t care to analyze, the part who kept his toy soldiers in the darkest corner of the cupboard under the stairs, was quite pleased to have this version of a boy that was just for him.
Voldemort could never again be considered a handsome man, in much the same way Harry could not be considered an unblemished one. And yet, when one looked past the scar, one found the whole picture of Harry and it was pleasant. Harry liked to practice looking past the red eyes and inhuman aura to find the whole picture of Tom beneath.
(It, too, was pleasant.)
“I’m only in danger because of this damn war you’re raging,” Harry continued, “You have immortality, you wield the most powerful wand in the world—“
“Not entirely,” Voldemort interrupted.
“Fine, joint custody, then,” Harry conceded. “Listen— my point is, you’ve got this giant unplottable castle, you have your cohort of Slytherin buddies, you’ve got immortality, why do you need absolute control of the world too? Why can’t you just start over, make change the legal way? Hell, start your own damn school— you’ve got the room for it. Quit wasting lives for an insane cause we both know you don’t believe in—“
“Magic is might. And muggleborns are a danger to this society,”
“Oh don’t even start. You’ve cornered yourself like this because of all your damn convoluted magic. And you and I are both muggleborns ourselves for all intents and purposes but bloodline— socialized in the muggle world, and raised outside of wizarding conventions except for Hogwarts,” Harry started down the path of a familiar argument.
“Well, one could argue you and I are concrete proof of the destructive potential of muggleborns, what with the six year war we’ve been waging,” Voldemort returned, smirking slightly.
Harry sputtered in amused disbelief, “Did you just admit to being a muggleborn to make a joke?”
“No, I admitted so to be right,” Voldemort said loftily, settling back down in his armchair.
Harry laughed, sliding down slightly on the sofa as he made himself more comfortable.
Voldemort was silent. He seemed to be mulling something over, his lips pressed tightly.
“I am not a muggleborn, you are not a muggleborn. We were each born into the wizarding world and cast out of it soon after. Both of us waited in squalor until Dumbledore deigned to allow us back in,” spat Voldemort.
“Well, I don’t have time to unpack all of that,” Harry frowned, a little surprised by Voldemort’s sudden vitriol, “But Dumbledore was certainly unfair to you in the orphanage. It used to bother me that he didn’t… he didn’t understand it. Dudley had always had so many things, of course I made a point to take what I could and hide it someplace special. So I could have something of my own.”
“Yes, Harry, but I was also actively terrorizing those children. The worst you ever did to that stupid muggle cousin of yours was breathe on him,” Voldemort did not like Dudley.
“So.. Dumbledore was right?” Harry grinned. “Wow, what an evening of revelations you’re having.”
“Maybe so,” Voldemort sneered, though there wasn’t much heart in it, “but I’ll never forgive him for the way he looked at me that day, like he could pierce to the heart of me and know exactly who I was.”
Harry gazed into the fire for a long moment, content to let silence reign.
“You know,” Harry spoke, contemplative, “I think Dumbledore always compared us to himself and Grindelwald. He was so comfortable dying and planning our choices for a year past his death because he thought he knew who we were. And I want to say he didn’t know me, that he got me all wrong, but I think he was more right than he’ll ever know,”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Well, Dumbledore and Grindelwald, see, they started out as best friends, then fell in love, trusted each other to protect one another. And then that trust was broken when Ariana died, and they were set on two paths forever,”
“I’ve read Skeeter’s disaster of a book, Harry.”
“Well anyway, I just mean, well— we did it backwards, I suppose. We started on the most divergent paths possible, diametrically opposed, and each year we’re just drawn closer and closer together.”
“Are you saying we’re meant to be friends, Harry Potter?”
“Well, no one else but Lily has ever cast an ancient ritual protecting me from death.”
“And no one else but Nagini has ever held my soul inside them.”
Harry shifted up on the couch, “Tom, you know I’m willing to lay down arms, I’m willing to protect this soul shard inside me, but Lord Voldemort must die. Leave the world be, make positive change, and let the wizarding world live without fear again.”
Harry gripped the fabric of his jeans tightly, already knowing Voldemort’s answer.
“I am seventy years down this path, Harry. I cannot and will not turn away from it now. As much as I wish you would surrender to me willingly, I think we both know that someday soon you won’t be fast enough to dodge the knife, and then I will have you.”
Harry sighed, disappointed.
The dreamscape began to ripple gently at the edges, as dawn finally melted through the window.
“Thanks for the healing, I guess.”
Voldemort turned, eyes piercing his as he gave Harry a sad, hungry smile.
“Until tomorrow night, Harry.”
The dawn light faded away, and all at once Harry was lying in a cot in the medical tent, Hermione and Ron at his bedside as if he were thirteen and fresh off the dementor-ridden quidditch pitch all over again.
“Did I catch the snitch?” he joked, voice weak.
“Oh God, he’s gone mad,” Ron exclaimed with an overdramatic swoon as Hermione rolled her eyes and smiled.