Chapter Text
It began with fire and ice.
It began with blood and darkness.
It changed with grief and love.
It ended with chaos and destruction.
It ended with a boy and a monster.
It began with fire.
The rage burning in him drove him forward. It let him forget how tired he was, how afraid he had been only a short while ago, afraid that none of his friends would make it out alive.
It would have been his fault.
None of that mattered. Not in the wake of the rage scorching his inside. Not in the wake of trying to catch up with Bellatrix Lestrange, Sirius murderer.
Harry ran through the corridors of the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry of Magic. One room blurred into the next. Bellatrix ahead of him, laughing manically. He caught up with her in the atrium and everything went downhill from there.
Moments later there was nothing but rage left. Rage so hot, so all consuming and so foreign, that Harry knew not everything came from him. Harry realized what was going on, had felt this already a few times throughout the last school year, but never like this. Never this hot, never so unstoppable.
He tried to think through the blazing fire of anger and fury, he knew that Voldemort had been there only moments before, had been battling with Dumbledore.
Then he had seemingly vanished, and Harry was burning from the inside.
He heard his own voice, with a strange undertone, talking to Dumbledore, who kneeled before him. But Harry couldn’t understand what was being said over the roaring in his ears.
He didn’t feel pain. Shouldn’t there be pain if he was burning alive?
There was no pain, only this all devouring fury.
Laughter, high pitched and horrible, cut through the blaze. Who was laughing? And why?
Then Harry realized it came out of his own mouth.
Words were spoken, some of them he could make out.
“Tom, don’t…”
“Did you hope I didn’t realize it, Dumbledore?” His own voice, but again with a hissing undertone.
Dumbledore’s face twisted into an expression Harry wished to never see again on the Headmaster. Horrified realization and then grief.
Then the flames inside him went out, and cold spread through him. Numbing, freezing cold.
It began with ice.
Harry felt his body move, like a puppet on its strings. A wall of ice came up between him and his body, emitting so much cold that it slowed down his thoughts, made it impossible to fight against the takeover of his body.
“Sleep.” A hissing voice commanded, and Harry’s body obeyed.
The next time he opened his eyes, he was in a well-lit room. He couldn’t move his head or his eyes but in his field of vision he saw an armchair and a fireplace. The burning fire suggested that the room was warm, but all Harry felt was the ice holding his body hostage.
A figure walked into his line of sight, tall, thin with snake-like slits instead of a nose, no hair, blood-red eyes. The face which had haunted Harry’s nightmares since the graveyard. He had the inkling he should react - would react normally. But he couldn’t move or even change the focus of his eyes.
Voldemort was talking. Words that reached Harry’s ears, but his mind was slowed down due to the cold, his thoughts so muddled as if he had to think through cotton or snow, that he had problems comprehending them.
Something about how he could have been so blind? Had been deceived and lied to?
Horcruxes?
What a strange word.
In Harry’s periphery Voldemort stopped and reached out a long finger to trace the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. Harry couldn’t even feel the touch.
“Nobody will ever come near you again. Nobody will ever take you away. You are mine.”
It took Harry awhile to decipher what Voldemort had said and then to realize that the wizard had already left the room. Behind the wall of ice, Harry tried to remember the hot burning rage from before. But the cold spread further and his thoughts succumbed to it.
Over the next weeks or months – Harry wasn’t too sure how much time passed in his frozen numbed stage - Voldemort made his body follow him to Death Eater meetings and sit in a chair beside him at meals and while he worked. Even in his stage he knew he was paraded around. Could still see the looks he got as he was standing behind Voldemort’s throne, still as the ice filling his body.
He couldn’t make eye contact with somebody, couldn’t focus on something out if his own will, couldn’t give a signal that he was still there. At times he was thankful that his mind had problems following what was happening around him. The torture, blood and gore he had to witness often washed over him, his mind only able to be faintly horrified. He was sure, that normally he would have been sick at what was happening during the Death Eater meetings.
Voldemort was cruel and twisted, not only to the victims – muggle and wizards alike – his followers brought before him, but also in his treatment of his own people.
Only once, had he ordered Harry to participate. Only to discover, that yes, he had full control over Harry’s body but not over his magic. It had simply refused to do anything. His wand, placed into his hand by Voldemort himself, hadn’t even warmed between his fingers. Voldemort hadn’t been pleased to find the limitations of his control and he had shown it. Harry didn’t remember much, as he had fallen unconscious while Voldemort made his displeasure known.
But with everything else and no control at all, Harry – or better, his body simply obeyed every other command.
Inside his own head, he tried to fight against the cold numbness of his own thoughts. With no results. He was completely, utterly under Voldemort’s control. And he couldn’t even feel the horror of this realization.