To Be One
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at
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Rating:
Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
F/M
Fandom:
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Relationship:
Harry Potter/Voldemort
Characters:
Harry Potter, Voldemort (Harry Potter)
Additional Tags:
Female Harry Potter, Contracts, Alternate Universe - Soulmates
Language:
English
Series:
Part 243 of HP Works
Stats:
Published: 2022-04-28
Words: 2,074
Chapters: 1/1
To Be One
by wynnebat
Summary
His fingertip presses lightly against her scar. “I can touch you now.”
She expects it to hurt. It doesn’t. It’s the impossible, terrifying joy of
the human existence. It’s the way blue begins to edge out the red of
Voldemort’s eyes and the way the deathly paleness of the skin of his
arm gains enough color that it can be mistaken for human.
Notes
Spruced up from the old Tumblr version. Prompted by anonymous.
Inspired by nocturnememory’s Ichor series.
See the end of the work for more notes
Harry could say she has never been so scared in her life, but that is patently
untrue. She’s been scared loads of times, each time that horrible feeling in
her throat and a shiver stuck in her spine. She’s looked death in the face and
it is always ugly. This time is no exception.
She struggles against the bonds tying her to the gravestone. Before her,
Voldemort rises from the cauldron. He is terrifying, but he is also all
hairless deathly pale skin, like an uncooked chicken emerging from the pot
to bring its wrath on all those who dared to turn it into something tasty
instead of gross.
This is no time for hysterics, Harry firmly tells herself. She stifles her
giggles and returns to her struggles, but it’s no use. Voldemort’s wearing a
robe now, and Wormtail is sobbing, and Harry refuses to flinch as her
enemy glides through the grass to loom over her.
“Harry Potter. The Girl Who Lived,” Voldemort says, his words almost a
hiss.
His voice is different from Tom Riddle’s and from the shade on the back of
Quirrell’s head. The shade had been miserable and ineffectual, Tom had
been a melodramatic boy who couldn’t seem to successfully kill anyone
even with a giant snake. Voldemort is… something else.
As his hand reaches for her, Harry twists away as far as she can, her head
flat against the hard stone.
His fingertip presses lightly against her scar. “I can touch you now.”
She expects it to hurt. It doesn’t. Harry wishes twice as hard that she’d been
able to get away because she would rather have pain than this horrible,
lovely feeling that arises at his touch. She has never felt so alive. It’s wind
through her hair and the ecstasy of the patronus charm. It’s the impossible,
terrifying joy of the human existence. It’s the way blue begins to edge out
the red of Voldemort’s eyes and the way the deathly paleness of the skin of
his arm gains enough color that it can be mistaken for human.
This isn’t the effect of a ritual. It’s something so grand and horrible that
Harry can barely contemplate it.
She speaks before she thinks, because that’s the way it’s always been. “No.
We can’t be.”
She turns her head abruptly to the side, but that only means Voldemort’s
finger brushes against her forehead in a line, then dips down to drag against
the side of her face, hitching only momentarily on her glasses.
“Soulmates are supposed to be good,” Harry says, more to the universe than
to Voldemort himself. “I can’t be stuck with you for the rest of your
hopefully short life.”
Voldemort’s nail digs into her skin sharply at that, but he looks more
thoughtful than angry. “Fate has already bound us together once. I shouldn’t
be surprised that it’s done so again.”
His gaze is cool as he looks her over; Harry doubts she’s his imagined
perfect soulmate, either. She bets that his giant snake would be more to his
liking. Instead of continuing to touch her and be healed further, Voldemort
removes his wand from his robes. At least he hasn’t grown a nose yet.
Ignoring her flinch when he raises his wand against her, he spells the ropes
to disappear.
Harry’s legs are shaky when she stumbles off of the gravestone, avoiding
accidentally falling on Voldemort by sheer force of will. When she rubs at
her arm, she finds the cut Wormtail made has already healed. She’d rather
have the scar, but no one’s given her a choice. Voldemort’s wand is still out,
but he hasn’t said those two fateful words again.
Harry lifts her chin, defiant to the end. “You can’t kill your soulmate. That’s
why you lost your body the first time around. If you kill me, you’ll be a
wraith again.”
“A small bargain for getting rid of my prophesied enemy once and for all,”
Voldemort replies. “I will always return. You, however, will be dead, and
the hope of the Light and the masses will fall with you.” And then, most
stunningly of all, he lowers his wand. “Wormtail. Her wand.”
“Y-yes, master.” He jumps up from his hunched over position and presents
his master with her wand with both hands, one normal, one silver.
“Not to me, idiot,” Voldemort says, but he takes it anyway.
He throws it to her and Harry snatches it from the air, grateful to have it in
her hand again. She doesn’t kid herself—Voldemort has decades on her in
skill and knowledge—but she feels safer all the same. She thinks perhaps he
means for them to duel, or that he will order her to do something with the
wand. Maybe he’ll try to get her to snap it herself; that’s suitably evil.
Instead, Voldemort says, “The trophy will return you to Hogwarts. Take it.”
“What?” Harry blurts out in her shock. “You’re just letting me go? Why?”
“You have one chance, Potter. Linger and I will try my other options.”
“Right, going now, immediately,” Harry mutters and backs away.
The trophy is only a few paces away, but with an uncertain look toward
Voldemort, Harry walks over to Cedric’s body first. His eyes are still open.
Harry alternated between crushes on him and Cho all year, and now he’s a
corpse on a battlefield that should’ve ended a decade ago. Dead by the
order of her very own soulmate, like some kind of romance novel with
competing suitors. Harry tugs at his arms to try to get him closer to the
trophy, but he doesn’t budge. The last thing she hears is a sigh before the
trophy floats to knock against her. Harry only has a moment to grasp it in
her hand before she’s being pulled away, taking Cedric’s body with her.
Back at Hogwarts, the crooked carnival mirror that is her new reality only
gets worse. She lands on the Hogwarts lawn and is greeted with horror and
confusion. She hadn’t had a spare thought for what it would look like,
appearing with the body of her rival in the tournament, only the all-
consuming need to be as far away from Voldemort as possible.
Amos Diggory’s grief and anger strike her to the bone. She’s not familiar
with that sort of parental love. It’s been too many years since she
experienced such a thing. Even her mother’s protection is gone now.
She keeps quiet about the soulmates business until the crowd is gone, until
she follows Dumbledore back to his office and curls into one of his
comfortable chairs.
There’s a cup of hot tea in her hands when she finally says, “He let me go.”
When she stops trying to scry in her tea leaves and looks to Dumbledore,
his gaze is gentle and pained. “Did you know we were soulmates?”
“Oh, Harry,” he murmurs.
She swallows. “It’s okay. I didn’t want to know. I don’t blame you for not
telling me.”
She wishes she could’ve gone her whole life not knowing it. Hermione
always says knowledge is power, but this isn’t a power she wants to have.
It doesn’t get any better when she asks what Voldemort meant by their fates
already having been tied once.
They’re bound by fate. Harry feels it like shackles on her wrists, like ice
over where her enemy touched. And she remembers just how wonderful the
soulmate bond felt, though she tries to forget.
It turns out that Voldemort can’t forget it, either.
Within a few weeks, Voldemort presents a magical contract to Dumbledore.
It states that Voldemort will agree to peacefully hold meetings with the
leaders of Light and the ministry for as long as needed for this war to reach
a conclusion. And it will happen only if Harry resides in his company once
a week for a total of six hours each time. It doesn’t state it outright, but
Harry realizes immediately that he wants her for their bond’s healing magic.
The meeting is held in Grimmauld Place office, with a cacophony of Order
members all with their own opinions. Good ones, bad ones.
Harry’s not a member of the Order. She wouldn’t even be allowed in the
room had the meeting not been about her. So she doesn’t hesitate in making
the decision that feels right to her. She signs the contract before anyone in
the room can say a thing. Instead of words, she sees Cedric’s face.
She carries the contract to Dumbledore. “I didn’t have to be an adult to sign
it?”
“Not in this,” he confirms. “Are you quite sure, my dear girl? This is the
third version of the contract. The previous ones were more draconian in
nature, but even this version makes demands on your time. I’ve wrested the
vows and promises I can, but you will never truly be safe around him.”
Harry looks down at the contract. Her signature is small and messy, but
true. In a show of good will, Voldemort has already signed it. It’s illegible,
the signature, with barely a letter that she can make out. Whether magic
demands he sign as Tom Riddle or allows him his new name, she doesn’t
know.
“I signed it,” Harry finally says. “I said yes.”
“You’re a brave girl,” Dumbledore replies. He sounds sad.
Harry wants to hug him, a little, and she resists. This is her headmaster, not
her friend.
“I’ll be fine,” she tells him instead. She says the same to Sirius, to Ron, to
Hermione.
*
And she is fine.
There is no monster that opens its jaws to envelop her the second she strays
into Voldemort’s presence. She arrives at noon, is motioned to a smaller
desk next to his grand one, and spends six hours doing summer homework
with her right hand while Voldemort completes paperwork with his left.
It is unnerving to hold hands with one’s enemy, but it is only one moment
of many strange moments in Harry’s life.
Voldemort doesn’t rise to any of her fears, so Harry goes again and again.
She’s there when he lives in the old Riddle manor and is present when he
moves to a grand magical old castle in the countryside. It’s properly
dramatic for a Dark Lord, she tells him, and he seems to take it as approval.
Each time she leaves, she begins to do so with less haste.
Voldemort’s skin always starts to pale again by the time she returns. Not
even soulmate magic can heal the damage he’s done to his soul, at least not
quickly.
Harry gets into the habit of taking his hand whenever she sees him.
Embarrassingly, she keeps the habit even outside of the contract’s stipulated
hours. She runs into Voldemort in the ministry once when their new
Defense teacher, Professor Crouch, takes them to visit various departments
in preparation for career counseling with their heads of house. Voldemort is
across the hall, beyond the grand fountain at the center of the room. He’s
talking to a man who doesn’t seem to fear him as he speaks enthusiastically
and waves his hands in Voldemort’s face. Voldemort looks human, if you
don’t look at the way red has once again began inching into his eyes.
Harry breaks away from her group and intrudes on Voldemort’s chat, but
her soulmate doesn’t look unhappy to see her. She slips her hand into his
and he brings it up, kissing her knuckles gently before asking her if she’s
met the minister for foreign affairs.
“What was that?” Hermione asks when Harry gets back to the group.
Judging by her tone, she saw everything.
Harry shrugs, glancing back over her shoulder. Voldemort is watching her.
“Me being an idiot?”
Harry continues being an idiot. The world doesn’t end, even when
Voldemort walks out of the final peace talks with more than his fair share of
power. Still, it’s better than war.
When the contract between them ends, Harry continues holding his hand.
Years later, Voldemort presents her with a contract of a different sort. “Only
if you wish it.”
Her gaze lingers over the details. She smiles. “You’re so possessive. It’s not
enough that I’m already your soulmate?”
He kisses her knuckles, their hands together as they so often are. “I’ve
never known anything to be enough.”
“I’ll marry you,” Harry indulges him.
And herself, too. It’s not bravery, this time; it’s just love.
End Notes
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