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Harry woke up to a pale moon of a face floating above him in the darkness.
He let out a breathless yell and scrambled upright, nearly colliding with the looming spectre. His legs tangled in the messy nest of blankets and clothes he’d made to stay warm, trapping him in place, and he began to overbalance as he struggled to free himself. Before he could fall off the camping cot in his effort to get away, a taloned hand shot out of the gloom to grab the front of his shirt and catch him.
“Careful,” Voldemort said mildly, as if he hadn’t been the cause for Harry’s panic in the first place.
“What are you doing awake,” Harry squeaked, fumbling his way upright. He squinted, struggling to make anything out in the dimness of the room. “Actually, no— what are you doing in my tent? How did you even fit in my tent?!” It was impossible to make anything out clearly at the moment, but Harry knew that there was at least twenty feet of tail attached to that face, and it had to have gone somewhere.
The naga tilted his head to one side and ignored Harry’s questions as if he hadn’t heard them. “It is winter,” he said, in the tone of one making an argument.
“Yeah, I got that impression, thanks,” said Harry, scrubbing at his sleep encrusted eyes with the back of one hand. “What with the snow and all.”
Voldemort hissed irritably and released the front of Harry’s shirt. It was difficult to assign human moods to the flatter, less expressive facial features of the naga, but Harry heard something thump in his tent as the man’s lashing tail gave his vexation away.
“Why aren’t you in school,” Voldemort demanded, rearing back.
“It’s winter hols,” Harry muttered. He shifted one of the spilled blankets up, wrapping it around his shoulders as the bitterly cold temperature of the room made him shiver. “I don’t have to be in school right now.”
“Speak properly when you answer me,” Voldemort hissed. He glowered down at Harry, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’ve never come to visit me during the winter before.”
“I didn’t expect to find you awake,” Harry replied tartly in parseltongue, rolling his eyes. Voldemort could both understand and speak English perfectly fine, but the man was obsessed with Harry’s rare, human ability to speak parseltongue. “I thought you hibernated.”
“I do,” said Voldemort shortly. He stared at Harry for a long moment, making him squirm under the baleful pressure of that bright red gaze, before reluctantly adding, “But I could smell you. It woke me up.”
“You can smell me?” asked Harry, momentarily distracted. “What do I smell like?” He tugged at his collar and sniffed discreetly. Harry thought he smelled a little stale from sleep, but otherwise nothing was particularly noticeable. Voldemort’s nose (what there was of it) must have been better than his own.
“Warm,” said Voldemort unhelpfully. He slithered closer, bracing his hands on the edge of the cot as he leaned down to study Harry intently. “And unhappy.”
“Oh,” said Harry softly. He looked down at his hands, twisted together in his lap.
“You are never here during winter,” Voldemort repeated. “What has changed?” Harry bit his lip. While he made it a point to never lie to Voldemort, precisely, there were certain– facets of his life he had opted to keep private. Such as what the Dursleys truly thought about their freakish ward.
“I turned seventeen this summer,” Harry said tentatively. He wasn’t sure if Voldemort remembered; it wasn’t uncommon for the naga to lose track of human timekeeping, distracted by his own studies and experiments with magic.
“An adult, by wizarding standards,” Voldemort hissed. Something moved in the dark behind him as he shifted his weight, rearranging his coils.
“Yeah,” said Harry. “Only, I didn’t realize that meant, uh, that I’d start getting mail. I never had before,” he explained awkwardly. “No one ever wanted to talk to me, I guess. When my parents died, they left me some money– I thought it was just the one vault, but apparently there’s more. A lot more. The goblins sent me a letter.”
“So, you returned to deal with your vaults?”
“Not exactly,” Harry hedged. “Unfortunately, one of the letters must have been misrouted, since it went to the Dursleys first.”
Voldemort went perfectly still, in the way only something cold blooded could manage. “Your guardians,” he said softly, his voice precise and emotionless.
“Mmm,” agreed Harry, pulling his knees up to his chest. “That would have been bad enough, but I’m in my seventh year at Hogwarts, so it’s not like I was planning to go back after I graduated. Only…”
Harry let his voice trail off. He buried his face against his blanket covered knees and took a deep, steadying breath. “My Aunt Petunia– she’s my mum’s sister, yeah? So she knows a bit about our world and all. I guess she remembered how to get to Diagon or something, because she sent the Headmaster an owl.”
“Dippet?”
“What? No,” Harry said, startled. He looked up at Voldemort and frowned– how had the Naga known that name anyway? “The current Headmaster is a man named Albus Dumbledore.”
That drew a reaction out of Voldemort. Several things went crashing to the ground as his tail lashed furiously (probably Harry’s trunk and the old chair he had found abandoned on the side of the road and dragged back to camp, Harry thought automatically) and Harry flinched away. The steel pipe frame of the old camping cot he had borrowed from Mrs. Figg squealed as it crumpled and bent beneath the powerful grip of the naga’s angry hands.
“Dumbledore,” Voldemort snarled.
“Do you know each other?” Harry asked, shocked out of his silence.
“He was the one responsible for the enchanted ‘sleep’ you found me in,” Voldemort hissed, his high voice gaining a silken, glacial edge. “We have had– disagreements in the past about the world and the way it should be run, so to speak, and he managed to catch me in a moment of temporary weakness. I had put off speaking to him about his sins until your– situation– was more settled; that was apparently remiss of me. I apologize.”
“No, no,” said Harry, reaching out instinctively. He curled his hand around the naga’s bicep and attempted to tug him closer. It was like trying to coax stone to bend. “It’s not– it’s no one’s fault. Things just happen, sometimes,” Harry finished lamely.
Voldemort’s cold glare made it clear what he thought of such empty platitudes. Harry sighed.
“Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?” He asked, scooting closer and ignoring the way the damaged cot creaked ominously.
Voldemort wrapped his arms around Harry instantly, pulling him back against the Naga’s broad chest and tucking him under his chin. His body was freezing cold, even with the blanket between them to insulate, but his heartbeat thumped steadily in Harry’s ear. Harry immediately relaxed, curling up in the hold of his monster and feeling, for the first time in a week, safe again.
“Anyway,” Harry continued after he had made himself comfortable. “I was planning on staying at Hogwarts for Christmas, like I usually do, but I got a letter from my aunt telling me to come home. She said it was important, and I guess… I dunno. I was dumb.”
“No,” Voldemort murmured, his voice a rumble in his chest. “You were a child on the cusp of adulthood. It is only natural that you hoped that maybe, those who should have loved you all along would finally have come to their senses.” He shifted, tugging Harry closer. “It is not a weakness I am prone to, but it is very human.”
Harry laughed weakly. “You always make human sound like such an insult,” he teased.
“For all, but you, my darling, it would be.” Voldemort considered his statement, then added in a musing tone, “Perhaps you have enough snake in you to make your defects more tolerable.”
“You’re so sweet,” Harry snarked. “So, I went home. Only, when I got there, the Dursley’s weren’t alone.”
“Dumbledore,” Voldemort growled.
“Dumbledore,” Harry agreed. “I don’t know what they told him– probably the same dreck they told the neighbors growing up. That I was a delinquent, that I was breaking things and behaving like a hoodlum, that I ate them out of house and home and stole money and, y’know. That sort of crap.”
“And he believed them,” Voldemort said flatly.
“‘Course he did,” Harry said, bile rising in the back of his throat. “People always do. He sat me down in the living room and scolded me for ‘muggle baiting’. He said that he had hoped that by placing me with my relatives, I would have learned that we were all people, deserving of respect– did you know that he was the one who placed me there?” Harry asked rhetorically. “Because I didn’t.”
“He has always been fond of leaving young wizards with abusive muggles in the interests of ‘teaching them a lesson,’” Voldemort hissed. There was something about his tone that made Harry perk up and take notice; he was clearly talking from experience. Someone he had been close to before? The naga’s past was shrouded in secrecy and Harry carefully added the new information to the short mental list of things he had figured out about his friend. He tried to ignore the jealousy that flared beneath his breastbone at the idea of Voldemort having other people he tolerated as much as he did Harry.
“He then suggested that the least I could do was make things right, and pay the Dursleys back for all of the care they had given me over the years,” Harry continued bitterly. “I tried to tell him about the abuse, but he brushed me off and talked over me. He didn’t want to hear anything I had to say in my defense.”
“Once he decides a thing is true, his belief in that thing is unshakable. It is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness,” Voldemort said. He began to card gently through Harry’s unruly curls, careful of the sharp nails on the tips of his fingers. “He was biased against you from the moment you sorted Slytherin, my dear.” He brushed his lips against the crown of Harry’s head and whispered, “And do not think that I have missed the fact that there were aspects of your childhood that you have kept from me, Harry. We will be talking about that later.”
“Yeah,” said Harry, already resigned. He had expected this outcome when he had decided to tell this story. Voldemort would drag the rest of his history out of him, one way or another– a distant part of Harry wondered if his relatives would survive the experience.
“So,” Voldemort prompted. “The Dursleys wanted– what, money, I presume?” The distaste in his voice for such plebian motives was very clear.
“Yep. My uncle waited for the Headmaster to leave before he turned on me, but I guess he had forgotten that I was of age and that the trace had been lifted,” Harry said. “I didn’t actually cast anything at them– I didn’t trust Dumbledore not to use it against me somehow,” he explained. “But I did summon my things, and I used the portkey you gave me to travel here.”
“Good,” said Voldemort. There was a certain smugness to his voice, although Harry couldn’t see his face to get a better read on his expression. “That was why I gave it to you.”
Harry hadn’t realized he had been tense, but a part of him that had been braced for rejection relaxed at those words. “I hoped you wouldn’t mind.” he said tentatively. “One of my neighbors gave me her spare tent before I left for Hogwarts earlier this year– she knew about the Dursleys, at least a little, and she knew I wasn’t going back. I think she thought I was planning on camping rough until I found a job,” Harry added. Mrs. Figg’s kindness had moved him deeply. “But since I had it, it seemed safer to stay here until winter break ended and I could return to Hogwarts.”
“You’re not going,” Voldemort said instantly. His grip on Harry tightened.
“I have to graduate,” Harry pointed out.
“Dumbledore will be there.”
“I don’t think he’d hurt me,” Harry said, confused. “He might scold me and look disappointed, and I can probably forget about trying to be an Auror now. He’s going to tank my prospects with the Ministry for sure by making people think I’m a bigot, but I’m of legal age. He can’t force me to give my money away.”
Voldemort shifted, draping his tail across Harry’s legs and pinning him to the bed. It could have made Harry feel trapped; instead, he just felt protected. “If he threatens you– if he does anything you do not like–,” Voldemort said at last.
“I use the portkey and come home,” Harry said promptly. He didn’t realize his slip of tongue until Voldemort made a soft, wounded noise behind him.
“Home,” he said slowly, tasting the word.
“Is… is that alright?” Harry asked, suddenly unsure. He hadn’t meant to say it, it had just popped out. Voldemort had always tolerated Harry’s company, but it was difficult to tell if the terse, grumpy naga really liked him or if he simply viewed Harry as a useful pair of extra hands. He knew Voldemort valued his ability to speak Parseltongue, but that wasn’t the same as valuing Harry. Even the compliments Voldemort doled out sparingly had a sharp edge to them, and what had seemed so certain a moment ago now felt shaky and unsure.
Harry opened his mouth to take it back, but before he could speak, Voldemort’s grip on him tightened.
“You will come home,” Voldemort demanded. His tongue flicked out, tasting the back of Harry’s neck. “You should stay close to me, so I can keep you safe.”
“I want to keep myself safe,” Harry objected. “I was thinking of going for my Defense mastery–”
“Then I will teach you everything you need to know for that,” Voldemort said dismissively. “There is no one more qualified for the task than I. Just come home to me, Harry Potter, and I will give you anything you need to be happy here.” The vow rang in the quiet of the midwinter night, heavy with magic and threaded with a vulnerability that pulled on Harry’s heart.
He wasn’t the only one who was lonely when they were apart, then. Harry swallowed, blinking back tears.
“I don’t need anything else, if you’ll be here,” he said. “You’ve always been enough for me.”
“You’ve always been home.”