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This fic was inspired by Maki's art: support her at @shelter-maki0 on tumblr or @ma_o_kl on twitter.
Tomorrow Never Comes - Ruby the Hatchet
Look to the sky, my love
I see tomorrow
There's a hangman to my right
You won't need anyone, except for me now
Harry’s burden was the weight of Voldemort. His body, constructed from the original biological instruments in a simple pewter cauldron—blood, bone, and sinew—was sinister in its make and dense with serpentine power. It worked in tandem with gravity to make Harry bend.
The dark lord remained asleep despite the scratchy thicket of brambles and bushes as Harry pushed through the forest.
His head pounded war drums, and his heart pulsed into overdrive. Dying and returning was not easy on the physical self. But most of all, his feet hurt. They were tired. They were bare on the forest floor, stabbed by sticks and snagged by sharp rocks, as if the forest knew he had passed on its ground and wanted to eat him into its ecosystem.
If he had any energy left to speak, he’d tell the trees they weren’t quite quick enough.
Voldemort shifted his head on Harry’s shoulder. He readjusted, and slowly ambled out of the tree line and into the sunset. Their blood trailed behind.
The first three days and two nights, Voldemort was bereft of consciousness, yet wealthy in ailment. A fever struck deep and malicious, so much so Harry wondered if there was a fire being coaxed to life inside the man.
Tending to Voldemort was a material task. His skin molted and shed, peeling scales to reveal shinier, purer ones beneath. Voldemort’s sweat rose to gallons as he continued to toss and turn with fever, demanding a supply of new clothes. Early morning of the fourth day, his eyes opened.
They were still red, but now with flecks of dark brown sat innocuously in the irises.
Voldemort was quiet as he observed the surroundings. His position in bed, laying on a simple cot in lounge trousers and a large shirt — Harry’s clothes. The small room they resided in, courtesy of an inn Harry’d found which was cloaked enough itself that the keepers refused to question the disguises they wore. Then Harry, who was asleep in the woodboned chair in the corner, with a single cloak to cushion the sharp digs of its architecture.
The cot was accompanied by a simple nightstand. There was a small bucket of water where a rag sagged over the rim. Voldemort discovered a duplicate of it on top of his forehead, cool to the touch where his scales were hot. There were bottles of used potions that smelled of ginger and peppermint.
Rain began to pepper the windows.
When the candlelight flickered on Harry Potter’s face, it lit up the lightning streaking across his forehead. His hair had grown out but, unconscious, he was not awake to reflexively cover his scar with it.
Voldemort knew that scar intimately. Today, it looked old and aged. Not dormant, not containing any depths. A surface scratch.
He was too exhausted for the thoughts rushing him, but before he could gather the effort to leave he fell asleep to the sound of rain beneath Potter’s steady breathing.
The continent was easy to get lost in. Better, to hide in.
“Your most brilliant idea was Romania,” gritted Voldemort.
“They’ll kill you on sight,” said Harry, “still missing home?”
Whenever Voldemort got angry, like this, his eyes would flash. The encroaching brown fled for the red to bask in Voldemort’s fury, re-living the glory days. Crimson as the blood permanently staining his hands.
He had woken days ago and attempted to leave. Too weak to fly, apparate, or kill Harry, Voldemort was forced into Harry’s custody. “The horcruxes have been recalled, your soul has to adjust to it now,” Harry would say. “It’s really no use getting mad at me for it. I didn’t make you split your soul seven times.”
“That blasted train station. That blasted Dumbledore,” Voldemort would seethe. He would throw his spoon. “You are a terrible cook!”
“You can make soup yourself when you get better. Just be grateful I’m not spoon feeding you—I know I am.”
“When I get better…” I’ll kill you. I’ll kill everyone. I’ll destroy you all. I’ll end this world.
Voldemort was angry. Unfortunately for him, he was tired even more.
They left Romania in favor of Albania’s dark forest. Voldemort wanted potion ingredients, and Harry was the only one who could apparate him. They set up camp between the mossy trees by a riverbank where trout and salmon inhabited.
Voldemort wanted to put him to work.
There were some lines he wouldn’t cross. “I don’t answer to you.”
Dark lord, monster, something human that looked animal in the mirror; he was quiet.
He observed Harry, and Harry withstood it. He bargained with a saint, “potions are an affordable market with a large profit margin and infinite demand. I need ingredients. You need money.”
Harry scoffed. “You want money. Why?”
On the dot. Voldemort didn’t want to answer.
Harry pressed it like a cut. “Why?”
“Money is a means to power,” Voldemort said.
“And everything is power,” Harry finished.
“You are full of surprises, Harry.”
Voldemort called him Potter when he was angry and Harry when he wanted to get under Harry’s skin.
“How so?” Harry set their folded laundry down. “Power is in everyone. You had power, and people were dying to your evil. Now you don’t, people are dying to nature. Fudge had power. He used it to silence his enemies. Dumbledore had power. He used it to protect others. The public has power, and they used it to turn a blind eye. Everything is power. Power isn’t everything.”
“Contradictory,” Voldemort accused.
“Conditional.”
“Cunning. My magic is not ready yet. I require money to build myself an identity.”
“Starting over?” Harry asked. Voldemort was silent. “Write a list down. The practice will help you regain your strength.”
Late at night, Potter hissed in his sleep.
It was an utter massacre. A humiliation in hand to end the century with. 1998, Voldemort thought, 1998—still a fool.
In the absence of Lord Voldemort the dark lord and Harry Potter the exalted savior, magical Britain flourished. Activists pushed for a proper fair trial system. Laws were written and rewritten. Kingsley Shacklebolt was a phenomenal minister. It was as if once the two actors had disappeared, everyone came to their senses. Their blindfolds lifted. Everything was great.
Everything was horrible for being great.
Voldemort could feel his claws snap off, nothing to dig into the world with. His long earned mark erased. The first war was never truly recovered. The second, shut down before it could properly begin. He was supposed to have Hogwarts. The ministry. He was supposed to have it all.
Now, he had an assortment of ingredients in front of him for a basic nutrients potion to sell in the market. France was in a potion drought, thus potioneers and merchants were clamoring for a spot in the shops. Harry remained adamant they make their potions accessible, otherwise he won’t work. It had the added bonus of cutting legs off their competition—not that the boy knew that.
He knew war, he didn’t know business was war.
Voldemort hummed. “Do you believe yourself to be great?”
Potter was doing inventory. “I don’t think about myself.”
Voldemort wanted to doubt that statement but also thought it may explain some of the airheadedness. “Great people, they cannot be ignored. They garner attention wherever they go. We have pilgrimaged across the east because of it.”
Harry put his pen down.
“You think we’re great?”
It was not the measure of power that caught his attention. Harry was alarmed by the identification. ‘We’re’ is not ‘I’. Voldemort and Harry as one unit, not two polarized opposites. Harry looked, as Voldemort and he moved around each other with ease in the small apothecary, and thought that somewhere along the way that may have become something. He hadn’t realized that Voldemort would think so, too.
“You know we are powerful.” Voldemort sounded impatient now, slamming the pigeon toes onto his workbench. “‘Power is in everyone.’ You said it yourself. Power is in us moreso than the average person.”
“Just to clarify—you’re including me in this equation because…?”
“Because you were my horcrux, and only an advantageous and superior vessel could ever…”
He petered out when Harry began to laugh.
“As superior beings we are inherently better and better fitted to lead,” said Voldemort, choosing to ignore it.
“If we’re so superior, why is the world so much better without us in it?”
“It isn’t,” Voldemort lied.
Harry chuckled. “You don’t have to hide anything from me. We have one soul.”
The boy sure did know war. His scars and his sharp tongue proved it. Voldemort’s brown eyes flicked to Harry’s forehead. The original scar was there, an old tale from a past life.
Voldemort wanted to gauge it out until he could see Potter’s bones and brains. He wanted his mark back.
Scales & Sowilo was an off-the-path storefront for an apothecary in Nice’s magical district. There, the local residents found great value in its medicinal and ritual services. The shop remained lit with lanterns and candelabras, its shelves filled to the brim with ancient tomes on the brink of disintegration, with a cozy cramped space to peruse before sitting. Residents learned that they should always request an appointment with Mr Harry Evans, the more pleasant, civilized of the two owners. The other, less welcoming, owner went by Morty — and he was as dreadful as his deadly name implied.
“How can you two be business partners?” an older resident said, shocked. “It’s like day and night.”
“He makes the goods. Trust me, this shop wouldn’t run if he weren’t here.” Mr Evans was a polite soul, and his accented French was endearing. “Here’s your potion, let me know if you have any issues at all! Goodbye now!”
“I’d love to invite you for a drink or two—we’re celebrating…” said the butcher.
“Oh I’m sorry,” said Mr Evans bashfully, adjusting his glasses. “My business partner and I won’t be able to make it.”
“We wouldn’t mind if it were only—”
“We won’t be able to make it.” Mr Evans was polite. No one could say he wasn’t firm. “I shall take my Hebridean Black lungs, now. Thank you.”
One resident, a terribly bored teenager, that snuck in to steal a polyjuice potion base had the misfortune of being caught in the act by Morty. “He spoke fluently,” the boy trembled as the town members listened in. “Red eyes—like a wolf! He warned me… should I ever come back… Oh, it was terrible. I believe him.” His increased paranoia led to their family eventually deserting the village.
Of course, with an incident like that… the rumors began circulating.
“They say he is half-wolf.”
“No—I heard he’s half-snake.”
“Did you hear of the man named death?”
“Hear of him? I saw him with my own two eyes. I live down the road from those strange folks, you know. Tall as anything, he is.”
“My child has been having nightmares ever since we walked past that shop. It’s utterly corrupted with black magic.”
“They’re surely up to nefarious deeds. Why else are they so isolated? What else could they be hiding?”
Years and years, the rumors spun their wheels, silky strands weaving together to build a tapestry that eventually became clearer and clearer. Then, one day, it reached clarity.
“Wait. That man, Evans, he hasn’t aged a day since we met him.”
After nightfall, the shop disappeared as if it had never been there in the first place.
Harry felt terribly homesick.
It became a rock lodged in his gut, then his breast, then his throat, traveling with heat as his patience waned into a sort of chaos.
“You. You want to go to Scotland.” Voldemort raised a brow, curled up snake-like on the couch as he read. He always sought out the position that would trap in maximum warmth.
“It’s been six years,” said Harry.
They had just eaten dinner Voldemort had made. Now, they sat before the crackling fireplace in their new abode in Germany’s countryside. They had arrived a few days ago after Austria. Snow fell in thick flakes onto the windowsill, layers obscuring the night sky.
“Need I remind you what you said to me, that first year?”
“No.”
Voldemort turned a page.
“I just…” Want to see them. What are they doing? What are they thinking? Did they believe him dead, just like the rest of the world, or did they know better—the way he secretly hoped they would?
Twenty-three years old and hope still felt like a dangerous word.
“No one thinks we’re alive now,” argued Harry.
“Yet they would, what was the phrase, kill me upon sight.”
Harry put his magazine down and walked over to Voldemort. His life-long nemesis peered back up at him, irises muddy with russet and brown. His cropped hair curled slightly over his forehead. Recently, the man had needed to begin shaving again.
“I wouldn’t let them,” said Harry, and climbed onto Voldemort’s lap with his knees on either side. He grabbed the book out of Voldemort’s hand—keeping a finger in to track the page—and kissed him.
As always, Voldemort clenched instinctively at the gesture, before manually relaxing into Harry’s lips. They did it languidly, softly, with the simmering heat that was always present underneath. Voldemort’s cold hands slipped under Harry’s shirt to run along his waistband and Harry exhaled shakily.
“Let’s go to Hogwarts,” he whispered against the man’s stubble. “You want to. Can’t hide from me.”
Voldemort bit his ear, sharp and painful. “You are an imp.”
Harry smiled, appropriately impish.
They were nomads. It was easy to pack all their belongings up into their suitcases and don disguises. They handed second wands and made up names to clearance, easily given entrance to the Ministry of Magic. “You’d think they’d have upped their security,” said Harry.
Voldemort silently pointed to the mage on the line to their right. They wore numerous moving, magical tattoos on their arms and neck. An auror was combing through every single tattoo.
“Oh.”
“Much has changed.” Voldemort looked around, the glassy blue eyes of his disguise reflecting the atrium’s light. “The statue is gone. I remember when…”
The grief of losing Sirius hit him in one big blow. It always happened that way. Slow, steady days, and then one reminder and he was fifteen and screaming his throat raw.
“Let’s not talk about that. Let’s go to Hogwarts, come on.”
They ended up stopping by Grimmauld place first, anyway.
Lurking underneath the invisibility cloak, watching for a sign of life in the early morning. Then, the porchlight turned on, and a gray haired woman was leading a child out by the hand. For a moment, she looked like—
“Bella,” breathed Voldemort.
Harry was caught on the child. As he watched, the boy flickered from brown hair to a bright yellow. The pair walked the opposite direction, away from them, getting smaller and smaller.
“Harry?”
It felt like his rib had impaled a lung, then. A pain worse than dying.
“That’s my godson,” Harry gasped. “Get me out of here—”
Voldemort apparated them away.
It was a disease.
Harry’s incessant obsession with other people. Rotting veins that grew up and out.
Voldemort watched as the man—for that was what he was now—repeatedly placed himself in scenarios where he’d only get hurt. The first brush with the Lupin orphan was the trigger.
“The Burrow was destroyed in sixth year.” Harry sounded haunted, more than he ever had the last half decade. Clearly, proximity was not a cure. “I don’t even know if… if they’d rebuild, you know?”
“They have the means to.” Voldemort clenched his jaw. He was learning to be… objective, rather than instantly dismissive. Harry did not listen to dismissal.
Harry smiled sadly. “Yeah. Orders of Merlin, all of them. I’ve never been prouder.”
“You received one too. Or did you forget that you banished the big bad Dark Lord?” Voldemort said sarcastically.
“I just meant—”
“Your childish need of these—”
“Childish—you want to talk about being childish?”
“Strangers who could not recognize you now—”
“Hardly their fault if I’m wearing a stranger’s face.”
“Takes away the strength within you I have seen grow the last few years.”
Harry stopped. “It’s not fair if you start talking in parseltongue you know I have a thing about that.”
Voldemort stared at Harry’s crotch.
“Bedroom.”
Harry exhaled shakily and stood up. “Okay. But we’re not done with this.”
He just stared until Harry turned red and began to walk to the bedroom. His soft steps grew quieter as he went farther in. Voldemort drained his tea and stood.
That.
No one else in the world could make Harry Potter do that. No one should hold his attention like that. No one but Voldemort.
He turned and stalked after his prey.
They do learn that the Weasley’s rebuilt their home eventually. Huddled and cloaked in the crowd of Diagon Alley, they hide amongst missing person posters with their original faces peering back at them. There they see a glimpse of red hair in the wind.
“She’s getting married.”
Voldemort looked down at Harry. His green eyes were wide, lips parted in surprise.
The boy had forgotten that while he remained in stasis, his past friends had grown up.
Heartbreak. Plain as day obvious on his face. Lightning struck-through.
“We shall have to attend the wedding,” said Voldemort.
She looked radiant walking down the aisle. Dean Thomas awaited, tears down his face as he beamed back at her, the Weasley-Grangers-Thomas-Johnson wedding parties sobbing in the audience.
Professional spies, at this point, they lurked and remained hidden.
“I just don’t understand. She was like me,” said Harry. “How…?”
Voldemort stood behind him, grabbing his wrists and turning him around, green eyes lingering and slow to arrive at their destination. “What?” the man squirmed in his hold instinctively. Voldemort tightened his grip.
“I should like you to know something. Ginny Weasley is not like you. She never was like you.” His low and decadent voice softened Harry’s expression. “No one in this world is like you. The diary horcrux chose her as a vessel only temporarily before acquiring his own corporeal form. She was but a means to an end. You, and you alone, he chose to chase. To hunt. I chose you from that very first day I heard of the prophecy’s claim because I knew that you would be formidable. I fought you because I knew you could fight back. You believe she is scarred, maimed, irrevocably. The way you have been scarred and maimed irrevocably by myself.” Voldemort’s thumb traced Harry’s scar, dark eyes watching a beautiful flush concentrate on his face. “She is damaged as one is by war. She will carry that. Still, she is not like you. She was not chosen like you. She was not as challenging as you. I bound you to me and you bound me to you because we are one. For as long as we are one, you will be unlike anyone else. Anyone who is not me.”
“Possessive.” Harry’s breath was heavy, heady.
“Practical,” said Voldemort, and Harry kissed his neck so sweetly before biting down very rudely.
“You annoy me.” Muffled into the skin he just licked, salty and soft. There were no longer tears in his eyes. “Coming back to life didn’t fix it. Did you know that?”
“I know everything.”
Eight years after the Battle of Hogwarts, the school could only be described as flourishing. A revamped house system saw that students were encouraged to collaborate and engage across barriers. The Ministry’s ongoing reforms had freed the elves from their duty to Hogwarts, and paid wizard and witch staff to carry through with their position. The population of enrolled students grew every year. Headmaster McGonagall was of strict but fair disposition.
She hired them.
“You really do seem familiar, Professor Evans. Are you absolutely sure you have no relation to the late Lily Evans?” McGonagall asked as they were leaving the office. “That red hair…”
“Oh, certainly. I’m afraid there is none. I’m from the continent, you know.”
“Right. Apologies if I’ve made you uncomfortable. I really am glad to have you and Professor Mort on board as Defence instructors. I say, I can’t quite recall the last time Hogwarts held classes taught by two professors at once… but change is welcome, these days.”
“I appreciate you agreeing to our proposal. Both of us are passionate about it—took us a while to find the perfect place.” They opened the door, where Voldemort waited for them at the window overlooking the mountains. He wore academic robes that looked utterly ridiculous.
He turned around and raised an eyebrow at Harry’s smile.
“Somewhere along the way, I think we realized we were always going to end up at Hogwarts.”