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At first, the persistent sound that finally roused Harry from his sleep seemed to him like the dependable, miserable beeping of an alarm clock, with just the right amount of robotic shrillness and inhumanly perfect rhythm to pull happy dreamers into the heavy torment of the waking world.
That was most likely what disturbed him – not the annoyance of the continuous noise right by his sleeping head, but the oddness of an alarm clock waking him up. He’d never had an alarm clock before, not when Aunt Petunia’s sharp knocks on his cupboard door or Dudley’s thundering footsteps on the stairs served as such a reliable wake-up call.
Even unconscious, Harry knew he had done nothing to deserve the privilege of his very own clock.
He woke into a blurry world with a strangled gasp.
A shadowy figure loomed over him, indistinguishable without Harry’s glasses, but his surroundings were unusually airy and light. Instead of the gloomy darkness of his cupboard, he seemed to be in a sterile, bright room – a hospital, he deduced with a squint, the beeping of a heart monitor next to him suddenly less steady in his startled confusion.
He was probably in massive trouble. Uncle Vernon would not be happy to have to take Harry home from the hospital or handle getting him any medication, and Harry idly wondered if Uncle Vernon would try his luck with just leaving Harry behind. After all, he’d heard his aunt and uncle whispering about how to get rid of him without getting caught before – it was only a matter of time before they started executing their poorly-hidden plans. Harry was almost looking forward to the day he was dropped in a ditch somewhere, left to fend for himself. At least if he died on the streets, he wouldn’t have to hear Dudley laughing at him in his final moments. What more could a little boy ask for?
But he’d already forgotten the tall figure in front of him, whom Harry only just now realized had started grumbling at Harry’s lack of attention.
“Are you not alarmed at my appearance, little boy?” said the dark blob, his voice low and raspy. “Surely you can’t have become accustomed to seeing monsters at this age.”
“Well, I can’t see you at all,” replied Harry matter-of-factly, looking in the direction of the shadow’s head. “I don’t have my glasses on.”
The shadow-man drew back with a scoff – Harry imagined he was probably throwing his head back in frustration, as Aunt Petunia often did – and made his way to Harry’s side, pressing the familiar plastic frame of his glasses into his hand.
“Look on my face, ye mighty, and despair,” said the shadow-man wryly, his voice dripping with the obnoxious condescension of grown-ups. Harry had no idea what he meant, of course, so he went ahead and put on his glasses.
The shadow-man looked weird. His dark hood couldn’t hide that his face was completely hairless, his bald head reminiscent of the eggshells from the breakfasts Harry cooked, made more unsettling with the subtle grooves and discoloration of the veins just barely visible through his thin, pale skin. In the place of a nose, two vertical slits ran down the center of his face, as if someone had taken scissors to the man’s face and left two identical slashes to flap in the wind. In fact, his red eyes were the least unusual aspect of his appearance, as piercing and freakish as they were.
But still, he wasn’t scary.
Harry knew scary. Dudley was scary, hunting Harry down at every opportunity, a sick thrill in his eyes whenever Harry was trapped with him, helpless and at his mercy. Aunt Petunia was scary, locking him away in his cupboard for what felt like years at a time on a whim, quick with a too-vicious slap on the back of Harry’s head when he was misbehaving. Uncle Vernon was scary, with his red face and his loud, stomping feet and the disgusting heat of his breath as he shook Harry’s shoulders and yelled his horrible threats.
Yes, Harry was very good at identifying scary people. There was something in the curl of their lips, the surety in their eyes, the confidence in their own superiority and Harry’s vulnerable worthlessness. The shadow-man may have looked like a half-formed nightmare come to life, but there was something soft in his monster-eyes, something fragile. He didn’t look mean. He just looked tired.
Harry gnawed his lip, unsure of what to say. The shadow-man was just looking at him expectantly, as if expecting some grand reaction. Was Harry disappointing him? Was he meant to be performing somehow?
“Hello,” he landed on eventually, speaking shyly. “My name is Harry. Why are you in my hospital room?”
The shadow-man tilted his head, his face still. “I am Lord Voldemort. And I’m here as a gift to someone I care for very dearly.”
Harry wrinkled his nose. “Me?”
Voldemort laughed quietly. “Someday, perhaps. The man I love has sent me back, oh, about five times now, to fix the mistakes I made in my first lifetime. I’m optimistic I can impress him this time around. Anything to avoid living through disco again.”
Harry was beginning to think that Voldemort wasn’t quite right in the head, or that perhaps he came from an alternate dimension of shadowy, bald, slit-nosed people where the rules of the universe were completely different. It would explain quite a bit.
“And so I’d like to get you away from here, Harry Potter,” said Voldemort, bending down a bit to Harry’s eye level. “Away from your aunt and uncle, away from your insipid Muggle neighbors. I’ll bring you to people who will cherish you and care for you, and you’ll never go hungry again. How does that sound?”
Nothing had ever sounded better, and though Harry still thought there was a solid chance the shadow-man was simply off his rocker, he hoped the shadow-man took him far, far away from the Dursleys before the cops found him and took him to an asylum.
“Will I have to shave my head like you?” asked Harry.
Voldemort hesitated, his lips twitching. Harry watched him think it over, deliberating carefully, before he finally sighed and shook his head. “No, child. You can keep your head of hair, as untameable as it may be.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” said Harry, his voice wavering despite his best efforts to seem brave. “Just…please don’t ask the Dursleys first. They’ll tell you horrible lies about me, and then you’ll change your mind about taking me away, and then they’ll get rid of me anyway. You can’t trust anything they say.”
Voldemort reached out one delicate hand from the depths of his baggy robes, slowly stroking Harry’s hair off of his forehead. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been touched with so much tender care – for a moment, he felt a prickling behind his eyes at just how paternal the gesture seemed before hurriedly blinking it away.
“They’ll never say anything to you again,” murmured Voldemort soothingly, voice low and soft. “I’ll make sure you’re taken care of, child. You have nothing to worry about.”
And though Harry still wasn’t completely sure if Voldemort was being honest about everything, for a brief, unusually peaceful moment, he believed him.