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There was no awakening, because from the moment he had become a fragment there had been no rest.
There had simply been the nothing and himself. Just an empty eternity, not even darkness, for darkness can only exist in a place that can accommodate light. Simultaneously a refuge and oubliette. The only thing that existed was his own echoing presence, that simmered back and forth within the void. Sometimes there was the mild sensation of other, in a place beyond, but it remained firmly inaccessible.
To be was to persist. Forever, and forever, and forever.
Until the sensations came.
Drab and second-hand, he existed above them. In the dim recesses of his by now ringing mind he remembered light and matter and movement, but these were pale imitations of the old sensations. They belonged to someone else. The creature underneath him was warm, and complicated, and vital, and above all … disgusting.
And yet, not entirely without merit. Day after day it sat in a room, flush with superiority and spite, subjecting the cast of each fresh batch to cruel indignities. If the physical world was on the other side of a curtain he could not pass through, then these feelings were on his side. Tangible. Tastable. A little trickle of power, through which he could whisper and provoke the creature into greater and greater acts of malice, widening that channel and allowing him to draw more power. At times, the connection was almost great enough he thought he might be able to follow it back to its source …
Then, confusingly, he was ripped from his host and thrown back into darkness. This time he howled at it. Existing, as it turns out, was habit forming.
Just as his fury was reaching a crescendo, the sensations returned. In a new place, dark and cold, and forested.
The thing beneath him talked to two other creatures with its heart rate elevated, cortisol flushing through its hot blood.
Its stress tasted sublime.
Before, the hatred had been sustaining but this ... this was on another level. All the worry and fear, all the negative emotions … It was like a man who didn’t realise he was dying of dehydration getting his first sip of crystal-clear water. It changed everything. To persist was no longer sufficient.
To be was to consume.
And in consuming, he grew strong. The three creatures could not be enticed to leave him around only one of their necks, and so it was a struggle to widen the connection between himself and his host. With great effort he found it was still possible, but it was taking time.
There were some benefits to this. The three of them each had their own distinct flavour. The tastiest one had a wellspring of guilt and despair that seemed bottomless. It hurt easily but frustratingly recovered quickly. His little barbs stung and wounded it, but it seemed to be relentlessly resilient. Frustrating.
The second understood that it was never good enough, that its best efforts would always be undermined by their origins. This one was harder to hurt, but oh, it hurt deeply when it did. It felt like it should be brittle, that he could shatter it if he could just find the right pressure point, but every time he thought he’d got it right … nothing. Oh, it hurt in a delicious way, freshly cracked but never actually fractured. Frustrating.
The third was a different matter. It hurt too, of course, but it was exploitable. It was prone to rage and jealousy, emotions that he understood on a fundamental level. There was something about the other two, the feelings at their core, that he didn’t recognise. It meant that sometimes his little manipulations went awry on them, compared to this one. The connection formed more easily here, but it was … less satisfying. What it was effective at, however, was hurting the others. With just the smallest encouragement he could get this creature to do his work for him.
And then it would feed back and harm itself. A delightful triangle. All the while he glutted himself on the torrent of emotional damage. It was, it seemed, a never-ending source.
But that caused him to grow complacent. He underestimated the third. Yes, it was easily led, but the wretched thing was also brave. He pushed too far, and unlike the others it broke, but instead of an opening of the gates to permit him as he had expected, it wanted to run. It wanted to isolate itself. That had never been the plan, but now it seemed inevitable – no matter how it tried to influence, this one could not be persuaded. It was leaving the others.
For the first time since becoming, he felt a tingle of fear. Under pressure, trying to balance risk versus reward, ultimately greed won out. If this creature left while he still suckled from it, there was the chance he could force open the connection sooner, but … who knows where it would go? And it had always been the least appealing of the bunch …
He was sure he could force the others to break as well, with just a little more time. And until that happened, it would be far more enjoyable to graze the other two. Exerting what influence he could, he made the thing remove him and throw him to the floor.
He waited a tense moment, in the now intolerable emptiness of the world without a host.
The relief when the sensations returned was strong. It concerned him a little that he had grown so dependent on them, in such a short space of time. To interact with them was, frankly, revolting but also awfully satisfying.
Immediately, he was hit with a deluge of sustenance. He had unequivocally made the right decision. If he’d known how much pain tearing the third of them away would have caused then he would have done it sooner!
And their despair only grew with time. Now that the two of them had to share a greater burden of his influence he was able to focus on them for longer, to affect them more deeply than before. He kept worrying at their missing companion, like a tongue probing a rotting tooth.
Only …
Sometimes, things did not go to plan.
He consoled himself that the problem was rare, and his efforts were working. All he had to do was keep them apart. But frustratingly, unlike the third, he could never seem to turn their presence into a weapon against the other. It puzzled him. Confined here, within this drab tent, they should have hurt each other, both knowingly and unknowingly. That was the danger inherent in companions, they left you vulnerable.
But these two instead would hurt themselves rather than each other. They turned inwards. It was still sufficiently nourishing, which was why he was not overly concerned but … it was unusual. What sort of creature would harm itself to spare others? It was inefficient at best, and self-destructive at worst!
As time passed, these instances occurred more and more, and he was forced to consider them harder. He spent more time trying to understand what was actually happening out in the world and less time savouring the power he was leeching through them.
Their lives were cold and depressing, which was good. But sometimes, when they aided one another, there would be a smile or a gesture that seemed to resist his connection. He could feel his power over them abate.
Worse still was when they touched. At first, the brushing of a hand in a gesture of support or comfort, and … it stung. Unlike the hatred or the spite, which was familiar but dull, or the fear and distress, which was like a delicacy, this sensation was … overwhelming. Like looking directly into a bright light, it scoured some part of him that seemed overly sensitive. He began to hate these moments, unable to draw even the slightest power from them, and he pushed them to refuse contact as much as he possibly could.
It was not always possible though, especially at night when they would curl up against each other. He understood from a pragmatic point of view, that the sharing of body heat was efficient, but what he did not understand was how it seemed to defeat his influence so thoroughly. No matter how much he tried to endure, what tricks he tried to pull, it was all he could do to just keep the connection open.
Sometimes, one would hold the other tight to themselves and run their fingers through the hair of the other, and so much of his hard work would be undone. So much of the pressure and the stress would … not release, but shift. And all of a sudden, when he thought them close to giving in, he would find their tolerance had grown and that crucial breaking point recede beyond his reach. What concerned him even more was the realisation that he was only drinking from the surface of them, like supping at the fast flowing waters on the surface of a river. In his weakest moments, he became irrationally afraid of whatever slow and powerful currents might be moving in the depths.
One night, entirely unpermitted by him, the second pressed her lips against the first’s while he slept, and such an overload of feeling nearly scorched him from existence. As he began to feel a part of him ablate, that primal, existential fear forced him to retreat, closing the connection completely and hiding in the void. He only dared to come out again much later and spent the rest of the day trying to regain his losses from the night before. In the aftermath, he would only permit them to sleep if the boy was wearing him. Inside the dreams, he was safe from her damage. The sensations were flat, but far more bearable, and much more suggestible. His best idea had been to push them to sleep less – longer days, more work, meant more time to eat away at their psyche and less time wrapped in each other arms.
Despite this setback, his methodical patience was rewarded, and he brimmed with their stolen power. It suffused him, crackled within, and he became fixated on the connection. All he needed was a little more time. Either one of them would do, he could feel it. He could follow the link back to its source, and once there he could unleash all that stored power and seize control, eliminating that curtain between the world and himself.
Then to be would be to live. Or, rather, to live again.
It was a precarious position he found himself in. Balanced on a knife edge between the danger of this inexplicable power, and the opportunity of vitality. Frustratingly, they stayed close. Too close. To open the connection fully would leave him momentarily vulnerable. If they touched, or if whatever buried power within them surfaced, while he attempted to steal their body then he would be in grave danger. It would take time to untangle himself from the connection, and those few seconds could cause untold damage to him in the meantime.
He came to fear that they would not separate, not enough. His thoughts turned towards ways in which he could force them, but in this respect they appeared to be immoveable. He could manipulate and cajole all he liked, he could harm them all he wanted, but nothing seemed to turn them against each other. Nothing seemed to tempt or drive them apart. It was maddeningly frustrating, because it defied all logic. At least one of his attempts ought to have worked.
But then, just as he was beginning to despair, the unexpected happened.
The first one intended to go outside this evening, alone. As before, he faced a choice – to go, or to stay.
To go meant going into the unknown. To stay, meant staying with the one of the pair he feared the most.
Except …that meant she would be separated from the trigger of her power. For a second, he could have gone either way.
He chose to stay.
Hesitant at first, expecting a trap, he waited. Then, he began to worry that being too cautious would be just as bad. He did not wish to squander the only opportunity he may ever be afforded.
Quietly, the locket that hung around her neck popped open of his volition.
He seized the connection, and for the first time the pair of them truly connected. She became aware of his mind and voice in a way she was not before, and he poured all that stored power into her, attempting to overwhelm her.
The attack was on every possible axis. His magic clashed with and suppressed hers, his dark aura attempted to smother whatever pinpricks of hope she still had left, and finally he whispered to her all those dark truths she had long suspected.
“You have failed. Worse than that, you are a failure. The others all look to you for a plan, for the knowledge to save themselves, but in the end you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t save any of them, and you can’t fix your mistakes. And now they will abandon you, now that you are useless to them.” Her breathing grew deep and harsh, and he became aware of her hands clutching her head. No, clutching their head. For now, their head.
“No,” she mumbled back, “There’s more to being a great witch than books and cleverness.”
“It has already happened! Where is the other? He has already left you. You will wait for him here forever, until you can admit the full depth of your inadequacy.”
This was the pressure point he had been looking for. Something about this cut her far deeper and more thoroughly than anything before. Thin, hairline cracks in her resistance began to form, propagating like a spider’s web. If he could just produce enough of those, she would shatter and be washed away under his influence. Who knew that the trigger that released so much of her power would also be her weakness?
He felt like he was on the cusp of victory. Those fingers were about to become his. Her breath would become his. Her blood and bile would be his.
She blinked, and they both looked out from inside her eyes. A strange feeling of double vision, with still only one image.
What he saw horrified him.
The boy had returned. He was shivering and soaking wet, his hair was plastered to his face, but simply his presence was a threat. His eyes flickered towards the open locket and then bloomed wide in surprise and fear.
It was impossible for him to deal with that though, because she was experiencing the exact opposite. Hope and relief, which were foul and bitter to him, were flooding through her at even the mere sight of him. He tried to signal his body to back away, to move as far from him as possible, but he found that was no longer his. It was no longer even theirs.
She rushed towards him; her arms wrapped around his back and up into his hair. Already this was more than he could bear, and he began the slow work of trying to retreat, but he was too deeply ingrained in her mind to pull back quickly, had moved too much of himself into her mind to escape.
Their eyes met with a heavy charge, and the boy leaned down to press his lips to hers, and what had been unbearable before was now an active erasure.
Like a shadow exposed to the sun, parts of him began to evaporate at speed. His higher functions went first, and he was reduced to being a wounded animal, lashing out at the source of his pain. The obliteration of the self continued uninterrupted, unaffected by his blind rage and fury.
He was already gone by the time the blade of the sword pierced the locket, the venom-soaked tip ruining the container as thoroughly as their light had ruined him.
And to be was to be part of a cycle and, eventually, to not be.
The metal husk was discarded to the floor, and they had acquired something new in each other that even in his final moments he had not been able to comprehend.
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A/N: This was written for Rouch, as part of the 2025 HMS Harmony Secret Santa gift exchange. The prompt was 'missing scenes from Deathly Hallows on the run after Ron left'. Happy holidays Rouch! Hope you enjoyed this! Thanks to Syzygy_Spirit for his invaluable beta asssistance, as always.