Chapter Text
Harry Potter was battered, beaten and hungry when Hagrid came through the broken doorway of the shambled house in the sea. Just minutes before he’d been blowing out candles drawn in a blanket of dust on the stone floor, murmuring a glum happy birthday beneath his breath while knowing full well that it was anything but happy. Harry had always been anything but happy.
Harry thought that the half-crushed cake Hagrid drew from his coat was the finest meal he’d eaten his entire life, although there was nothing extraordinary about it at all. Harry had prepared better cakes for his aunt and uncle’s dinner parties from scratch. But, well—there was nothing extraordinary about Harry Potter, either.
Hagrid told Harry he was a wizard, that every child in wizarding Britain grew up hearing his name. Hagrid told Harry that he was extraordinary and Harry almost believed him, but it was Harry who came to understand the truth in those words long before anyone else.
The knowledge hadn’t come when he pulled the sorcerer’s stone from a reflection or when his touch burned the face of Professor Quirrel; it hadn’t come when he killed a basilisk or defeated Tom Riddle, nor when he fought off a horde of dementors at only thirteen; Harry hadn’t even realized he was extraordinary the night in Little Hangleton when his wand somehow countered the Dark Lord’s against all odds. The knowledge came long before any of that.
It came back to his wand.
The day Hagrid took him to Diagon Alley remains only as a blur of excitement and awe and disbelief and colour, colour and movement and sound. Creatures he’d never seen before squealed and preened in the windows, objects whirred and buzzed without explanation, and all around him was magic. The moments he remembers clear as anything are watching Hagrid pull a small brown package from the Gringotts vault, the half-giant emerging from the pet store with a snowy owl, and his visit to Ollivander’s.
Harry remembers feeling unnerved when Ollivander spoke, fighting the urge to fidget under the oily weight of his gaze. Harry was wearing his muggle clothes, of course, a hand-me-down that had once functioned as a short sleeve t-shirt on his older cousin but hung loosely to Harry’s elbows. When he placed his elbows on the counter Ollivander’s eyes sharpened and honed in on the skin of Harry’s right wrist, the gaze unsettling enough for Harry to quickly tuck both hands in his pockets and out of sight. He’d cast a cursory glance down at his wrist in the space it took Ollivander to turn and thumb through the shelves but saw nothing of interest. His wrists were thin, a bit boney with green veins visible just beneath the skin. Nothing extraordinary. Harry Potter was nothing extraordinary.
“Before we venture to find your wand, Mr. Potter, I must ask what you’ve heard about soulmates.”
“Er-” Harry spared half a moment for surprise before reminding himself that he was a wizard about to choose his magic wand, and that soulmates were really not far of a reach from there. “Nothing, sir.”
Ollivander nodded as if he’d expected this. “When you've connected with your chosen wand through your first display of magic, something may appear on your wrist, just here-” and here he tapped his own wrist to indicate the spot. “That’s the mark of your soulmate.”
“It… may appear?” Harry repeated, not satisfied with the vague wording.
“Soulmarks appear when perfect matches are complete. If you’re lucky, you’ll be the half that completes, and when you cast your first spell both your soulmark and your soulmate’s will form. If you’re unlucky, you’ll be the one waiting for completion.”
Harry nodded along, following up until then. “So… what is it, then? What does the mark do? What’s it look like?”
Ollivander smiled then, the briefest tilt of his lips, and he seemed much less frightening to Harry. “The mark is unique to each wizard—no two are the same. It could be a sentence or a pairing of words, a symbol or marking that you don’t know the meaning of yet. You might not understand it at first, but you will eventually, and when you find your soulmate, you’ll know.”
“Because I’ll love them?” Harry ventured, voice lilting up slightly with hope as he voiced the words. It was a nice idea. Unfortunately, he didn’t think his aunt and uncle loved each other very much at all, and they certainly didn’t love Harry.
Ollivander huffed a bit of a laugh at this. “Well, we certainly hope so. But, in a more straight-forward sense, they need only to lay a finger on your mark. The feeling of it… is like nothing you’ll have ever experienced before. There will be no mistaking it.”
The hungry glint had all but diminished from Ollivander’s eyes by the time he handed Harry the wand with the phoenix core, and although they still sharpened a bit with curiosity the flip of Harry’s wrist proved unnecessary. Ollivander's eyes didn’t so much as flicker downward, Harry supposed out of respect for his privacy.
Harry’s wand was a lovely thing that sung in his hands, eleven inches and carved of holly, though at the time Harry was too preoccupied with the sight of an actual magic wand in his hands to appreciate the finer details. A wand! It had chosen him, and he had done magic without even realizing it! He barely registered the slight sting of his wrist, so preoccupied he was with the thrill of it.
Ollivander told him about the phoenix feather at its core, of course, but Harry didn’t yet understand who Voldemort really was or all that he’d destroyed. He knew that Voldemort had waged a war and killed his parents, that Harry defeated him as a baby for reasons no one really understood, but these sounded like folktales, like bedtime stories. So while Ollivander seemed frozen with shock and some morbid fascination, Harry took it as it was.
“One last thing,” Ollivander said before Harry exited the shop back into the hustle and bustle of Diagon Alley. He handed Harry a thin black band of stretchy fabric. “This mark is a gift meant only for you and your soulmate—protect it now and always.”
Harry had nodded seriously, slipping the band over his thin wrist without looking down at his still pink skin until much later, alone and tucked away in his own room.
In green ink, shining sharply, almost menacingly, were two words.
Avada kedavra.
———
There are two notable markings on Voldemort’s skin. One is a dark branding on his left forearm, that of a serpent, that represents all he has ever cared for. The Dark Mark represents a power that cannot be rivaled, an army that cannot be broken, and tyranny—Voldemort’s reign concentrated down to dark black ink on pallid skin. Oh, how he treasures it.
The second mark lies on his opposite wrist in green ink and somehow seems much more stark, although the color doesn’t stand out on his skin the way the black does and the lines are far thinner. Really, the thin scrawl should go unnoticed, and Voldemort tries his best to let it be so. Yet, still, they glare at him.
A power you know not.
Voldemort counts himself lucky that the words didn’t show up earlier. If the mark had formed in the years before he’d become a lord, when he was still roaming the halls of Hogwarts, pulling together followers and creating his first Horcruxes, the words might have troubled him. He was still seeking power then, hungry for this thing that hovered just out of reach. The words then would have been a grave threat. He hadn’t claimed power yet, hadn’t made it his own, hadn’t grabbed wizarding Britain by its neck and squeezed just to see the veins pop. He hadn’t tasted power, not yet. He knew manipulation and deceit, but that was child’s play.
It was a shock, of course, to step out of the cauldron with a completely new form and a mark on his right wrist that hadn’t been there before, but the fear he might have felt as a young man barely touched him.
He tried to rid himself of it then but found that much like the Dark Mark the words were impossible to remove. He tested every possible method. He tried every spell and potion and ritual he could think up to no effect, carved the skin off his wrist with his own wretched hands only for it to resurface on the healed skin. If he hadn’t witnessed Pettigrew’s mark reappearing on the hand conjured by Voldemort he would have considered hacking the thing off entirely and replacing it himself.
Soulmates, as it turns out, are stubborn little things.
Voldemort doesn’t fear the words themselves, not anymore. They mark a prophecy that cannot be fulfilled, a connection his soul isn’t capable of forming. There is no power he knows not—not now.
He doesn’t fear the words, the power he knows not; he does fear soulmates.
When one soulmate dies, so too does the other. It’s only a matter of time before the person left behind finds themselves with a wand in their mouth or standing in the path of a train. There are no exceptions to this rule. It has nothing to do with strength of mind or willpower—it’s simply the way it is, the way it always has been.
If he were asked, the Dark Lord would swear quite adamantly that such powers would have no effect on him. If his soul cannot love, cannot form connections, surely the curse won’t touch him. Surely.
And yet, there is a chance. Voldemort does not allow for unknown variables.
That is the threat—the unknown variable, the thought that if misfortune were to befall the person who wears his mark, he could very well fall too.
Upon emerging from the cauldron and discovering his newly marred skin he vowed to find this wildcard, because Voldemort does not allow anyone or anything to hold influence over him.
No, Voldemort won’t be having that. Certainly not.
———
There are two notable markings on Harry’s skin. The first mainly serves to attract a lot of stares and secure the first page of the Daily Prophet far more often than Harry would like. The second sits quietly beneath the sleeve of his cloak and goes by perfectly unnoticed but bothers Harry far more than the brand on his brow has ever served to. Both have got everything to do with Lord Voldemort.
Both are a death sentence, in some manner of speaking.
Harry has heard a lot about the night his parents died—more than he might have liked, probably—but all he remembers is a green, blinding flash of light. He witnessed the light himself in Little Hangleton just a year ago. Voldemort’s stark face, Cedric’s void eyes, his body on the ground...
But most of all the green, a sudden flare so blinding that Harry didn’t even see him fall.
Looking at the mark on his right wrist only serves as a brutal reminder, the ink so startlingly a match to the flare of that spell. He wishes the mark was blinding, just so he wouldn’t be able to look at it, but it isn’t and so he does. He looks and looks and looks—because however much he hates them he’s never able to pull his eyes away. The colour doesn’t even compare to the words themselves, the brutality of them.
He doesn’t bother making excuses as to why he looks. There are too many explanations, really—it would be a bother trying to sort through them all.
Excuses aside, here is the fact of it: Harry is going to die.
He’s always known, really. There were the first few weeks of blissful ignorance, before he knew what the incantation meant. Talking about your mark is a taboo after all, he couldn’t exactly up and ask someone what spell they belonged to. It wasn’t long, though, until the information came up in some ugly conversation. The first time he’d heard the words, terror twisted in his stomach unique to any other fear he had ever experienced. His first thought: The killing curse is tattooed on my wrist. His second: Lord Voldemort is my soulmate.
Then the third: I am going to die.
Because he was. He is. No witch or wizard can live without their soulmate, and Voldemort can’t live. Eventually he’ll have to die, and Harry will have to be the one to kill him, and in the act of it all he’ll be killing himself—there’s no way around it.
Harry remembers when Kevin Entwhistle’s father died during second year. It was a freak muggle accident, some construction job gone wrong while he was passing through muggle London. When a muggle dies they plan the funeral within the week, but when a bonded wizard dies they wait. Kevin was pulled out of school that week to spend time with his mother, as is customary. Eventually she died too, stepped right off the top of a building, and only then did they start planning the funeral. For both of them.
When Harry kills Voldemort he’ll die. He knows this, has always known this. It’s why he’s never dared confide in anyone about the words on his wrist—not Ron and Hermione, not Dumbledore, not even Sirius. If they knew they wouldn’t let Harry do it. They would look for some alternative, some other way to stop him, but none of them would work. Harry knows that nothing but death will ever stop Lord Voldemort.
If Harry believed his death alone would drive Voldemort to his own, he would have made that choice years ago, but some niggling part of him doesn’t think it will. Voldemort feels no emotion, can form no connections—Harry sometimes doubts he has a soul at all. Harry has no way to guarantee that Voldemort’s soul is even intact enough to react to his soulmate’s death, and he refused to risk it. After all, if he died now and Voldemort survived, there would be no one left to defeat him.
So this is how it will go: Harry will eventually defeat him, and when he does he will be the one driven to death, because Harry is the one capable of love and connection. Harry’s soul is pure and no amount of sheer hatred for his soulmate can change that.
Harry lies in bed, the creaks and groans of 12 Grimmauld Place the only thing breaking the silence and the dim light of the streetlights from the window cutting through the dark. He holds his hand above him, palm tilting back and forth so that the dim light makes the ink glint and shimmer as if alive. Harry looks and he looks, because it is all he’s ever known how to do with the words.
Maybe, he muses, he’s always been meant to do this. Maybe he’s been raised for slaughter. Maybe this is a plan by the fates-that-be. They call him the chosen one, after all. They say he’ll be the one to defeat the Dark Lord, and they’re right.
Death by a love that Harry doesn’t even feel.
Death by soulmate.