Chapter Text
The problems began almost immediately after Voldemort regained his body.
Late each night, Voldemort would be plagued with the most awful piercing headaches, which was terribly inconvenient as “late into the night” was also the best time to hold Death Eater meetings, and Voldemort’s favourite time to work. Pain relief potions did naught to alleviate the effects. Neither did addressing mundane concerns like ensuring this new serpentine body was properly maintained (having a physical form once again was at once a delight beyond description, and the most mortifying experience of his entire life, an impressive feat given that Voldemort had once as a child suffered through the indignity of having some muggle priest attempt to exorcise his magic away).
Luckily, there was often a Death Eater nearby when the migraines reached their peak intensity. Crucio did even less to relieve the pain than potions, but watching cowardly, traitorous idiots writhe on the ground while begging for mercy was always great to improve his mood.
On one such night, as servant after servant gave reports outlining their own inadequacy and it became hard for Voldemort to tell if the ache of his skull caving in was due to the regular migraines or induced by spending too long around stupidity, Voldemort found his mind wandering back to the graveyard of Little Hangleton. The vivacious green of the killing curse. The way the Diggory boy had collapsed. Potter, distraught and desperate, escaping more through luck than skill. It made something in his throat catch.
Silence was ringing loud through the room, the Death Eater’s report having trailed off long minutes ago. His followers all cowered beneath his gaze, clearly expecting some kind of reprimand or punishment. Who was he to deny them?
…though the fun was rather taken out of it when the screaming made the spikes in his skull dig deeper.
Around a week after the Hogwarts school year ended, Voldemort had a realisation. He paused mid-sentence, attention suddenly directed inward to the memories of the graveyard that so often accompanied these headaches.
The perspective was wrong. It wasn’t the view from his own eyes or that of his previous form. It wasn’t the detached perspective of a memory viewed in a pensieve. These flashes had the Diggory boy at his side, falling like a puppet with cut strings in a splash of horrifying green light, a small pale figure bundled in dark robes and cradled in Pettigrew’s arms—
Voldemort let out a hiss.
Before him, the Death Eaters quaked. He glared at each in turn, and cursed the first who flinched, before dismissing the lot. There was a lot to contemplate…
Most legilimency required direct eye contact to maintain. It was a skill more suitable for stealing a scrap of someone’s immediate thoughts rather than digging deep for secrets (though an immobility curse could make up the difference). Legilimens didn’t work across a distance, or anywhere too far to see the whites of another’s eyes.
Other varieties of mindsharing were far more rare. Twins occasionally reported a shared telepathy, though it was hard to say if those reports were genuine. A potions accident in 1913 had resulted in a link forming between two wizards’ minds, though one had apparently been driven mad by the intrusion and killed himself soon after. The most common accounts after twin telepathy were from failed rituals.
Voldemort glared at his hands. Potter’s blood ran within them.
All the more reason to kill Potter sooner rather than later. In the meantime, if he dared to contaminate Voldemort’s mind with this agonised nonsense again, he’d swiftly learn to regret it!
Two days later, as the first nails were driven into his skull and green light flared behind his eyes, Voldemort lunged for the mental thread at the back of his mind, chasing it all the way back to Potter’s head. He emerged into what he immediately recognised as a dreamscape—or perhaps a nightmare would be more apt—constructed from the events at Little Hangleton graveyard, all magnified and twisted in strange ways, repeating. Potter screamed as Diggory fell, clawing at the earth as the cup dragged him back to Hogwarts alone, and Diggory Sr appeared from the crowd, accusing Potter of murdering his son, and then the crowd around them turned violent, closing in like the frenzied maenads to rip Potter apart, and then Potter was back in the graveyard, screaming for Diggory Jr to run, Voldemort’s own voice hissing Kill the spare—
With a small effort of will, Voldemort took on his own form within the dream, tall and grand and powerful, newly resurrected. Dream Potter’s eyes fell on him with terrified recognition.
“You think this is is the epitome of agony?” Voldemort scoffed, gesturing around them, before raising his wand. “Allow me to educate you!”
The illusion of a curse shot from his wand, engulfing Potter. The boy fell screaming to the dirt, writhing as Voldemort struck again and again, indulging in the malleable reality of the dreamscape to commit impossible tortures. Potter shrieked, and sobbed, and begged over and over. Not for mercy, Voldemort noticed. Only for Diggory’s forgiveness. A phantom that Voldemort hadn’t summoned, one shaped like the dead boy, was only too happy to deny Potter’s pleas. With a sneer and a swipe of his hand, Voldemort dismissed it from existing. Bizarrely, Potter seemed to relax at its disappearance. Voldemort cursed him again—
Abruptly, Voldemort found he had been ejected from Potter’s mind. Opening his eyes he hissed, swiping at the candles to douse their flames and leave the room in darkness. Beyond the window, the faint grey of dawn had already begun to stain the sky. Still too bright.
It was hard to say from this distance, but Voldemort felt it was a safe assumption that Potter hadn’t suddenly become a skilled occlumens. He must have awoken.
Voldemort stood, unsteady on his feet, his face twisted into a sharp grimace. Perhaps he would retire early tonight instead of working until after dawn had broken. It would be hard to read anything at all right now with the way Potter had driven icepicks into his skull and left his vision clouded with blurred, twisting lights.
(When he woke up late in the afternoon on the floor of his study, he noted he had only managed to take three steps from his desk before fainting.)
The next dream, Voldemort tortured Potter again just to be sure, though a little less intensely. This time, he himself threw Potter back to wakefulness, before returning to his own body. As expected, the migraine had once again intensified after the tortures, though it wasn’t as bad as after the previous dream.
Voldemort snarled, and smashed some very nice glassware against a wall. Fate was playing some twisted joke! So Potter could infect his mind with these ridiculous memories and headaches, but any attempt to attack Potter back for the audacity would make it worse!? Absolutely unacceptable!
The mental link itself appeared to be rather unstable and weak, a single thread connecting their minds during times of high emotion. Given the likely nature of its origin, breaking that connection permanently would be troublesome too, unless Voldemort was inclined to craft a whole new body. Potter’s death would solve the problem, but Potter’s current location was concealed. In the meantime, his nightmares would continue to assault Voldemort’s mind.
The blurred vision wasn’t as bad tonight, though the lights were still too bright.
There was always the possibility of strengthening the bond. Potter wasn’t all that bright, he was unlikely to notice another presence in his head. If the thread was reinforced, perhaps Voldemort would be able to discern Potter’s location through it and kill him. Or maybe Potter could be used as an unknowing spy, observing order meetings. Even if Potter did notice, he didn’t possess the occlumency necessary to bar a foreign presence from his mind.
Perhaps, also, there was some short-term way to address the migraines…
The next night, as a new headache began to blossom, Voldemort once again turned inward and invaded Potter’s dreams. Using his legilimency, Voldemort shifted his appearance to that of his teenage self, the charming and confident Tom Marvolo Riddle.
The moment dream Potter saw him, he gasped, and all around them the graveyard morphed into the Chamber of Secrets. The basilisk lay slaughtered, half-submerged in a pool. The youngest Weasley was sprawled on the wet stone ground, Voldemort’s old diary by her side.
Potter stood before him. The boy looked several years younger and was covered in grime, a sword in one hand, a basilisk fang in the other. His arm was bleeding profusely, and as Voldemort watched, the boy collapsed beside the Weasley girl, glaring up at Voldemort in apparent betrayal.
“Please, let her go,” Potter begged. “Take my life instead.”
“What life?” Voldemort scoffed, stepping over the girl to Potter’s side. “You’re dying.”
Potter shook his head.
“The phoenix will fix it. Tom, please! I thought we were friends!”
Voldemort gave him a mean smirk.
“Lord Voldemort has no friends.”
Potter’s lip trembled like he was trying not to cry, and then Potter shrieked, shoving Voldemort back. With surprising speed, Potter scrambled to the diary and stabbed it over and over with the basilisk fang. Voldemort staggered back, each stab wound like a curse to the chest. Potter glared up at him, tears running down both cheeks, his hands stained black as he twisted the fang deeper into the pages—
Voldemort was back in his study, ejected from Potter’s mind. The ache was mild this time, lingering more like the aftermath of an energetic duel than a prolonged cruciatus. It was progress.
It also seemed that Lucius Malfoy needed to be punished.
When Potter next summoned his attention, Voldemort took on Tom riddle’s form again. When Potter begged him to spare the girl, he agreed. The dream shifted around them, and suddenly they were both seated on the stone floor, the girl and the diary and the sword all gone, the basilisk alive and circling them, a wall of dark-scaled flesh. Potter stared at him, eyes shining with a familiar stubbornness.
“You’re Voldemort,” Potter muttered.
“I am.”
Potter sighed, glancing away.
“I liked you better as Tom.”
“When I was weak,” spilled from Voldemort’s lips. Potter’s eyes snapped back to him, uncannily shrewd for a twelve-year-old.
“Weaker than a bodiless wraith, possessing rodents to survive?” Potter sneered.
Voldemort hissed, drawing his wand, and suddenly they were both standing, Potter at his current age, Voldemort in his resurrected form. Their surroundings transformed as they did, turning dark and abstract, nearly resembling the graveyard.
When Potter struck, his spells were impossibly fast, the dreamscape shifting to his advantage. Voldemort evaded and struck back, manipulating the dream, ignoring the sudden dragons and the portrait-lined halls, mere distractions—
“You promised me your life for the girl!” Voldemort snarled, and Potter’s form flickered, twelve again, and then they were standing in the Chamber once more.
“Fine!” Potter snapped, grabbing Voldemort’s hand (which had become teenage Tom Riddle’s hand again). Voldemort sneered, before bringing up his palm to interlock their fingers. At the contact, he felt beyond the illusion of the dreamscape to the mental link beneath, stitching new threads across to strengthen it. Potter grimaced, but he didn’t complain.
When Voldemort looked up, he found he was being watched with a forlorn gaze.
“I still miss you,” Potter murmured. “I know you were just pretending to care, but I still… it felt like you understood, when everyone turned against me for speaking parseltongue. You knew what it was like for everyone to hate you.” Potter looked briefly angry with himself, and around them the dream twisted until Potter was laid out on the floor half dead, basilisk fang embedded in his arm, his hand still clasped tightly with Voldemort’s. “But it was all just pretending…”
Potter sighed, the most miserable little thing Voldemort had ever seen.
A loud, foreign voice echoed across Potter’s dreamscape, demanding he get up and into the kitchen. Potter grimaced, groaned, shot Voldemort an apologetic look, and then Voldemort was ejected from his mind.
Voldemort opened his eyes in his own body. The headache still lingered, but so did a small thread of awareness at the back of his mind, linking to Potter’s head. Excellent.
Curious that Potter would consider Tom riddle a friend, though not entirely surprising. It would be easy to flatter the boy into believing they had a connection, especially if his ego was not satisfied with the adoration of his classmates. Voldemort could work with this. He was out of practice at doing things the subtle way, but he had never forgotten how. And in this case, Severus had provided substantial intel about Potter’s attitude, his friends, his hobbies, his wants.
This would be easy.
It was not easy.
Dismissing the image of the graveyard, Voldemort twisted Potter’s dream around until they were both students, walking through the halls between classes. His attempts at flattery made Potter grimace and stare, accusing him of not acting like himself. At the mention of heroics, Potter stormed away.
Voldemort snarled, grabbing his wrist. Potter spun from his grasp, aiming a wand at his face, and suddenly the graveyard had returned, their personal duelling field.
Except, this time Voldemort was the one bound to a headstone.
“You’re not my friend,” Potter spat. “You never were. Leave me alone!”
At Potter’s cry, the dream dissolved around them, and Voldemort was slammed back into his body. Snarling, he turned to surge back down the mental link—he paused. The threads between their mind felt raw, twitching in time with the way Voldemort’s headache throbbed. Travelling back along them would hardly be subtle, and Potter couldn’t be allowed to realise Voldemort could access his mind.
Glowering at the walls, Voldemort smashed another rare and beautiful set of glassware.
Voldemort allowed Potter to suffer through several loops of Diggory’s death before intervening this time (infuriating how much more miserable he was at Diggory’s death than Voldemort’s tortures). As he stepped forward, Potter’s eyes locked on him, and the world changed back to the Chamber.
“You promised me your life for hers,” Voldemort said, avoiding any niceties.
Potter blinked away his tears, determination on his face. He offered his hand.
“Why would you consider us friends?” Voldemort prompted after a few moments, voice dripping with disdain. The world shifted around them again, taking on the shape of some hidden corner in Hogwarts library.
“I don’t need you to fake an interest, Voldemort,” Potter hissed, turning to glare out the window. In the same instant, echoes of conversation surrounded them, the exact words unclear, but the meaning conveyed.
“Harry-hunting!” Voldemort crowed in malicious delight.
“A cave by the sea!” Potter snapped. Voldemort froze.
The dream shifted again, and suddenly Potter was younger and holding Voldemort’s hands in his, an intense look on his face.
“They sound even worse than my relatives! I wish I could have seen the looks on their faces when you got them back! I bet it was even better than when Dudley was cursed with a pig tail!” Potter says, an evil little smirk crossing his face before he sighed. “It’d be nice if we could just run away for the summer, somewhere far away from the orphanage and my family. We’d be okay, I know how to cook, you look old enough people won’t think it’s weird we’re alone together. And if they do—” that smirk again “—your pretty face can talk us out of anything, right?”
“Right,” Voldemort found himself agreeing, before jerking away and out of the dream entirely.
(Why did Potter know? He shouldn’t—Voldemort would never—)
Spending more than a decade as a wraith certainly hadn’t helped Voldemort get any closer to achieving his goals. The majority of his followers had been killed or imprisoned shortly after his “death”. Those that remained were composed of the cowardly, the self-centred, and the fickle; individuals who cared more about advancing their own fortunes than devoting themselves to their master. Fear and pain were enough to keep them in line for now, but Voldemort was no fool. Until he had something tangible to offer, their loyalty would be fleeting. And with his network collapsed, contacts a decade out of date, his treasures scattered and stolen, it would take time to rebuild.
(Years and years to build the first time, and never once had he shared those details—)
Voldemort needed to create a new base. Fresh blood, angry at the world and ready to attack whatever he told them was standing in their way. The disillusioned, sick and frustrated with the mess that had become their lives. The desperate, trapped by circumstances beyond their control—
Voldemort hissed, his eyes screwed shut at the sudden spike, before his face twisted into a snarl. Potter refused to give him even one night of peace, it seemed. Loathsome brat.
Whatever Potter thought he knew about the orphanage or the beach, it was false. The diary horcrux had been a snapshot of Voldemort at age sixteen, identical in every way, and Voldemort had never told a single soul any detail of his origins, not even to manipulate their pity. Why would the horcrux have chosen any different? Why Potter?
The bond still hung between their minds, threads woven into cord.
Early one hot summer evening, intense terror slammed across the mind link.
Voldemort leapt across the bond, and then he was watching through Potter’s eyes as dementors approached him in some muggle park. A muggle teenager was by Potter’s side, cowering and helpless. A woman’s scream was echoing through Potter’s ears as he lifted his wand. The scream didn’t fade even as Potter cast the patronus, still lingering as Potter grabbed the muggle and ran.
Voldemort scanned their surroundings, trying his best to spy some identifying feature, but the houses and neighbourhood looked frustratingly mundane, no different than any other middle-class muggle neighbourhood. No street signs crossed Potter’s vision.
Potter ran to the door of house #4, pushing the muggle boy inside. Two adult muggles sprang to their feet at their entrance, immediately fussing over the muggle boy. A thread of bitterness crossed Potter’s mind, intensifying as the muggle man turned to him and began yelling, threatening Potter for attacking his boy. Potter offered barely a word in his own defence, just some snide comment about leaving the boy (Dudley?) to die. The muggle man roared, lunging for Potter—
Potter dodged around him with practiced skill. The room fell to chaos, the muggle woman shrieking and sobbing over her son, the man demanding Potter fix him and threatening Potter with the most uncreative tortures, and then the howler arrived. A smug, self-satisfied voice announced that Potter was expelled, and his wand was to be snapped.
Cold dread welled up within Potter, quickly followed by horror and indignant rage. Voldemort couldn’t help but agree.
Potter ran for the stairs before the muggles could blink, already on the landing when the muggle man began to crow in vulgar delight. Through a door was a small room, a cot in one corner and not much else. Scanning the space, Potter freed a snowy owl from a cage and sent it out the window, then with a few quick spells collected his meagre belongings into a school trunk.
The muggle man was blocking the way to the stairs, a mocking grin across his face. He turned green as Potter aimed his wand.
“You’re a criminal now, boy,” the muggle sneered.
“Yeah,” Potter agreed, vengeful glee sweeping through him. “Which means nothing’s stopping me from cursing you anymore—”
The connection broke before Voldemort could watch any further, though satisfaction radiated across from Potter’s side of the bond.
He laughed.
Voldemort visited Potter’s dreamscape that night without being summoned. He twisted the world around them so that they were on the Hogwarts lawn on some spring afternoon. Potter was lying on his back, eyes closed, enjoying the sunshine, while Voldemort sat beside him, watching. Reaching over, he brushed a stray lock of hair from Potter’s forehead.
“Do you dislike people treating you as the famous hero?” Voldemort asked, tracing a finger across the lightning bolt scar.
Potter snorted.
“Famous for what?” he scoffed. “Defeating Voldemort? I was a baby, it’s not like I did anything.”
Voldemort grinned.
“You don’t consider your acts in the Chamber and defending the philosopher’s stone to be heroics?”
Potter grimaced, catching Voldemort’s hand to draw it away from his scar. Reaching below the illusion, Voldemort stitched more threads between their minds.
“Well, no one knows about that stuff, and it would be stupid if they treated me different for it anyway. I only did it because the adults are useless. People should care about that instead.”
Potter took a deep breath, his fingers tapping against Voldemort’s.
“Do you think it’s odd that the defences for the stone were all things we learned about in first year? Devil’s snare, wizard chess… that potions riddle was a little confusing but… I wonder sometimes about that.”
“Dumbledore’s machinations,” Voldemort murmured, and Potter nodded.
“But what was the goal?” Potter mused. “Why have Hagrid collect the stone on the same day he took me to my vault in Gringotts?”
Potter’s eyes opened, and he stared up at Voldemort, a green nearly as vivid as the avada.
“Why are you acting like we’re friends? You want me dead,” Harry said.
Voldemort shrugged.
“You’re within a dream, Harry. Perhaps I am some version of Tom that never became him.”
Harry shook his head.
“You’re already so similar.”
“My skin isn’t a snake's.”
“No but, back in the graveyard—” their surroundings shifted, gravestones and darkness all around for a few moments “—the way Voldemort talks, the way he holds himself—it’s all you, Tom. Or you’re all him. Why isn’t your past identity common knowledge? You were a prefect. People knew you. It’s so easy to see.”
“I killed everyone who’d remember me,” Voldemort said, an odd feeling building in his chest. Harry nodded like that made perfect sense, and the world shifted back to a spring afternoon.
When Voldemort woke, it was without a headache. The mental bond was stitched solid into a bridge. Potter’s mind felt distant, but easy to reach.
Perfect.