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The worst part about the end of the war was the deafening volume of it all.
For three solid months, Magical Britain had been caught in a relentless, drunken stupor. People flooded the streets of Diagon Alley throwing confetti and weeping into their firewhisky, singing victory songs until their throats gave out. They cornered Harry in the corridors of the Ministry, clinging to his sleeves with desperate, trembling gratitude, calling him their bright little miracle.
Harry smiled when he had to and nodded when he remembered to. But, in the end, he felt absolutely nothing.
The war had ended with a loud, triumphant roar in the Great Hall, but the moment the link in his head snapped, the entire world had gone flat and mute.
Harry couldn’t simply wake up, stretch his arms, and become a normal boy.
For sixteen years, Lord Voldemort had been a steady, poisonous hum behind Harry’s temples. He had been the fever in Harry’s blood, the sharp bite of malice in the dark, the burning ache of a scar that had dictated every breath, every choice, every instinct Harry possessed.
To have that torn away wasn't relief.
It felt like someone had reached into his sternum with bare hands, scooped out his vitals, and expected him to go on walking through polite society with a gaping hole in his ribs. The world was loud and bright and painfully alive, and Harry was suffocating in it.
Which made stealing the Dark Lord’s corpse the easiest decision he had ever made.
The Ministry had made a mockery of it from the start. For two weeks, the Wizengamot sat in endless sessions arguing over what to do with the carcass. Some wanted it burned in Fiendfyre; others wanted it hung outside the Atrium like a medieval warning, or dissolved in lime and dumped in an unmarked trench.
While they drafted their self-righteous legislation, Harry had simply walked into the Department of Mysteries beneath his Cloak.
It was almost insulting how simple it had been. No one stopped Harry Potter.
He had cast the stasis charms himself, locking the dead flesh into permanent preservation, slung the cold weight over his shoulder, and walked straight out the front doors into the fog.
Four flights of narrow stone stairs beneath the cellar of an abandoned cottage in Yorkshire, Harry pushed the door open.
Dozens of blood wards thrummed against his skin as he crossed the threshold were sealing the space away from the rest of the world. The only light came from black candles spaced along the perimeter.
At the center of the dark slate floor, elevated on a stone dais, was the coffin.
Harry hadn’t bought it from a shop, feeling a little too emotional for someone who had his world shut.
No, instead, he had carved the obsidian oak with his own hands, sanding down the edges until the wood was smooth as glass, lining the interior with heavy midnight velvet. And inside it, lay Voldemort.
Harry walked up to the edge and looked down.
He hadn’t disguised him. In fact, he had refused to cast a single glamour over the dead face. The skin was still the color of fresh chalk, bone-white and bloodless, clinging to the severe, skeletal angles of his jaw. The nose remained flat and serpentine, the twin slit nostrils settled in rigid stillness, and the thin lips were fixed in a faint, indifferent line.
Harry had spent hours stripping off the torn, blood-caked robes from the Great Hall. His hands had shaken at the start, but the revulsion faded fast enough. He had washed the grit from the grey skin himself and dressed him in tailored black silk. He folded the long, spider-thin fingers over the chest until the corpse looked proper.
Not like a pathetic trophy for the Wizengamot to gawk at, but like the terrifying bastard who had hunted him since he was eleven
He looked monstrous, regal, and entirely untouchable.
Terrible and magnificent.
God, you look ridiculous surrounded by lillies, Harry thought, a faint, humorless huff catching in his throat.
Ron would probably vomit on the spot if he walked in here. And Hermione would call an entire unit of St Mungo’s mind healers and have Harry locked behind wards before sundown.
Yet the tight knot in his chest began to loosen the second he looked at that pale face. It was the only room in Britain where Harry could actually breathe.
Looking was never enough, though. It hadn’t been enough for weeks.
Harry set his hands against the polished edge of the coffin, leaning forward until his shadow draped over the pale face. Carefully, he reached down and touched Voldemort’s cheek with the pad of his thumb.
Uh, it's cold.
The skin felt like frozen stone. It didn’t yield an inch under his touch, but the bitter chill snapped straight through Harry’s nerves. Goosebumps broke out across his arms. His pulse jumped hard against his ribs.
It was sick and completely unhinged, but five seconds of touching dead flesh made him feel more grounded than three solid months of Ministry handshakes.
Before the rational part of his brain could stop him, Harry reached into the box. The corpse was stiff with stasis charms, unyielding as a statue, but Harry dragged him in until the cold head slumped against his collarbone. He locked his arms around the narrow back, his fingers digging into the silk until his knuckles went white.
There was no warmth to be found. No pulse beat against Harry’s cheek, and no breath stirred the dark curls at his forehead. There was only the bitter of old dark magic that no cleaning charm could wash out, but having that cold mass pressed against his neck finally anchored Harry to the floor.
The hollow ache behind his scar stopped screaming.
Harry buried his face into the hollow below the jaw and squeezed harder, letting the corpse take all his weight.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Harry whispered against the pale neck. “They don’t get to touch you.”
Harry stayed like that for a long time, his face pressed against the frozen column of Voldemort’s throat, counting his own heartbeats until they slowed from a frantic hammer to something resembling calm.
Just him and the dead thing in his arms.
He pulled back slowly, his hands still braced against the narrow shoulders, and looked down at the face that had haunted his nightmares for half his life. Without the animating fury of the soul behind it, the features were strangely peaceful.
Harry’s thumb traced the line of that jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble that hadn’t grown since the killing curse rebounded. He mapped the severe architecture of the face fascinated over the hollow temples, down the bridge of the flattened nose, across the grey lips that had once breathed murder into every room they entered.
“You were supposed to win. You were supposed to be eternal. And now look at you.”
He laughed, a broken, hysterical sound that echoed off the stone walls. His hands moved lower, trembling as they found the collar of the black silk shirt he’d dressed the corpse in. His fingers hooked under the fabric, pulling it open to expose the stark white chest beneath.
The same chest that had heaved with Parseltongue incantations, that had risen and fallen with immortal breath for decades.
Harry had seen this body destroyed and remade, naked and reborn in a cauldron of dark magic. He’d watched it writhe in agony and triumph. But he’d never touched it like this.
No. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Voldemort wasn’t supposed to die like an ordinary man. He wasn't supposed to collapse on the Great Hall floor and just stop. He was supposed to be inevitable. A nightmare that never ended.
It was completely fucked. He was the Boy Who Lived, the great bloody conqueror, and here he was in a cellar furious that the Dark Lord had lost.
He didn’t care about the victory. He didn’t give a damn about the peace everyone kept crying over. The sickening truth was that Harry had spent his whole life tethered to this monster, and without the poison in his head, nothing else mattered.
He had crossed lines he could never walk back from, and he was too obsessed to even pretend to regret it.
“God, I hate you,” Harry whispered, but his hands were already sliding down the rigid sternum, feeling the impossible stillness where a heartbeat should thunder. “I hate you so much.”
His palms flattened over the cold skin, spreading wide to cover as much surface as possible, chasing the chill into his own bones until his teeth chattered. It was disgusting. It was perverse.
It was the only thing that made the screaming emptiness in his skull go quiet.
Harry leaned down, pressing his mouth to the centre of the chest, right over the sternum. The skin was ice against his lips. He opened his mouth, dragged his tongue over the frozen flesh, and moaned at the contact.
“Wish you could feel that,” Harry breathed against the dead flesh. “Wish you were alive to feel what I’m going to do to you.”
His hands moved with increasing desperation, pulling at the silk shirt until buttons popped free, exposing more of that terrible, beautiful corpse. He mapped the sharp ridges of the hip bones, the concave hollow of the stomach, and lower, lower, lower–
Harry’s fingers trembled as they found the closure of the tailored trousers. He paused for only a second, sanity flickering like a candle in a hurricane, before he wrenched them open.
The body was dead, utterly dead, but Harry had spent months in the Department of Mysteries before the war ended. He’d seen things. Learned things. Dark, useful things that Hermione would have hexed him for even knowing.
“Rigidus,” Harry hissed, the word falling from his lips in a snake-like whisper that made his own skin crawl.
Magic crackled in his palm, and when he wrapped his hand around cold flesh, it was hard. Perfectly, impossibly hard. Stiff as the rest of the corpse and still cold, but throbbing now with enchanted blood that would never flow naturally again
“Fuck,” Harry gasped, his grip tightening. “Fuck, look at you. Even dead you’re still magnificent.”
He stroked once, twice, watching the way the enchanted flesh responded to his touch. The head flushed dark against the grey-white skin of the body. The grotesque scene was making Harry’s own cock ache against his trousers, harder than he’d been since before the war ended.
“Wish you were alive to fuck me,” Harry growled, his voice dropping into something rough and animalistic. He climbed into the coffin, knees bracketing the narrow hips, his hands tearing at his own clothes until he was naked above the corpse. “Wish you could see what you’ve done to me. Wish you could feel how hot I am, how fucking desperate–”
He spat into his palm, working the enchanted shaft with frantic strokes, fixing his eyes on the dead face that stared past him at the ceiling. He wanted those red eyes open. Wanted that cruel mouth snarling commands.
But he’d take what he could get.
Harry positioned himself, hissing at the first press of cold, rigid flesh against his entrance. He was shaking, sweating in the chill underground air, his hands braced on the corpse’s chest as he slowly lowered himself down.
“Oh god,” he choked out, his head falling back as the artificial stiffness breached him, cold and thick and perfect. “Oh, fucking god…”
He sank down until he was fully seated, his thighs trembling where they pressed against the dead hips, his cock leaking onto the silk shirt. The cold was shocking, burning through him like ice, but it felt more real than anything outside these walls.
Harry began to move.
His hips rolled in desperate, grinding circles, taking the rigid flesh deeper, angling himself to find the spot that made stars burst behind his eyelids.
Naturally, the corpse didn’t make a sound, but Harry filled the silence with his own broken noises.
“So good,” Harry panted, his hands dragging down the chest, leaving red welts in the grey skin with his nails. “You’re so fucking perfect like this. Can’t fight me. Can't leave. Just mine–just fucking mine…”
He leaned forward, his mouth finding the sternum again, and began to trace a line of open-mouthed kisses across the frozen flesh.
His hips never stopped moving, riding the enchanted cock with increasing desperation, chasing the heat that was building low in his spine.
When he reached the pale and unresponsive nipple, Harry closed his teeth around it and bit down hard.
“Want you to feel that,” Harry snarled against the skin, biting again, harder, leaving bruises in the grey flesh that would never fade. “Want you to wake up and punish me for it. Want you to make me pay for desecrating your precious corpse.”
He sat back, grinding down hard, his hand wrapping around his own aching cock.
Fuck. He jerked himself in rough, uneven strokes, his eyes locked on the dead face that had ruled his entire existence.
“Look at me. Fucking look at me, you bastard.”
But the eyes stayed closed, the chest still beneath his hands, and Harry sobbed at the emptiness of it even as his body raced toward completion.
He rode faster, harder, slamming himself down on the rigid flesh until the coffin creaked beneath them, until his thighs burned and his vision blurred.
“Wish you were here,” Harry cried out, the words tearing from his throat. “Wish you were alive to hold me down. Wish you could see what you made me into– agfn– your fucking horcrux, your enemy, your–”
He came with a scream that shattered the silence, spilling hot and wet across the corpse's chest, his body clamping down on the cold intrusion as his orgasm ripped through him in brutal waves. He kept moving through it, milking himself on the rigid flesh, chasing every spark of sensation until he was trembling and spent, collapsed forward against the unyielding body.
For a long moment, Harry lay there panting, his face buried in the hollow of the throat, his body still joined to the corpse. The aftershocks made him twitch and whimper, his oversensitive cock brushing against frozen skin, the enchanted hardness still buried deep inside him.
“Perfect,” he pressed a kiss to the jaw. “You’re perfect.”
Harry stayed impaled on the rigid flesh, his forehead pressed against the corpse’s shoulder, his breath coming in ragged gasps that stirred the dark hair at Voldemort’s temple. He didn’t want to move.
Moving meant remembering that the thing inside him was just a spell and stolen flesh, not the terrifying, sentient monster who had hunted him through graveyards and Ministry atriums.
No…
“Wake up. Come on. Wake up and look at me.”
He rolled his hips experimentally, a shudder running through him as the rigid length shifted inside him. Still hard. Still perfect.
Still dead.
“Wish you were alive,” Harry said louder, his hands gripping the corpse’s shoulders tight enough to bruise his own palms. “Wish you could feel how hot and tight I am around you. You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Your little horcrux, your enemy, riding your cock like a desperate whore.”
He laughed, hysterical and broken, and ground down harder.
“You’d hate it. You’d be so fucking disgusted. The great Harry Potter, defiling your precious body. You’d wake up just to punish me. You’d…”
He cut himself off, imagining it with sudden, violent clarity. Those red eyes snapping open. Those long fingers wrapping around his throat. The weight of that terrible power crushing him into the mattress (or the coffin lid) or the stone floor.
Or anywhere, just please, please…
“God,” Harry choked out, his cock twitching against his stomach, already half-hard again. “You’d hold me down. You’d pin my wrists with one hand and fuck me so hard I’d scream. You’d make me beg. You’d make me cry.”
He leaned down, his mouth brushing against the dead ear, his breath hot against frozen skin.
“Please,” Harry begged. “Please wake up. I want you to destroy me. I want you to tear me apart. You were the only one who ever saw me, really saw me, and now you’re just– you’re just…”
He sobbed, his hips moving again, riding the enchanted cock with desperate, jerky movements. The friction was building again, the heat coiling low in his belly despite the chill that radiated from the body beneath him.
“You’d bend me over your throne,” Harry panted, his hands sliding up to frame the dead face, thumbs stroking over the serpentine nostrils, the thin lips. “You’d make me crawl. You’d make me thank you for every inch. You’d fuck me until I couldn’t walk, until I couldn’t remember my own name, until I was just a hole for you to use…”
He slammed down hard, crying out at the fullness.
“Please,” Harry whined, high and pathetic. “Please, I need you to wake up. I need you to hurt me. I need you to make me feel something other than this–this nothing–”
He was crying now, tears tracking down his face and dripping onto the corpse’s chest, but his hips wouldn’t stop moving. He was chasing something impossible, something that didn’t exist outside his own broken mind.
“You’d shove me face-down into the dirt. You’d hold my neck while you fucked me. You’d tell me I was nothing, just a vessel, just a tool, and I’d believe you. I’d believe you because it’s true. I’m nothing without you. I’m nobody. I’m just…"
He came again. His body seized up while his nails raked down the chest hard enough to draw the greyish preserved blood to the surface. He collapsed forward, his face buried in the shoulder, his body shaking with sobs and aftershocks.
“Come back,” Harry whispered, broken and small. “Please come back and hurt me. Please. I can’t do this without you. I can’t be alive in a world where you’re just… just dead. Please.”
Voldemort never answered.