#flank

ULTERIOR MOTIVES....

…He staggered like that with joy. He was that shocked because I was that happy. Harry had no idea what to do with that revelation, but he was sure that he couldn’t stop turning it over in his head. He saw the memory he had seen himself, with his own eyes, of Voldemort staggering, but he felt what Voldemort had. He’s never felt anything like that before. He— An arm like stone curled around his waist and drew him back to reality. Harry opened his eyes and shifted a little, unsurprised to find that the evidence of their orgasms had already vanished. Voldemort liked to do that for some reason. “Tell me what you are thinking,” Voldemort said, his forked tongue flickering directly above Harry’s face this time. “It made you happy to make me happy.” Voldemort didn’t freeze or draw away, perhaps because he already knew what Harry had felt or sensed. He looked straight at Harry and nodded. “Why, though?” “I have never felt anything like that before.” Harry swallowed. Complex layers of shifting emotions filled the Horcrux bond again, but this time, they were his own. There was pity for Voldemort, who in some ways had had a harder, blanker life than Harry had. And there was wonder, that he could affect Voldemort so deeply in that way. Voldemort certainly thought of it as Harry affecting him, anyway, not just the Horcrux in Harry’s scar. And there was a terrifying, shivery responsibility, as though he were walking about with a huge crystal ball in his hands that he couldn’t drop. I can do that to him. I can influence him like that. Before, although Harry had told his friends that maybe he would be able to influence Voldemort and make him less tyrannical, he hadn’t truly believed it. It had been something that got him out of bed in the mornings and through the days that seemed to stretch endlessly before him, without being anything more than a hook under his navel that didn’t take him anywhere, a distant goal. Now… Harry reached up and let his fingers gently splay out along Voldemort’s cheek, stroking the ridges underneath his eyes. Voldemort lay there, staring at him, wholly absorbed in a way that Harry had never had anyone be in him before. He knows very well what I’m thinking. This isn’t some game we’re playing where I seduce him towards good and he doesn’t know what I’m doing. He would let me try to change him because… It makes him joyful when I’m joyful.

📍 Bones & Blades