A year after the war, Harry’s shared visions with Voldemort somehow continue… but they’re not the visions of his Voldemort. They’re the visions of other Voldemorts, from other timelines, other realities, who had lost their versions of Harry instead of the other way around.
It now seems that Harry’s torn, throbbing Horcrux connection is reaching out across time and space to try to reconnect, desperately, with the soul it had been bound to for so long, and is instead connecting with a thousand different Voldemorts, whose souls are crying out for his, in return.
Haunted and hunted by impossible dreams, Harry asks Death, his unwilling servant, for a favour: that Death help him find and destroy each of these connections, or at least enough of them that Harry can get a decent night’s sleep once in a while.
Harry's trip to the first dimension… does not go well.
But will one of the dimensions convince him to stay?
Riddle Manor was brighter in this dimension than it was in Harry’s original one—happier, almost. The garden was bursting with bright, simple, joyful flowers from mismatched seasons that had none of the dignity Harry might have expected of Voldemort’s home, but were instead just… cheerful, flowers that might appeal to a child or an innocent.
Teddy would love these, as Teddy loved all colours; he’d hang around in this garden all day, turning his hair orange and yellow and pink and red to match every daisy, sunflower, tulip or daffodil. He might even end up with a rainbow hairstyle by dinnertime, if he got carried away. Harry pictured him here: nose-deep in a chrysanthemum and then sneezing that puppyish little sneeze of his when he breathed in too much pollen.
Harry swallowed around the lump in his throat. The sooner he got done here, the sooner he could go back to the people who needed him, though he increasingly felt that he himself needed something else, needed something stark and strange and wicked and sharp, someone with red eyes and a cruel smile and an empty, crumbling heart.
But Harry was done letting Voldemort control his every day and night, haunting his dreams in a thousand forms, each more heartbreaking than the last. He couldn’t stand it anymore—the vision of Voldemort standing alone at the edge of a cliff, staring out at a silvery, foamy sea, his hands empty and lost and the line of his back somehow forlorn—wondering, against all odds, about death. Harry remembered that vision even now: the sea-salt breeze; the rocks jagged beneath Voldemort’s bare feet; Voldemort’s despair, black as a Lethifold, consuming him.
Or the vision of another Voldemort, frantically searching through text after ancient text for a ritual to resurrect his Harry Potter, for only after killing him did Voldemort realise that he had severed a tie to a piece of his own soul.
Or the vision of a Voldemort who kept his slain Harry Potter in an enchanted glass case, its surfaces cut like a diamond, through which Harry’s face was refracted in a hundred angles, illuminated, serene, almost… holy. Something to be worshipped, longed-for, but never touched. Preserved for an eternity. This Voldemort’s hands shook every time he touched the case and smoothed his palms along it, yearning, yearning to open it and touch Harry instead, but terrified of doing so and discovering that the skin he would touch would be stone-cold. Dead. A part of himself, dead, when he had vowed to live forever…
Or, worst of all, the Voldemort who had used the Resurrection Stone and the darkest of necromancies to bring a disjointed, dull-eyed automaton in the shape of Harry Potter back from the dead, who sometimes spoke and sometimes didn’t, who sometimes thought and sometimes didn’t, and who Voldemort caressed, obsessively, hungrily, like one would a favoured pet, only to eventually choke even that pale imitation of Harry to death for not being Harry enough, for not defying Voldemort, not laughing at him, for not having that spark in his green eyes that Voldemort so longed to capture, like a flame in his hands.
They were all different versions of grief, some more monstrous than the others, but the fact that Voldemort grieved for him, missed him, sought him out in whichever way he was capable of, across a countless different realities… well, that was… that was…
Nobody had ever needed Harry that badly.
Not Teddy, not Ron or Hermione, nor even Ginny, who had left him in the end, as he’d known she would. As was good for her. Harry wondered if he was good for anyone, if the stain and muck of war and death had marked him so indelibly that, like his scar, they gave him away, rendered him too broken and dysfunctional to be truly loved. Even his friends, though they stood by him, did not understand where he stood, what it was like to be in his shoes. At times like those, he felt a lonely kinship to Tom Riddle, who had never fit in, either. Always the freak. Always just ‘boy’. Or, like Harry, the ‘boy who lived’, but the ‘boy’ never left him, did it? No matter how far away Harry moved from the Dursleys, he was never deemed deserving of a name: just a category, a title.
Except for Voldemort. A thousand Voldemorts, calling out to him across space and time: Harry. Harry. Harry. Harry…
So much longing that it filled Harry until he overflowed, until he woke up weeping.
He was lucky, he supposed, that Death had agreed to this little misadventure, but then, Death tended to agree to most things that provided it some manner of amusement, and apparently watching Harry flounder stupidly and pointlessly towards peace was one of them.
Only Death could travel across dimensions, and so Harry had asked Death to take him to every reality that contained a Voldemort from his visions, and to give him the tool to sever each connection, which was, apparently, Death’s scythe: invisible to the mortal eye, but certainly hefty in the hand. Harry had never expected the eccentric, devious and often vengeful being to lend him its most prized weapon, but Death had said that this was a connection so stubborn that only the soul on either end of it could sever it.
The task, naturally, fell to Harry, as most tasks did.
Death also seemed curious about how a human would handle its scythe, apparently a novelty in even Death’s boundless experience; it had never seen this before.
Now, transported directly to his first dimension, Harry stood in front of the door of one of the Voldemorts he’d dreamed about, though he could not be sure which one. The garden was unfamiliar; he hadn’t dreamed this, and it didn’t seem… quite in line with the more depressed Voldemorts he’d witnessed. Perhaps this was a maddened version, then? The idea of an unhinged Voldemort cavorting amidst daisies brought a long-absent snicker back to his lips.
Funny, how the mere thought of Voldemort brought him to life, after so many months of feeling numbed and indifferent. Perhaps it wasn’t just these Voldemorts who were grieving him; perhaps Harry was grieving Voldemort, too.
TO BE CONTINUED: PLOT TWIST COMING UP!
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