Harry giggles. His limbs feel lighter than usual, almost as if bubbles are making them float a bit. He can still control them, but it's a vague, interesting sort of control. Fun.
Harry lets sleep take him. The world whirls around him in sparks of disorienting colours, and Harry watches with a broad smile. It should make him dizzy, but he feels in the middle of something fantastic—a watercolour painting come to life. It's brilliant. Elating.
It stops as suddenly as it starts. Voldemort stares at him from across a desk. "Harry Potter," he sounds almost surprised.
Harry blinks at him. He still feels light, like he is floating, but also distantly sad. "Are you okay?" he asks thoughtlessly.
"I’d never felt as good as I did a moment ago," Harry confesses, drawing closer to the Dark Lord. Red eyes track him suspiciously. Harry's chest aches. "But now, looking at you… it makes me so sad."
Thoughtlessly, Harry reaches out, and Voldemort lets him. It’s how Harry knows this can’t be real. That it’s just a silly, drunken dream. Their fingers intertwine, though Voldemort’s hand remains stiff and cold in his gentle grip.
"Aren’t you lonely?" Harry wonders. "Is that yours I feel pressing in, or my own? Even without you," Harry smiles, crooked and small, brushing an irreverent thumb over his scar, "I’m sure it’d be there. People always isolate the freak."
Voldemort’s hand twitches in Harry’s, and he hums, focus dropping from red eyes to trace the long fingers with his own.
"Everybody’s frightened of you. You isolate yourself from friendship, from love, from time itself... don’t you want, Voldemort? I can feel that you do—you’re never satisfied, are you? Will it ever be enough? The world at your feet, no attachments, nobody to challenge you—is that your dream, or your nightmare?"
"You’re speaking nonsense, boy," Voldemort says, but it comes out odd. Stilted. "You presume much."
"Is it presumption when I feel you?" Harry asks genuinely, brows drawing together, hand lifting to press over his heart. Voldemort is dragged with him, pulled a bit over the desk, and Harry blinks in surprise before realizing he still has a grip on the other’s hand. He lets go slowly, and Voldemort pulls back with a scowl.
"You are drunk," the wizard snaps with disgust. "You know nothing of what Lord Voldemort feels."
Harry finds the words… annoying.
"You feel so loudly, though," he returns sharply, moving forward, sliding onto Voldemort’s desk. Ink spills over—Voldemort hisses in annoyance and the stain is gone with a thought—dreams are a magic of their own—Voldemort’s forehead is cold and smooth. Harry bears the man's mark. He presses his scarred head to the smooth. Long, clawed fingers are wrapped around his wrist. His throat.
"Right here, always pressing in," Harry continues, heedless of his position, precarious as it is. "You feel so much it hurts, Voldemort. You hate so much. You’re never just happy. And I was, am, could be. So just take some, won’t you?"
Red eyes are narrow, intent, fascinated as they dart over Harry’s face, trying to gather his meaning. "How do you propose I do that?"
"How does one normally take pleasure?" Harry wonders. Voldemort grimaces, pulling away quickly, and it takes Harry’s bubbling mind a moment to put what he said to context.
"No," he chokes on a laugh, "I’m not asking you to—to snog. To fuck. Just open yourself up. You’re so good at taking, usually, but all you’re doing is giving. Don’t you want to feel like this? Light? Thrilled?"
"You don’t even know what you sound like, do you?" The question is rhetorical. Voldemort’s hand tightens over his throat, until Harry’s breathing grows thinner. "You wish for me to let your happiness pass my Occlumency, as though you have not just slipped through yourself. As if you have no method to make Lord Voldemort feel your pleasure; as if you want to give Lord Voldemort pleasure at all."
Harry touches the hand on his neck, slowly tightening with Voldemort’s rant, and a spark lights his fingers. Voldemort’s hand spasms before it drops. Harry takes a deep breath, glaring balefully. His light-hearted air has faded.
"Perhaps I would give you pleasure so your misery would be all the worse for it," he bites out. The world is fuzzy, but no longer from alcohol. From being choked. Even in his dreams, his life is threatened by this man.
"A pretty plot," says Voldemort. There is something very condescending in his voice; he is clearly looking down on Harry. Doubting him. It’s nothing new, but it makes the sting of anger grow in him. "Very well. If you can conjure happiness as you peer into the face of your death, Harry Potter, then do. Make me feel it, if you can."
Harry’s nails bite into his palm and release. He takes a breath and lets his eyes flutter closed. He focuses.
Happiness. What does it feel like? Like floating, as he was moments ago, or like getting an anticipated hug—not his first, not all the ones he flinched away from, but a hug from Hermione when they’ve almost just died. An arm around Ron’s waist as the boy drapes one around his shoulder. Laughing, hysterical and joyous, by the fireplace. Finding his wand. Finding out he was escaping the Dursleys. Happiness is a brief thing, drenched in the shadows of his life. Happiness is contentment, even if it is a momentary thing. It is the pleasure of a perfectly prepared cuppa; from—nonono, not going there.
Harry wraps the sensations up, one by one, like he’s re-wrapping hard candy, and throws them at Voldemort. Into Voldemort. All but one—his favourite one, his happiest one. That, he grasps, and it’s actual candy in his hand, a sweet that he looks down to, and then unwraps, and he’s moving forward, intent eyes raising, and Voldemort is already gasping, a bit, at the suddenness of it all—of pleasure.
Harry’s lips curl and he pushes the candy into the slightly agape mouth of the Dark Lord a bit cruelly, shoving it deep. He pulls back quickly, before sharp teeth can gnash on his fingers, and watches on as Voldemort experiences pleasure. As Voldemort softens, and sighs, relaxation in every hard line of him, mouth sucking almost greedily around the treasure that Harry has placed within it. Now he’s drunk on it, Harry thinks, horribly pleased to see Voldemort this way.
It’s not real, but still, he hovers on Voldemort’s desk and observes the pink brushing his cheekbones with fascination. He observes the way red eyes roll back a bit, and the way a long, pale throat swallows convulsively down on a slowly dissolving candy until there is nothing left.
Lashless eyes open, dark and suddenly staring. Red barely peeks out from behind the dilation of his pupil, and Harry’s smile is a smug thing.
“There’s your pleasure,” Harry whispers to him, like a secret. “I hope you enjoyed yourself. It can only get worse from here.”
“Worse?” murmurs Voldemort, staring at Harry intently. “You think there is worse you can do, Harry, then give me that and take it back?”
Belonging, thinks Harry, quite suddenly. He’d given Voldemort his favourite thing, the thing that he had been looking for, for a very long time. Longing, and peace, and laughter, and a burgeoning happiness that had very rarely managed to emanate past its conception. He had given Voldemort, too, his desperate hope for things to get better—and then he’d made them get better—and now Voldemort had lost it all.
Suddenly, impossibly, Harry’s eyes are liquid. I’m cruel, thinks Harry, gaze falling from red. There is nothing so cruel as what he has done, and he had done it so carelessly, so happily, so smugly, because he had felt slighted. Had felt wronged by this man who had ceaselessly wronged him.
Slowly, Harry looks back up at Voldemort, who is watching his tears with an expression of keen interest.
“Has it made you sad to give your enemy your pleasure, Harry Potter?” Voldemort asks, gripping his wrist and drawing him near enough that Harry barely keeps his bottom on the desk rather than Voldemort’s lap.
“It makes me sad to treat you with such cruelty,” Harry corrects, “when I know you will never allow yourself to experience such pleasure again.”
“Would I not?” breathes Voldemort, eyes still dark instead of bright.
“You won’t,” whispers Harry. “It'd require you to trust someone. To have faith in them. And that, I know you’re incapable of, because you are a man but don’t see yourself as one, and gods do not have friends, nor equals.”
“Equals?” Voldemort’s breath brushes Harry’s brow, his stinging scar. “But what if Lord Voldemort were to draw you from the depths, Harry? Raise you from the pale mortality until you, too, are exalted? Then you may give Lord Voldemort what he so deserves; give me pleasure, Harry Potter,” Voldemort enunciates awfully. “Give me it all.”
I wrote this one of the first times I ever drank, and just expanded upon it a bit. I'm honestly really fond of finding these little things I've forgotten.
