“Why…” the alive-again hero gasped from the stone slab. On it he lay inside a ray of light, illuminating him like a font–of youth, of unending blood, of gleaming silver. The manor’s cellar was no longer for spirits, nor was it for prisoners, it was for the undying Master of Death.
From the dark, Voldemort’s soft voice said, “Tell me, Harry: to whom do you belong?”
“N… No one,” the boy said, and was swiftly killed.
Always the same.
More must be removed, but there was little left. Most of the boy's body had been replaced by Voldemort’s silver. The boy died and woke, every time with more silver body pieces, but that naive insolence of his never wavered.
But Voldemort was unwavering, too. The boy would know who owned him. And then a new dawn of their eternity together would bloom.
“My Lord,” a Death Eater said from the cellar’s entrance. Not long after their victory, the Death Eaters realized their lord loved winning, but not ruling. This was one who still served him as the loose demon he was rather than a leader. “I have brought what you asked.” Behind him, he dragged a cowering muggle physician.
“Good. Leave her.” The commands were followed.
The physician cried where she huddled against the wall.
“Tell me, where lies the human will?”
She stammered uselessly. A magical warning shot didn't inspire her, so Voldemort pulled answers from her mind directly.
Memories of air, the long exhale of patients at death, like when falling too far, speculations of the tiny weight lost at death was the calculated mass of the soul expelling through the closing lungs.
But Voldemort had already taken the lungs. He kept looking.
The brain, chemicals like swirling autumn leaves painting emotions across animal insides, seasons changing. Resistance, rebellion, defiance, all reflexes of an exposed mental nerve, refusing fate, refusing truth, refusing nature.
But Voldemort wanted the boy, the Master of Death, to know he was owned. Taking the brain would be a defeat. He searched deeper.
The heart, too small or three sizes too big, the heavy hearts of heroes–
The heart. Of course! Could it have been so simple?
The physician died and Voldemort cast a heart of silver.
With a practiced wave of his hand, the boy’s chest snapped open with a voracious snap. Voldemort replaced the hero’s heart with the new, loyal one like a snake resting an egg in a shared nest, and vanished the old one as useless.
He waited for the boy to wake again, grinning with electricity and conquest.
But it was taking too long.
Days passed and the Master of Death did not wake. He ever would again. Harry had died. And the truest essence of him was vanished.
Tom’s heart hammered dizzyingly fast. He did not understand. Nonononono! NO!
With everything that made him, he roared.