A cooling vacation

Slipping down his lap, a shocking bolt of electricity shot through her body. Harry curled into a defensive stance, shoulders tensed up and legs getting ready to dash at any given moment. Voldemort was not the kind of man people could be casual with. Either you die with him or you die for the betrayal. 

His hands flexed and unflexed at her side, face falling to mask the look of disbelief. It was unimaginable that after years of practising Dark Arts, Voldemort was still fit for life. 

As if fearing he would startle her, and as if fearing she would run away, Voldemort slowly, steadily seized his distance, like a rope around her neck, like a hammer hitting the table in court. She must be hallucinating as the sound of the funeral church’s bell rang out, tolling the ceremony and about to put her down into the ground. A body with two lives. When Voldemort manoeuvred their bodies until shoulders were grazing shoulders, forehead to forehead, the underlying sharpness in his eyes had Harry rethinking her choices. 

Harry flinched when his palm ran over her body, over the supple fat that clung to her waist, up the ridges of her ribs under the skin as if he could spot the changes with his eyes and touches alone. As if Voldemort should have known of this before she even said a word. 

“I think I’m with child.” 

He cupped her face, thumb over the bitten pink lip, wanting to pry her open and see the truth for himself. The piercing stare he adopted sunk deep. 

When he looked up, pupils dilated, mouth agape, something in him wavered, like a white flag in a losing battle. His calculating gaze dumped a cold bucket of water over her growing anxiety. It wilted. 

For a split second, Harry feared it was the wrong thing to say, words in the heat of a moment. Things that she shouldn’t be telling him. She braced herself for the eventual end. Voldemort didn’t seem to be a family man. Swallowing down the rapid heartbeat in her throat with difficulty, she thought of the old nightmares plagued with children’s cries and shattered glasses. It resurfaced here and there when storms rolled on the roof of their house, accompanied by thunder and lightning bolts. Granted that he wasn’t really there, during the bleaky downpour, but to return to an empty building, overtaken by mold and refugees, haunted by the traces of someone’s life, was as much of a curse. 

How could she not predict this? Voldemort choked in a breath. 

Harry was there, among the ruins, among the burnt rubber and abandoned rooms where the broken children’s cot resided. That and a few blurry memories in his head, washed out with time. 

Between her bated breath and his heavy gasp for air, the silence was deafening. It bore into her head and Harry planned to scurry away, running off to Merlin knows where. 

A thousand thoughts condemned her. She should have dealt with it, waited for the storm to be over. So Harry made a run with the thought she cooked up before his arm sprang like a vice, keeping her exactly where he wanted. She bit back a scream as it died right in her throat. Gradually, unhurriedly, the fright descended back into the lagoon of her stomach. 

Arms flared, legs kicking, laboured breaths after laboured breaths, Harry rejected his hold. 

“No.” He snapped, voice low and scratchy like a growling dog, its canine barred out. That shook her awake from the haze of panic. Harry was in the eye of the storm. It was calm there. “You don’t get to leave as soon as it turns ugly.” 

That wasn’t very comforting to know. Harry hastily corrected. “It’s just a suspicion.”

It cut, to realise she didn’t know Voldemort as well as she initially thought. It should be as easy as breathing, to know which hand was hers and which was not, to breathe and not feel like she was drowning. To not recognise the doubts growing in her lungs like a cancerous cell until it had been far too late, until it had spreaded all over the foundation of their relationship. And any time it hurt, Harry ran like crazy. She was good at it. 

“Still,” He glanced down, cupping her lower stomach, which was still flat and soft. Tender fingers grazed over as if he could sense life there. A shiver rippled through her when he did so. He muttered. “Pregnant.” 

“Yeah.”

“-As in carrying a child?” Voldemort didn’t quite believe his ears. 

Blinking rapidly, Harry wetted her lips, wondering if it was a good idea to sneak in his head and scoop out his thoughts now. A quiet Voldemort was a latent risk, a ticking bomb. “Yeah.”

Harry covered his hand with hers, pressing it harder against her skin until he resisted, stopping her mind from going down the darker lane. He unlocked the gate to his head and Harry stepped in. Her words constantly rang out in there, the beep beep beep of a flare telephone line. A call unanswered. It was on the walls of his thoughts and in between the lines also. A single word repeated back and forth. It shifted and distorted into a strange looking creature. The thing edged along the space, barely out of her peripheral. 

It stepped into light and her anxiety melted away. 

Collecting in the pit of his guts, blooming like spring, a bark of laughter bubbled up. Voldemort just hadn’t quite processed the news properly yet, amidst the stun from disbelief. The wind picked up its cue and Harry squinted her eyes from the dust. 

Wiping her face with a thumb absentmindedly, he was having a hard time ingesting the information, head resting in the crook of her shoulder, rocking back and forth. Legs shaking and trembling, he went to relearnt the hymn along the knobs of her spine, arms wrapped around her like a boa constrictor. Voldemort sought for a quiet world in her when it was overwhelming. 

The lines on his forehead deepened. Child. Harry. His. 

Fallen all over again, he searched for her gaze, searching for the silhouette of truth. His fingers wrapped around her skill, thumb a fine imprint over her cheek, it struck him, an ‘eureka’ moment went off. 

A flash flood of emotion broke out.  Voldemort’s face split into a grin. Oh,he would never let this live down. The kind of ego trip he had from siring a child in the Chosen One. 

“There’s a child in you!” 

“Well, that’s pretty much all.” It was anti-climatic as Harry mumbled and scratched his head for his timely realistion. “It’s yours.” Said as if it wasn’t a general consensus. It was almost laughable, and he did. An earthquake-like thing that reverberated to her chest. 

“You should be concerned if it wasn’t.” Now there was something not quite right here, she frowned. 

“Shouldn’t it be you the one to be worried?” 

“No, no, my pretty little darling-” He appeared suddenly coy and writhing with joy, so much he had to have Harry look the other way, back to his chest, thighs over his knee, so he could salvage the last of his pride. Face between her shoulder blades, he nudged the bones sitting under her skin. A late blooming pair of wings that hadn’t grown yet. A big hand enveloped around her delicate neck, the other over her stomach. “My soul, you have it wrong.”

“Have what?” She teased just to feel the faintest pressure on the side of her throat, being warned not to test him. 

“Oh you know-” Said in a tone people would use to discuss the weather and not a potential murder. The thing about Voldemort was that he would spend a good moment to consider if he should dig a grave or two, because no way in hell he would let Harry share a tomb with anyone that was not him. Not that he planned to die anytime soon or allow her to do so. “-having someone of mine astray.” Head pressed to his collarbone, cheek to chin, and temple to lip, Harry gasped, fingers crawled to pry at his fingers out of instinct. 

The way he said it, it was not possession, Harry wasn’t a possession. 

It was holding hands, twining souls, and kissing strived to be, declaring to the world at large and anyone bothered to look that they belonged to each other, fit like pieces of a puzzle. Careful as if arching a vine, he angled her head to the side, kissing down the side of her face, down the pulse in her neck. 

“So,” He mouthed at her skin. “-about your supposedly unconfirmed pregnancy.” The speed in which he changed the subject gave Harry whiplash. “What’s your plan?” 

“Funny, I was about to ask for your opinion.” 

And the look of obtuse on his face didn’t look belonged. 

It was as if Voldemort had never considered that his opinion had anything to do with Harry’s plans because Harry had never once in her life asked for his advice and actually gone through with them. She generally treated it like a guideline of what not to do and then did the opposite of it. Somehow she came out winning despite all odds. “I’m not opposed to raising a child. But I have to warn you, that’s my spawn you’re carrying, it would not be an angel.” 

The word ‘spawn’ reminded Harry of shrimps for some reason, and not the devil that Voldemort was implying. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “That's your baby!”

“If I can’t see it, then it’s not a baby yet. Besides, it’s too early to tell.” 

“You can’t even see souls, yet you claim mine is yours.” 

The cold air brought chills to her, a flicker of a storm rolled at the skyline. Darkening clouds and heavy sky. Through the shuffles of bird wings seeking shelters, Voldemort said something she hadn’t caught yet. It was hearing voices in a closed up cave. The sounds distorted and the words meshed together like flesh. 

“What?”

“I have proof for it.” He stroked her shoulders, easing the tension as if he was preparing to say something she wouldn’t necessarily agree with. “After all, I’m an academic at heart. I believe in the sustainability of theories and logical categorisation.”

And the scathing look of a multiple time defeated debater from Harry kind of killed whatever argument he had in stock. 

“Remind me not to use logic with you.”

“I ought to support you to start putting your brilliant mind to use.” There was an uncharacteristic drawl to his voice that Harry never really heard. It was only when he was slightly drunk and slightly too happy that Voldemort did it. The slurring of his words. Unguarded. Unpolished. Rough and borderline instinctual. He was unmade and undone, ravelled down to the barest layer. 

“No.” She promptly put a stop to his impeding speech.

A soft sound rolled out of his throat. “Oh?” It should not have been that attractive considering that he didn’t have to speak a word when Harry was on the verge of squirmish, knees closed and little toes scrunched up. She was fighting on lower ground to shield her mind away from his. 

“The only way I would win an argument with you is to be so irrational that you would quit.” The curve of his eyebrows stretched over her skin when he shook his head behind her back. 

“That’s still applying experience and knowledge, I’m afraid.” 

“See, logic isn’t the option for me!” 

Voldemort looked far from impressed at her argument, but for the sake of peace, he agreed. 

“Very well.” He did all the dirty work for Harry’s theory. “From what I gather, you haven’t had a single idea of what to do.”

The weight of the worlds was on her shoulders again. Her world. “It’s yours.” As if there was doubt about its origin. The thing was surely sired from Voldemort’s wretched marrow. “I’m giving it a chance.”

Hands holding down her fluttering skirt, Harry shrunk further into the heat of his body, hiding away from the windy day. And he took her in. Took her in like an implant that helped him to breathe, that helped his heart to beat and feel what normal people felt. Something close to love but not quite. Too dark and damaged to be just what love was. “We have a window of weeks left for you to change your mind. After all, I doubt either of us would be the family type.”

“It’s not like I haven’t been crying about it for the past few days.” 

No. Between the martyr and the devil that required a sacrifice, Harry assumed none of them were that stable but she wanted to try and to make it work and had that kind of family her parents were. The absolute hell she put him through had Voldemort digging his nails into the fat on her thighs. When the urge waned, he spelled the marks away with a smooth of his hand. She took the seat between his legs. He let out a gruff, halfway to a laugh and entirely made of exasperation. “That explained your behaviour.” 

“Wow, you should try to shut up sometimes, it’s great.”

Remaining silent at last, he chuckled at her sarcasm, teeth nibbling on her skin like a parasite finding the best spot to bite down and suck her dry. 

The river slowly inched by, feeling the plain gentle surface waxed and waned. Harry sighed, wiggled her feet side to side, ankles rubbing into his knee. Her stomach grumbled from all of the stress. It ate her up from the inside. “I’m hungry.” She complained, drawing circles round and round his knuckles, stopping right at the gaudy lordship ring he had on his pinky. 

Somehow, a flush of giddy preceded. “Hi hungry, I’m Vee.” He was supposed to be annoyed at the nickname, not using it to tease her. Harry could hear the laughter in his voice and it was darnly contagious. 

But it didn’t mean her feathers weren't ruffled. 

Harry rolled up her short sleeves for show and delivered a mighty slap to his forearm. The sound reflected on the rippled surface of the river nearby. 

A blush bloomed under his skin. “It’s too early for you to make that joke!”

“It’s bound to happen, my darling. Why wait.” Like he didn’t flatly tell her she could terminate it if she wasn’t prepared yet. Voldemort was so quick to recover from any blow. He was invincible. Unshakeable. Stubborn as a mule to death. 

“You make terrible jokes, it’s not funny anyway.”

“How tetchy of you.” He smacked his lips to her cheek, the sound of wet kisses made Harry’s skin crawl, mortified even though there was no one around to judge them. 

Fighting all her might to slither away from his grasp, she hissed, kicked and played dirty, pushing on his chest. Short of breath and slightly short circuit because everytime Harry Potter was in his vicinity, Voldemort lost a few brain cells; he huffed and puffed, lying down on the blanket, holding her by the ankles because she might leave him with the chance to produce only a child. If he could get his way with her, they would end up with a soccer team, now that Harry had put that vision in his head. 

“We should get some steak on the way home.” 

Unflinchingly unquestionable, as if he had no critical thinking at all, Voldemort asked with the kind of confidence that would be irritating if he didn’t have his handsome face. “Raw?” 

Harry pulled back, face falling into a fit of hysterical. 

“Should I expect to crave blood and claw my eyes out while pregnant with your child!”

It was a funny expression plastered on his face, barely holding back. “There’s always a chance because we have no surviving records for Parselmouths’ birth.” And the abject horror that drained Harry of her blood had Voldemort regretting his poor taste joke. He quickly fixed his answer, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Don’t worry, you’re not birthing monsters, it’s just a child.” Voldemort added under his breath and Harry might cry. “-Hopefully a human one.”

“The child of two Parseltongues, might I add. An event that hasn’t happened in a century thanks to your fucked up plan to marry young girl while you should be literally rotting apart in the dirt.” 

“You can’t deny I look good doing that.” 

She sneered right back. “Beauty doesn’t equate to morality.”

“But it could sometimes overpass it.” He was frankly unapologetic when it came out of his mouth. Had Voldemort been in public and years younger, he would have been cancelled so fast. It wasn’t as if Harry could deny that so she settled for a ‘sometimes’.

“When it is needed.” Voldemort had a cheeky smile before he pounced, holding her down and gnawing at her throat despite her protest. 

Harry thought she would forgive him for that offense if he kept up with that charming suasive look, so confident, so prideful. When he ceased his plot to kill her with laughter, Harry rushed her words, admitting defeat. “Alright, it is useful in some cases.”

“Alright,-” He was so indulgent when he got his way. “Let’s go get steak.”

Harry clumsily pushed herself up, until her knees gave up and she slumped right back down on his chest, head swimming, heavy as a bag of bricks. 

“You do need some steak for your anaemia.”

“I know what I want.”

“Yes you do.” He said, nuzzling his nose to her face, thumbing her cheek and picking her up princess style.