Survivor

Tom stood on the short grass that swathed the area outside of Hogwarts, his arm extended to his side as the curse he smacked fizzled away in the distance. It felt easy, like he’d never taken a break. Even with the smaller body and shorter limbs, it was like breathing for him. He felt good, free. 

It’d been far too long.

Letting his arm drop, he looked up at the attacker, Quirrell, a man he knew to really be Voldemort stuck in another body. The confusion emanating from his counterpart’s body amused him enough that he felt his smile turn into something smaller, subtler. The man was trying to figure out how Harry’s change came to be, not having a single idea just how much he didn’t understand. 

It felt good to be in the know. He was destined to be the best, even if that meant he had to be better than himself. Not quite able to help himself, he decided that a bit of playful mocking was in order. It’d been so long since he’d been able to talk with anyone besides Harry, and he didn’t want to think about the boy much after the shitty deal he was forced to take if he wanted to save both of their lives.

“Hello, Tom,” he said, delighting in the look on Quirrell’s face. “It’s so lovely to see you again after so much time apart.”

His words were met by an explosive ball of magic flying straight at his face. It was lightning fast and deadly accurate. Tom flexed the magic within him, and he gave a satisfied sigh as he felt the power himself for the first time. 

It was so fascinating.

It was as if there was a hole torn in his core. The cut was clean, precise, brutal. That hole felt so very wrong to someone who knew what should’ve been there, but that wrongness was matched by the pure spectacle of what remained. He knew deep down in his gut that it was truly impossible for him to cast his favorite branch of magic in this body. At the same time, the sheer amount of potential that hole left for Harry’s favorite branch of magic was unimaginable. Even he couldn’t believe how much power was hidden within such a small boy.

Bending low, he dragged his wand across the grass and pulled it into the air before him. The individual blades rippled and swayed as he coaxed them along, and they grew into each other, weaving themselves tightly among their neighbors and taking on a metallic sheen as they reached toward the sky until they became taller than him. The woven plate of metal grass grown straight from the ground took the explosion head on and vibrated from the impact, but it didn’t fall.

Tom couldn’t help but laugh at the pleasure that accompanied such easy, casual power. All of his experience with transfiguration didn’t matter in the slightest because it came naturally in this body. It took barely a thought. His knowledge of what was possible made it slightly easier for him to come up with ideas, yes, but he had no reference for just how far he could push it with time and practice. With this kind of instinctive, effortless connection to an entire branch of magic, the possibilities were endless. 

Another explosion battered his shield, and the third actually managed to shatter it. Broken pieces of his splintered barrier threatened to impale him, but he was far too confident to be concerned. Deciding to push his limits, he worked to grasp every single chunk of metal with his magic and transfigured them all to mist at the same time. It was seamless, the way they each shifted into microscopic particles of liquid as they flew past his body. His transfiguration turned the shrapnel of his shield into a veil, and the velocity it gained from the explosion forced the fog to swirl away in a cone behind him before disappearing into the air.

“Incendio!” he hissed, pointing his wand ahead of him.

He didn’t need to say the incantation, but he did need to know how far that would allow him to go.

Six tendrils of flame sprouted from his wand, bulging in the middle before splaying around the center like a demented flower. The child still had a weak core, so gigantic bouts of flame were probably beyond him, but the control he could exhibit was awe-inspiring. Whipping his wand to the side of his body and then above his head, he let the tendrils extend and flow behind him before slinging them around toward Voldemort. 

The wonder in Quirrell's eyes was exactly as pronounced as his own. They were, of course, fundamentally identical. He would’ve been more surprised if Voldemort wasn’t interested in what he was seeing. The man decided to take the attack head on just to see what it would do, merely extending his wand and erecting a magical shield of such magnitude that an auror wouldn’t have been confident in their ability to break it. 

Each of the six lines of flame stretched around the shield, attempting to smother it until it shattered from the oppressive heat. Tom could see the way each one of them simmered against the barrier, and he squeezed despite the fact that he knew he wasn’t burning through it. Harry was beyond prodigious when it came to this branch of magic, but the difference in their ability to dispense magic was simply too vast for him to succeed with bullheaded strength. 

“Just who are you?” Voldemort asked with a smile as he began to expand his shield. “Potter is impressive but not that impressive.”

“Oh,” Tom pleasantly sighed as he cautiously approached his contained opponent, keeping his hold on the shield firm. “Harry is every bit this impressive. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”

“But how are you doing this?” Voldemort asked curiously as he inspected the flames like they weren’t trying to burn past his shield and incinerate him. “Knowledge aside, a visitor in a body is only as strong as the host. He’s amazing at transfiguration, but he doesn’t have that level of mastery over his creations. You can't bridge that gap just by dominating his mind.”

“But he does have that level of control. He just doesn’t know how to apply it! Are you telling me you haven’t noticed the way he seems to have no aptitude for your class while somehow having the animagus form he does. It’s almost embarrassing me, Tom… I thought we were better than that.”

… We?

Voldemort’s brain spun within his head as words and hints collided, exploding within him until a number of world-changing realizations sparked from the resulting flames. He was stunned so badly that he almost accidentally dropped his shield. He looked across the grounds, reached into the eyes of an apparently very willing “Harry Potter”, and saw every single suspicion to be true. So many things shifted for him in less than a second. 

It all made so much sense now.

Why his magic begged him not to kill Harry Potter when he had the chance to choose; Why the boy interested him so much with his intellect and his potential; why the boy seemed to know more about him than he should; why the boy was drawn to speak with him despite his obvious apprehension.

All of this wasn’t because Harry was a threat. It was because their magic was compatible. If a reflection of himself was living within the boy, seemingly as an equal, then they were more than compatible. They were practically built in synchronization. Oh, it was as if he’d reached the end of a foreign mansion, thinking the adventure to be over, only to open the final door and see a universe of things to explore. He was so invested in his own mind that he was ashamed to admit he missed the tendrils of flames transfiguring into wood. 

He kept his shield up, knowing now that transfiguration was going to be the beginning and end of this duel for him. In his current body, despite his puppet’s power level, the Voldemort in the boy across from him was almost on equal footing, perhaps even at a slight advantage. The six vines of wood exploded with slews of sharp, jagged branches. They extended over his dome, trapping him within them.

This was bad…

Who knew what he could come up with in Harry Potter’s body and a dome of transfigurable material surrounding his opponent. Dropping the shield, he gathered his magic and blasted into the air with a gust of wind blowing the dam of jabbing branches out of his way. Taking to the sky, he suspended himself, knowing that it was something he could only hold for moments in his current body.

Looking down, he saw a variation of himself staring back through the green eyes of Harry Potter, and he raised his arm with the intent of striking to kill; nothing else was going to be good enough to escape a fight like this. He was certain that his opponent was just as likely to yield as himself. There was no way he would bow to anyone. That was, of course, the entire point of making those damn horcruxes in the first place. Things became infinitely more complicated as he realized that, of course, there was another him looking for the same item he was. 

He scowled as he lamented the stubbornness of his counterpart. The triumph of his plans finally coming to something that resembled fruition was equally combated by the frustration of competing with his only true equal. Yes, the ego in that statement was astounding, but it was also indisputably true. 

Just as he was about to carpet bomb Potter’s general area with as many explosions as he could muster, the boy twirled his wand over his head until, to Voldemort’s shock, a trail of blue, crackling electricity began to trail in circles behind it.

There really were no limits to this boy’s transfiguration prowess, were there?

Aborting his attack, he threw himself back as far as he could until lightning flooded from Potter’s wand. It branched and spread through the air as it approached him, filling the sky with a web of lethal energy, the likes of which a hurricane would’ve found pride in. Spreading his arms wide, he forgot about his wand and focussed solely on his connection to his magic. 

With a deft but gentle hand, he delicately guided the electrical energy toward either side of his body. Voldemort kept his eyes wide open, refusing to blink or look away as, in a flash, the lightning flew past him and spread out into the darkness of the night sky. He imagined that his counterpart was probably sharing in his exhaustion, but he couldn’t very well see past the blindingly white streaks in his vision. Cursing, once again, the weakness of his current body, he descended into the forest below and began his trek to the castle. 

It was a shame he didn’t have more time, but someone was bound to get suspicious of the spectacle that was their duel, and his plan was more than a success anyway. As much as he didn’t want to hit the Greengrass girl with the curse he did, that was the one he truly needed injured for this to work. Now that he figured out exactly who and, more importantly, what Harry Potter was, it seemed he had another objective this semester.

As impressed as he was with Potter’s magic, a display like that had to have been… well…

Taxing.

There was much to be done. He just had to wait for the perfect opportunity.

Gulping down as much air as possible, Tom bent over his knees and let the sweat drip from his forehead onto the ground. That last bout of power was intense, but it was also the bare minimum he needed to get Voldemort to leave the fight. As much as he adored the power he could feel waiting just underneath the surface, it wasn’t yet revealed, and Voldemort had much more stamina in Quirrell’s body than he had in Harry’s. 

He could feel himself fading.

Falling to his knees, he raised Harry’s wand to eye-level and waved his open palm over it. He let his magic sink into the wand, unburdening it of its past spells. He couldn’t rely on continuously casting to crowd Harry’s wand history, not after something like this. 

The aurors were going to be all over this shit. After all of the trouble they’d gone through to keep the Ministry away too. Voldemort had to have some sort of reason for directing so much attention toward the place of his current schemes. He wasn’t sure what that reason was, but he did know that he’d only ever bring the aurors around here if it aided him in his goal.

That meant Voldemort was close to going for whatever Dumbledore had hidden in the castle, and he needed the ministry to do it…

He sneered to himself as he felt his vision start to fade. It seemed as though Potter was getting his body back sooner than he thought. He would’ve been annoyed at the entire situation if he wasn’t oddly proud of the brat's cleverness. He’d make sure to complain about things later. 

For now…

He needed to rest.

Harry woke up on the ground, trying his damndest to stop himself from hacking up a lung. His throat was so raw it hurt to think about it, and his mouth was parched to the point that he thought water might evaporate the second it touched his tongue. Every muscle he owned throbbed with a vengeance, and a serious cramp formed on the side of his neck the second he tried to turn it.

Yelping at the pain and then almost choking on the sandpaper-esque, horrific feeling that noise caused in his throat, he rubbed the cramp out as he turned onto his stomach and pushed himself off of the ground. The entire field was absolutely demolished. There were parts of the grass that were scorched, some of which were still burning, and that was only considering the parts that weren’t blown to hell.

That was when his eyes fell upon Daphne. 

Fuck!

He clumsily stumbled over to her, almost falling flat on his face when he tried to get onto his knees and check on her. She was normally pale, yes, but she looked almost ghastly. He forced himself to examine her legs, pulling up her robes enough to see the damage clearly, and it was even worse than he'd thought it was when he gave control to the stranger. 

Her bones were ground into such fine shards that her legs looked almost shriveled, like bags of skin with no structure. Most of her flesh was shredded by her own bones as their sharp edges bit into her from the inside out. If he couldn’t see the tattered skin attaching her thighs to her hips, he wouldn’t have even called them legs. His insides were freezing just looking at it.

He needed to move her, and he needed to do it now.

He grabbed her hand and got ready to teleport. Damn the consequences; he’d go straight to the matron. She’d know what to do, and he’d teleport away immediately. They couldn’t detain him if he was half-way across the country. When he tried to shift, he was greeted with what was the biological equivalent of a car sputtering when it was started with an almost dead battery. 

Cursing under his breath, Harry tried to figure out what to do. He was almost entirely out of magic, too much for him to even transform, and that was usually second-nature to him. Wracking his brain did very little when he had such a low list of known spells. There was no way to get out of this without help. He mentally begged the stranger to help him despite the deal he’d forced the man to take, and when he didn’t get an answer, he switched to begging verbally. There wasn’t a peep.

He was all alone…

“Shit!” he exclaimed, despite the pain, as that burning sensation of uselessness bubbled up his chest and into his throat. 

She was getting paler by the second, and the blood wasn’t stopping on its own. He couldn’t teleport, he couldn’t carry her when she was like that, and he didn’t have the stranger to help him. Was this really all he amounted to? 

“Is this how it’s going to end!?” he hoarsely yelled at the sky, not sure if he was talking to a deity, the universe, or himself. "Well, fuck you!"

He stared at Daphne’s withering form as he searched for anything that could help him. Time was running out, and he was starting to get frantic when his brain defaulted to the most straightforward path. As clever as he was, there came a time when the only good method was to appeal to his baser instincts. If he couldn’t find some brilliant way for them to travel to the castle in record time, then he just had to brute force it. 

“D-don’t you give up on me now,” he whispered to her, cursing himself for his inability to keep his voice from shaking. 

He needed to be calm for this, damn it!

His wand was shuddering in his grasp, and he was barely capable of aiming it properly, but he used it to help him latch his magic onto a nearby rock. He turned it into a thin, narrow platform made of wood. On it were four wheels that he made thick and wide in order to better move across grass, and he used a second rock to create a strap that he stuck onto the platform with a nail that he fashioned from a blade of grass. 

With that done, he moved it closer to Daphne and then knelt by her side. “J-Just hang on. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

He wrapped his arms underneath her armpits and heaved her onto the platform, cringing at the way her demolished legs limply dangled against the ground as he lifted her upper body. Once she was on the platform up to her hips, he moved to her side and gently snuck his hands under what he hoped were her knees, lifting them as he shoved his other arm under her shoulder blades to get her onto the platform the rest of the way.

Once she was situated, he stepped inside of the looped strap and placed it against his midsection. He took a deep breath and started walking. Thankfully, the wheels made it possible for him to move her, but his legs were losing strength by the second. Hogwarts wasn’t known for its flat landscapes, and pulling both of them up hill after hill was burning him down to the bone and back to the surface of his skin. 

The midnight dew on the grass was complicating things. His shoes were, for lack of a better term on hand, dress shoes. They weren’t made for traction. He felt as if his progress was nonexistent before the sheer amount of energy he was losing. He glanced back at Daphne and hissed in a breath when he saw the way her blood was starting to accumulate on the platform he’d transfigured. He forced himself to take another step up the largest hill in his path to the castle door.

He slipped…

When his foot shot across the dew-covered grass, he fell onto his other knee and was forced to use his hands to keep his face from smacking against the ground. Helpless, burning frustration accumulated far too much to be kept off of his face when his fall caused him to start sliding down the hill. Jamming his feet and hands into the ground as hard as he could, he forced himself to come to a stop only for him to realize that the sudden halt made Daphne start to slide down the platform. 

Reaching behind him, he snatched the hood of her nighttime cloak, barely stopping her from falling off. He slowly turned around while keeping his feet dug into the indent he’d created and pulled her back to where she was. Hauling himself to his feet, he trudged back up the hill and past where he fell. By the time he reached the top, he couldn’t feel his legs anymore. Reminding himself that his legs worked while Daphne’s didn’t, he tunneled his vision on the door and refused to let his legs stop moving. 

His heart beating out of his chest and his lungs almost exploding inside of him, he finally got to the castle entrance. He almost ran into the door instead of stopping in front of it, and he fumbled around the rough surface of the wood until his skin touched the cold, metallic handle standing between him and the castle’s interior. With a heave, he tried to push the handle down and shove the door in.

It didn’t open.

His panic was slowly turning into hysteria. A bark of mirthless laughter let itself out of his mouth against his will because it was either that or breaking down. Pushing the handle down again, he threw his shoulder into the door no less than three times, each one further crushing the last of his hope far more than he would’ve ever been able to damage the door. It was locked, and he didn’t know how the hell he was meant to get in without help. Hagrid was supposed to be the one to take them back, but he’d briefly noticed the gigantic man as he was helping Daphne, and he was either dead or too unconscious to be of any help. If he was getting through, it was going to be by his own power.

Pulling his wand, he took a step back and leveled it at the door. “Alohomora!”

Nothing happened…

He’d spent everything he had left creating the stuff he needed to drag Daphne all the way here. There was nothing left to magically unlock the door. They were stuck outside, right at the final hurdle. 

Harry fell back onto the ground, finally running out of the steam to keep marching forward. He didn’t think there was a way to get past that door, be it through magical means or muggle. He looked back at Daphne and found that he hated himself right now probably more than he ever had in his entire life. What the fuck was he good for if he couldn’t do this!? He couldn’t just make magic out of nothi-...

“You can sacrifice practically anything so long as you deem it important enough to gain magical power from it.”

That was right…

Magic, at least as he understood it through the stranger’s lessons, wasn’t actually the exchange of energy for a practical effect. That was simply how modern magic worked. According to the stranger, magic was about sacrifice. If the exchange was made with energy, then that was because the wizard or witch decided that this was the sacrifice for their magic. It was, however, possible to change that sacrifice to anything so long as it was made with the intent of trading it for power. 

What could he give? What would he give?

His eyes flicked around the grass, and they fell upon a decently sized, very sharp stone. It was but one of many; Hogwarts was on a cliff, so rocks of various shapes and sizes were always present somewhere. Lifting the strap over his head, he crawled over to the stone and claimed it, looking over its sharp edge and contemplating how well it would work. Deeming it sufficient, he sat up on his knees and began to unbutton his undershirt. 

It was a cold night. Luckily, they were in between storms, and the entire castle got sick enough with the snow by now to melt almost the entirety of the grounds around Hogwarts. He was already shivering before, and he was practically turning blue without his shirt, but the snow would’ve made it so much worse. He wouldn’t have taken the shirt off at all, but the damn thing’s sleeves were too tight for him to pull them more than a bit above his wrists.

Taking a calming breath, he scraped the stone against the skin on the back of his forearm, pushing down until it drew blood. He focused the whole time on the purpose of his injury and the intent behind it. Once he was finished, he dropped the stone, drew his wand, and pointed it at the door.

“Alohomora,” he incanted. 

The door didn’t budge.

He felt the pull, and it wasn’t as intense as it was before, but it wasn’t enough. His eyes moved to his friend, and he hardened himself as he crawled back to the platform with his wand back in his pocket and the stone in his dominant hand. He placed his cut arm flat on the wooden plank and steadied himself. Bringing the stone back to his skin, he dragged it across the surface, slicing it open and then going back for another time to do it again.

His arm was bleeding quite a bit now, and he dropped the stone to go for his wand. He pointed it at the door, and he let loose the spell.

“Alohomora,” 

It still didn’t click…

“God damn it!”

Gritting his teeth, he tossed his wand onto the ground and picked up the fucking stone. He wasted no time slashing his arm with it again. He hissed from the pain when he accidentally let it slip, creating a messy and much more painful cut than the previous three, and he went for the wand again. 

“Alohomora!”

The spell wasn’t fucking working!

Now manic from exhaustion, anger, panic, and pain, he slammed his wand crudely against the platform, snatched the rock from the ground, and bashed it against his arm without reprieve or mercy, violently cursing in between each of the three strikes before throwing the bloody stone at the wooden door with all of his might. His arm profusely bruised and bleeding, he threw his hand against the platform and dragged his wand off of it, slinging the tip toward the door.

“Alohomora!”

A loud *clink* signified the door’s locking mechanism switching positions.

Jamming his wand back in his pocket, he pulled himself onto his feet and, with blood now dripping from the self-inflicted wounds marring the entirety of his forearm, pushed the door open and limped the two of them into the castle. His eyes flew around the dark entrance as he looked for anything or anyone capable of helping them. The hospital wing wasn’t a place he could reach on his own, let alone with a broken Daphne in tow. He couldn’t think straight, and no plan was forthcoming.

Through sheer willpower, he managed to get to the foot of the first set of stairs before his legs collapsed beneath him. He didn’t know what to do, so he naturally acted on instinct alone.

“FARLEY!” he shouted.

Harry was only half aware he even called the Prefect’s name. He wasn’t even sure if she was anywhere near him. The castle was large, and a patrolling Prefect had lots of places to cover. Still, he yelled the name, and, when he heard nobody coming, he did it again.

“FARL-!” 

His raw throat cracked in the middle of the shout, and he hacked as his head fell the rest of the way to the floor. His breath shallow and raspy, he found himself unable to keep his eyes open. With the very last, nonexistent bit of energy he had left, he reached out with his mind and offered himself up on a sacrificial platter, not caring what it took from him as he called out to the only recourse he thought he had left. That last act of resistance against his coming fate was enough to rip him asunder, and he blacked out next to his dying friend not a second later.