Speaking in Tongues

“We shouldn’t be doing—” the faceless Death Eater did not get to finish his words. For Harry, in that second, decided that he would not allow the man to ruin his fun.

Harry pressed close enough that his bare chest grazed the man’s shirt, his thighs caging the man’s hips until there was nowhere else to go. He didn’t know who this man was, but that small fact didn’t matter. Not really.

They were all the same. Men and women the Dark Lord had seduced to his side, idealistic fools that knew Voldemort as a leader rather than the terrorist Harry had come to know for the majority of his life. They were insects that danced only to the tune Voldemort saw fit to play for them.

What they thought and did was insignificant. They were monsters. Accessories to the atrocities the Dark Lord permitted in his new government. They could all rot for all he cared.

“Shhh, it could be our little secret,” Harry whispered into the man’s ear, voice soft. A seductive lilt to the words no one that knew who Harry was would ever associate him with. He had been a boy of light, a creature that only knew kindness and love.

But that was a long time ago. There was none of that boy left for even the vultures to pick at with their long, sharp beaks.

Harry couldn’t see the man’s face, but the harsh exhalation from unseen lips was enough to alert Harry  of just how well the seduction had been received. There was no ding in his mask, in the way he romanced even the staunchest straight man into his hands.

They were all the same in the end. Weak to gentleness when their lives were harsh beneath Lord Voldemort’s callous regime. But there was no softness in his heart, no warmth to his soul despite the heat writhing just centimeters beneath his skin.

The golden rings around his ankles and wrists were perhaps the only thing truly golden about him now.

Harry Potter had been broken and remade into a new man. His heart had become stone, hardened by the layers of scars and atrocities he’d been forced to witness. Death after death of friends he had known. Brands and tattoos etched onto his skin until there was nothing left of the pliant, gleaming skin of a boy born from the sun.

The war had made him into a martyr, but Lord Voldemort had turned into him a devil. A creature bound to a soulless master that only knew manipulation and death. It was only fitting that he, the Boy Who Dared Survive, would erode along the way. Broken down to fit the new world order that Voldemort continued to amass, an army of sycophants and enamored youths that knew nothing of what freedom tasted of.

Only Harry knew what that was, what life before Voldemort became everything. Ignorance...truly was bliss, in that respect.

“He’ll k-know, the Dark Lord always knows,” the man pled, frozen stiff within Harry’s lax embrace. Afraid that any movement, even accidental, would somehow alert Harry’s onerous guard. It almost made Harry laugh to see a man nearly twice his weight quiver like a leaf.

Harry Potter was thin. Forever soft and youthful in spite of the decades that had passed since he’d turned eighteen years old, since he’d lost the Battle of Hogwarts all those years ago. It was ridiculous that one of Voldemort’s men would be so afraid. Terrified by the temptation of Harry’s skin and the promises that swam within the gleam of his gaze.

It made this game all the sweeter.

“But aren’t you curious about why the Dark Lord keeps me at his side? What it is that I possess that makes your master guard me like a precious jewel?” Harry asked, fingers resting on the man’s shoulders.

The man flinched, but Harry did not stop. No. He refused.

This was the most entertainment Harry had had in years. To see the Dark Lord’s followers quiver at the mere sight of him, to know that they feared his flirtatious murmurs and the chaos that would ensue should they be the recipient of his attentions, was intoxicating. It was the greatest kind of high, to see men that Voldemort had personally brainwashed beside themselves when it came to Voldemort’s mysterious charge. A boy they knew the Dark Lord possessed but knew little of.

Except, of course, that Harry belonged to the Dark Lord.

Voldemort’s orders were absolute. Voldemort had left no room for disobedience, for even error. If anyone dared to press their fingers against Harry’s skin, to gaze too long and to covet something that belonged undeniably to the Dark Lord, would suffer for their transgression. A fate no one wished to face, was terrified, of experiencing.

To touch, to brand their hands across Harry’s skin, was death. A poison that would run, run, run down the victim’s fingers until all they knew, and all they felt, was the chilling lips of a Dementor’s kiss. It was what Voldemort had promised to them all, announced to the world with Harry at his side.

He is mine. Touch him, and you shall learn for yourselves how merciful death can be.

It was laughable, for the Dark Lord to claim him before an audience when there was nothing to claim. The Harry Potter everyone knew and loved was gone.

All that was left was a boy that no longer recognized himself in the rippling surface of shallow waters.

Harry leaned in further until his breath misted against the nameless man’s clothed neck, his teeth aching with need to bite, bite, and bite until it was swollen and red. Hungry for blood to gush into his mouth, to dribble down his chin and smear the white robes Voldemort had insisted he wear.

Ruin the purity just as he has ruined you.

“W-we cannot—”

Harry’s laughter interrupted him, hands smoothing over the man’s shoulders until his hands wrapped loosely around the stranger’s neck. A non-verbal threat of his own making, one that Harry would never go through with, but wished to burn into that clothed neck nevertheless.

It was the closest to control Harry had. Like flying near the sun without burning, the waxen sheen of his flesh immune to the caprices of a dangerous flame. It made him feel powerful to hold this man’s life in his hands.

To know that Voldemort, even when he delighted with his success in the war, was still a loser in his own right. For Harry, though lost in mind but not in body, still knew where to hurt him most. To covet was a sin, Harry had read once upon a time, and the Dark Lord coveted so much. Ached and thirsted for what he did not possess, for what he could not have. How easy it was to force the man’s hand.

To sow the seed of doubt and watch the fruit of the poisonous tree grow.

“But it’s so lonely. Voldemort is never here. He leaves me here to wallow in my solitude as he enjoys the splendors of the outside world. An empire of his own making that I know so little of...” Harry crooned, smiling when the man shuddered beneath him and a sharp gasp fled covered lips.

“But you’re here. With me. You can tell me of this world, can show me all that there is to know. You can do so much for me more than Lord Voldemort ever could...”

The lies came easily, his honor and morality no longer restraining his falsities.

A pleased purr rumbled in his throat when the man’s fingers twitched, as if itching to press against his back and explore the lines of skin Voldemort had not touched in ages.

Excitement swelled within him, the high of stalking and waiting, of bending and twisting the unsuspecting to his will enough to make him smile. For Harry knew that the moment this man crumbled, the moment he gave in just as the others before him, would be his downfall.

Just as pawns died in the name of the game.

The anticipation was almost as exquisite as the aftermath that would surely follow.

“He isn’t here... ” Harry purred, caging the man further into the wall of his bedroom, the mirror on the right side of the trembling Death Eater giving Harry a nice view of the doorway at his back. “It is only you and me.”

Then, like a crack of a whip, Harry felt the man’s resistance crumble.

Hands that once laid loosely to the man’s sides were crushing into Harry’s hips, fingers tight enough to send jolts of misplaced ecstasy down Harry’s spine. A low moan escaped Harry’s lips, and Harry leaned in, hands pulling onto the man’s robes with a frenzy he didn’t need to fake.

To be touched, to be wanted, after all he had been through always made him feel alive. It lit the spark Voldemort had dedicated years into snuffing out, whispered intricate spells into the shell of his ears he hadn’t heard since Voldemort had departed.

Without Voldemort’s attentions, without a monster to rally against, to defy at each turn, Harry was nothing more than a corpse with cruel seedlings in his maw. Blossoming in the shadows, away from the light he’d thrived in for most of his life, like some sordid secret families hid away in darkened basements and dusty attics.

In this moment, in the calm before the storm, Harry was all this man would see.

Harry sank into the touches, drank in the desperate panting of a Death Eater that had minutes to live, that would breathe his last breaths only because Harry had chosen him. No other reason, no other interest, but to elicit rage in Voldemort’s mind.

It was cruel, but there was no kindness left for him to give.

A hand released its tight grip on his hip and trailed up his stomach, curved over his ribs like vines twisted ‘round ancient trees, until they settled in his curly hair. Nails scratched at his scalp pleasantly, fingers tightened gently around the strands to press him closer, to force him nearer to the Death Eater’s clothed mouth.

And Harry allowed it, followed him until their bodies were almost one. His thighs pressed against wide thighs, his chest to a soft chest, his groin to hard flesh, and Harry felt alive.

“Yes, that’s it,” Harry groaned, grinding his hips into the man’s hard cock, humming when it elicited a loud cry. The sound sent another delicious jolt up Harry’s spine, nearly drowning out tingles of awareness that bloomed to life at the nape of his neck.

A smile threatened to break along Harry’s mouth. His mirth and vicious amusement like an illness that rotted perfectly good meat.

Voldemort was watching. How the man had managed to slip past the mirror without being seen, how the monster had leaked through his senses without letting Harry know at all, exciting. Thrilling in a way that it should not have been, but was.

This fact did not frighten him. Not like it would have in the past when he still had a mind of his own, a mind pure and clean like the robes draped around his skin.

But that boy was dead.

All that remained now was the creature Voldemort had bred, and oh, how it hungered, how it wanted to ruin everything Voldemort had dedicated his entire existence into creating. All to see the man focus his distanced eyes on him, to feel the monster’s rage lick at his flesh and make him sing.

“What is this?” Voldemort’s sharp hiss was like the crack of a whip.

The Death Eater released him immediately, a terrified choking sound fleeing the man’s mouth almost as if Voldemort had already cursed him for daring to touch what was his.

Harry laughed, unable to hold it any longer. His ribs ached, his stomach quivered, cock growing hard for the first time that night at the sound of Voldemort’s sibilant hiss.

This was what Harry lived for. This moment, the look of fear in his subject’s eyes and the anger in Voldemort’s voice. It was delicious.

“M-my Lord, it’s not—’ but Voldemort gave the man no time to explain himself. Within seconds, Harry was wrenched away by a powerful force Harry did nothing to fight against, and then, the room shook with the force of the man’s screams.

Harry hardly noticed the minute his back smashed into the wall behind him, not when Voldemort’s magic was pressing against his skin. His anger and his will bored into him, rendering him breathless for a moment.

It didn’t take him long to recover, however. He was accustomed to Voldemort’s violence, to the potent magic even if being deprived of his radiance had softened him slightly. But that had passed, and now, Harry could enjoy the spoils that his conquest had produced.

The sounds were like music to his ears, the sight of the pathetic man’s body writhing and twisting, begging for his Lord to spare him like the sweetest candy. It should have repulsed him to witness this, made him guilty to see a man that had no hand in the cold murder of his friends, of the splintering of his sanity, but it didn’t. It hadn’t in all the years Harry had preyed on the weak Death Eaters Voldemort employed in his home.

They were all the same, after all.

“Do you not grow tired of the games?” Voldemort hissed, irritation and rage like the heat of a wildfire. “How many must I kill before you see that you are mine?”

Harry did not bother to answer, shifting his gaze away from the writhing and screaming Death Eater to level Voldemort with a mischievous look, tongue peaking out to lick languidly at his bottom lip.

Voldemort stood beside the door. Serpentine features twisted, eyes bright with his fury. His eyes were entirely on Harry, never straying from him even when the Death Eater begged and screamed for mercy and forgiveness. It was like Voldemort and Harry were the only two in the room.

“How many is it now?” Harry asked, ignoring the man’s questions. “Twenty-five? Fifty-two? I’ve lost count.”

Voldemort’s expression hardened further, and then, Harry was flying, his body propelled forward, wrenched close enough to the Dark Lord that he could see his own bright green eyes reflected in Voldemort’s red stare.

There were slits in Voldemort’s eyes where there should have been round, black pupils. There were scales and smooth gaunt flesh where there should have been the flush of blood flowing through a network of capillaries on Voldemort’s face.

And you can’t get enough of this, can you?

A grotesque monster laid before him, dressed in robes of the highest quality. A king, a Lord, despite the atrocities he had committed to achieve what he had. He’d leveled the earth, moved the stars to fit his own image. He’d twisted the laws and the promises of those that stood against him, driven a wedge between the muggles and the wizards that no one had a means of superseding.

Lord Voldemort had become a god. A fearsome creature that smote all that dared snub him, to turn against him even when it was useless...

And his attention was all on him. His and his alone.

It was breathtaking, a different kind of excitement making his skin flush. Because Lord Voldemort was looking at him. This man, no, this angry god, guarded him. His zealous protector, Voldemort’s greatest treasure despite the cracks and fault lines along his innards.

Voldemort’s pride, Voldemort’s joy, Vodemort’s horcrux—

Harry’s fingers itched to touch, wanted nothing more than to dig his fingers in the same fashion the Death Eater dying just a short distance away had. Harry wanted to brand, to bleed his touch into Voldemort’s skin. To unmake him, to sully him in the same way Voldemort had done him.

It would be poetic justice, as the monster of Voldemort’s own making, to return the favor. The thought aroused him, stoked a monstrous hunger Harry had no means of containing, had no interest in repressing.

“Such a cruel creature you’ve become...” Voldemort murmured, one pale hand lifting to caress his cheeks. Memorizing the skin, or perhaps, reacquainting himself with flesh Voldemort had not touched since he’d left to talk business with the Magical Congress in America.

Shivers ran up Harry’s spine at the way Voldemort’s touch harmonized with his magic, the way his darkness sought out the black of his own, devouring it just as Harry’s light had been swallowed by the emptiness that had wormed its way into his mind.

“...From a golden daffodil to a poisonous flower...”

Harry’s back arched when Voldemort’s fingers made their way to his scar and a jolt of mind-scrambling ecstasy exploded in response. A loud whine tore from his throat, cock swelling to the point of pain with need for more. The connection made him feel alive, made his blood sing.

It was so much better than the pained screams of all the victims that had fallen prey to his seduction. This was nirvana, this was completion, this was—

“...You truly are my Valour.”