Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/14150193. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: F/M Fandom: Harry_Potter_-_J._K._Rowling Relationship: Harry_Potter/Tom_Riddle_|_Voldemort Character: Harry_Potter, Tom_Riddle_|_Voldemort, Bellatrix_Black_Lestrange Additional Tags: Fem!Harry, Female_Harry_Potter, Alternate_Universe_-_Gender_Changes Stats: Published: 2018-03-30 Chapters: 1/2 Words: 4352 ****** the bible didn't mention us ****** by Nocturnememory Summary “Did you think I would spare you, you wretched thing,” he snarls, but her memories, her mind, the wild, off-kilter slamming of her heartbeat makes his fucking head spin. “Do you think yourself worthy to carry Lord Voldemort’s soul?” Her eyes slip close, her foot scuffs a prophecy, something shatters, echoes, trips along the dark and her mind is all full up with one word. A litany. A prayer. A supplication and it gouges him and he wants to make her beg— Horcrux. Horcrux. Horcrux. Notes Warnings: Fifth year AU, Fem!Harry, Harrie knows she’s a Horcrux. Underage, vaguely dub-con because of age, obviously. Smutty-ish, violence, and Voldemort. Also: absolute abuse of grammar and more prose than anything as it was very self-indulgent. Part one of two, maybe three. ---  I  ---                      The room is cavernous and dark, but he’s walked the length of it so many times in dreams, in meticulous re-imaginings to show her the way, in fantasies too, the ones where that slow voice of Fate crawls along the air and settles like electrified iron—   Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…   —like blood and promise all slick and red. There’s more to it, he knows and he needs her to get it for him because there’s nothing quite like the divine comedy of karma.   And then—   There.   The girl looks up at him, her eyes wide, the light of the shifting blue-tinted orbs turns her eyes turquoise, a colour meant more for the seaside than for the dark. She looks up at him and he steps close because there’s all that iron in the air and its electric and charged and she opens her hand and the orb swirls, casts pale lights that arc off the young angles of her face. The temptation to kill and be done with it is an itch along his index finger, the palm of his hand, an ache in the blood for a moment of peace— A moment of reprieve spared not to a girl who carries the brother wand to his own, who had looked up at him in that graveyard, bloody, beaten and brave and raised that one against him. The sheer audacity of her sits in his molars like a cavity; he cracks them open daily to chew her over, taste the bitter truth that Harrie Potter lives and breathes and dares— His hand touches her throat, a scrawny breakable girl with eyes that taunt death, his death in the ring of her iris. The girl doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, doesn’t blink— Even as his fingers curl around her throat, circle the distance so easily. Her young heart thuds against his palm and there’s an awareness at the back of his mind, that the rhythm of it settles into his, less an echo than a wave, a cresting swell in the ocean, a continuous current. One pulse into another. “You are a foolish creature, Harrie Potter,” he leans closer, her head rises, eyes locked on his and her breath stutters when his hand tightens, when his fingers compress into her skin and jugular, and he swears he can hear the crack of her bones but it’s all just air getting lodged in their throats.   And then—    And then he hears it.   A siren song, a pulse beat, a truth more sweet than the bowed backs of purebloods kneeling on marble floors before him; at the foot of their Lord, their God.   Her face turns red, eyes watering, her body kept still by sheer force of that stubborn, Gryffindor will—    Do you know?    (Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux. Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.)   Horcrux.   His fingers tighten, mouth curving into a snarl, her eyes on his, lids sinking heavy, opening; her sneakers squeak on the cold floor, the shelves of prophecies, lost fates, clatter-clink-shake as he lifts-shoves-slams her into the slats of Fate heavy shelves; her foot knocks into something, a mindless, animal instinct for purchase, for air, hands lifting to his arm but all she does is grip on, small fingered, bird-boned— They grip on, curling into the dark of his suit jacket.   (There’s a boy in a chamber. Dreams of a voice. A cupboard. The dark. A snake. The dark. A language all slippery smooth. A boy— There’s an old man and he says, I am so sorry.)   “Did you think I would spare you, you wretched thing,” he snarls, but her memories, her mind, the wild, off-kilter slamming of her heartbeat makes his fucking head spin. “Do you think yourself worthy to carry Lord Voldemort’s soul?”  Her eyes slip close, her foot scuffs a prophecy, something shatters, echoes, trips along the dark and her mind is all full up with one word. A litany. A prayer. A supplication and it gouges him and he wants to make her fucking beg—   (Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.Horcrux.)   He lets her go, her legs weak, body trembling as he pins her with no more than his hand around her throat, tight enough to be a warning, a threat unspoken in the width of it around the breakable bones of her neck.  She coughs and chokes and shakes. Tears slip along the flushed red of her cheeks and her hand is white-knuckled, buried in black and he watches her face; watches colour slip out, watches the red of her lips, gasping for air, watches her eyes open a feeling in his chest like he’s nearly as desperate for air as she is.  “Beg,” he whispers, breathes out like he’s a God bearing commandments for a man to bury a knife in his son’s belly.   (Sacrifice unto God and he will be    m e r c i f u l)    The silence builds, filled up with her breathing and their pulse and the Girl, the Prophecy Child— his Horcrux—   “I’m yours,” she whispers, voice torn, soft, so honest it’s an agony.  And his hand loosens, a shift of breathing, of being caught, stolen, lost in green…   “But I won’t beg.”       ---   I I  ---                        She slips into his life like a phantom limb; like she’s always been there, a little shadow in his wake (infinitely brighter though she is) and bears no marks but the one upon her forehead. (So he thought: she shows him one, a loose-limbed young thing in his lap, Spreads her hand along the back of his and says, I must not tell lies.)                 In the aftermath, (because he owns her and you don’t fucking touch what’s his) in the blood and the screams and the mess of a once-was toad-faced woman torn open into something much more like roadkill, he says, Don’t you want to make her hurt? Harrie’s face tucks into his neck she says, I am yours, but I am not                             you.        (He tries once more, because what truth can one ever know about oneself until one tries?)     The girl, his girl, is touch shy; a kitten with instincts found in back-alleys, in too rough hands and too many violences for young limbs. This is not unknown to him, has spent the same first decade outside the womb in the same unloved, unwanted, you’re a freak ain’t you, nobody loves you, you should be  t h a n k f u l— She’s scrawny, and it isn’t just that she’s fifteen and still learning the weight of her body; isn’t that her stomach is empty (he knows, he’s watched her lick sweet things from the corner of her mouth, the red of her bottom lip, has thought about how sugared her tongue would be, how sweet a kiss.) He knows because he feeds her, watches the sweet of her tongue chase the whorls of his fingerprints, the white sharp of her teeth scraping the pads of his fingers, a slick heat in her mouth that makes him want in ways that would shame the Devil. So he bares the skin of her shoulder, the sharp of her collarbone, curves his fingers into the neckline of her shirts and traces the bump of her bones, the history she wears but weighs her tongue down with denial. So he says, I know. And revels, thrills, exalts the taste of skin with his tongue and waits for her to squirm, to hitch a breath, to say—                   I grew up in the dark.   And here, he shows her his violence is not just for himself, but still for himself; because she is nothing if not his and if she is his then is she not him?                   (This isn’t a creation myth, but)   But there are roots in her mind and they all lead to a cupboard. To a mundane street, a mundane house, a mundane family who touched something that belongs to him. And what God would he be if he were not selfish and terrible and unkind and cruel? So he tells her to watch, watch, Harrie. Filth begets filth. And I am the Purification.                 (But it is a myth in its own way.)   There are no tears, though he cannot lie and say this doesn’t disappoint him, she is lovely when she cries. But after, after they’ve stopped crying, after they’ve stopped begging, stopped twitching, stopped breathing—             That night in the dark there’s a creak of a door and her limbs are thin and cold and she presses herself against him and she says Do not do that to me again.   And his hand is on her throat and she asphyxiates like an angel out of grace, like the plummet of a seraphim and then his mouth is on hers and who knew grace could ever be found in the grave because he is certain that she’s stolen life from his chest, for every heartbeat is in her name and—   He learnt prayer in school, beneath a cane, old wood, old pages, old verses— But here, he recites hymns and pulls mercies and her skin is holier than his own and he wants her dead—   But kisses her instead.       ---   I  I  I  ---           G I R L   W H O   L I V E D   M I S S I N G ?                        Harrie grins at him over the paper, all teeth and dimples and crinkle-eyed laugh. It bounces through him, a reverberation of light she creates on airwaves and leaves him a little breathless in the wake of her. “Haven’t told them you kidnapped me, then?” And his Death Eaters are waiting, he knows, but Harrie is naked and last night he touched his mouth to every bit of her skin he could and she’s bruised and marred by his hands and mouth and teeth and tongue and he’s never seen anything more lovely than the way sheet pools just over her chest and the pink tease of one nipple and— He’s their Lord,he thinks, Let them wait. “And here I thought I couldn’t get rid of you,” he drawls, sinks back down beside her in the bed and bares more of her skin to his eyes, hand spread wide, teeth sharp; waits for a hitch, a squirm, roll, sharp little please—                          His spies tell him that the Order’s foundations are shaken beneath the weight of weakness and infighting; Dumbledore insists they search for the girl, but there are those who think it more…prudent, to carry on without her. Without the Chosen One, the Girl Who Lived, Dumbledore’s Darling— Who lazes naked in his bed and has never had him inside of her but smiles like she’s been well-fucked and can tempt him with the pure fantasy of it. (And he doesn’t know why he hasn’t yet, other than he’s always been a bit of a masochist but far more of a sadist and he wants her to fucking beg.) Bellatrix’s face twists whenever the girl is in sight, whenever she presses herself against him, whenever he touches her, shameless, irreverent of who sees. Her disdain unchecked, un-tempered; he spares a thought to cursing her just for the weakness of her expression but it feels more like a weakness to care at all, so he orders a raid, a shake-up, a little strife to whet the pureblood tongue. We’ll show them what they should fear, who they should fear. No girl, no prophecy but the Future within our grasp. Take it. Take it, show them the value of your blood.                      That night Harrie crawls into his bed, all cold sharp limbs and presses her body over his and presses her mouth over his and presses her heart into his and it thumps against his chest all the more wild for the press of peaked nipples, pebbled skin, a young want that trips her confidence into something devastatingly sweet when he rolls her beneath him.   She whispers into his mouth, between the slip of their lips, over his cheek when his teeth scrape her jaw, will you keep me?   And what a weakness the yes in his throat is, so he sinks his teeth into her neck, her shoulder, the soft swell of her chest and ruins her, just a little, beneath his mouth until she squirms and hitches and inhales those sharp little pleas and her hands press against his shoulders, a downward urge that makes him gloat and smirk and fucking grin into her cunt at the desperate roll of her hips, the scratch-scrape-cut of her nails into his skin and the rolling arc of her body while her voice sobs out his name like it’s something holy in between the gasps and bitten inhales and the please—   (And if this is a creation myth, he’ll build universes out of those sounds.)         ---   I V  ---                       She turns sixteen as summer hangs a heavy, cicada humming lull over the countryside, he spends it working his fingers inside of her, spends it watching the sunlight turn her into the Golden Girl the Prophet still claims her to be (even missing, even gone. Even His.) Spends it watching, listening, licking up the leak of her over her thighs, his fingers, his wrist, her cunt, until two becomes three becomes aplease, please— And he thinks to deny her, to show her that he is merciless and unkind and very often cruel, but her eyes are violent and wet and he’s been teasing her so long she’s pink with it and not just her face. He isn’t careful but their fingers lace together above her head and every move inside of her is as slick and slow and thick as honey and every breath from her mouth lands heavy in his and every exhale from his lands warm in hers and this, he knows,           is a creation of some kind.   One that starts hot in the belly, pools low, surges, tenses, draws taut between them until there is no truth so known as an inhale, a kiss, a thudding heart beating in time with another. Harrie’s nail sink into his neck and her voice twists with pleas and prayers for harder, harder— And what God would he be if he wasn’t merciful, but what man would he be if he wasn’t just a little cruel, so he stays steady, stays deep, sinks inside of her as slow as the sun burns across the sky and tints their skin into darker shades and watches her frustration, swallows her whines, licks up everything she lets slip from her mouth and has never felt so     Mortal.       ---   V  ---                       There’s a war raging, belching hexes and curses through the streets and fields of their hidden world and it leaks into another like the climb of bile along the throat. Stains sidewalks, shatters windows as still burning rubble breaks through disillusioned streets. Harrie reads the papers every morning like she’s committing them to memory; he catches names in her head, like funeral processions. Rufus Scrimgeour- “Does it bother you,” he asks, knotting a hand into her hair, tilting her to face him. “Do you weep for them, little Horcrux?” She meets his eyes more easily than anyone ever has, no fear, no hesitation; like she knows that despite what he claims, she owns him, more and more each day. “Does it matter to you if I did?” He thinks to laugh, to hurt her, to show her the blood and bone and the gore left gouged in the cobblestone streets. Or, perhaps, he’ll show her how easy death can come, an exhale, a whisper, a flash of light— Avada Kedavra “No,” he says and pulls her to her feet, bends her over the table and fucks her until the sex-slick-sweat-damp of her skin smears the names of the dead. He says, Say them. Tell me. And Harrie gasps, begs, moans:   Rufus Scrimgeour, Amelia Bones, Florean Fortesque, Thadeus Thewl, Miranda Grady—           ---   V  I ---         The first time she asks, it’s nothing more than a whisper against his skin, nothing more than her pink mouth pressing, promising, praying something as close to worship as Harrie ever comes. A nip of teeth, the beat of his jugular, How did you make me? And his first thought is, as easily as I can unmake you. And sets a hand to her throat as he sinks back inside of her, would you like to be unmade? Her eyes are violences, vitriolic, venomous, but they sink beneath lashes and that pink mouth parts and she chokes, how much of you is inside of me? How much can you lose?   (And here, he finds, as he fills her up just a little bit more, that he isn’t certain he wants to know.)                                  “Dumbledore had it last,” she shrugs, scrapes her tongue along the spoon, chases ice cream and sugar and she well knows what she does to him. “I mean, not exactly your swiftest idea, it had your name in it an’ all.” “I was sixteen,” he drawls. “I wanted to see what I could do.” She smirks, her eyes flick to his, teeth scraping her bottom lip. “Don’t we all.” He snorts, watches the shine of her mouth. “And what would you know of it.” Another spoonful, another, long lick, another sugary white trail that spreads along the red of her tongue; a taunt, a tease, a pornographic still frame in his mind. The fire crackles low and warm behind her, his quill tip scratches over the parchment. She barely makes a noise when she moves, but the air shifts, (or his world does) and Harrie’s hand lays flat against the parchment, a dry crinkle as she draws her fingers together. “Tell me,” she whispers, her eyes dark and wide; nudges his thigh and sinks to her knees like she’s going to prayer, her hands reaching for his belt. He swallows, stills his hand, his eagerness, his violence to take and take and take more still. To break her open and make her his. Her tongue drags over her lips, “How did you make me.”  He leans back in the chair, and says, low enough that the sound of his zipper is near deafening still, “I already knew what I was capable of.” She looks up at him, her hand closing around the thick of him, her mouth bitten, sugared red, more sweet than saint, “Do you want to see what I’m capable of?”   He thinks, as the cold of her tongue sweeps over him, that he already knows.   And it’s more threat than promise.                      Dumbledore’s hand is black and withered and Harrie sees it in the moments their minds meet as their bodies do, in each rough plunge, in each half-torn noise, his hand on her throat, on her hip, her temples wet, her eyes clenched shut. “Look at me,” he hisses. “Look at me.” Her nails scrape his wrist but her hips roll into his but her mind cringes but swells towards his on impulse like she needs to know but wants nothing less than to see it. Look at me, he growls, makes her wince and whine and writhe and then she does, opening her eyes and meeting him straight on, a wet green more brutal than his pace, more deadly than his tongue. He spits, you’re fucking soaked, little Horcrux, what are you now? And Harrie scrapes her nails along the back of his neck, up along his scalp, drags him down and groans, yours. You fuck, I’m yours.                 “Is he dying,” she asks, later, when the blood on his wrist is dirt coloured and the bruises on her hips and throat are still violent but he’s eased the worst of it beneath a softer touch, a half-sorry mouth. It’s less a question than a statement; like she knows already. “His end was inevitable,” he says, watches the moon glint along her skin. “All he’s done is brought himself a slow death.” Harrie says nothing, he hears her heart trip, a faint echo just slightly off beat from his. “Will you cry for him?” he sneers and thinks about making her watch. Silence reigns but for their heartbeats, until Harrie shifts, her legs sliding over his, her body sliding over his, straddles his lap and she’s all angles and shallow curves and an openness on her face that belies that sudden trip of her heart that makes him want to bite her open and sink more and more of himself inside of her until there’s nothing, nothing, nothing left of anyone but him. She’s wet, leaking him, it soaks between them, makes her cunt all slippery smooth along his cock and he thinks this should be enough, should be enough to sate him, but— But it’s not, not nearly. “How many more can you afford to lose?” “I’m not concerned,” he lies. Half-lies, because that’s two down, that’s two less, but he has her and that’s…and she’s— “How many?” she whispers, rocks up, sinks down, nails scraping his chest as her head tilts back, a pale thing, less girl than a momentary fantasy, spun in moonlight, a boy’s young desire brought to life, a man’s darkness given a home, a sanctuary, a blessed little vessel to sink himself inside. “Seven,” he groans, grips her hips and prays. “You’re the seventh.”           ---   V  I  I   ---                   She’s a lazy thing more snake than girl, bathes in sunlight like hot stones, like Nagini, who trails after the girl, a winding, long shadow. Like follows like, after all. He wonders if she knows.                      They return blood splattered, dipped in violence, still sparking with death-magic and blood-lust and that humming thrall of aggression, adrenaline, an appalling appetite unsated. Bellatrix’s laugh is a high-pitched church bell calling masses and Harrie’s attention from the green of the grass she melts into. Nagini uncoils as the girl does, a winding, rolling stretch. Far too comfortable, he thinks, but watches a flash of skin, the arc of her body, the strain of her arms and the lazy, indolent smile that spreads across her face. “Come here,” he calls, just barely, Lord Voldemort does not ask for things. She comes and her skin is sun-kissed warm and her eyes are burnt bright from the sunlight above and he hates her for how clean she still is, even bearing that five finger-tipped ring of ownership around her neck. Even bearing the crowning indents of his teeth on her shoulder, hip, thigh… Her eyes flick to Peter Pettigrew, who slinks along the end of his Death Eaters progression into the manor, as they peel off bloodied layers and vanish gold masks and whisper cleaning charms along the slick of their hands. Revolution is rarely a tidy matter. War is...  Well. “Peter,” he calls, his eyes trained on the girl’s face, on that imperceptible twitch of her heart falling out of rhythm with his. Harrie’s eyes snap back to his, another trip, twitch, two-timed thud. “M-my Lord,” Pettigrew stumbles, the fear in his heart, a pungent thing. Bellatrix, a step behind his shoulder, giggles. Harrie looks up at him and her heart realigns, but her eyes are hard and empty and she says, don’t, with nothing more than the pulse beat of their connection. “Did you love your friends, Peter?” Her jaw ticks, he thinks to laugh, to taunt her, to realign the scales just a bit more in his favour. “Did you hold their child when she was born?” Pettigrew stutters, a sniffing noise, “Did you love her?” Harrie meets his gaze, waiting, nearly empty but for the too steady beat of her heart, too calm, too coiled, the snake in the long grass he wants to see strike. A first bite, wants to know if she’s venomous. “Y-yes, my L-lord.” Come on, little Horcrux, you’re mine, aren’t you? (Or just a poison to him.) “But you still betrayed them, Peter, betrayed her, didn’t you?” “M-my Lord was—was all Powerful, E-everywhere, I was, was, faithful to your Cause.” Harrie looks up at him, her jaw tight, her eyes steady, but her soul— “You were faithless, Peter. Weak."  Their soul— “You handed them over to me to save your worthless life.” A sniffle, whining noise and when his body hits the ground with a thud there’s no scream but a choking noise, a gurgling, gruesome writhing of a once-was friend. —Sparks. “Would you like to hurt him?” he offers, draws her wand from her side and slips it along her palm, fingertips grazing hers, a slow stroke, a slow urge. The weight of their soul, body, all that lies between them, Harrie shivers. “Would you like to see how long he can bear the pain?” A gurgling, groaning noise from the lump on the ground, Bellatrix laughs, giggles, squirms in delight behind him. Harrie’s eyes flick to her, back to his. Her spine straightens, her body eases. She steps into him, against him, aligns bodies the way the minds meet, like breath and heartbeats, all steady deep, a hymn he’s gotten far too used hearing, to looking for, to searching out constantly. Her hand knots into the front of his shirt, the still war-bloodied fabric; her fingers clench, pull taut, and she tilts up against him, a few scant inches closer on the tips of her toes. Leans into him, pulls him down until she can breathe into his ear, the pink of her lips as soft as her voice, as soft as the vice her breath is. Behind him, Bellatrix’s laugh cuts off. Harrie’s hand twines in his, her wand pressed between palms like something holy, two at prayer, a play at communion that’s less and less a play as the days, months go by. Harrie exhales, her words cloying, sticky sweet, a syrupy smooth supplication. “Bellatrix,” he says and spreads his hand along the base of Harrie’s spine, his own teeth marks beneath his fingers, a honeyed-hitch of her breath as his nail catches one.   “Dispose of the rat.”   In his ear, all breathless with eager warmth, Harrie laughs.   ===============================================================================   Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!