Chapter Text
Very quickly, they had to set up some ground rules for their ‘arrangement’. The first was Voldemort couldn’t outright dispossess her of her body.
From the decade he’d spent displaced from his body after Lily Potter’s curse, he had more practical experience in possession than any known wizard alive. Angels and Demons knew more, she recognized from his idle remembrance of a book long since read and discarded. If those celestial beings had ever existed, they were the magicians of a long-dead world, shamans capable of shifting between corporeal and incorporeal bodies at will. Voldemort didn’t have that particular skill, but the demonic knack of seizing control of a body had become instinctive as breathing after his years without one.
And Heather’s body was easier to control than the shapes of those snakes. Even the most mundane beings had an innate magic, an internalized bond between body and soul. The degree of compatibility between soul and body dictated the degree of control the soul could exercise over it, and the health of both.
You always high compatibility with your own body. Perfect compatibility, she understood, you only saw with those who focused on their own bodies to an astonishing degree. Voldemort used the example of wizards who’d learnt to use their entire bodies as a channel for their magic.
“You mean some famous martial arts practitioners, or like those Tibetan nuns who meditate to change their body temperature—they’re wizards?”
She felt his irritation on the other side of the bond as he floated in the bloody pool, amid flimsy shed skins.
“They’re Muggles.” His irritation spiked at her surprise. “Why the surprise? They can do some magic, though the Ministry goes to great lengths to shield them from anything dangerous enough to also be useful. Tell me, girl, did you think all Muggleborns were as talented as Granger?” He didn’t wait for her response. “There’s as much a spectrum of magical ability amongst Muggles as there is amongst wizards.”
“There’s no difference between us then,” she realized.
“No difference at all,” he said drily, heaving himself out of the pool to dry before the fire. She felt the itching closeness of his skin about him, a size too small again. “Only the minor fact that there are billions of them, they last for a fraction of our lives, and most of them are too stupid and uneducated to recognize how they’re being manipulated by their own leaders, let alone wizards.” He shuddered and his skin loosened, he tucked his head to tear a strip from his arm with his teeth. “Like pigs or other livestock, they possess a rudimentary intelligence, what they lack is the power to determine their own life and its purpose. We usurped that.”
“I’m going to become a vegetarian.”
He hissed a laugh. “Of course you will. You’re too tender, too fast to empathize with those who do not deserve it—and anyone whose welfare does not coincide with your own, dearest, does not deserve it. If any of those Muggles had your power, do you think they’d hesitate to use it on each other to get what they want?”
“It’s a moot question,” she said, affecting boredom. “They don’t have the power. I do. And what I want is to fix this shit world,” she said, maybe in part to piss him off, maybe in part because it was true. “So are you going to quit paraphrasing Nietzche at me, or you gonna get with the lesson?”
He stared at her through their minds. “It’s astonishing how different you are. Yet we must be the same, in some crucial way, or else I couldn’t fit into your body so easily. The compatibility between my soul, and the bodies of other humans—even willing ones—was never greater than a fraction. They’d mutate weirdly or decompose in a matter of weeks—months, if I could find unicorn blood. You, however—” his glance through her mind was almost affectionate. “You’re a perfect match.”
“I don’t date serial killers,” she deadpanned.
“What we have,” his lipless mouth twisted, “brooks no comparison with any Muggle courtship ritual, or any bond you might have, romantic or otherwise, past or present. See—”
Something twisted in the bond, and she felt as though she was being flung through the air, across a large room, when she suddenly came to herself with a jolt. She filled her lungs desperately and hissed as water rushed through her throat. She clapped her hands to her neck.
Gills.
She ran her hand down her body frantically. Smooth planes of white skin. Her chest had neither nipples nor navel. A cock hung down and its shape was disturbingly different from the ones she’d handled in the laughing dark with Piers Polkiss or the Muggle boys from the bars. Long fingers, nails like a lizard’s.
“Girl,” came a voice, and she untensed suddenly. Nagini. “You’ve switched.”
She felt no choking panic. She was past panic, these days. “This is a thing.” She muttered, barely even weirded out by Voldemort’s new body. “How do I get back?”
If Nagini could have shrugged, she would have, Heather thought. “He will come back when he has eaten.”
Snakes in general were not very good at guessing human motivations or expressing anything abstract. Nagini, as a horcrux, was the exception, but she was generally too lazy to exert herself in such a direction.
“What is he planning to eat?” What, in the Nine Hells, does he want?
She blinked, her nictitating membranes sliding over her eyes. “He’s hunting for you, lover/broodmate/sister.” The word was close as Parseltongue came for a word for an equal. Snakes, even magical ones, weren’t social creatures and ignored their own kind except for food or mating. What she’d read of them in natural histories was so different from her firsthand experience that she almost wondered if the mere presence of a Parselmouth didn’t affect them.
“Hunting?” she tried.
No further responses were coming. Nagini had settled herself in the pool and was gulping down a chunk of bloody meat floating on the surface. Useless reptile.
She lifted her gills above the water and took a couple gulps of air. It stung her throat a little, but it was fine. Probably. She lifted herself out of the pool awkwardly and lost a layer of skin from her palms in the process, decided to forgo patting herself dry. Even in the moist air, her skin already itched.
She went directly to his library. She’d noticed the alcove of books on the few occasions he’d kept her in his rooms. She’d asked him to use their bond to deal with Sedgewick and extracted his vow that he wouldn’t kill any of her people while he was at it. Now, she wondered if she’d been naïve. Clearly, she knew nothing about soul magic or its capabilities.
Looking through his damned library though, she didn’t think she’d learn anytime soon. If his books were organized, it wasn’t by any method she’d ever seen. About half were in English. The rest were in Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, and other languages she couldn’t identify. The few written in Old Norse were somewhat legible, given her familiarity with the Futhark alphabet, but that was the extent of her skills. Irately, she began to open the English books at random and reshelve them almost as quickly. Really, would it kill these people to provide a table of contents and an index?
All of them were handwritten though, and seeing the number of spells described, it looked as though the man had assembled a collection of grimoires and personal notebooks. She had paused on a necromantic text whose descriptions of possession looked promising when someone stumbled through the door.
“My Lord, I have the loveliest little piglets for you this evening,” sang out a familiar voice. Heather shut the book and cringed inwardly. “Sweet of flesh and fulsome-souled.”
She braced herself and came around the corner, trusting the body to move in a manner that was natural to Voldemort. Bellatrix stood before the pool in loose dark robes, looking healthier than she had during Heather’s residency at the Riddle Manor. She had girls with her—one slung over her shoulder, the other at her feet, both nude but for their bindings. Neither could be much older than Heather herself.
She hissed.
“And this is what you bring for my sacrifice?” she demanded, stepping closer.
“My Lord?”
“Put them back where-ever you found them,” she hissed. “They’re lively enough, and a worthy sacrifice in that right, but they’re young. Young enough that they might change their minds and live to serve me.”
“But they’re mudbloods, my Lord!”
“I change my words about the worthy sacrifice then,” she sneered.
Bellatrix looked at him incredulously. “Where shall I find the sacrifice then, my Lord?” she asked plaintively, dropping the girl she carried like so much trash. She flinched, despite herself, hearing the girl’s head hit the floor. Were Bella’s eyes narrowing in suspicion, or was it a trick of the light? “My Lord?”
She wouldn’t legilimence her, Heather thought frantically. Whatever Bella’s suspicions, she wouldn’t dare the insult to her Lord if she was wrong. Bella would sacrifice herself to the Dark Lord if Heather asked her to—and she was sorely tempted—but that would be the end of any aid she could expect from Voldemort.
“Get me a warrior. A dark one, from the prisons. One who has accepted sacrifice themselves, if possible,” she told her. “There’s more of a conquest in devouring such a sacrifice.”
“At once, my Lord,” Bella bobbed a curtsey. “The spares are from Hogwarts. I’ll have them obliviated and thrown outside Hogsmeade.”
“No,” she said shortly, and then, more consideringly, “No. Let them remember this night, and the generosity of Lord Voldemort. Dress them like decent witches and leave them untouched,” she emphasized.
Bellatrix’s eyes shot to hers then.
“Why, Heather.”
She considered denying it, but Bella wasn’t stupid, and she knew the Dark Lord better than anyone. And the Dark Lord would never care so much for the welfare of Muggleborn girls so as to deny his men—or Bella—the pleasure of using them.
So instead of denying it, she did the only thing she could do. She slapped Bella hard across the face.
Bella hissed, a noise near enough to Parseltongue that it made Nagini coil up her head in interest, and she fumbled for her wand. Suddenly confident, Heather seized her arm in one of her webbed hands, tutting her tongue in a mockery of Bella’s habitual teasing.
“And what do you mean to do with that?” she demanded coyly, turning into Bella as she grasped the other woman’s arm. The older woman’s body stiffened familiarly against hers, in Bella’s own peculiar fight or fuck response. Months of sharing a bed with Bella had taught Heather there was no real difference between the two for her cousin.
She didn’t care to assess how or why Bella had developed that connection in the first place. Knowing whether it was by Bella’s own brand of magic or by a tragic upbringing wouldn’t change who Bella was now, what they were to each other.
Bella didn’t speak. Heather grasped her wand and finished her thoughts. “You won’t curse this body,” she told her with certainty.
Bella laughed and turned into her, a move calculated to throw her off. Whether through her memories or this body’s though, Heather anticipated the motion and turned with her, using the motion to fling the other woman away. Bella stopped short of hitting the wall and laughed.
“No. No, I won’t curse you while you’re wearing my Lord’s skin, not after we’ve slaved and slaughtered to slip his soul back within it. But you won’t do anything either, will you? If you’re here, little cousin, it can only be by his will. Which means he’s there, in your body. So stupid,” her eyes gleamed. “What do you suppose he’ll do, but march it back here for safekeeping? He’s saved the goblin steel for you, girl. He hasn’t forgiven or forgotten Dolohov. Antonin was with him from the beginning. As close to a friend as he ever had.” Her voice gained an edge as she crept closer to Heather, until the older woman was staring up at her, and she was no longer smiling. “He’d kill any other of us who dared what you’ve dared. I know what he gave to you. He told me, what he would tell no other. He bestowed himself on you. You don’t deserve him.”
She wouldn’t waste time explaining to Bella what she’d explained to herself a million times in the months since she’d left this house behind. That none of this was her choice—not who and what she was, and how she felt about it. Those, she accepted unhappily, were the Dark Lord’s choices. The choices and instincts of a self and a life she’d left behind the moment that scrap of soul reanimated the corpse of Heather Potter. What she would become was her choice.
Even less would she waste time trying to make the woman see how corrupt her spiritual predecessor was.
So instead, she shrugged.
“But he won’t kill me. He won’t even lock me up, not yet. Where I am now, and what I am doing there, is advantageous to him.
“Yes,” Bella said, languidly coming to her feet. “The Sedgewicks. A bare dozen independent Houses in Britain, unbending to both the Dark Lord and the Ministry.” She smiled a little. “But you have his boy heir, do you not? He’s as much a child as you, not even twenty yet, unmarried and all yours for the corruption. Shall I tell you how to bind him? I’d show you,” she murmured, coming closer, her hand a whisper away from this body’s cheek, so that Heather could feel the heat of her skin and the discomfiture of this form’s arousal.
“No thank you,” she said precisely.
“Well then, into the bath and I’ll feed you his evening meal,” Bella said pleasantly, moving again to the bound girls.
Heather hissed lowly, her gills flaring to the sides.
“There’s nothing for it,” Bella argued. “He’ll have them now or I’ll sacrifice them later, when he’s spirited you—ha!—back to your own body.”
“Your wand please, Bella.”
“Why would I give you that?”
“Would you like it better that I used this body’s magic wandlessly? I understand it’s such a strain, particularly for the young. How old is this form? A few weeks?”
Bella handed her the wand coolly and said nothing more. Heather turned to the girls and gently removed the gag from their lips. One, the plumper of the two, started shrieking almost immediately.
“Quiet,” she snapped, slapping her lightly on the side of her face.
In response, the little ingrate tried to bite her. Well, that was more or less what she herself would have done. The skinnier of the two was silent and assessing.
“Names please,” she requested patiently, coming to a crouch before them. Bella sniffed disapprovingly.
“We’ll never—”
“I’m Candace Bushnell, and she, she’s Apple Whitby,” said the quiet, assessing one promptly.
Apple glared death at her fellow prisoner and began hurling abuse at her, all of which Candace chose to ignore.
“Candace. I’m afraid we don’t have much time. Do you know where you are and what’s to become of you?”
“I’m in the Dark Lord’s Manor, and I’m about to be sacrificed.”
“Good. Deep breaths, Candace. I can’t get you out—” a glance at Bellatrix confirmed this, “—but I may be able to keep you alive. However,” she grimaced, “there’s a good chance that you’ll end up dead anyways, and it will be more painful and drawn out than the death you expected tonight.”
“I’ll take any chance to live.”
Heather nodded.
“Hold out your left arm.”
“Candace—” Apple shrieked.
She curved her wand slowly and precisely, the motions spelling out the Parselscript for chattel, and stabbed it into the girl’s forearm, pierced twixt radius and ulna. It sank into her without resistance. The girl gripped her arm, eyes bulging.
“Don’t move,” she warned. “I’ve never done this before.” She breathed in deeply, imagining she was pulling all the magic of the dark manor into herself in the action. A moment, two, three, and ten, a minute, until black spots clouded her vision like an apparition of death.
She released the magic and the death into the girl.
“MORSMORDRE.”
A heavy pressure at the end of her wand, and the girl screaming and seizing, Bellatrix eagerly grabbing Candace before she could fall, and steadying Heather’s shaking arm.
The girl’s arm was swollen fat around the wand, her hand purpling, her veins creeping black away from the wound’s entry point. Heather could barely keep the wand within the girl, and a frantic rifling through Voldemort’s memories didn’t tell her how long this should take.
“Withdraw it,” Bellatrix told her. “Slowly.”
The older woman didn’t sound nearly as manic as she usually did. Heather did so, with a shaking hand. The girl’s flesh sealed shut as she did so, with only a trickle of black blood—ink?—running from the injury.
Heather fell to the floor, suddenly exhausted. Her gills were dry as paper and she was ravenously starving. She crawled toward the pool on her belly, like a snake, and then Bellatrix was there.
“The Master will be furious you’ve set him back this far,” Bella told her, picking her up tenderly (it was the Dark Lord’s body, of course Bella would be careful) and slipping her into the water. She grabbed the other girl, Apple Whitby, who was still cursing them both to hell and back.
She smiled absently. She liked Apple.
And the pool was flooding over with blood and magic, and Apple hung by her hair from Bella’s hands like a puppet on a string, a red gash on her neck, a moment before Bella flung the body into the pool.
She stared in shock for only a moment, before she forgot herself and the fatigue of this body and shot to the corpse, her lips sucking tight to the wound, her edged teeth gnawing free the flesh, breathing in the blood through her gills.
She didn’t remember what happened next.