Chapter Text
When Harry Potter did not show up in the forbidden forest to die, Lord Voldemort kept his promise—every witch and wizard still fighting within the castle had been mercilessly slaughtered, and anyone who continued to protect the boy-who-lived from his wrath, anyone who had ever called themselves a friend of Harry Potter’s, was tortured for information and then killed by the Dark Lord himself.
But no one knew where Harry Potter was…not even the boy’s friends. After searching the entire castle and its surrounding area for days, the only clues left were the boy’s invisibility cloak and a broken snitch— the fact that both items were found on the edge of the forbidden forest only added to the mystery of Harry Potter's sudden disappearance.
But without the boy to stand in his way, Lord Voldemort’s takeover had been swift and quick. Too quick. All forms of resistance vanished after the final battle was lost, and like Harry Potter himself, no one seemed willing enough to fight in his place.
Back then, finding and killing the boy had been the Dark Lord’s highest priority, wanting to put an end to what he had started all those years ago…
… but it was not to be.
When the days turned into months, and the months into years…no trace of Harry Potter was ever found. Every potion failed him. No tracking spells worked. Even the connection between them seemed broken, distant. As if the boy had simply vanished into thin air, or else—
But no. Lord Voldemort would not accept it. Just as for years he did not accept many of the things that had become his own twisted reality: that, no matter who he destroyed, he was still not the master of the Elder Wand; that his horcruxes were all but empty, worthless artifacts, with the sole exception of Nagini; and no matter what spell or ritual he tried, the Dark Lord could not bring them back…
…that his victory over Wizarding Britain had been nothing but a default…
No. Because out of everything the Dark Lord had eventually put to rest… out of everything he had reluctantly accepted after years and years of persistent denial… for whatever reason, Lord Voldemort could not do the same with Harry Potter. Without ever finishing the symbol of the light himself, without ever watching the boy-who-lived die in finality by his own killing curse… without ever putting an end to his own, wretched past and proving to himself, and the world, that Harry Potter was never once capable of defeating him. Not even knowing what had happened to the boy! Whether he was dead or alive, kidnapped, or else abandoned his friends in a final act of self-preservation…! No! Lord Voldemort would not accept it. He could not accept it...because…he knew the boy better than that …or so he had thought.
It was only after five years of searching in vain, and the Dark Lord’s own mounting paranoia that he had made some fatal mistake concerning Harry Potter, that Lord Voldemort began to investigate the past.
He interviewed anyone who had ever known the boy-who-lived, in school or otherwise. And he ripped the memories from their minds, carefully storing them away in his private chambers…
Indeed, what started as a simple task quickly turned into an annoyingly difficult one, made more so by the fact that it was the Dark Lord himself who had killed nearly every close friend and confidant of Harry Potter’s during battle. But Lord Voldemort had yet to quit any task he had set his mind to, and after three more years of carefully gathering and storing away information, he had assembled an impressive collection of memories surrounding Harry Potter.
And so the Dark Lord began the endless task of watching and re-watching every memory he possessed of the boy-who-lived. Reconstructing everything he had ever known about his former enemy’s life.
He did not expect what he eventually found. Nor did he anticipate his thoughts would darken so thoroughly, nor sink into a near damning obsession with the ghost of a boy the world had long forgot, a mere phantom of the past, as the Dark Lord was endlessly dragged into the life and mind of Harry James Potter, and towards his own undoing.