Chapter Text
She stepped out of the cauldron with a shudder, the vile concoction slipping off her skin as she broke the surface. That had been exceedingly unpleasant, but - and she didn’t care to hold back the smug smirk that graced her lips - the ritual had clearly worked. As strange as it felt to be back in her own body after so many years, it was infinitely preferable to being a wraith forced to possess whatever she happened upon, or, Isis forbid, death. She delighted in the sense of vindication - there had been many fools who had thought her mad over the years for her obsession with Horcruxes, but most of them were dead and she was not so that clearly showed what they knew.
She let her senses search her immediate surroundings out of habit - as a natural legilimens, sensing the feelings of those around her was as natural as breathing. The only minds of note near her were the Potter boy, who’s mind seemed curiously filled with a sense of static as he gaped at her with utter shock and confusion, and Wormtail who was kneeling in the dirt and shaking with a combination of fear and awe as he desperately clutched the bleeding stump of his arm.
Satisfied there were no immediate threats to her newly restored health, she became abruptly aware that she was freezing - not unexpected, hypersensitivity was a common side effect from ritualistic reconstruction - and she shivered from the cold air on her naked form. With an instinctive gesture of her left hand, she reached inside herself for her magical reserves and delighted in the power that sprang to obey; it had been years since she had been able to access her full powers, and a part of her - a small part, to be sure - had been worried that her death and subsequent resurrection would have diminished her abilities.
Wandless conjuration was not easy, but it felt so good to stretch her magical muscles as she stepped into a warm robe formed of nothing but shadow, and there was a reason she had been named the most powerful witch in a century.
Feeling a little more herself and the wind no longer feeling like hail striking her exposed flesh, she turned to her useless, quivering servant and extended her hand impatiently,
“My wand, Wormtail”.
The rat fumbled in his robes with his remaining hand before finally producing her wand, extending it to her reverently - but as much as she usually enjoyed the theatrics of being a Dark Lady, she was far too impatient for it now and snatched the wand out of his grasp without paying his subservient babble or sobs of pain any heed.
The moment she touched her wand, the connection to her magical core snapped back in place as though it had never left, and she could finally breathe easy. She was back with her power and capabilities seemingly intact, after only a minor setback. Granted, if she stopped to think about how she'd spent the past thirteen years she would have to kill someone, but for an immortal it would be but a blip.
Turning her back on the pathetic rat, she waved her wand and conjured a full body mirror out of thin air to examine herself critically. Perhaps she was a little more pale than usual, but she could live with that. She spent a few seconds admiring her burning red eyes - she loved them, very pretty. But she was also bald, and that was unacceptable.
She lifted her wand and chanted the appropriate spells, watched as black hair sprang from her scalp and grew rapidly past her shoulders, down to her lower back. She shook her head and ran her free hand through her hair, admiring the way it fell around her form. So, she was a vain creature. They'd just have to deal with it. It was not as though --
“Y-you’re a woman?”, the Potter boy squeaked, interrupting her thoughts.
This scrawny child was supposed to be her fated nemesis, and he didn’t even know something as basic as her gender? For the thousandth time, she cursed whichever primitive fear had caused her to give that thrice damned oracle even a credence of credibility.
“And what else, precisely,” she drawled in a voice that seemed a bit higher and sharper than she had remembered, “am I supposed to be?”
The boy’s befuddlement was so clear, he might as well have shouted, “B-but I thought.. Isn’t your name Tom Riddle?”.
“Aahh… dear, dear Dumbledore. How adamant the man has been, that I could only ever have been what he saw me as. Weak. Pathetic, scrabbling after power he deemed forbidden. Male.” The last word, she nearly spat, so venomous was it; her assigned gender had been long left behind, like an old snakeskin, but her foes seemed determined to only refer to her by the skin’s identity.
The boy gaped at her, until his features crystallized into what could only be envy and jealousy. Curious, most curious. “You changed. You-... you can do that?”, the boy gasped.
Voldemort raised the space where an eyebrow had been, many years ago. “...is this truly the first thing on your mind, Potter? After so long?”
Potter huffed, and if he had not been tied to a statue and hanging in the air, she felt certain he would have thrown his hands in the air as he started to rant, “Well, I’m sorry for being a little confused here, when I’ve been kidnapped and forced to watch the Dark Lord Voldemort, he-who-must-not-be-named, come back to life, and then it turns out you’re a woman?! Why is this the first I’ve ever heard of this? How did you even-.. If that’s a thing people can do, why doesn’t everyone do it?!”
Voldemort’s eyes narrowed as she looked down upon the boy… well. Boy, she supposed. “Do you believe that everyone would want to do such a thing?”
The kid seemed a little baffled, squinting at her as though that was a trick question, “Well.. yeah? I mean.. the boys would.. ? Who wouldn’t want to be a girl?”
“Simian though they may have been,” she replied slowly, “I have studied the minds of teenage boys enough to make use of them, and I can guarantee that the vast majority do not desire to become women. Most hover in that liminal space between lust and disdain, to one degree or another.”
“........ oh. Really? But.. I mean… girls have it so much better…”, the kid mumbled.
“Do they, now?” Thoughtfully, Voldemort began to walk, setting a pace around Harry’s gravestone. “You long for them, you envy them, you see the vicissitudes that puberty inflicts and yet yearn to feel that pain for yourself, if only to have had the option to?”
Harry seemed rather suddenly more aware of being the sole focus of the Dark Lord, trying to keep the pacing Voldemort in sight as he stumbled over his words, “I’m sorry-, um.. forgive me, uh, scary Lady, Ma’am, so what if I envy them and their.. whatever vicissitudes means, when I’ve had the bad luck of being born a boy? It’s not as though there is anything I can do about it.”
“Spoken like a lapdog of Dumbledore,” replied Voldemort smugly. “While it’s hardly magic you would learn at Hogwarts… it is magic I mastered, and used to transform myself to what you see before you. My body is self-made, and mediocre though you are, perhaps…”
There followed a few seconds of awkward silence before, abruptly, Harry blurted out, “Will you teach me?”
It had been fun to play on the child’s shock, not to mention Potter’s fumbling attempts to pull more information out of her, but… “Harry Potter,” Voldemort said softly, reaching down to softly stroke a finger down her adversary’s cheek. “For nearly your entire life, my greatest mission and desire has been to kill you. You ask a peculiar question.”
The child did his best to flinch away from her touch, clearly expecting it to hurt, and his shock was evident when it did not. Still, he blinked away the tears building in his eyes and directed a defiant glare at her, much to her amusement, “Then why are you telling me all this? If you are going to kill me, just do it.”
Voldemort paused, idly fingering her wand. “If you desire to learn this… tell me. What would you give in exchange?”
Harry stared at Voldemort's wand, his harsh breath audible in the brief silence. When he finally replied, his voice was barely more than a whisper, “What does it matter?.. If you’re just going to kill me anyway.”
The Dark Lady allowed herself a small smile. "And if you amused me enough to consider letting you go?"
The child sagged against the bindings, “Please.. just tell me. What is it you want from me?”
In truth, Voldemort wasn't quite sure herself. Letting Potter go now would be ridiculous when he'd already humiliated her once and could possibly be the key to some future doom. And yet… perhaps, just perhaps, someone who had already proved themselves uncannily like her could be so in this too?
It was, she decided, a worthy experiment.
"Go," she said calmly, raising her wand and unbinding the ropes. "Return and tell Dumbledore of my return, if you wish."
Dropping to the ground, Harry quickly scrambled away from Voldemort. He picked up his dropped wand and stumbled to his feet, the tip hovering uncertainly halfway to rising towards his (former?) nemesis, clearly aghast, “You're actually letting me go? But.. you’ve been trying to kill me since practically the moment I found out I was magic, and now it's just.. over? You killed my parents! You.. you killed Cedric!”
Voldemort smiled, cruelly. "Would you rather join them, Potter?"
It was amusing to watch the conflict play out on the child’s face, she did not need legilimency to know what he was thinking. The fervent desire to run away and be anywhere else. The burning need to know more, to ask more questions. The willful defiance in the face of danger. She sighed. Gryffindors.
At last, the child took the choice he had been so generously offered and ran for his school friend, kneeling to check on him - dead, of course, most people did not survive the killing curse. His desperate gaze searched the grounds, looking adorably lost.
"The Cup has a second Portkey attached that will bring you back to Hogwarts," said Voldemort lazily. "But…" She leaned in closer to Harry before her (former?) nemesis could rise to summon it. "Ask yourself, would you wish Dumbledore to know of this little conversation?"
Harry stared at her for a long minute, then pointed his wand and yelled, “Accio Cup!” It immediately lifted and flew to him, and he reached out to grab it, before he and the dead boy disappeared in a blinding flash.
An hour later, Voldemort's various and sundry minions had gathered about her, and she had finally taken pity on Wormtail for his bleeding arm. No one, of course, had dared to question her decision to allow Potter to escape, but when she had told them of what happened, she saw the uncertainty in the way a couple of them had moved or glanced at the others.
"You need not know what purpose Harry Potter serves, only that it exists," the Dark Lady intoned, trailing her eyes around the circle of Death Eaters. "But the Ministry will be making moves as Dumbledore informs them of my return, and my intelligence suggests," here she nodded to Lucius Malfoy, "that they will be the wrong ones. I expect those of you whose children are in Hogwarts to inform them that Potter is to be kept… safe. For now."
"And sooner than any of us had hoped," she finished, her face splitting into a wide and eerie grin, "the Light will burn, and magic itself will be ours again."