Heir Apparent By MonsieurClavier

Chapter 5

Summary:
Voldemort confuses being a daddy with being a sugar daddy.

Also: Demisexual Voldie! (Like me!) Which explains why he doesn’t recognise his own horniness for Harry; he’s never been so attracted to someone before. While he has slept with people, he’s never experienced... passion? So this is all very new to him.

Note:
what harry should be saying: heck yes spend all your money on me. i deserve it after everything you’ve put me through

what harry actually says: fuck off i don’t need your money. stop spending cash on me. i’ve never had someone literally try to buy my affection and it’s freaking me out. just stop

voldemort: :(

harry:

voldemort: :(((((((

harry: oh OKAY. but just a little bit, all right?

voldemort: *buys harry an entire island nation as well as a magical lamborghini to explore it in*
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Diagon Alley was blinding, the sunlight dazzling upon fresh-fallen snow. A new world, and Voldemort had never felt so like a newborn—barely formed and stripped of his defenses. Helpless in ways he’d never been, in ways that had nothing to do with power or knowledge.

The Lord Voldemort who left La Plaque that day was a changed man. Or, more precisely, a changing man.

He was still fractured and unstable, the pieces of himself that he’d held together with sheer will ever since childhood coming apart, but they weren’t spinning into chaos so much as rearranging themselves into a baffling new order. Voldemort wasn’t yet certain of what that new order was, except that it revolved around Harry like planets revolved around a blazing star, irresistibly drawn in by its gravity.

Too close, and they’d burn to ash. But too far, and they’d be so unbearably cold. Inert. The worst sort of death.

That Voldemort had become aware of more than one sort of death was already disorienting. There was the death of the body, which he’d always fought against—but now there seemed to be another sort of death, another enemy, and it lurked in the pockets of emptiness when Harry was not near enough to see, to hear, to touch. It was a vacuum with only Voldemort in it. And he had never before found his own company inadequate, but now, he knew, it was. Everything was inadequate compared to Harry, just as everything was incomplete without Harry. Dim, somehow. Devoid of light. Unanimated. Unfulfilled.

Wasted time.

What use was immortality, if it was lived in a vacuum? Without Harry by his side?

Harry, who now stood under the falling snow with his spectacles off, his head tipped back and his eyes closed, smiling as snowflakes dusted his eyelashes.

Voldemort watched, transfixed. This moment had no tactical significance that he could ascribe to it; there was no reason the sight of Harry under the snow should be so arresting. Voldemort was blinded again, not by the sunlight but by, it seemed, the sun itself.

He had been living for years in the shadows—sunless, lightless, with nothing but bloodlust to heat his veins, and he’d never realised it. The profundity of his solitude. He had been a chasm in the shape of a man. A monument to nothingness. A hollow temple in a windswept wasteland, godless and steeped in ice.

And now Harry’s fullness was almost too much for him, the abyss in Voldemort suddenly overflowing, his frostbitten limbs stinging and searing back to life.

It hurt, more than anything had in years, but Voldemort was not afraid.

Was this what Harry felt like, always? Unafraid?