Title: Delusional
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Voldemort, background canon couples
Content Notes: Mindfuck, angst, present tense, ambiguous ending
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4700
Summary: After the war, Harry is having delusions of Voldemort, and even after he gets himself admitted into St. Mungo's, nothing seems to help. A slow spiral downwards, or perhaps sideways.
Author's Notes: This is one of "From Samhain to the Solstice" fics for this year. This is a dark story. Please read the summary and the warnings.

Delusional

"I'm so sorry it's come to this, Harry."

Harry mouths the words along with Hermione. It's honestly rote at this point. He keeps his gaze fixed ahead, on the face of the matronly mediwitch who's preparing a room in the Janus Thickey Ward for him. "I know, Hermione. Don't worry about it."

Hermione puts her hand on his arm, and Harry mouths the next words. "You know I would give anything to make this different."

"I know," Harry says simply. The mediwitch turns around, and her face twists, white skin flowing across brown, normal calm eyes turning bright red. At this point, Voldemort's face no longer even makes Harry jump anymore. It's his definition of normal. "I'll see you sometimes, and that's all I can ask for."

Voldemort leers at him even as the mediwitch's voice asks from behind the mask, "Will you want the Daily Prophet delivered to you, Mr. Potter?"

"I don't see any reason for that," Hermione states in an authoritative way. "Mr. Potter isn't going to have much contact with the world outside these walls anymore. The paper would only distress him further."

Oddly—oddly because since they got here, most people have been listening to Hermione—the mediwitch's temporarily red eyes stay fixed on him. "Mr. Potter?"

"I actually do want it delivered," Harry murmurs.

"Very good, Mr. Potter." The mediwitch pats the blankets in front of her down with one hand, then steps away. "This will be your room."

Harry sits on the bed and looks around. The walls are white and bare except for a few blurred pictures of trees in sunlight. He thinks they're probably supposed to be calming and cheering. A week ago he might have resented that. Now, he honestly doesn't care.

He has a bed and a table next to it, a desk with a chair across the room, a chair for visitors, a bathroom off to the side, and a bookshelf that Hermione is already bustling around and stocking. He thinks that's enough for now. At least if he goes mad here, convinced that he feels Voldemort's touch on his soul and mind, then he can't harm anyone.

The door is burnished steel, set with shimmering colors along the bolts that Harry recognize as heavy-duty wards meant to stand up to even wandless magic. He nods. That's what he needs right now.

He reckons that he couldn't have expected to come back from death normal, but how abnormal he is still stings more than a little.

Hermione hugs him and leaves, her hand rising as if to brush tears out of her eyes. Harry glances away. How hard this is on his friends still bothers him the most.

"You have everything you need, Mr. Potter?" The mediwitch is lingering near the door.

"Yes, thank you." Harry hesitates. Sometimes he still shrieks about Voldemort if he wakes up suddenly from a nap. "Can you...tell people that if I yell, they shouldn't take it personally? I'm here because I'm imagining that everyone has You-Know-Who's face." He smiles to show how ridiculous it is.

"Don't worry, Mr. Potter. I would hardly take it personally."

She leaves. Harry folds his hands behind his head and stares up at the ceiling. When red eyes seem to open and watch him there, he closes his own and does his best to sleep.

It seemed to begin so innocently.

Harry really wasn't surprised when he began having nightmares that Voldemort featured prominently in, and sometimes waking up and seeing the illusion of his face floating like a mask against the wall. Hermione even seemed relieved when he told her. She was reading lots of books about post-traumatic stress then, and she thought Harry should have suffered more than he did.

"The way we threw you in the front lines," she said earnestly, as she pressed some book or another on him to read. "I'm surprised you survived. I'm surprised that you're not already a raving wreck in St. Mungo's, honestly!"

(Harry has to smile, now, as he lies in St. Mungo's with Voldemort's face sprouting around him like mushrooms. At least that much of a sense of humor is left to him).

"It wasn't your fault, Hermione," Harry said, scratching the nape of his neck. "I mean, it had to be done and I was there to do it, you know?"

But she didn't listen and continued to ply him with the books.

Then Harry began to see Voldemort's face on the faces of random people in restaurants and Diagon Alley, and every photograph in the Prophet turned into Voldemort grinning at him, and now and then Voldemort's voice was speaking to him, recounting, dreamily, what seemed to be Arithmantic equations. That convinced Harry he was mad faster than anything else could have. Arithmancy? He didn't even know anything about that.

Harry sat in his flat, staring straight ahead while Voldemort whispered into his ear, and remembered what Ron had once said when Harry was hearing the basilisk.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign even in the wizarding world, Harry.

He put it off for a long time before he went to the Mind-Healers, mostly because he was afraid of what they would do with the information, but when he finally went, they were just as baffled as he was.

"Post-traumatic stress," said the ones who were aware of the Muggle diagnosis, the way Hermione did. "Interference with the magical core caused from dying and coming back," said some others, in authoritative voices, but given that there were no other cases of that—ever—they were making it up as much as anything.

The final straw came when Harry was walking down a corridor of the Ministry one morning and Voldemort hissed into his ear, Am I standing behind you?

Harry spun with his wand aimed, and found himself pointing it straight at another Auror trainee, who stared at him with a white face and then ran down the corridor, sobbing and panting.

That was when Harry decided he had to go to St. Mungo's. Living with his delusions is one thing, but almost harming someone else is…something else.

"You realize that I didn't die?" Voldemort's voice asks him, speaking in Parseltongue, after he's been a fortnight in St. Mungo's.

Harry shrugs and replies in his own head. He would just go ahead and speak aloud, but he really doesn't want to frighten the mediwitches and Healer trainees who bring his meals. They haven't done anything to him. I don't see how it matters. If you didn't die because I was your Horcrux and a part of you is left in my head, well, I'm here and no one will ever trust me with a responsible position again. I can't take over the world for you.

Oddly enough, the voice shuts up and leaves him alone for a while. Harry turns on his side and sleeps. He doesn't think that he's driven away the voice for good, and he doesn't hope for that.

He's getting very good at living with disappointment so well that it isn't disappointment. He's getting very good at living without hope.

"I think you should cancel your subscription to the Prophet."

Harry gives Hermione a mild look over his tray of soup and fruit. The St. Mungo's mediwitches give him things that can be eaten with spoons or fingers, now, and cut up his meat for him. He understands why, and it doesn't make him sigh more than a little. "Because of the stupid things they're saying about how I was probably mad or possessed by Voldemort all along? I'm used to that."

Hermione shakes her head, nibbling on her lip. "I think it might upset you, is all."

Harry looks away, and watches Voldemort's face smile at him from the middle of the far wall. That seems to happen more often lately than Voldemort taking over other people's faces. If the delusions were real, Harry might think Voldemort was getting bored. "Hermione, you know I haven't been violent."

"I—I wasn't talking about that."

Harry turns to Hermione. "Yes, you were," he says quietly. It's the first time that either of them have brought it up. Harry has tried to be sensitive to the fact that it's hard for his friends to have him shut away here, and that they have busy careers that mean they can't visit often. But now they need to bring it out in the open. "You know that I haven't been violent because of my delusions, no matter what I see or hear. But you think I should be kept away from knives and other weapons."

"It's a wise precaution, is all, Harry."

Harry goes back to his lunch. When Hermione speaks, it's on other topics, and Harry knows they probably aren't going to talk about his violence or lack of it again.

But it also means a door has been shut between them that won't be opened again.

And Harry isn't all that surprised when, two days later, his Prophet stops being delivered.

Sitting in the Janus Thickey Ward's version of a common room is a strange experience. Harry speaks with Lockhart, who doesn't recognize him each time and greets him with a grin as an "old friend." He speaks with a witch who was tortured by the Cruciatus like Neville's parents, but to a lesser extent, and who mostly giggles at him and thinks he's someone who died years ago. He plays games with a young wizard who seems almost normal until he starts shooting random sparks of magic out of his palms while shouting that he rules the earth.

Luckily, there are always Healers who can stop any accidental or wandless magic that might cause problems.

And, of course, Voldemort's face appears. Harry rolls his eyes and looks away from it when it shows up on the walls. He continues playing chess right over the top of the red eyes when they open in the middle of the table. Sometimes he thinks those red eyes watch him hungrily.

Hungry for my death. Harry shakes his head over that sometimes, over the fact that his diseased imagination can't imagine Voldemort as anything other than vengeful. You'd think it would be more creative sometimes and show him the young Tom Riddle from the diary memory, or a remorseful Voldemort, just for the variety.

Instead, it's always Voldemort as he was in the Forbidden Forest, just before the event that probably screwed Harry up permanently.

Well, there is one variation. But it doesn't happen while Harry is awake.

"You have come to me at last, Harry Potter."

"It happened once before, you know," Harry says mildly, looking around the room Voldemort has brought him to this time in interest. He doesn't recognize it from the Pensieve memories Dumbledore showed him or the visions he used to get through his scar, but that doesn't mean much. His mind is bored and this is maybe the only way it can exercise its creativity.

"When?"

"When I walked into the Forbidden Forest, of course." Harry turns to raise an eyebrow at Voldemort, who lounges in a comfortable chair across from a blazing fireplace. The room doesn't seem to have a ceiling, although it has walls; stars peer down at them from above. "You don't remember?"

"That doesn't count. You came to me to die, then. You are very much alive."

This is at least the most interesting conversation Harry has had in the last week, and even though people have warned him about indulging the delusions, he can't see why it matters. He's not going to get better, and everyone knows it. He takes a chair across from Voldemort that's more like a piece of bench from the Hogwarts Great Hall with a back on it. "So what's the difference? If you're really still out there taking over the world somehow, you must know that I'm not going to be part of the resistance effort. Why come here? To gloat?"

"To admire."

Harry snorts. "I see. You finally met someone as crazy as you, and you're coming to me for pointers on how it's done."

"Hardly. I never realized before how beautiful someone who defies me is."

"Probably because you killed all of them before you could."

"Hush." Voldemort gets up and moves towards him. Harry studies him with the same raised eyebrow, and Voldemort reaches out and moves a taloned hand up his cheek. Harry waits to see when the pain is going to start. So far, the hallucinations haven't included that, but there's always a first time.

Instead, all he feels is the slide of nails, tickling almost, up his cheek to the other side of his eye. Harry shakes his head, and Voldemort takes his hand back, but continues to stare.

"I wonder why I don't imagine my scar hurting," Harry murmurs. That was always an essential part of any interaction he had with Voldemort.

"Because I did not return with Horcruxes," Voldemort answers. "Did you think I would only use the one method of immortality?"

"Well, yeah," Harry says. In a weird way, he's enjoying this. And at least it is better than exploding with violence or accidental magic at someone. "You used to be intelligent enough to use different ones, but you were mad in the last few decades, at least. No offense."

"None taken," Voldemort says, while one tooth glitters through his lips like a fang. "What if I said that I used the second method of immortality in the time before my mind began to decay?"

"Then I might say it was possible," Harry concedes. "But it still doesn't have much to do with me. Madman, remember?"

"You proclaimed my return in your fifth year, and they called you mad then."

"Right," Harry says patiently. "But then they were lying for political gain. This time, I'm just mental."

"Why?"

"Because I'm seeing delusions of your face everywhere, of course." Harry leans back with his arms folded and studies Voldemort. "Are you just going to be an ordinary hallucination who doesn't understand what the other versions of him are doing? That's disappointing."

Voldemort is smiling very slightly. It looks disturbingly real, not the wide, crazed way he smiled most of the time that Harry remembers. "But just because you are seeing my face," he whispers, "that does not make you mad. If I was a ghost haunting you, it would not."

"Ghosts are real. You're not."

"Oh, Harry." Voldemort reaches out and brushes the back of his wrist against Harry's throat. It's a disturbingly sensual gesture, and all the more so because his skin is actually flaring with heat. Harry gasps. It's the first time any of his delusions have included that. "Just because it's happening in your head, why should it not be real?"

And that's when Harry wakes up.

He blinks at the ceiling, replaying the echo of the last words—Dumbledore's words—in his head for a moment, and then rolls over to go back to sleep.

Sure, it makes him uneasy. But he knows exactly what would happen if he started proclaiming Voldemort's return, and he's determined not to disturb his friends that way.

Now and then he gets a visit from a friend—Neville once, stopping over from visiting his parents, and Ron, and then Ginny, and then Hermione—but they all seem to be distracted, hurried. Harry buries his pain at that. He doesn't have much in common with them anymore. What is he going to tell them about? The gloating smirk on the latest version of Voldemort's face hovering over the chessboard? The hot romance between Mrs. Smythe, who thinks that she can transform into a Kneazle if she just tries hard enough, and Robert the Bold, as Lockhart is calling himself this week?

He does ask about what's happening with the Weasley family when Ginny is there. All he really wants is harmless news of, say, Bill and Fleur and their kids, or how George and Angelina's dates are going, but Ginny tenses up as if slapped.

"I can't tell you that, Harry."

"I—okay." Harry backs off, but he feels as though he's been stung. Is he so untrustworthy that everyone thinks he's going to break out of St. Mungo's and go off on a murder rampage? And that he would target the family of his friends, and children?

Ginny reaches out and places a tentative hand on his arm. "I really, really can't. It's not because you're you, Harry. It's because it would stress you further."

"Something bad happened?"

Ginny shakes her head and looks away, and then takes her leave soon after that. Harry sighs and leans back against his pillow with his arms crossed.

You know their visits are becoming fewer and fewer, and more widely-spaced? How long before they stop coming altogether?

Harry shrugs and replies to the hissing voice in his head. I suppose not long. But what do the mad and the sane really have to talk about?

You speak with me.

One madman to another. We're on equal terms.

They threw you away. They insisted that you march to your death to spare them the consequences of their own mistakes, and now they want to get rid of you.

Harry laughs aloud, and ignores the way that a few people passing in the corridor glance through the window in his door and then hurry their steps. Do you think that I'll forget that you were the one who killed me? The one who killed my parents? Who made a sacrifice necessary in the first place?

There's a long silence, and then Voldemort murmurs, What if, Harry Potter, they won't talk to you and they won't let you see a paper because I've returned to the wizarding world, and your friends still care enough about you to want to spare you the accusations, but not enough to be able to look at you and imagine a different savior?

It sounds exactly like the kind of delusions that Brian is always going on about. The kind that make a person important to the fate of the world. I've had that, and I was right, but it would be purest insanity to think I'm still important.

Voldemort's voice departs and doesn't speak to him for several weeks. The face is still there, of course. It always is.

Harry opens his eyes to the study that he saw once before a few nights after Hermine's last visit, which was tense and unhappy and full of silences that she obviously didn't want to fill. He's surprised to see Voldemort sitting across from him, coated with blood. His imagination makes some strange choices.

Still, questioning it doesn't serve much purpose. Harry studies Voldemort for a moment, and then asks, "What, hard night?"

"I have officially returned, and begun my slaughter of the masses."

Harry feels a long chill unfold down his spine like a slithering snake, but he tells his apprehension to shut up. It's his madness, that's all. "Congratulations, I suppose. What did you come to me for, sympathy?"

"Yes. But to offer it. I killed wizards who did nothing to defend themselves, only shut their eyes and screamed aloud for Harry Potter to come and save them. They died cursing your name. These are the people you died to defend?"

Harry sighs. "No, they're the people my imagination invents because I'm still trying to convince myself I'm important."

"You are the sanest madman that I have met, then," Voldemort murmurs, standing up and striding over to him, circling him like a shark. "Who told you that you were mad?"

"I didn't need anyone to tell me. I thought it was a good idea to come to St. Mungo's when I started seeing your face everywhere."

"And if it was real?"

"Then someone else would have seen it." Harry shrugs. "I'm mad. It's terrible, but I've accepted it."

"Have you considered," Voldemort breathes, bending down towards him and staring at him with fascinated red eyes, "that it takes a special pair of eyes to see certain things? That perhaps your death did not tear apart your mind but opened a door that is closed to others?"

"No." Harry leans forwards until he's nearly nose-to—well, face—with Voldemort. "Because that would mean believing the whole world is lying or in denial and I'm the only sane one. Which is stupid."

"A position," Voldemort says quietly, triumphantly, "that you held in your fifth year, if I am not mistaken."

The dreams come every night after that. Harry does his very best to ignore them. They're mostly quiet, anyway, with Voldemort telling him of various victories that Harry just thinks he's stupid for creating in his own broken mind, and otherwise staring at Harry with wide eyes and touching him gently, cheek and throat and eyelids and scar. The scar never hurts when he does that.

Harry does ask him, once, when Voldemort is coming to kill him, if he's really out there slaughtering Muggles and Muggleborns left and right. Voldemort shakes his head slightly. "Never."

"Ah, yes. A much better fate to let me rot in the Janus Thickey Ward, right?"

"You misunderstand me. As far as I am concerned, you died on the battlefield. You paid the ultimate price. And you are still paying it. They made you into their scapegoat. No, Harry Potter, I have set you aside from this war. I regard you as neutral. Should you ever come with me of your own free will, you would be assured of an honored place, a quiet one. Otherwise, I only like to be near you, the one who has come the closest to understanding me."

It takes Harry a long afternoon of thinking, after he wakes from one of those dreams, to understand that one, but he finally does. His mind is telling him what he would like to happen if Voldemort ever did return.

Which doesn't mean it's real, of course. Nothing that Harry sees, with the possible exception of trays of food and Healers and his friends and the other residents of the ward, is.

"They're never going to cure you!"

Harry blinks. He was having a quiet visit with Hermione, and suddenly she stood up and shouted that at him. It makes him wonder if his mind is inventing actions and words for his friends, now. He feels an ache at that. Something else his insanity has torn away from him.

"What do you mean?" Harry finally asks.

"That's why—why we've been avoiding you. The Healers told us six months ago." Tears are pouring from Hermione's eyes. "They've experimented with all these potions and spells, but they don't know what's wrong with you, and they can't cure you. You're going to live the rest of your life in here and die here. I'm sorry, Harry. I didn't want to tell you because I thought I could find the cure myself, but I can't. I just can't."

"Potions and spells," Harry repeats. "When did these happen? I don't remember them."

Hermione closes her eyes with an expression of weariness on her face as if he'd asked her to visit more often. "Of course you don't," she whispers. "Oh, Harry, you've lost so much touch with reality. The Healers even told me that they hear you speaking in Parseltongue in your sleep."

She weeps, and embraces him with Voldemort's face flickering across her own, and leaves. Harry stares at the ceiling, and sees red eyes watching him.

One day, no one comes with his meal. Harry waits and waits, and then finally gets up and hammers on the secure, locked door that he rarely approaches because he doesn't want to frighten the mediwitches. "I'm hungry!" he shouts. He remembers enough of his childhood to know why he hates being locked up without meals, and he's not happy that it's happening now.

But no one answers. Harry has to go to bed that night with his stomach gnawing on his spine. He's only grateful that there's a bathroom attached to his bedroom, or he would have had to make several unsanitary choices.

At least he'll probably die of hunger instead of thirst. Or madness, if his mind is preventing him from noticing trays of food now.

It might be two days, it might be three, before the door opens. Harry turns around with a sarcastic comment on his tongue about whether it's official hospital policy now to starve residents, and he doesn't care if it frightens the mediwitches.

But Voldemort strides through the door instead. Harry blinks and shuts up.

"My apologies for the delay," Voldemort murmurs. He's covered with blood, as usual, but not in the same patterns that Harry has sometimes envisioned when he was dreaming. "The resistance was particularly fierce around here. They seemed to think that if they defended you long enough, you might come forth and save them."

Harry sighs, and his stomach rumbles with hunger. "So now you're going to sit here and tell me of the food you would feed me if you could?"

"You are hungry?" Voldemort's eyes are sharp. He draws his wand and waves it. A tray pops into existence with food on it, tea and eggs and bacon, under what looks like Stasis Charms. "My apologies. I should have expected that the food deliveries would stop once I attacked and they summoned all available wands to battle."

Harry stares at him, and then at the food. It smells real. It smells as though it's delicious and waiting for him.

And he has lost the urge to argue with his delusions, he discovers. They're the only ones who have been keeping him company for the last few months, and apparently they're feeding him now, too.

Harry still thinks he should ignore the food on two counts. Imaginary food can't feed him, and if it is real, maybe it's full of experimental potions that will cause him a lingering, agonizing death.

But in the end, he's too hungry. He falls to eating breakfast, and Voldemort sits down on the chair across from him, the one Hermione used to sit in, and studies him, and talks softly, in soothing tones, of how he held back and let the Weasleys and Hermione flee Britain at last.

"The Veela and her husband went to France long ago," he concludes. "You do not need to worry even about them."

Harry shakes his head and swallows. "This is all nonsense. I'm insane."

"I said that you would have an honored place at my side whenever you wished to take it," Voldemort says. He stands and extends his hand.

Harry stares at him. "I'm imagining this. I'm crazy."

Voldemort tilts his head towards the door. "You ate the food. Do you not smell the smoke? Do you understand why the mediwitches would suddenly have stopped feeding you, if not for the war?"

Harry sniffs. He can smell smoke in the distance. And he did taste the food. And it is weird that suddenly St. Mungo's would have abandoned the Janus Thickey Ward.

But he could still be imagining everything. His senses could be warped, the same way that his eyes stopped being reliable when they started showing him Voldemort's face everywhere. He turns and stares at Voldemort again.

Voldemort still has his hand extended. "Come forth," he repeats softly.

Harry stands. He thinks that he must have gone mental. This is the final break, the final disaster. There are probably Healers trying to restrain him even now and talking gravely about his case, and maybe Ron and Hermione are weeping in a corner of the room where he can't see them.

The thing is…

If that's the case and he'll never be cured and he'll never be sane enough to see them again, what difference does it make what he does now?

Harry puts his hand out. Voldemort takes it with the sharpest smile and promises, "You will never want for anything."

Maybe, Harry thinks as they step out into a smoking corridor and walk past rooms that are full, or seem to be full, of wary, chained Healers serving prisoners food, in this version of the world, he never will.

The End.