Chapter Text
Harry shut his eyes as he heard Tom enter the flat after him. At least he knew that Sirius and his parents had both planned to be elsewhere; Sirius was at the Ministry answering all sorts of questions about his legal status, and James had gone with him to support him. Lily was at the Archive, doing some more research.
“Tom, I don’t really want to talk right now,” he whispered. “Or have an ethical argument, or something like that.” He didn’t even want to continue the conversation they’d been having in Diagon Alley when Lestrange had interrupted. The duel using both their magic had drained and shaken Harry in a way he hadn’t expected.
It was as if it had deepened the emotional bond, or the magic had leaked into the bond and heightened it. Tom’s admiration and lust had filled Harry to the point where he knew it would be easy to mistake for love if he had let himself. And while so much else the Order had told Harry about Tom had been lies, he didn’t yet have proof that he could love.
“I wasn’t going to talk, Harry, except to ask your permission.”
Harry turned with a frown. “Permission for—”
Tom leaned in and kissed him firmly. Harry gasped and kept on gasping, as Tom’s tongue slipped into his mouth and he got the most thorough kiss of his life. Harry was dimly aware that Tom had him pushed up against the doorframe into the drawing room and that his hands were sunk into Harry’s hair, but only dimly.
The kiss was so good that Harry’s head filled with light and his heart pounded madly. He had no idea where his hands were. He kissed back, and let the heat fill him and his erection swell.
Tom reached down and touched him, gently. His fingers smoothed back and forth, and he slowly pulled away from the kiss to murmur, “Will you let me?”
Harry paused, but the emotional bond and the magic surged around him and told him that Tom was telling the truth. His admiration was burning as bright as a bonfire, and the lust was there but restrained.
Harry’s wasn’t.
Harry groaned shakily and opened his legs. “Tom, I’ve never—I can’t promise I’ll be good at—”
“I know, darling, and I’m beyond pleased that you waited for me,” Tom hissed in Parseltongue. Harry shuddered as the words dug into him and seemed to drag more heat to the surface of his skin. Tom smiled at him and added, “You like that? I’ll talk to you in Parseltongue as long as I can, then.”
“What do you mean? What are you going to do—”
Never removing his eyes from Harry’s face, one hand remaining on his cock, Tom sank to his knees.
Harry’s breathing picked up, and he reached out and gripped Tom’s hair before he thought about it. Tom tilted his head without moving it from his grasp and murmured, “I’m also delighted that you can be possessive, too.”
A strange, feral mood was overcoming Harry, pouring through the emotional bond like a heavy waterfall. He dragged Tom forwards, and Tom laughed and gently mouthed his cock through the cloth of his trousers before saying, “It’ll be easier for both of us if you take your clothes off.”
Harry swallowed and nodded, sweeping a hand down his body. His trousers folded back as if slit, and his pants did the same thing, and Tom’s eyes dilated at the same moment as the emotional bond leaped around them.
“Mine forever,” Tom said, and then locked his mouth furiously around Harry’s erection. Harry cried out without meaning to, thrusting forwards. Tom rode it without choking.
For a moment, the knowledge of the reason why cut through Harry’s haze. Tom hadn’t waited for him. He’d been with others. He’d practiced on them to get as good at this as he was right now—
Tom’s magic tightened around him in a whole-body caress, and Tom licked up and down his shaft without letting go. Harry relaxed except for the tightened muscles in his groin and legs, understanding the message. The others had only been practice. Tom had done it to make this good for him.
And because Harry understood that, he let go of some of his hard-won control.
He grabbed Tom’s temples and tugged him closer. Tom’s mouth widened in what Harry knew had to be a smug smile around him, and then he began to suck in so much earnest that Harry rose up on his toes.
Yes. Yes. This is what I want.
Frustration and longing pulsed through him, and Harry began to thrust, shutting his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to see Tom’s dark ones looking up at him. Right now, he couldn’t take that. He gasped and gripped hair and felt smooth skin slip under his fingers. Tom’s hands shifted, and he nearly lost control of himself.
Tom didn’t say anything, but then, he hardly could with his tongue and lips so busy. Instead, his fingers slipped gently through the cloth that still clung to Harry’s hips, and up to his bollocks, tugging on them. Harry growled his approval, widening his stance, and hissed when Tom’s fingers gently brushed against his arse.
He’d wanted this. He’d stared at other blokes in school and resented the fact that he would never have this.
It burst in his head like a star, the sudden realization that he could have this. He could have all the sex with his soulmate that he wanted. His soulmate wanted to give him this, proclaimed their tensely singing bond. Harry could thrust as hard as he wanted and come as often as he wanted, and it would only make Tom like it all the better.
Harry bent forwards, letting Tom have more access to his arse but forcing him to move so that he could keep Harry’s cock in his mouth, and breathed out, “I want you to make me come as hard as you can, and I want to do it in your mouth.”
*
Tom wanted Harry like physical pain.
But he held off, because that was also what he wanted to do, and Harry—Harry was putting his own pleasure first, finally.
Tom bobbed his head to show he understood and then gave a single long, violent suck that he’d learned from a Muggleborn wizard who’d been talented at little else. Harry shouted once, and then settled into a steady, shallow pushing. Tom would have protested, but the lazy look on Harry’s face said that this was what he wanted to do right now.
Tom had never seen him like this, and the sight pulled him, making his magic spiral out of his body. Harry’s eyes were slightly glazed, but utterly focused on him. His lips were parted, the air rasping in and out of them, and he closed his hands in Tom’s hair as if he had forgotten it might be attached to his head.
His desire soared through their bond and made its own spiraling dance, and Tom threw himself into that and let himself be utterly consumed.
Everything was for Harry right now. Tom’s mouth—for his pleasure. Tom’s probing fingers—to slide gently along the crease of his arse and show him the thin, thin line between a flickering flame of touch and sensation intense enough to hurt. Tom’s hair—for his grip. And Harry was warm and thick in his mouth, thickening steadily as Tom blew him, and it was everything he wanted right now.
Harry came without warning, but Tom took enough of one from the way he abruptly stopped thrusting and all his muscles tensed. He swallowed, while Harry’s hands curled down hard enough to resemble iron bracelets. Tom swallowed one more time and slid back, catching Harry as he slid downwards in turn. Harry was breathing fast enough that Tom would have been concerned without the bond to tell him that Harry was more content than he’d ever been in his life.
“Welcome back, love,” Tom murmured when Harry’s eyes finally fluttered open with something other than bliss in them.
Harry gave him a satisfied, languid smile that would have started wars for his hand if he’d been born without a soul-mark. Tom knew pure-bloods who would consider it even knowing who he was bound to. But he had caused that smile, and no one else could, and this was the first time Harry had looked like that.
He licked his lips, and Harry flushed an abrupt, brilliant rose. The bond grew hesitant. “Do you—do you want me to do that to you?” Harry said in a voice husky enough to make it sound like he’d already sucked Tom off. “I know that I’m not going to be as good at it as you are.”
“I know that, and I wouldn’t expect you to be good at it,” Tom murmured, taking Harry’s hand and moving it gently downwards. “The reason why you aren’t is more than acceptable.” Harry flushed a harder red, and the bond sang a high startled note. “For now, what you did in the past for me is what I want.”
Harry’s hand began to move, and Tom tilted back his head and bucked into the pleasure, intertwining himself even more with the emotional bond and the magic than with the physical sensations. When he came, it was like a wall falling on his head. He shuddered and turned to bury his face in Harry’s shoulder, something he had never done.
They fell asleep on the floor, and there was no part of Tom that wasn’t happy.
*
“You got into a duel with Lestrange in the middle of Diagon Alley?”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
Lily sighed as she examined her son and his mulish expression, somewhat marred by the red flush to his cheeks. Yes, she knew that. Of course Harry wouldn’t have thought it was a good idea to duel with innocents around, or without a formal ring and all the rest. James had been careful to teach him the rules of dueling, as separate from battle; duels were primarily a pure-blood institution, and Harry was risking less respect from others because of his blood status if he portrayed anything at all except perfection there.
But she still reached across the dining room table and clenched his hand tight. “Can you promise me that you won’t do it again?”
“Can you promise that some hot-headed idiot isn’t going to attack me in Diagon Alley again under the pretense of a duel?”
Lily sighed and sat back. No, she couldn’t. But she did have something to say, something that hadn’t occurred to her before. “Are you sure that you want the part of being the Minister’s soulmate in such a public way? No one would have bothered you like this before when you were posing as a minor Ministry flunky.”
Harry paused, a frown darting across his face. Lily held her breath. There was a depth of thought in his eyes that promised he wasn’t going to just respond with a banal reassurance, and an expression in them that she had never seen before.
“When I was posing,” Harry repeated softly. “That’s the trouble, Mum. I know why you were trying to keep me safe, I know why you did it and chose the methods you used, but it was always a lie. It meant I even had to keep secrets from you and Dad and Professor Dumbledore.” His voice roughened for a moment on that last name, but he kept right on. “I don’t want to lie anymore. I can’t lie anymore. I announced the truth about me to too many people with my actions and in those articles, and so did Tom. And what are we going to do? Obliviate anyone who saw me duel Lestrange yesterday? We can’t.”
Lily tapped her fingers on the table. “You’re saying that people are going to court you for being a powerful wizard even if you distance yourself from Riddle and decide that you don’t want to accept your place as his soulmate.”
“Something I will not allow.”
Lily jumped. She had come to think of the flat Riddle had given Harry as “their” place, since she and James had a bedroom and Riddle maintained his own house, and had forgotten he could bypass the wards. But she turned around determined to meet Riddle’s eyes and justify herself if she had to.
He gave her a polite little smile that was more chilling than a shout, and came over to put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. Lily didn’t think it was her imagination that a small patch of air near his shoulder had darkened and formed a red-eyed serpent that was watching her.
“Tom, don’t threaten my parents,” Harry said, without even turning to face his soulmate. But Lily knew it wasn’t her imagination that Harry had leaned back towards him and that some of the tension had dissipated from his body with the rush of his breath.
“I’m not threatening them, darling,” Riddle said. “I’m only telling them the truth.”
Harry grunted and turned his head a little. “What did you mean, exactly? You’re not going to allow me to distance myself from you or you’re not going to allow people to court me? And don’t I get a choice in this?”
“Of course.” Riddle bent over to kiss the nape of Harry’s neck, but his eyes never left Lily’s. “If you want to make a choice that leads to the streets running with blood, you’re of course free to.”
Lily swallowed. She wondered if Harry heard the tone as lightly teasing, as soft as any ordinary person’s. Lily didn’t. She couldn’t, not gazing into those red-tinged eyes and seeing Riddle’s hands flex as if he was about to grab hold of Harry’s shoulders and carry him off like a dragon.
“I don’t want to,” Harry said quietly. “But if we do find out that we’re incompatible, Tom, I want you to let me go.” He turned around in the chair while Riddle was still opening his mouth to reply. “For your own sake. You deserve to find a partner who truly complements you, instead of someone who can only be a hindrance.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me that that’s what you believe you’re going to turn out to be.”
Lily had to turn her head away, her face burning, as Harry arched his neck back and met Riddle’s gaze. She couldn’t feel their emotional bond or their magic except as a distant swirling on the edge of her senses, but what she could feel was almost unbearably intimate.
“No,” Harry said finally. “I wouldn’t turn out to be that.”
“We may disagree on many things,” Riddle said, his voice now having no tone Lily had ever heard in it before. “We may need to talk and argue them through. But that’s not the same as leaving or threatening to leave. I need you to know that, Harry.”
Harry reached out and touched something that Lily couldn’t see because she was still looking aside. Maybe the side of Riddle’s neck, maybe his hand. “I know. I’m sorry. I think I have…exaggerated ideas of how easy and right it would be for someone to leave me.”
“I know. And I know exactly who to blame for it.”
“Stop looking at Mum like that.”
Lily turned back to face Riddle’s eyes and the silent, deadly stare. She couldn’t deny her fear, but neither was she a coward who would run from it or leave her only child unprotected in the face of it. “Are you going to attack me, Minister Riddle? Most of the time, I would consider such a look a threat.”
Riddle blinked, then laughed, rapidly and silently. “I enjoy your spirit, Mrs. Potter. Can I speak to you in private?”
“You’re not going to kill my mother.”
“Of course not, darling,” Riddle said, and although Lily strained her hearing to search his voice for the sound of a lie, she heard nothing but soft, sincere affection. “There’s simply one aspect of the situation that we’re both aware of, but she’s not. I want to explain it to her.”
Lily nodded before Harry could say anything. “Yes, I want to hear it.”
“As long as it’s not anything about our…”
Riddle laughed. “Of course not.” And he traced his fingers for a second over Harry’s cheekbone. Lily blinked. It reminded her of something, but she wasn’t sure what.
Then she knew. It reminded her of the half-silent, half-verbal conversations she could have with James, the ones that were only possible because they knew each other so well that they could anticipate what the other one was going to say.
Lily felt her cheeks flush as she stood. She didn’t want to think too closely about how Minister Riddle and her son could have formed that part of their connection.
But she walked into the drawing room, and turned around as Riddle shut the door behind them. She did have to stiffen both her shoulders and her legs when he turned to face her, and she saw the wild flare in his eyes.
“Do you know why Harry is so convinced that I would simply leave him? That he is a burden, a hindrance?”
Riddle stood absolutely still, but it didn’t matter. Lily could feel that same wildness in him, the kind a tiger would have expressed by pacing around its cage. She knew he was ten times more dangerous than that tiger. “Yes,” she replied. “Because we told him that his soul-mark was a shameful thing and he would never be able to be with his soulmate. I know that. I’m sorry for it. I’m working every day to make it up to him.”
“Not only that.” Riddle gave her a smile that should have been framed with fangs; it nearly looked wrong without it. “But also because his parents and godfather abandoned him for a decade.”
Lily stared at him and felt for a second as if she was going to faint. Then she stood straight. “Harry knows why we did that.”
“Of course we are. My soulmate is a man of compassion and understanding, for which I must be grateful. But it has contributed to this complex of his that he would be easily abandoned. Why did you not take him with you when you ran?”
“How could we? It would have meant disrupting his education at Hogwarts and making him a fugitive when he was fifteen years old!”
“Of course it would have. But you don’t know Harry at all if you think that mattered to him, compared to being with you.”
Lily reminded herself that Riddle wasn’t a parent and wouldn’t understand the deep, defensive tide of reaction moving through her. “And parents get to make the decisions for their children, most of the time. We had to lead a running life from that day forwards. A limited life. It wasn’t what we wanted for him.”
“Interesting,” Riddle said, studying her.
“What?”
“When did what Harry wanted come into it?” Riddle asked, in the kind of detached tone Lily was more used to hearing Healers adopt. “Or did it never? Did only making decisions for him and telling him to hide himself and running away from him and ensuring that you could only meet with him sometimes come into it?”
“You don’t understand.”
“No. But I am willing to give you the chance to explain.” Riddle smiled, and this time I was an emptier and colder expression. “Because you’re special to my soulmate. Otherwise, I would have killed you by now for damaging him.”
“We did not damage him!”
“Oh? Then you haven’t noticed the way he looks at you, as if you’re going to disappear any second? You haven’t noticed that he’s at least as willing to confide in me as you, despite the fact that he’s truly known me for only a few weeks? You haven’t noticed that he seems to assume every person in his vicinity is going to abandon him the second he does something that’s ‘difficult’ for him or demands attention?”
“We had to go!”
“Both of you? One of you couldn’t stay and take the punishment? Your particular crime would have required three years in a non-Azkaban prison at most. You would have been out in that time and there for him for the past six years, not on the run.”
“James and I had to go together! Soulmates have to be together. It’s more important than anything else—”
Lily stopped.
The room was full of Riddle’s laughter, gentle if you heard it at a distance.
“I know that you don’t see it this way,” he said. “But as far as I am concerned, you put your cause before Harry at all times. That, and your soulmate bond. While you continually told him that his own soulmate bond wasn’t special enough to warrant even trying to get to know me, you chose your husband over your son, and your war over him, and your loyalty to Dumbledore over him, and everything over him!”
His voice had surged into a vicious whisper by the time he finished speaking, not a shout but a rattling noise that seemed to fill every corner. Lily flinched, but then held herself still. Riddle didn’t know the full context, she told herself again.
“Why are you bringing this up?” she asked. “You know very well that you would hurt Harry if you told him, and you’re not going to hurt me.”
“Because someone should have,” Riddle snapped. “And because if you make another decision where you put the greater good of people you’ve never even met over my soulmate’s while preserving your own precious bond and individual good, then you should know I will destroy you.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
“Do you think I need to cause physical pain to destroy you?” Riddle asked. “Your soul is bleeding right now because I told the truth. I can feel that much.”
“I’m not—affected as much as you thought I was,” Lily said. And she truly believed that. She continued to study Riddle. “I won’t abandon my son again.”
“Unless you thought it was for his own good. After all, you’re still defending that particular decision to me.”
“I know better than to think Albus Dumbledore infallible anymore.”
“There is a large difference between holding that belief and trusting Harry to know what is best for him and make his own decisions.”
“And you think you do that?”
Riddle shrugged. “I tell him what I will and won’t do, what I’ll stand aside for and what I won’t. At least Harry has the information to make his own decisions and decide how he’s going to respond, not just be left behind when someone disappears or be blindsided by the raids that the Order of the Phoenix made.”
He turned and departed the room before Lily could answer. She exhaled slowly and stared after him.
She supposed, in a sense, that she should thank Riddle for looking after Harry. It was true that she and James and Sirius hadn’t been there to do that for years.
On the other hand, she also wished, fervently, that Harry could have been paired with someone less—intense.
*
“What did you want to talk to my mum about?”
“About the way that your parents left you behind when they chose to become fugitives.”
Harry was on his feet before he even thought about it, his wand drawn. Tom smiled, his magic spreading out to encompass the room, and briefly flaring as though it was growing wings. Harry tried to ignore the sensation as he stalked up and jabbed a finger into Tom’s chest.
“I don’t want you to get in the way of me developing my relationship with my parents again,” he hissed.
“But that’s not what you’re angry about right at this moment. What are you angry about, Harry?”
“How did you—how did you know I felt that way about my parents?” Harry barely managed to stop his voice from shaking. “Did you read my mind?”
“Not at all.” Tom reached out and wrapped his hand around Harry’s wrist. Harry watched him, ready to break free the second Tom started to pull him forwards. This was too important to get distracted by the effect Tom’s touch had on him. But Tom only stood there, arm at full extension, eyes brilliant. “It’s there for everyone to see in the way you act as though anyone could leave you behind, the hurt they inflicted on you.”
“I understand why they did it. They could hardly take a fifteen-year-old child with them, and I—”
“Understanding is one thing, and feelings are another. What do you feel, Harry?”
Harry swallowed, and felt as though his throat was being cut by knives. He tugged his hand, and Tom let him go. Harry turned and paced around the dining room table, staring out the window for a second. Tom remained still.
“As though they finally decided they could never trust me,” Harry admitted. “As though everything was a test. They wanted me to stay at Hogwarts even though I was less likely to come to your attention if I was hiding with them, and it felt like they wanted to see if I would crumble and run to you. And the work in the Ministry, the same thing. I made the suggestion that they let me work there so I could feed them information, but I never expected them to take me seriously. Then they did. I mean, Dumbledore was the one who approved the idea, but my parents didn’t say anything against it.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Except, later, they did,” he added, trying to be fair. “They said that what I was doing wasn’t worth the risk to my life and I should join them.”
“But they never tried seriously to discourage you from taking the Ministry job.”
Harry eyed him. “The way you would have.”
Tom simply smiled. “The situation would never have arisen.”
Harry decided not to think about that, and continued pacing in a slow circle around the table, ignoring it when he came near Tom and both the heat of his soulmate’s body and their burgeoning bond tugged on him. Tom just kept watching him, with that obsessive devotion that Harry told himself he hated, couldn’t get enough of in reality, and found so hard to admit that he might as well not look at Tom while he thought about it.
“I wanted to go with them,” Harry finally whispered. “I sent them an owl the night after they fled, asking them to meet me somewhere and let me come with them.”
“What did they do?”
“My dad sent me a Patronus telling me not to owl them again, because the letter might be intercepted.”
“Just that? Did he ever reply to your question about wanting to come with them?”
Harry shrugged uncomfortably. “No. I suppose they had to think of their safety first, and the safety of the other Order members, but—it was years before it stopped hurting.”
Tom’s face was blank and smooth. Harry shook his head at once. “Tom, stop it. You have no idea what it was like for them.”
“Perhaps not,” Tom said, although with harmonics in their bond that said he doubted his own ignorance. “But I know exactly what it was like for you. Your pain and loneliness were among the first things that drowned me when we established the emotional bond, did you know that? Along with guilt because you felt like you had failed.”
“I want you to promise me that you’ll never hurt my parents.”
“That vow has to be conditional, Harry. If they attack you, then I will return blow for blow.”
Harry stared at him. “They never would. They love me.”
“Loving parents don’t run away and leave their child behind for nine years. How many times did you see them between when they left you and when they finally came back? Tell me the number of times,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth. “Now how deep or rich any interaction was, I don’t care about that. The number. Now.”
Harry hissed at him, which made Tom smile, but not stop waiting. Harry could feel the incredible tug on his magic, and he wanted to curse at Tom. He could keep silent, and Tom wouldn’t harass him about it, but the question would hang between them asked and never unasked.
And he couldn’t lie to his fucking soulmate. Which meant that he couldn’t claim not to know the number.
Finally, he swallowed and said, “Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five times in nine years.” Tom paced slowly towards him now. Harry was the one who remained still and watched him with narrowed eyes. Tom reached out and slid a slow hand up his neck, cupping his ear for a second, before touching the back of his head and drawing him close.
“I am never going to forgive them for what they did to you,” Tom whispered.
“You have to. Otherwise, it will hurt and hurt me.”
“There’s a difference between not hurting them unless they hurt you and forgiving them. Or did you think there wasn’t?” Tom rubbed his fingers gently behind Harry’s ear, and Harry closed his eyes in spite of himself. No one else had ever found that spot, but then, no one had ever been close to him in the way Tom was. “One thing you need to learn, Harry, is that there is a difference between intentions and actions.”
“I know that,” Harry muttered. “I wanted to kill Lestrange, but I held back and just hurt him.”
“Wonderfully,” Tom said. “His pain was wonderful.” His arousal played through the bond, and Harry opened his eyes but just stared straight ahead. “But I meant when it comes to me. Your Order judged me for decades, thinking I had hidden intentions to start a war that would eliminate Muggles and Muggleborns, when they should simply have judged me by my actions.”
“Your actions that also include voting for horrible legislation because it’s convenient?” Harry snarled, and felt his magic activate around him, reaching out for Tom’s in lazy swirls. He pulled at it irritably, trying to separate them a little, and swore when he only physically tugged himself closer to Tom.
“Yes, judge me for that,” Tom said. “But that’s not what they judged me for. They thought all my actions were lulling them off-guard, and my hidden motivations were more important.”
“Motivations are important!”
“Would it matter to you what I believed, if I did the things you consider right?” Tom asked softly, his hands reaching out to cup the sides of Harry’s face. “If my voting record was pristine and I was speaking up for Muggles and Muggleborns all the time, but it turned out that I secretly despised them, would you care?”
“Yes, I would.” Harry glared at him. “I know what this is about. You’re thinking of playing up the redemption angle.”
“Do tell me what you’re thinking, Harry.” Tom’s finger moved back into that distracting place behind his ear again.
Harry managed to keep his eyes from crossing, and ignored the soft pulses of disappointment down the emotional bond. He hoped that he couldn’t resist Tom so well just because he was a virgin. That would imply he’d do whatever Tom wanted after they established the sexual part of the bond, which was not acceptable. “That you’ll start voting the way I want soon, and claiming that as your soulmate, I redeemed you. I won’t accept that. You can’t—you can’t do something right if you have the wrong motivations for it.”
“Oh,” Tom said, his voice deepening. “Then I should change my whole person? Bow to your desires and do exactly as you want?”
“What? No!” Harry jerked his head away.
“But I’m confused.” Tom smiled at him, and Harry hated how attractive he found it. “You don’t want me to act as I’ve been doing. You don’t want me to change my actions to please you while keeping my beliefs that you are the only person who matters to me. You don’t want me to bend to your will and become a different person. What do you want, Harry?”
Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. He wanted Tom to be—like him. Valuing Muggleborns and Muggles because they were intrinsically worth as much as pure-bloods, as wizards. But it really did seem that Tom was going to never do that.
And he wanted Tom to be like him without forcing him into it. If Tom had woken up tomorrow morning and found goodness in his heart on his own, it would have been perfect. But it couldn’t be because Harry wanted it and had told him there was no choice.
“Well, I did think of a fourth course of action that might be acceptable to you,” Tom said brightly a few moments later.
“What?” Harry asked, turning.
“We could try to sever the bond if the kind of person I am is totally—”
“Don’t you fucking dare suggest that,” Harry snapped, and the air around him burst into fire before he thought about it.
Tom reached out with a raised eyebrow and ran his fingers through the flames. Harry started. It was like being petted on his soul. He swallowed and subdued them. No one had ever been able to be close to him when he was blazing like that, not even his parents or Sirius when he had done it as a kid.
“Then it seems,” Tom said, “that we’ll have to find a compromise. And what you scornfully call a redemption angle strikes me as the most plausible one. Given that I stood back in Diagon Alley and watched you destroy a pure-blood man I’ve often voted in concert with without raising my wand, we’ve laid a good foundation for it.”
Harry took a slow breath. Yes, things would probably never be perfect, but Tom was right about the compromise. Withdrawing, forcing Tom to act as he wanted, and doing nothing all unsettled his stomach with wrongness.
Before he could say anything, an owl soared through the window. Harry turned towards it with the uncomfortable churning relocated to his stomach. He recognized the bird. His name was Solaris, and the Order often used him for official messages.
To enemies.
Harry reached out a trembling hand, only to find Tom’s arm across his chest. Tom frowned at him and shook his head tolerantly, then cast a series of charms at the owl. One of them stopped him in midair and then conjured a perch beneath his feet. The others sparkled around the wings and on the letter.
Harry blinked. “You’re looking for—potions?”
Tom nodded, ignoring the indignant hooting from Solaris as if he heard things like that every day. “And charms that would enforce certain actions on your part.” He stepped back and studied the owl for a second, then used another charm. This one made a swirl of green light start around the letter, but it turned white as Harry watched. Tom sighed. “It also means that they haven’t used any poisons, either.”
“You would prefer them to have?” Harry asked in a low voice as he stepped through the last of the magic to hold his hand out to Solaris. He got the indignant hooting, too, but at least he handed the letter over.
“It would make your inevitable rupture with them less painful if you made the first move.”
Harry rolled his eyes, but only until the parchment started to glow blue when he touched it. He stared at it, his mouth feeling frozen. Then he swallowed and unrolled the letter.
“What does that spell do, Harry?” Tom spoke calmly, but the bond jolted in a way that told Harry the only reason Tom wasn’t already at his side snatching the letter away was that Harry appeared physically unharmed.
“I won’t know until I read the letter,” Harry said, and didn’t much bother to damp his own emotions as they entered the bond. Tom stepped up beside him and bent over to read the letter at the same time as he did, but given what Harry now knew it contained, he couldn’t fault Tom for that.
Dear Harry, said Hermione’s handwriting,
Please forgive me for the spell. I know that you aren’t evil or insane, now that I’ve had more time to think about it. I just can’t support what you’re doing, either. You might reform Riddle, but I think it’s a very small chance, and in the meantime, Muggles and Muggleborns will be tortured and dying. And if you fall in love with him and his power doubles, there will be no one who can defeat him.
Therefore, I’ve bound you to meet me in a duel that will decide the matter. If you win, then Ron and I will turn ourselves in and face punishment for our “crimes.” And if I win, I have the right to demand that you reject the bond with Riddle the way that Professor Dumbledore rejected his with Gellert Grindelwald.
Hermione.
Harry closed his eyes. Tom’s hand was almost crushing his wrist, but he only had to shove a little with his magic, and Tom released him. Harry swallowed and didn’t look at him.
“Explain to me how she’s bound you.” The word itself was in Parseltongue.
“A spell the Order developed,” Harry said softly, still not opening his eyes. “I didn’t think to check for it because—well, it’s not commonly-used, and your charms wouldn’t have found it, anyway. It can be used to bind anyone who touches the parchment to a certain course of action. It’s how Dumbledore kept some of the people who worked in the Ministry for the Order and had a change of heart from betraying us. Them, I mean,” he added hastily, as Tom’s magic coiled and lashed in hatred. “They couldn’t talk about anything they’d done on behalf of the Order after that, but magic scanning them wouldn’t have come up with anything similar to the Imperius Curse.”
“You’re not going to duel this woman.”
“I won’t have any choice,” Harry said. “That’s what the spell does. If you had me under sedation and in an area that was impossible to Apparate out of, then it would wake me up and forcibly Apparate me to the place she’s chosen when the time comes. It would make sure that I was alert and had my wand in my hand.”
Tom was silent. Harry could feel a darkness tumbling through the bond that he hadn’t sensed before. Then Tom clamped his hands on Harry’s shoulders and turned him around. Harry met his eyes solemnly.
“If you do not try in this duel,” Tom began, “then you will be forced by the same spell to reject our bond.”
“Yes, I will.” Harry reached up and hooked his fingers gently around Tom’s wrist. “But there are two advantages here.”
“Which are?” Tom’s magic was probably visible in the air right now, but Harry had closed his eyes.
“First, Hermione has never seen me use my magic fully,” Harry said. “I hid it from her and Ron and everyone else but my parents and Dumbledore. She thinks she can win the duel, which says something about how she much she really knows my power.”
“And second?”
Harry opened his eyes and saw Tom stare into them in fascination. He knew they were shining, at the moment, more like green glass lit behind with fire than anything else. He had looked into the mirror before when he felt like this, when he had to be in private with his real emotions and there was no one he could show them to.
“She probably thinks that I’m going to hold back and not try that hard because I don’t want to see her and Ron punished,” Harry said. “But I am—Tom, I don’t want to reject the bond even more. I think this is probably Dumbledore’s latest suggestion for a way to get me back in the Order’s fold. It doesn’t feel like something Hermione would have done on her own. And…”
Tom said nothing, which meant Harry could unleash his anger around himself as visible, lifted dragon wings made of pure light.
“By forcing me to duel my friend, he’s made me really angry,” Harry said.