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Chapter Text

“May I have this dance?”

Harry blinked and looked up. Minister Riddle stood in front of him in bright scarlet robes, stooped in a half-bow, his hand extended.

“I—sure, why not?” Harry said, with a faint shrug. He put down his mug of butterbeer and stood up.

Riddle’s hand settled into his, heavy and warm. He smiled at Harry with the same warmth lighting up his eyes, which were as scarlet as his robes. Harry thought it an odd approach to a Giftless twenty-year-old who’d made nothing of himself, but the Minister was famous for his subtle politics. Presumably someone else at the dense gala in honor of the new improvements to Time-Turners needed to be impressed or made jealous.

Not that dancing with me will do that.

“Excellent,” Riddle breathed, and hooked an arm around Harry’s waist. “You know this dance?”

“Yes, sir.”

“None of that while we’re dancing, Harry. Call me Tom.”

Harry gaped at the Minister until Riddle raised his eyebrows, and then he snapped his mouth shut and nodded. “Uh, sure.” He wouldn’t actually say the name, but even the pretense that he could was incredible.

Riddle smiled as if he knew what Harry was thinking. He might. Rumor said he was a Legilimens, in addition to possessing Parseltongue, the Gift of the Slytherin line.

That had had a lot to do with his rising to the Ministerial position, Harry thought, despite the odd way that Riddle clung to his Muggle last name. He could have changed it to Slytherin or Gaunt, but he never had.

Harry tripped over Riddle’s foot, and the Minister straightened him with a chiding expression. “Do pay attention now, Harry.” His right hand lingered on Harry’s elbow, while the left one came to rest in the middle of Harry’s back.

He’s definitely trying to make someone jealous by pretending to flirt with you. I’m still surprised he picked me, though.

“Okay,” Harry breathed, and paid just enough attention to the music not to stumble again. Meanwhile, he looked around the room for Riddle’s target.

There didn’t seem to be an obvious one. Ministry flunkies, Department Heads, Wizengamot members, and Hogwarts professors crowded the room, which was decorated with hourglass motifs and drifting golden wisps that resembled tumbling sand. People laughed and chatted and danced and ate. No one seemed to be paying outraged attention to Harry and Riddle, although a few were staring.

Harry caught the eye of his younger brother, Colton, who was one of the starers. He shook his head. Need help? he mouthed, as Harry and Riddle whirled past.

No, Harry mouthed back. He was sure the dance would end in a few minutes.

And it did, but Riddle just swept Harry into the beginning of the next one, his hands still firmly in place. When Harry looked back at him, there was a hard smile on his face.

“Clarify something for me if you would, Harry.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did I say?”

Harry just met Riddle’s gaze and projected his disagreement as strongly as he could. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to get away with calling Riddle “sir,” but nothing would make him use “Tom.”

Riddle paused for a second, but managed to conceal it as a casual sidestep, before he turned Harry into the next pattern. His voice was soft, intense. “Is it true that you were born both without the Potter Gift and without the Evans one?”

Harry’s nostrils flared before he could stop himself. He thought of tearing himself out of Riddle’s arms and flouncing to the other side of the ballroom, but that would only cause commotion for no good reason.

And he had his pride. He couldn’t deny that he was Giftless, so he would tell the truth.

“Yes,” he said evenly. “Although some purebloods would disagree with you saying there is an Evans Gift, I’m sure.”

“Your mother can fly, which is not a trait of any pureblood lineage in Britain. She has the right to call it a Gift.”

Harry half-shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Since he couldn’t carry the name Potter, Harry went by “Evans” as a courtesy. If the purebloods had taken Mum’s claim that she had a Gift seriously, then he wouldn’t have been allowed that name, either.

“You are entirely without both of them.”

“Yeah, I am.”

Harry kept his answer clipped this time. Now he wondered if Riddle was making a point about how he associated with the Giftless to whoever in the room he was trying to impress, but still wanted to taunt Harry so Harry would know how far beneath Riddle he was.

He tried to step back, but Riddle whirled them in a circle and shook his head. “My reason for asking is not what you think it is.”

“What, you’re not a stuck-up, pompous prat like the rest of them?”

Riddle’s eyes heated as if Harry had said something flirtatious. Then he spun in another circle, pulling Harry close with one hand so low on his back that his fingers were practically caressing the top of Harry’s arse. His voice was low and intimate, and breathing the last thing into Harry’s ear that he would have expected.

“No. I needed to find someone entirely without a trace of the Gifts, not even something that could show up in their child, so that I could change the world.”

Harry stared at him, and then realized the music had stopped. The musicians were getting something to eat. Harry recoiled from Riddle, shaking his head.

“You need to work on your sales pitch,” he said, borrowing a term from his mum.

Astonishingly, Riddle laughed at that, his chuckle dark and nothing like the laughter that Harry had heard on the wireless before. His eyes shone. “You’ll see what I mean soon, Harry. If you would let me owl you after this?”

Harry’s face burned at the feeling of eyes on him. “Go fuck yourself,” he spat.

“If you could help me bring down all the purebloods who think that a single inborn talent defines you? The ones who drive Muggleborns back to the Muggle world half the time?”

Harry paused. One of his best friends, Hermione Granger, had gone back to the Muggle world when she finished Hogwarts, because apparently the protective spells to keep out witches and wizards from other countries had felt unwelcoming to her, too.

Even Harry was starting to feel the same way in Hogsmeade and Hogwarts, the last time he had been there.

“Harry?”

Right, he was still standing in the middle of the dance floor with Riddle saying weird things to him. He shrugged. “If you want to. I don’t have wards up against it. But you might want to do it this week.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll be taking the Squibarren Potion and going to the Muggle world soon.”

He hadn’t told anyone else that, not even Cole, but the astonishment on Riddle’s face was worth it. Harry smiled sweetly and turned away.

Riddle said something, but it was low enough that Harry didn’t hear it. He kept walking until he got to the side of the ballroom where Cole stood, his eyes, a few shades lighter than Harry’s own, wide. But Cole shook his head a moment later and got a glass of Firewhisky for Harry, because he was a good brother like that.

“What did he say to you?”

“Some kind of political move,” Harry said, because that was what it was, and he didn’t feel like telling Cole the details of a conversation that would never happen the way he was envisioning. “Did I see Lucius Malfoy snub Mum earlier?”

“Yeah, want to go make his evening miserable?”

Harry gave a smile that was only a little strained. Malfoy hated being close to any Giftless person and would hate it if Harry came within a few meters of him, while also considering it impolite to retreat.

“Yeah, let’s.”

Harry set out, walking beside his brother, who was the best sibling he could ask for, and who wasn’t at fault for having inherited the Potter Gift, and so the name and eventually the land and the house and the vaults, when Harry hadn’t.

It was hard not to be bitter sometimes. But Cole didn’t deserve it, so Harry straightened his shoulders and set his sights on someone who did.

*

Tom felt as if his heart had squeezed into a small ball in his chest.

Because I’ll be taking the Squibarren Potion and going to the Muggle world soon.

Tom had searched, for so long, for someone who had no trace of a Gift, meaning that they wouldn’t even pass it to their children. So often a Gift would skip one generation only to appear in the next. There were tests that could detect that kind of thing, and so purebloods who might have Gifted children in the future were often treated as exceptions to the scorn Giftless people faced, but the tests had only been recently developed.

Tom had wasted so much time and tried so many times with unsuitable candidates before the Unspeakables had developed those tests.

The Squibarren Potion, unfortunately, was another thing the Unspeakables had developed. Giftless people who drank it would become Squibs and wouldn’t have magical children, either.

Officially, it had been invented in the first place to “allow Giftless people to integrate better into the Muggle world.” But Tom knew a lie when he heard one.

He knew, too, that he could not accomplish what he wished to with only one Parselmouth. That was another thing he had tried for years without results.

He needed someone utterly without trace of a Gift to host the Slytherin Gift in their soul. And it had to be someone who wasn’t a pureblood, either, because most of them would never agree with Tom’s real political goals.

Tom clenched his fists, his eyes following Harry Evans as he went to bait Lucius Malfoy.

He would have this chance. He would persuade Harry one way or the other.

And he rather thought that Harry would enjoy it, once he had agreed. Not only the chance to pay the purebloods back for what they had done by proving them wrong, but to have such a powerful and prominent Gift…

With abilities that no one in Britain except Tom knew, given that he was the only one alive here who possessed it.

He smiled and went to pick up a flute of champagne. Perhaps he would join the circle forming around Lucius.

*

“It’s beneath you to torment Mr. Malfoy, Harry.”

“No, it really isn’t.”

Mum stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom, holding up a blue gem that probably had some magical resonance Harry couldn’t sense. She turned it back and forth, examining it in the glass, and then she met his eyes in the reflection.

She smiled a second later. “Yes, all right, you deserve that satisfaction.”

“You do, too. He has no call to snub you like that.”

Mum sighed, and the burden fell on her shoulders again. Harry came forwards to hug her. He knew there were purebloods in the Ministry and Hogwarts and everywhere else the bastards swarmed who blamed her for not bearing James Potter two children with the Gift of Potter Luck, even though Colton’s birth should have proven it was just chance that Harry didn’t have it.

“You’re a great person,” Harry whispered to her. “A wonderful mother. It’s not your fault that the world is this way.”

“I wish I could have changed it for you.”

“I know.”

They stood there hugging for a minute or so. Then Mum cleared her throat. She was an Unspeakable and had probably been examining the gem for her job. She hadn’t developed the Squibarren Potion that Harry knew of—he just didn’t think it was the kind of project she would have agreed to work on—but she had uncanny intuition.

“Are you sure that going to the Muggle world is what you want, Harry?”

“Yes.”

“And the other—you would give up magic?”

Harry took a deep breath. So it seemed that Mum would be the second person he would tell after all, instead of Colton.

“I know myself,” he said. “And Mum, I’m not a great person.”

“Harry, of course you are! You’re compassionate, thoughtful, you love a lot of people—”

“I love some people,” Harry said, even though he felt bad for interrupting her. But it was important for her to understand this. “And I know that I’m jealous. I’ve been jealous of Cole for years for having a Gift that I didn’t. I mean, I love him because he’s my brother, but I still feel that way. And I know that I would be jealous if my children had a Gift and got accepted into a pureblood lineage when I couldn’t.”

Or even halfway accepted, like you were.

Mum looked genuinely astonished. “I never knew you were jealous of your brother.”

“Well, I am.” Harry jammed his hands into his robe pockets. “I’ve done my very best to make sure he never sees it—and please don’t tell him. And please don’t say it’s your fault. It’s not.”

“You know that the Potters have married purebloods for generations and they’ve preserved their luck…”

“That’s just accepting the stupid pureblood lies about how blood has something to do with it,” Harry said firmly. “I’ve studied the family tree, Mum, and there were more than a few instances when no Potter children in the direct line had the Gift and they had to adopt a cousin or a niece or something. Or they sneaked in a Muggleborn a few times who had a Gift that resembled theirs. Dad admitted that.”

Mum breathed out slowly. “I didn’t realize that you’d dug that far back.”

“Yeah.” Harry didn’t think he should mention that he’d been looking for any instances of when a Potter had manifested their Gift after they turned seventeen.

There were none. A Gift appeared by the time a child was seventeen, or not at all. It was the same with all the other families Harry had studied.

At least that fact had allowed him to stop lying to himself.

“So you’re going to give up all your magic?”

“I can’t support myself here, Mum. You know how many times I’ve tried to get a job in the Ministry, or playing Quidditch, or even in a shop, and they just all tell me no.”

“That’s so stupid.” Mum’s eyes were deeper and greener than Harry’s when she got angry. “As if not having a Gift were something you could catch—”

“I know. But that’s the way it is. And I don’t want to stay at home forever,” Harry added, anticipating the next thing she would say. “I know you’d support me, and Dad, and Cole. But I want to stand on my own.”

To have a name I have a right to.

Harry wasn’t sure whether he would keep the name Evans when he went back to the Muggle world or adopt a new one, but either way, it would be his. Something that belonged to him. Something that people didn’t look on the verge of correcting him about half the time.

The magical world wasn’t his home, even though it was the one he’d been born to. He would go to the Muggle world and study as hard as he could, work as hard as he could, until he achieved a position he could be proud of.

Sometimes he thought he should have let the Hat put him in Slytherin after all.

Mum sighed hard enough to ruffle Harry’s hair from where she stood. “All right. But you need to explain it to your father and brother, not just spring it on them. They deserve to know.”

“Not the part about the jealousy.”

“No, I agree. I’ve never told your father that sometimes I’m jealous of him for being a pureblood and having a Gift that other people acknowledge.”

Harry stared. “I—didn’t know that, either.”

“We’re a lot alike,” Mum said softly, and leaned over to embrace him. “I hope that you achieve all your dreams, Harry, and that you never feel you’re not a good person. Jealousy or not, you’ve still struggled to make sure that Cole is comfortable around you, and I know he doesn’t think you hate him. It’s an uncomfortable situation. We’re doing the best we can.”

Harry hugged her hard, half-closing his eyes. He knew that it was technically illegal to set up a Floo fireplace in a Muggle home, but Mum could probably step around that, since she was an Unspeakable.

He hoped she would visit a lot, after he went to his true home.

*

“What is this about, Riddle?”

“Riddle” was at least better than “sir,” Tom told himself. Riddle was a name he had made his own, independent of the man who had sired him.

“Please sit down, Harry. We’ll order first.”

“Oh? You think they’re going to give us that long? I saw the look in the owner’s eyes when I walked in.”

Tom smiled, and let the full force of his true self shine in his eyes. Harry paused, his hand on the back of the chair and his expression growing sharp.

“I told them to let you in and ordered them to leave us alone other than bringing the food and wine,” Tom said softly. “They know that I can make them regret it if they don’t.”

This was part of a series of tests he’d been conducting on people for years, including some of the candidates for the Slytherin Gift who had failed because they turned out to be carrying the traces of their ancestors’ Gift in them. Tom had to see if Harry would run now.

“This is what you’re really like?”

“Tell me what you think I’m really like, Harry.”

“Ruthless.”

Harry leaned forwards and stared at him. Really stared. Tom looked back with a faint smile lifting the corner of his mouth, and abruptly Harry nodded and sat down in his chair without taking his eyes from Tom. He didn’t look away even when a vine stretched along the delicate arched window of the restaurant bounced and bobbed in the wind.

“I should have known it,” Harry said softly. “Even with your Gift, you wouldn’t have made it this far with a Muggle last name. unless you were ruthless.”

“And will you turn away from me now?”

“As a collaborator? It’ll depend on what you want. In general? No. I was willing to make myself a Squib to live in a world where I could have some pride back and to make sure I had Muggle children whose magic I wouldn’t have to be jealous of.”

Tom’s breath caught. This was more than he had reckoned on. Someone who could match him beat for beat, darkness of soul for darkness of soul.

Maybe. Tom told himself not to be so sure.

“I’ve never heard a hint of it about you.”

“I’ve kept my jealousy tamped down because it’s not fair to my brother to be jealous of him,” Harry said with a shrug. “Because he had the good luck to get the Potter Gift and I didn’t.”

“And?”

“And that’s my mature perspective. There were times when I was a kid when I dreamed about him getting sent to Azkaban for something and the Potter Gift manifesting in me the way that those old stories say it can when the family’s in danger of losing their last heir.”

Tom shivered and let himself rake his eyes over Harry’s face and body and those intense green eyes for a moment. This might be pleasurable in many ways.

But he needed it to be pleasurable in the most important one, first.

“Are you willing to listen to what I have to say?”

“Of course. But let’s order first.”

*

Harry put down the fork and sighed a little. The delicate chicken in a white sauce he’d had was very good, and he could find some amusement in the way that the server had flinched away from him when she’d put the dish down on the table.

He wouldn’t be surprised, honestly, if Riddle had picked this restaurant specifically to torment people who thought you could catch not having a Gift.

Harry could appreciate that.

He sipped from his glass of wine and said, “All right. So you’re saying that the magic of someone who wasn’t born with Parseltongue but who could acquire it from this potion—” He broke off and swallowed. He wanted this so badly that his throat hurt. But he had to continue. “Has to be completely clear of the trace of any other Gift, even one that they might have inherited from a Muggleborn parent and which wouldn’t be called a Gift by that bunch of stuck-up arseholes. It’s like planting a mandrake in a pot. It doesn’t tolerate competition.”

“An innovative way to put it.” Riddle’s eyebrows climbed up his face. He had a far more expressive one than Harry had ever thought. Then again, Riddle had mostly appeared in the papers with a slight frown or a smile as the political situation demanded. Harry hadn’t known him. “But yes, that is right.”

“You haven’t said why it’s so important to you that someone else have the Gift. You could get married if you wanted a child who had it.”

Riddle’s face went still. Then he said, “I am disinclined to the company of people who could produce children for me.”

Harry stared at him for a moment, wondering what he meant. Riddle had plenty of witches who worked for him in high-up Ministry positions, like Amelia Bones in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement…

Then it hit. Harry swallowed and nodded. “Oh. All right.”

“I must have another Parselmouth. I did try to achieve what I wanted alone, and it was impossible.” Riddle leaned forwards, and like this, with him so close, so intent that his features looked as if they were lit by an inner flame, so ruthless (now that Harry knew that), Harry could see the appeal other people had talked about for years. “And they cannot be a pureblood. A pureblood would never agree, in the end, with what I want to do.”

“So you’ve tried other people before me.”

“Yes.”

“None of them worked out.”

“No.”

“Because they had traces of Gifts in their magic still? Or because they ran when they found out what your goals were?”

Riddle’s smile was bright and savage and terrifying. “Both. You have met two of my qualifications, Harry Evans. It remains to be seen if you can meet the third.”

“Tell me one thing first.”

Riddle looked at him.

“Why did you keep your Muggle last name, when you could have called yourself Gaunt or Slytherin?”

“Slytherin was a pureblood who hated Muggleborns—who made me loathe half my heritage before I discovered the Gift that makes me the equal of any pureblood. And the last Gaunts were inbred degenerates who also loathed Muggleborns and Muggles.”

Harry smiled. The way that Riddle said those words, the sharp edges to them, made him feel alive as he thought about something other than the Muggle world for the first time in years. He swallowed the last of his wine and stood.

“Then let’s go, and you can tell me what your plan is.”

Chapter Text

By the time they came out of the Apparition, Tom was not entirely surprised to see doubt creeping back into Harry’s face. He stared around, probably taking in the thick brush on either side of them and the small Muggle village in the distance, and cleared his throat. “Where are we?”

“The Gaunts’ old estate, such as it was. It is my property, and also one place I can be sure that none of the purebloods who support the current state of things would visit.”

“You meant what you said about the Gaunt family.”

Tom barely managed to control his sneer as he thought about what he had found when he had visited his uncle Morfin years ago. “Yes.”

“All right, then.” Harry glanced around again, then hesitated. Tom watched him. He didn’t think this was a late-arriving crisis of conscience. It was more that Harry had had so little hope for the last few years, he was finding it hard to resume now. “Are you—I know you said that I had to have no Gifts at all, but there’s always a chance that I could have a child in the future if I didn’t take the Squibarren Potion who would have a Gift from another family who wasn’t mine—”

“My tests were more thorough than you could imagine,” Tom said. “I am absolutely sure that you have no chance of that.”

“Where exactly did you see my test results?”

“What do you imagine is secret from the Minister who encouraged the development of those tests in the first place?”

Harry stared at him, astonishment and something else that Tom found difficult to read in those wild green eyes. That was all right. He was glad that he would have someone standing beside him who could still surprise him. “Oh,” Harry said softly. “You’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

“A very long time.”

Harry nodded. His voice was still soft when he said, “What did you want to show me?”

“Why I need another Parselmouth.”

He led Harry down between the thickets and to the place where the Gaunt shack had once stood. Now it was a small clearing ringed by a wall of carefully placed small stones. Harry started when they stepped into the clearing.

“Yes?” Tom thought he knew what Harry had noticed, but again, he wanted to be sure. To be thorough.

Although already he thought Harry the best chance he’d had for decades, if not ever.

“Those stones? They look like a ritual containment pattern.”

“Watch.”

Harry did, his brow furrowing. Tom stepped forwards and concentrated on the space inside the stone wall. He breathed in and out, and focused his mind on the image he had privately chosen years ago to symbolize this project: Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, the snake who lay coiled around the earth and stretching through the oceans with his tail in his mouth.

“Create the earth!”

There was a shudder that made Tom stagger, passing through him and into the clearing, And, slowly, the clearing began to stretch, new earth and stone and soil emerging from within what was already there. Expanding. Changing. Pushing the wall back.

It couldn’t last long. It never did, when Tom was a Parselmouth by himself. He sagged back, panting, and the clearing stopped moving. It had gained perhaps three inches of space, all around.

He turned to look at Harry.

Harry, who was gaping at him with his jaw halfway down his chest in metaphor, if not in reality. Tom felt a surge of satisfaction.

“What was that?” Harry whispered. “How did you—you can make buildings and tents bigger on the inside, everyone knows that, but there’s no way to do it with natural areas—you didn’t make the wall bigger, did you?” His eyes darted to the stone wall, then back to Tom. “No. It’s the same—it’s the same size it was, the same height, I think it encircles the same amount of area, but you—”

“Stretched the earth like a snake stretching as it grows. Yes.”

“That’s what Parselmouths can do?”

“Yes. You have heard of the legends of the World Serpent?”

“Of course. But they’re only legends.”

Tom shrugged. “Of course, there is not in truth a giant serpent encircling the world and lying beneath all lands and seas, but Parselmouths working in concert can act like that serpent. We create the world, create earth from nothing and increase the size of spaces that are bounded by a firm barrier without increasing the space the barrier takes up.” He nodded at the stone wall. “That is the major limitation. There must be barriers of some kind. I could not simply increase the size of a meadow that trailed off into another meadow without a clear boundary.”

“So it’s a variation of wizardspace?”

“If you like. With the limitation, as you said, that you cannot usually create more ground in a natural place with ordinary wizardspace charms.”

“And…”

Harry walked over to the stone wall and then abruptly increased his stride and jumped over it. Tom watched him in some amusement.

Harry whirled back to face him. “I can still jump over it as if the extra space wasn’t there.”

“Yes.”

“It exists inside the boundary, not outside it.”

“Yes.”

Harry shivered, gaze locked on Tom. His eyes were blazing with wonder. Tom had to smile at him. Harry looked as if he were in love with the magic, and it had been so long since Tom had seen that. So many of the people who toadied to him in the Ministry wanted power, or money, or sometimes what they saw as safety from others.

Not magic. Not wonder.

Then again, Tom had often thought that purebloods who had grown up in this world in a completely secure position would never embrace and love magic the way that he did. Or other Muggleborns or Muggle-raised people, or those who had at least contemplated leaving magical Britain.

In truth, it was a little surprising that Harry, raised in a secure, loving family, understood so well. But his lack of a Gift doubtless had something to do with that.

“Why do you want to do this?”

Ah. This was the point that Tom had reached with no one else in years. He moved a step forwards. “I know you have Muggleborn friends. You have probably heard them complain about finding areas like Diagon Alley and even Hogwarts hostile to them, as if the magic were pressing against them and willing them to go away.”

Harry sneered. “Yes. People like Malfoy say it’s about blood, but I refuse to believe there’s any difference between the blood of a Muggleborn and a pureblood.”

“No, there is not. The magic to make those places unwelcoming to foreign wizards and witches was cast after Grindelwald’s war, when the purebloods who wanted to do it were in control of the Ministry and used the public’s panic about Grindelwald’s invasion—”

“I know that history.”

“But I doubt you know all the underpinnings to the spells.”

Harry paused, his eyes, brilliant and locked on Tom, challenging him for a moment. Then he inclined his head and stepped back. “No, you’re right about that. Please go on.”

Tom did, with a curl of pleasure in his stomach. Of course, people acknowledged that he was right and deferred to him all the time, but it felt better to have someone do it for the right reasons, and someone whose respect was valuable.

“They wove their own fear and panic into the spells. The thing is, they didn’t hate just foreign wizards and witches after Grindelwald managed to make it all the way to these islands. They considered Muggleborns foreigners. Muggles, of course, which is why Muggles parents come into Diagon Alley to accompany their children on their shopping trips even though they used to be able to. And magical creatures.”

Harry stared at him. “The—the goblins have a bank in the middle of Diagon Alley, though. The centaurs live in the Forbidden Forest.”

“The goblins almost never leave Gringotts. It is a welcoming place to them, but the rest of the Alley is not. And there are fewer and fewer centaurs, and sentient non-magical people, in the Forest every year. They are leaving as the years advance and the ground of Hogwarts becomes more hostile to them.”

Harry hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “I heard there used to be half-giant students at the school. Some werewolves.”

“Yes. There used to be. Even the purebloods in control of the Ministry after the war didn’t imagine they would get away by rejecting all those people in the name of safety—immediately. So they wove the spells in such a way that the hostility gets worse over the years. So that those students who might have thrived there in decades past would not come now. And eventually, I believe it is their goal to eliminate Muggleborn attendance as well.”

“That’s stupid. Without Muggleborns, we would become so inbred—”

“Does hatred strike you as logical? These were purebloods who would have been on Grindelwald’s side in other cases, had he not threatened their homes and their sense of safety. They hated Muggleborns and blamed them, in some cases, for Grindelwald becoming so extreme. And in truth, I believe that people like Rodolphus Lestrange and Xerxes Nott would not care if Muggleborns went to some other school in Ireland or the like that they did not ward. They simply do not want them where they can see them.”

Harry paused, his eyes narrowed. “Say that’s true,” he murmured. “You still haven’t told me exactly what your plan is.”

“Muggleborns and magical creatures finding places to live has always been a problem not only because of the political power lying with purebloods, but because of a lack of space in magical Britain. We are on an island that is covered with Muggle areas, where magical buildings and homes and land also belong to purebloods who are not inclined to share them.”

“So you’re going to create space.”

“Yes. If you agree.”

Harry was quiet, his eyes focused inwards. Tom waited. He could imagine how big a shock this must be to Harry, who had not only grown up in that incestuous—literally—magical world but had never seen a way to change it.

He finally turned back to Tom with a challenging look. “I saw how much effort it took you to expand the space inside this stone wall by even this much. Why do you think it would work better with other Parselmouths?”

“I’ve traveled to other countries and spoken with Parselmouths there who managed to do it. Two Parselmouths together would be far more than merely the Gift multiplied by two. It would be even better if we could have more, but finding even one more candidate has been hard enough.”

“I’ve never heard of this.”

“It’s not something Parselmouths spread about, for obvious reasons. There are people who fear us simply for speaking with snakes, although outside of areas populated by serpents, it‘s not a particularly impressive power. But this?”

“True enough.”

“So?”

“Let me think.”

Tom nodded and stepped back. He had come this far, further than he had ever expected to come even when he had begun pinpointing Harry Evans as a good possibility. He could wait.

Despite his anticipation feeling as if it were blocking his windpipe.

*

Harry closed his eyes and stood there, while new possibility and old caution mingled and rang in his head like a bell.

If it could be done…

You only have Riddle’s word that it could be done.

But Harry had also seen a small version of what Riddle had talked about coming to life. And in truth, the mere idea wasn’t so impossible, not when it resembled the kinds of expansions that people could do with wizardspace.

So what would it mean for people if it were possible?

Harry shivered just considering it. There could be spaces that weren’t hostile to Muggleborns, where they could build homes and even live with their Muggle families if they wanted to. Spaces where magical creatures could trade with wizards and witches and not be dependent on the kinds of spells that Riddle said protected goblins inside Gringotts but also kept them trapped there. Businesses that could be built which wouldn’t automatically turn away from the Giftless people among them.

A whole new society inside their society, breaking the bounds that that society had set on them so far.

Harry swallowed and opened his eyes. Riddle was watching him, body taut not with patience but with impatience restrained.

Harry stared at him and whispered, “And you would value me as more than just a means to get vengeance on the purebloods.”

The smile that spread over Riddle’s face at that looked unholy. It was the best smile Harry had ever seen. “If you knew how I would cherish you,” he purred. “The fulfillment of my dreams, a Parselmouth like me, a half-blood who has known what it is to have purebloods despise you.” He looked at Harry’s body then without trying to disguise the look. “And someone handsome enough to tempt me to far more than political partnership.”

Harry swallowed again, dry-mouthed. He had thought of seeing someone look at him like that. He had dreamed.

Perhaps he might have been able to find a Muggle who could. But he had really wanted a magical person, and no one would, flinching away as they would have from the thought that their children might not inherit a Gift.

Even Muggleborns were controlled by the desire for Gifts, the way his mother had been for a while. The way she still was, sometimes, to hear her talk.

To steal not only one of the most powerful Gifts but one of the most powerful men in the magical world, one other people had counted on marrying, from them?

It struck at the center of Harry’s soul like dragonfire. And while he was attracted to witches, he was also attracted to wizards, and Riddle was—

What he was.

He opened his eyes and took a step forwards. Riddle gave him a small smile.

“I have so many questions,” Harry whispered. “But the most important one, I can answer now. Yes.”

Riddle seemed to have stopped breathing for a moment. Then he reached out, claw-like hands grasping Harry’s shoulders to draw him nearer. Harry went, smiling up into his face. There was an answering response deep in Riddle’s eyes, something that went deeper than the ruthlessness.

“You will stand with me as a Parselmouth and extend the space available to Muggleborns and magical creatures and others who wish to live in them?” Riddle whispered to him.

“Yes.”

“You will withstand the hatred that will come our way? And the fighting? There will be murder attempts, I am certain.”

That wasn’t something Harry had thought about, but honestly, the idea stirred up delight in him. He laughed a little. “And finally be able to strike back at those aresholes for a reason, instead of having to suppress everything because surely they didn’t mean it that way and anyone would be uncomfortable around a Giftless person? Yes.”

Riddle’s eyes moved over him for a moment, like a living flame. Then he nodded, and his hands tightened into true talons on Harry’s shoulders.

“Then let me begin to prepare the ritual.”

*

Tom stepped back from the edge of the circle and studied it for a long moment. Then he nodded. He had worked harder on preparing this one than he had ever worked in his life, but the care taken did seem to have paid off.

The circle shimmered with blue fire already, even though Tom hadn’t finished preparing all the runes. This was the mere sign of the magic to come, the potential already gathering. Only the most powerful circles called that magic to them, like an oncoming storm.

In the center of the circle, clad in the white linen robe that Tom had woven long ago against this contingency, Harry sat on the stone floor, his eyes closed. The necessary potion rested in a cut crystal bowl in front of him, a brighter green than his eyes.

They were in the cellar of a private house Tom owned through two fictitious purebloods who had lived outside of magical Britain for generations. And they were also in the middle of a night of the new moon, when transformation magic could be more powerfully worked.

“Harry.”

Harry’s eyes flicked open, and Tom doubted that the potion was as bright a green after all. “Riddle.”

Tom shook his head quickly. He’d thought that moving outside of a formal situation would change Harry’s approach, but it seemed he would need to remind his future partner. “If you maintain emotional distance from me, then the ritual will not work. We are going to achieve an emotional intimacy that neither of us has had with anyone in our lives very soon.”

Harry paused, studying him. Then he smiled. The wicked smile went straight to Tom’s groin, and he had to work to focus his mind on the ritual.

“All right, then, Tom,” Harry said, and maybe it was a good thing that he hadn’t used Tom’s first name earlier. “Even if I sort of think this is just a way to make me say your name.”

“I enjoy hearing you say it.”

“Mmm. Maybe I enjoy saying it, too.”

Tom had to turn away before he had an inappropriate reaction. But focusing on the runes did it. Exultation rose in him. He was so close to his triumph. He only had to sketch one more rune to bring the hanging storm-potential into being.

He glanced back once at Harry and nodded. Harry’s smile vanished as if it had never been, but left something long and narrow and gleaming as a crocodile’s jaws behind. He picked up the bowl of potion and held it in front of him.

Tom closed his eyes once, centered himself in the strength of his magic that had never forsaken him, and laid the final rune in place.

The world trembled like a bell. Tom’s eyes snapped open as light flared around him, fountains of golden power rising like fireworks and cascading down from the cellar’s ceiling. The rivers of radiance burst into heatless fire as they hit the floor and then turned and ran in several directions, curving all around the runic circle, Harry, and Tom.

Tom turned to check on Harry. He was unharmed by the magic—of course—but gaping at it, the bowl held in front of him.

“Harry!”

Harry started, luckily not hard enough to spill the potion, and remembered himself. He nodded and drank.

Tom began to chant in Parseltongue, laying out all his hopes and fears and dreams and desires for what they could achieve in the rawest, most honest words he could. There was no established ritual to add a Gift to someone who didn’t have one (or the pureblood families would have been using it long since on their own “failed” children). He had had to design it.

He reached out into the magic that hovered around them, into his own longing to change things, and the magic roared and responded.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Harry crumpling to the floor. Tom took a steadying breath. He couldn’t help that. Just as he had to conduct the chant, Harry had to battle through the changes the potion was making in him, and accept them.

Or not.

Tom continued to speak.

*

Harry had expected pain from the potion, when Riddle—Tom—had explained what it was made of, what different kinds of snake venom it included. The only way to survive it, Tom had emphasized, was to want the change so badly that Harry overpowered the poison.

But it wasn’t pain that flooded through him. It was like nothing so much as standing under the cool, judging gaze of some greater being, struggling to meet its eyes.

Why should I think you special? Why should I grant you this Gift?

Harry didn’t know if he was actually hearing the voice or if his mind was only conceptualizing the struggle for him. It didn’t matter. It made it easier if he thought of it as a voice, so he did.

The World Serpent, Tom had said. Harry pictured that looming head in his imagination, the green-brown color of grass patterned with falling leaves, and an amber eye larger than his whole body.

Who are you to awaken me from sleep? What do you want? Why should I grant you this Gift?

Harry shakily forced himself to his feet, or imagined that he did. He looked Jörmungandr in the eye and bowed.

“I want it to make changes for other people, and to stand at Tom’s side, and to get vengeance on the people who wronged me.”

Jörmungandr considered him. Harry could feel the coolness of the potion pooling in his stomach. The poison wanted to destroy him, in whatever way a potion could want something. But he wanted to live.

He stood and looked the serpent in the eye, and the judging gaze dove into him.

Harry hoped he was thinking and feeling the right things. He had no idea what a gigantic serpent as big as the world would think was a good goal or one worthy of deserving the Gift of Parseltongue.

And then he reminded himself that this was only the way his own mind was thinking of the struggle of the magic and the potion in his body. He calmed his breathing and tried to turn his attention to the battle.

It wouldn’t turn. He still floated in a black imaginary space with the great serpent’s head hovering in front of him.

And then Jörmungandr said, Yes.

The pain gripped Harry and threw him back into his body. He felt his back arch, heard the screams emerging from his mouth as if they were coming from someone else. His attention was mostly on the way that his throat seemed to be swelling like a cobra getting ready to attack, and the way that his stomach burned, and—

And then it was done.

Harry sat up slowly. He was panting, and his limbs shook as if he had been lying on all of them at once. He turned his head back and forth, wondering for a second if his eyesight had been damaged, and whether he should have asked Tom more about the consequences of the ritual and the potion—

And then his vision gave an odd snap, and he could see again.

Tom stood in front of him with his head hanging and his robe sleeves swinging around his arms, his body heaving with his breaths. He kept his gaze on Harry.

Harry smiled at him.

“Did it work?” Tom asked. Harry couldn’t hear his voice, but he knew what he was saying from the motion of his lips.

“Yes, it did,” Harry hissed.

He had to concentrate to make sure the words didn’t come out in English, but it was worth it. His throat vibrated differently, his tongue dashed through different sounds, and he could feel the magic reverberating in his chest and spreading through his body. There hadn’t been the Gift before, and now—

Now there was.

Radiant joy burst in him like the light that had begun the ritual. Harry looked up at Tom and waited for a moment for his reaction.

The flames that lit his eyes made Harry scramble to his feet and reach for him. Tom did the same thing at the same time, hands passing easily across the ruined remnants of the ritual circle.

“Harry,” Tom hissed.

The sound of his name in Parseltongue was another revelation. Harry was sure now that Tom had never said the word before, even though he’d spoken in Parseltongue around Harry a few times as they got ready for the ritual and the potion-drinking. And the embrace that grabbed him and swung him around made him feel as if Tom had never really touched him before.

Harry leaned his head on Tom’s chest and closed his eyes. Tom’s heartbeat was warm and quick beneath his ear, and he reached up and covered that portion of Tom’s chest with his hand.

“If you know what you mean to me.”

Harry lifted his head and laughed wetly. “I’ve only had Parseltongue for a few minutes. You knew that I was a good candidate for this, but other than that, you don’t really know me all that well.”

Without taking his eyes from Harry’s, Tom reached down, picked up Harry’s hand, and lifted the backs of Harry’s knuckles to his lips. Harry felt as though his face was trying to catch on fire.

“Do I not?” Tom murmured back. “Do I not know that you were courageous enough to take the risk, bitter enough to want to make the purebloods pay for what they have done, ruthless enough to approve of my ruthlessness, compassionate enough to see why it makes sense for us to help Muggleborns and Muggles and magical creatures?”

Harry took a moment to accept the words. Then he hissed, “Bitterness and ruthlessness don’t sound like the kinds of qualities you should normally put such trust in.”

“Neither of us is normal.”

Well, Harry had to agree with that.

He laid his head against Tom’s chest again, and Tom cast a Lightening Charm and scooped him up. He carried Harry to the room where he had put on the white linen robe, and laid him in a comfortable bed.

“Sleep well, Harry. Tomorrow, we move the world.”

Harry smiled drowsily as Tom’s hand swept the fringe back and traced what felt like a protective runic design on the skin of his forehead. Yes. Yes, they would begin to make things better.

And to show those bastards what they’re missing.

Chapter Text

“Minister Riddle.”

Tom looked up with a slight frown. He had told his lackeys only that he was busy for the next day, and they wouldn’t have known where to Floo him. But it seemed Lily Potter had discovered his hiding place.

Well, she is an Unspeakable.

Tom inclined his head to the woman looking at him through the fire and murmured, “Good morning, Mrs. Potter. Could I help you with something?”

“Perhaps you can tell me why my son never came home last night?”

“I assure you, Harry is an adult.”

Lily Potter’s face pinched tight. “And you would not address him by name that way unless there was something between you.”

“He is well,” Tom said, feeling a little pinch of irritation. “I have sheltered him and would never leave him without shelter.”

Mrs. Potter studied him in silence for a moment, then announced, “I am coming through.”

Tom thought she probably would have tried even if he had kept the Floo locked—she had managed to get through to speak to him even though the Floo was locked right now—so he released the wards on it and waited.

Mrs. Potter manifested in the kitchen in a roar of flames a moment later, brushing the soot off her skirts with her hands instead of a spell. Tom felt his mouth twitch a little. He often did the same thing. It seemed to be an instinctive gesture for Muggleborns and Muggle-raised magicals.

“Where is my son?”

“Upstairs, in the second bedroom on the right.”

Mrs. Potter stilled, staring at him. Tom stared back.

“If you took advantage of him…”

“I have given him everything he desired.”

Too late, Tom realized the other way that could be taken, since it wasn’t likely she knew about the Parseltongue Gift being transferred. Mrs. Potter’s wand was in her hand and pointed straight at him.

“If you touched him.”

“I have shared my Gift with him,” Tom said, more sharply and bluntly than he’d meant to. “He is a Parselmouth now.”

“That is impossible. We’ve perfected the potion, but not the ritual that goes with it!”

“I designed the ritual.”

“And so you put my son in a situation where he could have been driven mad?”

“Do you think he wasn’t going mad already, living in this world centered on purebloods that has done all three of us so much harm?”

Mrs. Potter gave a lizard’s slow blink. Then she tucked her wand away and considered Tom some more. Finally, she said, “If I find that he has been harmed, you will wish the ritual had failed.” And she turned and walked up the stairs.

Tom sat back with a small shake of his head. He hoped he would find an ally in Lily Potter eventually, but at the moment, she would need to hear from Harry how much his life had changed before she would accept that the potion and ritual had been a good thing.

Her protectiveness was understandable, of course. Until yesterday, there would have been far too many magical people who saw Harry essentially as sub-human, someone they could taunt or hex or use at will.

Tom himself had clawed his way out of that fate, but only because of his Gift. As he lifted his teacup to his lips, he felt a small, cold smile creep across them.

He was looking forward to the moment when those who had mistreated Harry found out about the Gift almost as much as he was looking forward to the moment when they saw some of the land he and Harry would create.

*

“Harry!”

Harry came rearing out of sleep, feeling an absurd combination of refreshed and like he was a child who had been taken sick. Mum was hovering next to him, her hand on his forehead. Her face was so awfully pale that Harry reached out an arm to support her before he thought about it.

“Mum?”

“You’re safe.”

Mum’s eyes were bright and desperate. Harry frowned at her. “Of course I am?”

“When you didn’t come home last night, I thought someone who hated you for being Giftless had got to you.” Mum collapsed into a chair she had probably conjured at the side of the bed, since it didn’t match the style of the room. “Harry, dear, what were you thinking?”

“That I wanted a Gift.”

“Oh, darling, he might have tricked you into thinking you had one, but—”

“Harry is my name in Parseltongue,” Harry hissed, and watched the way that her eyes widened. “Tom is his name. Lily is your name.”

Mum swallowed. It was a long moment before she reached a hand towards him. It trembled. Harry grabbed her wrist and held on. He was here, and real, and he didn’t know everything she was feeling right now.

When she spoke, she said something he hadn’t really expected. “I didn’t know you were that desperate for a Gift, darling.”

“The way this society is set up, everyone who doesn’t have a Gift is disadvantaged. Of course I wanted one.”

“But…you know we love you anyway.”

“Of course, Mum. But we already talked about this. I don’t want to be dependent on you or Cole for the rest of my life. I was willing to become a Squib to avoid that.”

Mum bit her lip, her eyes brilliant and worried for a second. “True. I’d forgotten that.” She found Harry’s hand and gripped it tightly. “As long as you understand that we love you and we never would have abandoned you.”

Harry smiled at her. “Of course I know that. You and Dad and Cole are all great.”

He talked soothingly to her about how he had gone through the ritual and was just fine, and by the end, she was smiling and declaring she wanted to talk to Tom about the ritual and understand how to duplicate it for other Gifts. Harry thought it would probably need to be redesigned for different people, given that the Unspeakables had only worked on a potion containing snake venom, but he nodded and asked questions.

And, well.

There might be people in the future who wanted to become Parselmouths enough to drink the potion and do the ritual and join them. But Harry would have the satisfaction of knowing he had been first, that he had the most of Tom’s regard, that he had been willing to take the risk.

That was what Mum would never understand. Harry didn’t distrust his family’s love and protection. He hadn’t wanted to become a Squib.

But he would always choose would what leave him a modicum of pride over what wouldn’t.

*

“I have to go home. Mum told me that Dad and Cole are worried.”

“And you always jump to do exactly what your family tells you to do?” Tom asked, but his voice lacked bite.

Harry just raised his eyebrows at him. He was eating the scones Tom had bought that morning with neat bites, much more relaxed and in less pain than Tom had expected from the ritual. “I promise to come back in a few hours. Or maybe tomorrow. Mum told me that my godfather is there as well.”

“Godfather?” Tom had probably read the detail about the godfather in one of the files he’d consumed on Harry as a likely candidate for the Parseltongue ritual, but he couldn’t remember the man’s name right now.

“Sirius Black.”

“Oh, that one.”

Harry peered at him. “What is it?”

“He thinks that it’s funny to morph into one of my Auror bodyguards and then cast prank spells at me.”

Harry’s lips twitched. “Well, no one ever said the Black Gift was responsibility.”

“Or sanity,” Tom muttered. The Unspeakables’ research into Gifts had largely discounted the old idea that the most powerful magic needed to be paid for by some flaw like madness or weakness in some other field, but the last Tom had known, they’d still been studying the Blacks’ Metamorphmagus Gift.

“Yeah, Sirius isn’t the most stable on that front, either.” Harry got up and walked around the table. He moved more smoothly and confidently than he had yesterday, already, Tom thought. He rose to his feet, and Harry reached up to clap his shoulder. “But you’re the one who gave me not only a Gift but a purpose, and a way to strike back at all the purebloods who loathed me. Of course I’ll come back.”

Tom reached out and drew Harry towards him with both arms around his waist. Harry’s pupils dilated as he stared up at Tom.

“See that you do,” Tom murmured, and bent his head to kiss Harry.

He went slowly, so Harry would have time to pull back if he wanted to, but it seemed that Harry was perfectly able to read the messages Tom had been sending him. He surged up, capturing Tom’s lips and urging them open with his tongue before Tom would have tried that trick. Then Tom was fully able to lose himself in warmth and pleasure for a minute or so.

Before Harry leaped back, shook his head, and shivered. “Damn, you’re good at that.”

“So are you. No jealous boyfriend or girlfriend waiting in the wings?”

Harry laughed outright, the sound tinged with bitterness. It was still Tom’s second favorite sound behind Harry’s joyous laughter. “Who would date someone without a Gift, who should have had it? Not even the Muggleborns wanted to do that. Too afraid of their children not having it. Or,” he added, a little more temperately, “they’d prefer to return to the Muggle world instead of marrying someone who might look down on them for their blood.”

“So you haven’t dated anyone.”

“No.”

“Have you—”

This time, Tom got the joyous laughter. “What, Minister Riddle, afraid to talk about sex in identifiable terms?”

“Your speaking my last name is extraordinarily annoying.”

“I’m not going to be compliant.”

Harry winked at him and then vanished through the fireplace. Tom was left staring after him.

Only a minute later did he become aware that his hand was on his lips, as if to preserve Harry’s kiss.

*

“I understand why you did what you did. But you could have waited.”

“But then Tom might have found someone else who wanted to be a Parselmouth.”

“Tom?”

“That’s what he told me to call him.”

Sirius spluttered wordlessly. Harry leaned back on the couch in front of the fire and grinned at his godfather. Sirius was sitting across from him, with Cole, who was listening intently but hadn’t said anything yet. Mum and Dad sat in chairs on either side of the couch.

Mum was tapping her fingers, but she had been at Tom’s house earlier, after all, and hadn’t found that much to disapprove of. Dad was the one who spoke up. “Based on what you described, he would have asked you to be a Parselmouth even if he had found someone else, Harry. Why not just wait? Why not discuss it with us?”

Harry sighed and faced his father fully. James Potter was still a handsome, fit man, even though he carried a lot more scars than he had before he became an Auror. There was grey around his temples, and he was chewing his lips, as he tended to do, while he looked at Harry.

“My choices were becoming a Parselmouth or taking the Squibarren Potion, Dad. Of course I went with the more attractive one.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to do that!” Cole objected at once. “I’d never kick you out!”

Harry shook his head. “It’s more that you would have the right to kick me out,” he said. “That I could never get a job. That I would be unlikely to find anyone magical who wanted to marry me. That a lot of people would hate me just for existing. I wanted to change the world so I could be more comfortable in it. And now I’m going to.”

He held back a chuckle as he thought how thoroughly that would be true. Tom had asked Harry to accompany him to a gala the Ministry was holding in a few days, one that would be smaller than the one in honor of Time-Turners where they’d met. Harry was looking forward to speaking Parseltongue in front of people with names like Malfoy and Lestrange.

“But I wouldn’t!”

Harry came back to the present and sighed a little. “I know. I still wanted to stand on my own and make sure I can earn my own Galleons. And I want to make the world better for other people like Hermione, too, who didn’t have that much choice,” he added. “I can do that now.”

“How? It seems likely to me the purebloods will just ask for that potion and ritual Riddle came up with. They won’t be that impressed that you’re a Parselmouth now.”

Harry shot Mum a glance. She shook her head. So she hadn’t passed on anything about how he and Tom could create land.

Of course, that might be because Harry hadn’t clearly explained it. He’d referred to Jörmungandr a few times, and that was it.

He stood up. “Let’s go to the garden, and I can show you.”

*

“What was your family’s reaction when they saw that you can create earth?”

“Silence.”

Tom turned around and studied Harry. He was wearing a pair of extremely brilliant blue dress robes with golden edging that Tom thought had been recently Transfigured, judging by the seams. Then again, Harry wouldn’t have had any need for dress robes for years, given that many people wouldn’t have invited him to any galas requiring them.

That will change.

“Silence?” Tom prompted, because Harry was examining himself critically in the mirror of Tom’s dressing room and not speaking anymore.

“I don’t think they really believed it would change the world.”

“You told them about why I think it will?”

“Sure. But Sirius said the pureblood arseholes would stop it, and Dad said it would probably contravene a lot of the Ministry’s laws.”

Tom laughed quietly. Harry met his eyes in the mirror and began to smile. It was a slightly mean smile, and Tom promptly adored it.

“What is it?”

“I suppose your father hasn’t paid attention to how I’ve quietly been changing most of those laws in the past few decades.”

Harry stared at him for a second and then laughed, a low, dark chuckle that was yet another sound Tom could see himself loving in the future. Harry hooked his arm around Tom’s and pulled him towards the entrance of the dressing room. “This is going to be even more fun than I thought.”

“You enjoy startling and confusing your family along with other people?”

“I already told you that I wasn’t a particularly good person, Tom.”

“Not good as the world understands it, perhaps, but to me, you are perfect.”

Harry stared at him, so still for a moment that Tom feared the compliment had landed wrongly. Then he broke into a brilliant smile and leaned forwards to kiss Tom.

Tom would have been happy to cancel their plans to attend the gala, after all, but in the end, he was looking forward to an opportunity to irritate the purebloods. There was a deep smile on his face as he followed Harry through the Floo.

*

“Sir.”

Harry thought that the way Rodolphus Lestrange flinched and shot him a hateful glance as he walked up to Tom and had to deal with Harry standing at the Minister’s side was one of the most hilarious things he’d ever seen.

But I know what would make it more hilarious.

Harry gave Lestrange a bright, careless smile, as if they’d never met before and Lestrange had never made his opinion of Giftless people clear, and started forwards with his hand out. “Hey, Tom was just telling me how valuable your perspective was at our private meeting this afternoon! Harry Evans.”

Lestrange nearly tripped over his robe hem with how fast he tried to go backwards, only to stop when Tom clucked his tongue. “I did hope that two of my most important advisors would get along, Rodolphus. What a disappointment that you apparently have some grudge against Harry without even shaking his hand.”

Harry turned a smile to Tom, bright enough that he saw Tom’s cheek twitch. “Oh, I’m sure Roddy here doesn’t have a grudge against me, Tom! It’s just he probably doesn’t like shaking a non-pureblood’s hand.”

“I—no, of course not. I’m no blood purist!”

Harry looked at Rodolphus and made his smile melting-sweet this time. “Oh? I probably just startled you, putting my hand out like this, then? Sorry! I forget sometimes that I need to treat purebloods like small wounded animals.”

Rodolphus was staring at him, and then back and forth between him and Tom, as if he were certain there was an explanation for this somewhere, and Tom would get him out of the situation. But Tom only raised an eyebrow and tilted his head so that the fairy lights strung along the walls of the ballroom reflected off the silver streaks at his temples.

(Harry should probably not find that as hot as he did).

“Aren’t you going to shake Harry’s hand, Rodolphus?” Now Tom’s voice held a promise of pain.

Rodolphus swallowed and slowly extended his hand to Harry. Harry grabbed it and shook it enthusiastically. He ignored the way Rodolphus tried to let go a second into the handshake and made it go on for almost a minute.

Rodolphus snatched his hand back and wiped it on his robes.

“I do expect you to wash your hands before you touch anyone else, Rodolphus,” Tom said, voice distant and icy. “You ought never to have come to this gala with dirty hands in the first place.”

Then Tom and Harry swept on into the ballroom. Harry contained his laughter to one choke, but he did conjure a small mirror in the hollow of his palm and hold it so he could watch Rodolphus.

The man looked as if the center of his universe had collapsed. Harry did laugh this time, and banish the mirror.

“Sir.”

That was Lucius Malfoy. He flicked an eyelid at Harry in acknowledgment and then turned to fully face Tom. “Might I have a moment of your time about that minor matter we were discussing the other day, when you get a chance?”

“The bill to take any money that Giftless people might have made and donate it to a fund for homeless orphans that you just happen to manage, Lucius?”

Malfoy started and shot an obvious glance at Harry this time. “Sir?” he asked slowly.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out, Lucius? That your charity is as empty as your heart?” Tom shook his head and gave Malfoy a weary look. “You could at least try to treat me as the intelligent opponent you think of me as.”

Malfoy seemed to try to simultaneously look at Tom’s eyes and look away. Harry had to hold in his laughter again. Had Malfoy forgotten that Tom was a Legilimens? Or just assumed that he would get away with things forever, if Tom had found it expedient to let him get away with some things some of the time?

“Ah, er, Minister, I assure you—this is a real fund.”

“It is not.”

“You would read the truth out of my mind?” Malfoy hissed. He seemed to have decided going on the offense was better than acting contrite.

“Of course I did. I warned you when we first began to work together that I would occasionally check your honesty that way. Did you think I was lying?”

Malfoy then decided he should attack Harry, because that must also be a better plan than acting contrite. He spun to face Harry. “How dare you stand so close to our Minister, you Giftless little—freak!”

Harry raised his eyebrows. This was going to be so good. “You went looking for another insult, didn’t you?” he hissed. “Except you probably remembered that I’m a half-blood at the last second.”

Malfoy froze. So did several other people who had been drifting towards Tom with seemingly casual movements. Harry thought even a non-Legilimens could have heard their thoughts.

What?

“I did not understand you,” Malfoy said, through what sounded like numb lips. “What did you say?”

“Well, you still won’t understand, but at least now you’ll have to acknowledge that it’s Parseltongue.”

Tom clapped a fist into place across his mouth, his eyes blazing as he looked at Harry. Harry smiled sweetly back and turned to Malfoy.

“Don’t you recognize Parseltongue when you hear it?” he asked. “I suppose you’re not familiar with the greater Gifts.”

Malfoy turned so pink that he looked like he was about to start bleeding. It was well-known that the Malfoy Gift was being able to shapeshift into a white peacock. They still counted as the “right sort” of people to those who were prejudiced against the Giftless, but it definitely wasn’t considered impressive.

“I want to know how you received Parseltongue, Mr. Evans. It is impossible for a Gift to manifest after one’s seventeenth birthday.”

“Is it?”

“Sir!” Malfoy turned to face Tom. “Are you going to let him defile your bloodline by speaking the Sacred Tongue?”

“The only ones who use that name for Parseltongue are those I would never share the Gift with,” Tom told Harry.

Harry again bit his lips to avoid laughing aloud. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so light and bright and cheerful. He shrugged. “You’ll have to make allowances for them if they’re politically useful, I suppose.”

“Lucius in particular seems to become less useful every time I see him.”

“Sir! Where did he get it?”

Tom turned and looked Lucius in the eye. “I shared it with him,” he said, and wrapped an arm around Harry’s waist, tugging Harry against himself. They pressed together from shoulder to hip, and Harry let out a contented little sigh at the constipated expression on Malfoy’s face. “I could have shared it with whomever I chose to, but until Harry, I had found no one worthy.”

Malfoy looked as if he didn’t know whether to splutter in indignation or die of a heart attack. He settled for some vague fluttering motion of his hands that was no more impressive than his Gift. “But surely—someone wise—someone pureblood—”

“Oh, but you already have your Gift, Lucius. And I would never defile your family line by saying that the Slytherin Gift should take the place of yours.”

Tom turned away, his arm still around Harry’s waist, and led him further into the gala. The silence was intense enough that Harry wondered for a moment whether any other victims would approach them.

But of course some people did. The ones who couldn’t learn better, or the ones who thought they would be different, and Tom wouldn’t devastate them.

Harry smiled more brightly than ever, and went to devastate them.

*

Tom found it difficult to take his eyes from Harry, who was talking with his godfather at the moment. The man had shown up from nowhere, stared at Tom with distrustful eyes, and tried to engage him in conversation. Harry had sailed in and done it instead.

Harry was magnificent.

And to think that Tom had doubted he would be able to bear the burden of Parseltongue, or might be unsuitable for the Gift. Of course he could handle it. The fact was there in the turn of Harry’s head, the glittering flash of his smile, how he hurled himself with savage joy at all the people who had hated him for years.

“Minister.”

Tom turned around and raised his eyebrows a little when he saw Amelia Bones standing behind him. She was not the kind of person who normally attended these galas. “Yes, Amelia? Did you have Ministry business to discuss?”

“No.” Amelia looked at him through her monocle, her grey hair frizzing a little around her head. “I wanted to ask what you thought you were doing.”

“Stunning the purebloods. Changing the world.”

Amelia gave him a deep frown, and leaned a little past him to look at Harry, who was currently saying something that had made Black start laughing almost frantically. “You’re possibly endangering your position by associating with a Giftless half-blood.”

“You’ve heard him hissing, Amelia. You know he’s no longer Giftless.”

“But there will be people who think it’s a trick or an illusion. And people who will think his behavior tonight arrogant. Is it worth risking your chance to be elected Minister again simply to prop him up?”

Tom smiled. “I’m not up for reelection until next year.”

“You know that you should really begin campaigning now, Minister.”

Tom studied her. This wasn’t the kind of advice that he would have anticipated Amelia dispensing. It seemed too conservative for her. He reached out and gently skimmed through her mind, cautious in case her Occlumency had improved since the last time he’d tried it.

Ah.

Amelia didn’t agree with all his politics and disapproved of the way that he had been elected more than four times, but she also thought he was the best option she was likely to get in the Minister’s office. She believed that anything would be worth him staying in the office, and anything that endangered it was wrong.

Tom shook his head and gave a soft laugh. “I promise, Amelia, I won’t endanger my standing for this.”

Especially since, now that he finally had the Parselmouth he’d been searching for, Tom would be stepping down next year. He had sought the Minister’s office in the first place so he could search more thoroughly for a candidate who could accept his Gift, and to have access to the Unspeakables’ research they were willing to share.

“I think you will.”

Tom shrugged. “I can charm a lot of people, you know that. I’ll simply do it again.”

“I hope you’re right, Minister.”

Tom smiled at the polite condemnation in her voice, and then turned around to meet Harry’s eyes again. Harry smiled back at him, and Tom hissed, “I think we’ve spent enough time at the gala, darling. Do you want to return home? You’ve only seen a property I use for practical reasons so far, not where I live.”

“Do you think we’ve freaked enough people out?” Harry asked, and his mouth twitched at the way some purebloods flinched back from him.

“Yes. The ones who will still persist in thinking this is a trick or the like are unreachable anyway.”

Harry nodded and came over to put his hand in Tom’s. Tom drew Harry against his side again, where he seemed happy to fit, and turned around to nod to Amelia. Her eyes were so wide that her monocle had almost fallen out.

“I will see you tomorrow, Amelia.” He would have to spend at least some time in the office taking care of meetings and paperwork.

Harry smiled at Amelia, and then Tom was sweeping him through the Floo and into the entrance room of what he knew was an impressive house. Harry’s eyes widened as he studied the pure, gleaming marble, accented by colorful rugs and decorations made from the shed skins of giant snakes.

Then he turned to Tom and said, “I want to do something.”

“What is that?”

“I want to stay the night with you.”

Tom’s eyes widened the way Amelia’s had. “After what you said about never sleeping with anyone—”

“Yeah. So you’ll get to be the first to fuck me.” Harry laughed again, the joyous one, as he looked at Tom. “I thought you’d like that.”

Tom bent forwards and kissed the laughter from Harry’s lips, and then whispered, “I would enjoy that. Let me show you pleasure, darling, as I have shown you happiness.”

“Looking forward to it."

Chapter Text

Harry looked around Tom’s bedroom curiously. He wasn’t entirely sure what he had expected, but “room that was austere and almost white except for the enormous bed in blue and green” wasn’t it.

“Are you reconsidering?”

Harry turned towards Tom with a smile. Tom had unbuttoned his outer robe, the formal one that he’d worn for the gala, but his eyes on Harry were intense and measuring.

“Of course not. Just that I would have expected you to have a lair that’s full of overstuffed chairs and fluffy cushions and the like.”

“Lair?”

“Of course. You’re the charming beast who’s seduced the young prince and carried him off. It’s absolutely required for you to have a lair.”

Tom shuddered a little, and Harry paused, wondering if he’d gone too far in the teasing. But instead, Tom stalked towards him, shedding the robe as he went. Now Harry could see the muscles in his bare arms, and the golden tinge to his skin that Harry hadn’t realized was there. He swallowed.

“If you knew what you do to me.”

Harry smiled at Tom and plunged his hand down to rest on the hardness waiting for him under the soft fall of the robe. “I think I do.”

“You only think you do. Take off your robes.”

Harry did, hiding his private amusement that the instruction in Parseltongue came so near to “shed your soft skin.” He shook himself free from the outer one and then kept stripping, removing his socks and shoes and pants, head bowed. He’d never got this far with anyone before they’d decided they couldn’t sleep with a Giftless person after all, and part of him kept expecting Tom to back away, too.

“You are magnificent.”

Okay, so maybe not.

Tom stepped forwards, his eyes on Harry’s chest. He reached out and traced a scar that Harry had got when he’d been on a practice broom and a Bludger had slammed into it, sending wooden splinters flying into his chest. Now, Harry’s breath caught as Tom’s fingers spiraled over and down the scar, and landed on the ropy part at the bottom.

“Disgusted by what you see?” Harry hissed. It was probably stupid of him, but part of him had to keep asking and pushing and making sure that Tom wasn’t going to leave him. Just—so many people had.

“No. It means you are a survivor.”

Those red and gleaming eyes rose to his, and Tom dipped in for a kiss without removing his hand from Harry’s scar. Harry shuddered and looped his arms around Tom’s neck, kissing back, barely noticing when Tom began urging him towards the bed.

He did notice when the back of his thighs touched the smooth sheets and Tom lowered him backwards. Harry swallowed, but let himself drop, and stretched his arms over his head, arching, moving his fingers on the pillows.

Tom’s eyes were hotter than Harry’s blood as he stripped his own outer robe off completely, leaving himself naked. Harry hadn’t even noticed him removing the rest of his clothes.

Harry raised himself on an elbow and ran his eyes appreciatively over Tom’s skin. And his erection, curving up against his stomach.

“Going to put that in me?” Harry asked, raising his chin so he was looking Tom in the eye. “Or not?”

“Is that what you want, darling?” Tom took up his cock, stroking it languidly in a way that made Harry have to swallow again and again. “Or did you want something else, different, to begin with?”

“People have kissed me before, but no one’s even come close to fucking me. Put it in.”

*

Tom hadn’t thought, once, that people making demands of him could be sexy. But the way Harry was staring at him, magic running and flaring over his skin, casting ripples of crimson and silvery light into the air…

It was all Tom needed to pull him to Harry.

He touched his fingers to Harry’s arse and hissed a few spells he had found useful in the past. Harry’s eyes widened in appreciation, maybe because Tom had cast them without a wand, maybe because they immediately made Harry slick and relaxed. Harry tossed his head back with a long, unending sigh, and let his legs sprawl open.

The sight of that trust affected Tom more than Harry’s demands themselves had. He moved forwards, his gaze darting back and forth between Harry’s face and his arse.

“Are you going to start or not? Maybe you need some help?”

Tom stared with his mouth open for a moment. Harry looked back unapologetically, his eyes sparkling like jewels.

“You might regret this.”

“You’re right, I really regret your slowness.”

Tom shook his head incredulously and moved forwards again, sinking into Harry. As it turned out, he didn’t sink by himself. Harry lifted his ankles and curved them around Tom’s arse, tugging him deep in a way that made Tom swear shakily.

“You might make me come too fast at this rate.”

“Sorry, I forgot about your age.”

Tom swallowed back many things that he wanted to say, and focused on the way that Harry’s eyes widened and pleasure crept across his face. He showed no sign of pain. He just hissed wordlessly, aligning himself with Tom, and then reached down and curled his hand loosely around his own cock.

“What if I want to make you come by fucking you alone?”

“Then I’d say you should get on with it.”

Tom checked one more time, but Harry truly seemed to be in no pain, only on fire with need. He swallowed and thrust forwards.

Harry grunted in such absolute pleasure that Tom couldn’t help thrusting again. He smiled down at Harry, and got the slyest smile in return.

“This was worth waiting for.”

Tom practically folded himself in half so that he could kiss Harry, and Harry reached up and grabbed the back of his neck and tugged, and Tom awkwardly half-fell on Harry and had to brace himself on his elbows.

Meanwhile, Harry cried out beneath him and thrust back and—

The gathering warmth in Tom’s groin took him by surprise, surprise that he expressed with harder thrusts. Harry smiled up at him as the pleasure grabbed and consumed him, and his thoughts spiraled through his eyes, ripe for Tom’s plucking, there where his mind spoke half in English and half in Parseltongue.

Tom thrust once more, shuddered, and came.

Harry tensed up around him, pulling, urging Tom on. His hands closed on Tom’s neck and shoulders again, and Tom pressed his lips to Harry as the pain became more pleasure.

He urged his hips on when he wanted to soften and slide out, because Harry hadn’t come yet.

But Harry followed a minute later, neck strained back and a triumphant cry spilling from his lips. Tom reached out and gripped Harry’s hand and held it.

Harry blinked and gasped and filled the silence with his panting for a moment. Then he smiled sleepily at Tom and said, “That was awesome.”

And then he rolled his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes and was gone into sleep.

Tom stared at him, one hand still stroking down the side of Harry’s neck and over his collarbone. Harry didn’t seem to notice. His skin didn’t even twitch. He simply breathed, there, pliant beneath Tom’s hands, not in a hurry to get away, not regretting it the way some of Tom’s other partners had.

He was there.

Tom made sure to cast the necessary Cleaning Charms and a few others that he thought would cushion Harry’s muscles and make him more comfortable. And he made sure to drape himself behind Harry with his arms linked around his waist, to reassure himself if he woke up and thought he was still alone.

But mostly, he lay there and listened to Harry’s breathing, felt his skin, the undeniable fact of his presence, his strength in the face of the world that had tried to destroy them both.

*

The house in front of Harry was neatly and trimly kept. He could feel the soft hum of wards over his skin, the kind that most people wouldn’t notice. They were mostly meant to discourage people who might knock on the door for no reason or linger nearby shouting at each other and making noise, but there were anti-fire and anti-theft wards, too.

Harry took a deep breath. He should have come here years ago.

At least he came bearing good news now.

He stepped up to the door and knocked.

There was a long silence, probably because the person in the house was watching him in a reflection of the wards and couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Then the door swung open, and Hermione stared at him, as wide-eyed as the purebloods at the gala last night had been. “Harry?”

Harry swallowed. “Hi, Hermione.”

She took a step towards him, one hand stretched out, and then stopped, trembling, as if she thought he wasn’t real. She whispered, “You never came to visit.”

Harry closed his eyes. “I thought you wouldn’t want me to.”

“I never had those stupid prejudices about Giftless people, you stupid, blind, nonsensical, ridiculous—”

Harry took a step forwards and swept her up in a hug. Hermione shuddered and clung to him. Harry could feel a few tears soak the collar of his robe.

“It was so hard, without you,” Hermione whispered. “I still get owls from people who tell me I should have taken the Squibarren Potion instead of trying to live in the Muggle world with magic.”

Harry swallowed back his hot anger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be reminded of—of what you lost.” He stepped back and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m so sorry. But things are going to change now, and I wanted you to be one of the first to know.”

“Of course I’ll attend your wedding.”

Harry stared at her, and could feel how unhinged his jaw felt. “What?”

“I thought that must be what you meant. That you’ve found someone to marry you. You—don’t mean that your world is changing?”

“No. Our world.” Harry grasped Hermione’s hands. “The world you were unfairly driven out of.”

Hermione swallowed and cast her eyes down. “It’s sweet if you want me to come visit you, if you have a home, Harry, but I just don’t know that I’ll ever be comfortable in the magical world again. It felt like the cobblestones in Diagon Alley were going to attack me the last time I went.”

“I know, I know,” Harry whispered, swinging her hands back and forth. “And I don’t mean that. I have a Gift now, and it’s one that can be used to create spaces welcoming to Muggleborns and magical creatures. Even Muggles. You could live there with your parents if you wanted. Or they could come visit you,” Harry added, because Hermione hadn’t chosen to live with her parents when she had moved back to the Muggle world.

Hermione stared at him, her hope obviously choking her, the expression on her face painful.

“Come with me,” Harry said. “I think Tom will want to meet you.”

*

It only took five minutes of speaking with Hermione Granger for Tom’s seething hatred for arrogant purebloods to return full-force. Here was a young woman who would have made a huge difference in the Ministry, if she’d been allowed to exercise her brain. Who could have returned to be a professor at Hogwarts, who could have done research in libraries, who could have fought for the same goals Tom was fighting for, and helped him achieve them years earlier.

How many other Muggleborns have been driven out, like she was? Simply because the ones who wove those protective spells could not control their blood prejudice?

A second later, Tom had to acknowledge that he wasn’t being fair. It wasn’t that the protective spells had been woven by people who were blinded by their prejudice. Rather, they had known exactly what they were doing and woven the spells to slowly and insidiously increase their effect over time.

Tom would have to make sure that he had a stranglehold on his own prejudices when he and Harry started to create their sanctuaries. He would want purebloods able to come and go as they pleased, except the ones who intended harm to the sanctuaries’ inhabitants.

“This is incredible, Minister Riddle.”

“Please call me Tom.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Granger blurted, and then blushed hard enough that it tinted her brown skin rosy. “I just—I could never do it with any of the Hogwarts professors who invited me to, either.”

Tom noted that. It was rare for Hogwarts professors to ask that of a student even after they had finished their seventh year, and especially for a Muggleborn student like Granger. “Very well, you may call me the Minister if that works.”

Granger nodded, and then leaned back and stared at the parchment Tom had put up on the wall in the sitting room of the house where he and Harry had done the ritual. “It will be incredible,” she whispered. “If it can be done.”

“There is that, of course.” Tom leaned forwards. Harry hadn’t stopped sitting in a chair at Granger’s side, looking at her affectionately. Tom might have been jealous if he hadn’t been secure in what he and Harry were to each other. “Would you like to be present at the first demonstration we plan of our Gift, Miss Granger?”

“I could?”

“Of course,” Harry broke in, all bright impatience, running and stamping life. Tom hadn’t stopped admiring him yet. “We want you there. There are also going to be goblin and centaur and Squib representatives.”

Tom nodded. “We wanted a few others, but you are the Muggleborn person closest to either one of us, and I don’t yet know how well we’ll affect water. So we couldn’t have the merfolk represented.”

Granger clasped her hands together and lowered her head. Tom wondered for a moment if she would refuse. The long cowing they endured affected some Muggleborns and Squibs that way, made them doubt they could participate in the magical world even when they were specifically invited.

But then Granger looked up, and Tom saw it was due to the shine of tears in her eyes. “I’ve never even dreamed of something like this,” she whispered. “But if I had, I would have wanted to be there.”

Tom smiled at her. “Excellent.”

He glanced at Harry, who smiled back at him, and hissed softly, “It’s going to be wonderful.”

Yes, Tom rather thought it would be.

*

Just in case anyone attempted to spy on them after Harry’s dramatic reveal of his Parseltongue at the Ministry, they had chosen a site to alter that was some way into the Forbidden Forest. The spells that made the ground hostile to everyone except Gifted purebloods were nonexistent here.

Harry leaned into Tom’s side, smiling at the goblin and centaur representatives. The goblin was an extremely silent woman called Silverright, who had only spoken to introduce herself. The centaur was a tossing-maned braggart called Bane. Harry had to ignore the litany of insults he spoke.

Although, honestly, he did agree that a lot of humans were rubbish.

Off to the side stood Hermione, and the Squib representative Tom had chosen: the Hogwarts caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry had been dubious about that, but Tom had said in this case, the man’s bitterness would work for them. He was well-known for that bitterness to a generation of schoolchildren, so they would take any hope he felt seriously.

Harry exhaled slowly and stared at a small, low circle of stones, like the one that Tom had built on the ground where the Gaunt shack had stood. Tom’s hand found its way into Harry’s hair, and he squeezed, hard.

“You’re ready?”

“Ready,” Harry murmured, and then leaned a little closer to Tom as he raised his left hand.

The gesture wasn’t precisely necessary, since the Parseltongue would channel their magic when they created the earth, but it made a silence fall over their audience. Tom turned towards them, meeting each person’s eyes in turn. Harry had seen him achieve a variation of the same thing with large crowds.

Tom was good at politics. By which Harry meant a ruthless bastard.

“Thank you for coming,” Tom said, voice so soft and deep that Hermione and Filch leaned forwards to listen. Bane scowled, and Silverright touched her claws together and said nothing. “I hope that this will be the beginning of a new era for those of us who have felt uncomfortable in pureblood-controlled areas.”

“You’re a half-blood!” Bane said, with a stomp of his front hoof that tore a huge divot out of the grass. “No reason for you to feel uncomfortable.”

Tom turned a polite half-smile on the centaur, who crossed his arms and scowled as if he could imagine how much less polite Tom might get. “You forget. The spells woven carried prejudice against anyone the purebloods who created them found intolerable. And some of the people who wove them went to school with me. They found me a jumped-up half-Mudblood who didn’t know his name and had no right to Slytherin’s Gift.”

Harry squeezed Tom’s side with one hand. Tom squeezed him back, and looked at Bane until Bane scowled and stared at the ground.

“Now,” Tom said softly in Parseltongue, and everyone jolted except Silverright. “Harry, we must think about what we want.”

“But I thought we already knew. We discussed it yesterday.”

Tom smiled and took his hand. “Tell me again, in Parseltongue.”

Harry obediently closed his eyes. Among other things, that helped focus him because he didn’t have to look at the way everyone except Hermione was gaping at him.

“A sheltered meadow, with trees and a river running through it,” he whispered. “A castle the tenth the size of Hogwarts in the middle.”

He honestly didn’t know if their building the castle would work, and Tom didn’t, either. It wasn’t something he’d done in the past, he’d told Harry. But he wanted to start big, and if they failed to do it, they would still have the meadow and the river and the rest. No one had to know that they’d tried for a human building in the first place.

“Can you see it, my dear?”

Harry concentrated, and an image swam into his mind with such clarity that he was startled. He’d never been particularly good at picturing things like this.

Tom’s hand tightened on his, and Harry remembered what Tom had said about Parselmouths being able to exchange thoughts as they prepared for land creation.

“Yes,” he whispered, and stifled the strange urge to laugh. “I can see it.”

“Then let us begin.”

Harry opened his eyes and turned to look at the stone wall. Tom’s arm curved more steadily than ever around Harry’s waist. Harry swallowed and then began to breathe steadily. Tom’s breathing matched his in instants.

They spoke at the same time, in the rushing hiss that Harry had heard Tom use with that first stone circle—a few days and a lifetime ago.

“Create the earth!”

There was a huge surge of power inside Harry, and then it paired with what seemed to be a river of magic flowing from Tom. When the two torrents together crashed down on top of the stone circle, Harry thought for a moment they would destroy it.

But instead, they flowed over the top of the stone circle and into the space in the middle.

Harry panted, his mouth open. He could see the vision of what they wanted to create before his eyes, and he could feel the magic, and it was difficult to meld them. Tom’s hand holding his was the only solid anchor point he had.

And then—

Then the earth inside the circle stretched.

More than one person in their audience stumbled back. Harry couldn’t see who, couldn’t see if they were upset and about to interfere or run. He had to keep his eyes on the land inside the circle, which was turning greener and crawling as they watched. Slowly, the grass of the meadow sprouted, as the land expanded without changing the size of the stone circle.

Small crawling lumps sprouted in the grass and then rose higher and higher, before breaking into spindly shoots. The trees Harry and Tom had thought of, all of them regal oaks and pines.

Tom closed his eyes, straining. Harry leaned against him, remembering the way their bodies had moved together in bed, and trickled his magic through a channel of familiarity with Tom’s body.

The grass shuddered and swayed and turned blue. A river came into existence, pouring smoothly down the inside of the rock wall like a cascade and foaming across the ground. When it reached the stone wall on the other side, it disappeared.

“That’s impossible,” Harry heard someone whisper. He closed his eyes to outside sounds and concentrated again.

Tom’s hand closed on his until Harry felt as if his fingers would get crushed the way they so often did in a pureblood handshake.

Tom uttered a wordless hiss, and Harry leaned against him and shoved the magic through.

Then they seemed to break through a barrier, and the magic flowed. Harry opened his eyes in time to see stones come flying out of the grass inside the circle as if they were propelled by a force from underground, and pile into a castle. It had a few unfinished towers and a stubby wall, but it still soared higher than any of the people in the clearing. Harry knew it would have rooms inside, corridors, maybe a Great Hall.

Anyone who wanted to could step over the wall and walk into their miniature world.

Tom groaned and cut off the flow of his magic, so Harry did the same. They stood in silence, staring at the ground inside the stone wall where trees not of the Forbidden Forest grew and a river went from nowhere to nowhere.

“Impossible,” Silverright said, the only word she had spoken since her name, and her claws clicked together.

“Not at all,” Tom said. He had donned his composure like a cloak. Harry smiled. At least, even if each expenditure of magic took time and energy, he knew that they would be able to stand back up again and recover quickly. “I will invite you to step over the wall and walk through this world that did not exist a few minutes ago.”

Their audience exchanged uncertain glances. Harry smiled at Hermione, and she smiled at him in return and came forwards to hold out her hand to him.

“Help me over the wall, will you?”

The wall wasn’t nearly tall enough to require it, but Harry could appreciate why she was asking him. He made sure that she didn’t trip over the stone, and Hermione gave a little gasp as she stood in the meadow, staring around.

Harry tilted his head. It seemed that the meadow and the stream and the trees and the rest shouldn’t have fit within the stone wall, but he also couldn’t see any blurry corners or the like that made them look like an illusion.

Hermione swallowed and then began to cry softly. Harry turned his head away. He knew she hated anyone seeing her cry.

Luckily, at least for Hermione, she got it under control quickly, and she laughed a little as she said, “The entrance to the castle looks exactly like the entrance hall at Hogwarts.”

“I cannot pretend that we were uninfluenced,” Tom said.

“Yeah, Hogwarts is pretty much my perfect ideal of a castle,” Harry said, shrugging when Bane and Silverright and Filch turned to stare at him.

Filch was the next one to cross over the stone wall. He stood in the meadow, staring down into the stream. Harry couldn’t read the expression on his face, but it was private enough that he turned away like he had for Hermione.

Silverright crossed next, but she knelt down next to the stream and dug her claws into the dirt, grunting a little as she held up her hand and let the soil crumble down. “This seems to be prime earth for digging,” she said. “But perhaps a little soft.”

“We can create more stony and rocky areas if that is what you desire.”

“And what do you want in return for this, wizard?”

Harry blinked at Silverright’s tone, but then again, the goblins had been confined to the same building in Diagon Alley for at least two human generations. He couldn’t blame her for her hostility.

“Your political support in the confrontation we are going to have with purebloods sooner or later.”

“No financial considerations?”

Tom smiled and held up his hand, which had crept over to intertwine with Harry’s, as per usual. “We can create space and buildings without any cost to ourselves except a bit of magical energy. What financial considerations do you imagine we need?”

Silverright studied him for a moment, then snorted and went back to examining the dirt.

Tom turned to face Bane, who was tossing his head, his mane flying. “Do you wish to enter?”

“The area would not hold me.”

“It is even bigger than it looks.”

Bane gave Tom a long look, as if he thought Tom was joking with him. Harry leaned against Tom’s side again and wished he could hiss a question without Bane noticing. But talking in Parseltongue in front of the centaur would probably just worsen his opinion of humans.

“I mean,” Bane said at last, his voice slow and considering and heavy, “that a centaur’s magic would conflict too badly with the wizard magic that established this place.”

“Take a step inside,” Harry said, before Tom could say anything. “I felt uncomfortable in Hogwarts by the end of my seventh year, and going into Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade has been impossible for me for a little while. But these places that we create feel good to me.”

“You are still human.”

“Yeah. And we need to know whether you are uncomfortable in sanctuaries like this, so that we can involve centaurs in the building of the next one if we have to.”

Bane stared at Harry long enough that Harry was afraid he’d unwittingly insulted him. Then Bane muttered, “Oh, very well,” and stomped forwards to cross the stone wall.

Harry watched carefully. Bane came to a stop on the meadow grass, not far from the castle entrance, and stood quivering. Then he reached down and ran his fingers through the grass much the way that Silverright was running her claws through the dirt.

“Do you think he is uncomfortable?” Harry hissed to Tom.

Tom hushed him without words, eyes on the centaur, so Harry looked back at Bane. He was in time to see Bane close his eyes and an expression of profound sorrow cross his face.

Sorrow, though. Not pain.

“Bane?” Harry asked quietly, although Tom was squeezing his hand in a way that indicated he should probably stay silent.

Bane turned to face them, kicking at the grass inside the stone wall hard enough to send clods of dirt flying. “This is comfortable,” he said, and his voice was low and harsh. “How much time and how many years have we lost to humans who claimed that we could never live on their lands because it must be hurtful to us?”

Harry smiled. He knew Tom was giving the same kind of ruthless smile next to him, but he was the one who answered Bane. “Too many. But we will build sanctuaries and defend them that you can live in.”

“How will you defend them? Wards?”

“Harry and I can weave spells that will keep out those who intend harm to the humans and other people inside our sanctuaries,” Tom said, folding his hands behind his back. “They will be based on the spells that the purebloods wove after Grindelwald’s war, but these will reflect our priorities. I have access to all the original research and development of the spells in my files at the Ministry.”

Bane was quiet for a few minutes more. He walked over and bent his knees to get a drink from the stream, then looked from Silverright still examining the dirt to the castle and then up to the tree looming above him.

He said at last, “This is the kind of magic that centaurs might well die to defend.”

Tom inclined his head. His entire posture sang with triumph, but he said only, “You will not need to. We will defend it.”

Harry leaned his head on Tom’s shoulder and thought of all the people he would be able to take care of as well as the ones he would get to anger, and smiled.

Chapter Text

“Sir! I heard the wildest rumor.”

Tom smiled a little as he watched the Junior Undersecretary jogging towards him. Percy Weasley was a smart, capable man, who had unfortunately embraced the idea that there was nothing anyone could do to change the laws or structure of the Ministry, and therefore the best thing to do was roll over in front of them.

He’d said that to Tom even when they were discussing a law that Tom had changed. Truly, Tom didn’t understand him.

“Oh? What is that, Mr. Weasley?” Tom paused to adjust his robes. He had Apparated to the front steps of Gringotts, his Auror bodyguards appearing a minute later. Of course, he’d immediately drawn attention, even from those people who didn’t know what he intended.

He was only waiting for Harry to arrive before he began.

“That you were going to give the goblins more space! Isn’t that impossible, sir? They can’t come out into Diagon Alley, and they can’t expand the building.”

“Why can’t they expand the building?”

Weasley blinked and shoved the glasses he had lately taken to wearing up his nose. Tom didn’t know why he wore them, except perhaps to appear even more intelligent than he was. He didn’t need them. “Er, it’s in the Treaty of 1849, sir. The one after the Ninth Goblin Rebellion?”

“Have you read the Treaty of 1849, Mr. Weasley?”

“Well—not the original, no. But I saw it quoted in the Prophet.”

“I think if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that there are no quotation marks around those quotes.”

Weasley opened his mouth, then closed it. He said, “But they wouldn’t lie.”

Tom laughed in spite of himself. “Don’t you remember the article they published last year, that said I was the son of Morfin and Merope Gaunt, the product of incest? They didn’t have any proof of that, and they backed off after someone brought them proof of my Muggle heritage. But they said it.”

“That’s wrong.”

“Of course it is. But it doesn’t stop them saying it.”

Weasley looked as though someone had hit him on the head. Tom might have continued talking to him, but a flare of power reached him from the bottom of the stairs, along with the crack of Apparition. Tom turned towards it, his heart pounding so that his body shook.

Harry was walking towards him, clad in a pair of dove-grey dress robes Tom had altered to fit him. Sooner or later, Harry would buy his own, but Tom had a number of robes he hadn’t worn in years whose colors suited Harry perfectly. Harry didn’t have to buy his own yet.

And if it settled something possessive inside Tom to see Harry wearing his clothes, that was his own business.

Harry came to a stop next to Tom, smiled at him, and then gave Weasley a curious look. “Hullo, Percy. How’s Ron?”

“He, ah. He’s well.”

Weasley looked stunned to see Harry at Tom’s side, even though the Prophet itself had reported on Harry’s Parseltongue. Tom shrugged. He might hope that Weasley would have a clearer vision in the future, but it wasn’t something he was going to dedicate himself to.

“We are both here,” Tom said, using the slightly raised voice he had perfected that silenced all conversation in the area.

People turned to stare at them. Besides his Auror bodyguards and a few Department Heads from the Ministry who had wanted to come along, there were some who had gathered from the crowds flowing through Diagon Alley.

“What exactly are you going to do?” Amelia asked, looking tired and careworn.

“Expand Gringotts.”

“The building can’t expand. It would smash into others, or at least into their wards.”

“I don’t believe that we said we would expand the building.” Tom smiled at the odd glances thrown his way. “Although that is not explicitly forbidden by treaty the way that so many wizards and witches think, more by the practicality of space in Diagon and the spells that make goblins uncomfortable here.”

There was a bit of shifting in the crowd. Then someone said, “Well, they have an exemption to live in Gringotts.”

“Yes. And now they want more space.”

“How are you going to give it to them?”

It was the question Tom had been waiting for. He tilted his head to the person who had spoken, Augusta Longbottom. She looked skeptical of everything, but she had done that since a magical accident had taken her son from her tragically young. “Please come in and witness it for yourself.”

That invitation was enough for all of them, and everyone followed them in. Tom shot one glance at Harry to make sure he was all right, but Harry was striding along, the most bright-eyed and eager of them all.

Tom smiled, and looked ahead. Silverright was standing in the middle of the great lobby of Gringotts, waiting for them.

“We have come as requested, Madam Goblin.” Tom bowed to Silverright. She had told them to address her that way, as people who were not allies of the goblins did not deserve to hear her name.

Silverright nodded. “Come with me, Minister Riddle.”

She turned away and led them out of the lobby into one of the side tunnels Tom had never been into before. He could hear a murmur of confusion moving behind him. Probably most of the wizards and witches here thought the vaults beneath Gringotts were expansive enough already.

Tom smiled, and kept walking.

The tunnel soon became rough, barely worked stone, sloping further and further down. The floor remained marble, however. Tom stopped when Silverright held up a claw and gestured for him to do so.

They were in a large cavern, Tom knew that, but he didn’t know how large until Silverright barked an incantation and the torches on the walls came up.

Tom almost swallowed his tongue. The roof of the cavern hung perhaps twenty-five meters above them, and it and the walls and floor were all smooth black stone without a single hint of a join or a seam. There were doors in the walls that were either closed or quickly closed, as Silverright turned around and did it for the door behind them. A worried murmur erupted from the crowd behind them.

“Silverright, please do let out any of those who don’t want to bear witness to our glorious transformation,” Tom said, without turning to look.

The murmur calmed down.

Tom held out a hand and grasped Harry’s. He was looking around the cavern, to make sure that he had a good sense of its dimensions.

Then he faced Harry, who was looking at him with a faint smile and absolute confidence. Tom closed his fingers down in a hard hold. “Do you think we can manage a space this size, my darling?” he asked.

“Yes. We can.”

Again came the startling and the surprise and the disbelief that Harry could speak Parseltongue. But then again, this was a group of witches and wizards accustomed to believing daily lies. Tom ignored them, drawing Harry against his side and turning so that they faced the cavern.

It was the first time they would be creating space that they stood inside, and their first time working with a space this large. It didn’t matter. Not when Tom could feel the heartbeat in his throat, the power rising in him.

He and Harry were unstoppable, together.

“Create the earth!”

All around them, the cavern shook. Tom tilted his head back as magic seemed to flow and drip from his hair, sliding across the floor like water, rearing in invisible waves. Silverright’s eyes widened, but she didn’t move away.

The humans in the crowd didn’t seem to feel anything.

That was all Tom had time to see before he had to turn his attention fully to the magic.

It sloshed back and forth for a moment in the cavern, not seeming to understand the confines of the place or how it was different from the small areas in stone circles that Tom had claimed before. But he spoke the words again, and heard Harry echo him, and then—

Harry’s magic roared in answer.

This time, the collision of their power was visible in a flash of golden and silver light, and flames as dark as the walls around them. Tom looked down and watched calmly as more black stone began to stretch underneath their feet. Within a few moments, the walls of the cavern were notably further away.

Fearful cries emerged from the human audience. Tom ignored them, again. He was diving within Harry’s magic, curling along the tops of the waves, leaping from watery point to watery point, and the magic cried out in response.

More than it had ever cried out before. Tom lifted his hand, still joined with Harry’s, and the power rolled out and become visible again, this time as the silvery waves Tom had thought of, lit from within by a flickering fire. Mystical water leaped up and ran down the walls of the cavern.

Which breathed, and grew higher and further away.

Tom kept his eyes locked on Harry’s face, which was transcendent with joy. He dipped his head and took Harry’s lips in a kiss, and Harry tilted his head further back, as the warmth blazing between their mouths spread out and encompassed the cavern and the pouring magic.

Tom lost himself in the kiss, in the way that the cavern was expanding, in the way that Harry trembled beneath his touch. And then he lifted his head with a soft exhalation as he realized that Silverright was shouting to them.

“That is enough! That is all that is required!”

Tom turned around, still holding Harry close beside him, and stared. The cavern’s walls were now out of sight, and the smooth black floor beneath them stretched into the distance, beyond sight. Part of the problem, of course, was that they hadn’t multiplied the torches, so it was hard to see in any case.

But they had certainly succeeded. The cavern was so big that Tom suspected it rivaled the bank above for size.

The humans who had come to watch looked very small, standing in the middle of all that vastness. Tom gave them only a glance before he turned to Silverright. “I trust we have passed the test you set us?” he asked politely.

Silverright looked at him for so long that Tom thought her fear might win out. And then she gave the loud cackle that was laughter to a goblin, but which so few of them would use in front of humans.

“You have indeed,” she said. “Consider our agreement made.”

Tom bowed to her, which made Weasley, among others, stutter what sounded like the beginning of a protest. Tom wasn’t interested in listening to them. He began to guide Harry back to the entrance, which would take some walking.

It was just as well if none of their audience saw how much Harry needed the support, after he had come close to magically exhausting himself.

“Minister.”

Amelia was standing in the way, everything about her stiff, from her limbs to her face. Tom nodded to her. “Yes, Director Bones?”

“You—that is impossible.”

“And yet, you saw me do it.”

Amelia’s gaze darted back and forth between him and Harry, as if to bring to his attention that Harry had been part of it. Tom smiled at her mockingly.

Amelia swallowed, and then said, “Sir, I hope you will consider Auror protection for Mr.—Evans as well as yourself.”

Tom paused. If Amelia thought there might be attacks, there probably would be. He nodded. “Look for Aurors who are half-bloods or Muggleborns and won’t speak the word Giftless in a taunting tone.”

“No one will do that now.”

Tom looked at her.

Amelia flinched. “Yes, all right. Although we have very few half-blood or Muggleborn Aurors, as it stands.”

“Get as many as you can.”

Tom turned to Harry, wondering if he would object to the idea that he had to be protected. But Harry gave him a sweet, sleepy smile and shook his head. “Whatever you think is best, Tom.”

Tom wouldn’t want Harry this docile all the time, but it was appealing at times, in its own way. He swept Harry out of the bank, and their trailing crowd split back off in the Alley, talking in low voices.

Harry made a soft noise of discomfort. Tom glanced at him and realized that the Diagon Alley wards were getting to him. They probably didn’t hurt as much as they’d used to, now that Harry had a Gift some of the pureblood creators would have approved of, but Tom saw no reason to keep them here with their purpose fulfilled.

He Apparated, Harry held close in his arms.

*

Harry opened his eyes and grinned at the ceiling. He actually felt the joy curling through him even before the memory of how they had altered the goblin cavern came back and he rolled over and laughed aloud.

“Something funny, my own?”

Harry looked up and smiled at Tom, who was sitting on the edge of the bed. He had been studying a book that looked more like a bound scroll than anything else, but he set it aside and leaned towards Harry.

“I’m free.”

“A somewhat ambiguous statement when not made in Parseltongue.”

Harry rolled towards him and raised his arms. Tom bent into them at the silent demand and kissed Harry. Harry kissed back, with lots of tongue, still reveling in the notion that he had found so much.

A Gift. A place in the magical world. A lover who was attentive and gentle and would also fuck him hard.

And is really bloody hot.

Tom straightened back up and raised his eyebrows. Harry laughed again, more for the fact that he was of course waiting for Harry to explain what he meant, and lounged against the pillows. “I mean free of all the cages they tried to put me in.”

Tom’s eyes lit, and he nodded slowly. “I felt much the same way when I became Minister.”

“Even though you hadn’t found another Parselmouth yet?”

“Even though. At least I was free to search and to urge the Unspeakables to develop the kind of magic that would allow me to find a potential partner more quickly.” Tom leaned forwards, attention fastened on Harry. “Though I could not have imagined finding someone like you.”

“It’s the hotness, isn’t it. The eyes? Everyone says the eyes.”

“I find that I am rather fond of your arse.”

Harry laughed aloud again, because he could and because it was a day for it, and pulled Tom down on top of him. They should share the pleasure and the joy of the day with their bodies as well as their minds, he thought.

It was his last coherent thought for some time.

*

“Minister Riddle.”

It was the first time Tom had ever seen a centaur use the Floo. He asked no questions, however, because the centaur in the fire was Bane, and he was grim as Tom hadn’t seen him since the beginning of their creation in the Forest.

“Yes, Bane?” Tom turned in his chair and made sure to focus his full attention on Bane, so that he wouldn’t feel he was being ignored.

Bane closed his eyes and opened them again. “Someone destroyed the sanctuary that you made in the Forest.”

Tom felt a wave of cold move across his soul, and Bane drew back in the fire—from him, not from the aftermath of the destruction. Tom did his best to smile a little and nod. “I did expect a strike from our enemies, though not quite so soon.”

“Then you will come and heal it?”

“Heal it, protect it, make it bigger. Thank you for telling us about it.”

Bane paused, waiting for, probably, an insult. Then he nodded and murmured, “You are welcome,” and the fire shut.

Tom rose, feeling as if dark wings stretched around him. He would fetch Harry, and they would go and strengthen and heal the sanctuary.

Their enemies had struck them a blow. But they would strike back, harder.

Perhaps the purebloods think all magic that we wield is the gentle magic of creation. But they should remember that the forces of creation include fires, winds, enormous waves…

Tom smiled.

And earthquakes.

*

Harry swallowed tears that he thought Tom probably wouldn’t want him to shed as he stared at the ruined sanctuary they had created in the Forbidden Forest. He leaned against Tom and closed his eyes.

Tom stroked his hair and took over the business of talking to Bane and Magorian, another centaur who had come with him. “Were you able to track the ones who did this?”

“No. They obviously Apparated in and then back out. The footprints we found on the ground were of dragonhide boots such as many wizards might wear.”

“Hm.”

Harry couldn’t read that sound. He hoped that it meant Tom didn’t feel as hopeless and battered as he did. He looked up and walked around to the side of the stone wall that was now scattered rubble, where the invaders had apparently crossed.

The meadow’s grass was blackened and burned, the stream’s water rusty-colored and foul-smelling. The castle they’d made in imitation of Hogwarts had been so completely destroyed that Harry never would have thought a building had stood here if he hadn’t known. He felt desolation sweep through his soul like a winter wind.

“Harry.”

Harry turned reluctantly to face Tom. He thought Tom would probably say that he shouldn’t cry, and he was actually ready to argue and fight about that. If he couldn’t mourn the first sanctuary they’d created as a symbol of hope, what could he mourn?

But Tom was only watching him with glittering eyes. He extended one hand. “Come,” he said quietly. “We will build it better than before, more to the centaurs’ specifications.”

Harry hesitated, then crossed over to Tom. “It’s gone, though.”

“They cannot take the memory of that joy,” Tom said softly, running a hand down his face. “Do not give them that much power, Harry. Rise from the ashes, and build a sanctuary that’s better than the one before.”

Harry leaned forwards and kissed Tom, hard, ignoring the way that Bane and Magorian stamped and shuffled and looked uncomfortable. They could put up with it.

When Harry was finished, Tom looped an arm around his waist in the position that had become so familiar Harry just cherished the warm weight of it now, and faced the centaurs. “Tell us what you would like to see.”

*

Tom waited until he was sure Harry was asleep, and then set up wards around the bed that would protect Harry against anyone with any Gift Tom knew of. Tom had put his Legilimency to good use when he first became Minister, reading the truth of how to defeat the Gifts of every pureblood family out of their minds. And most of them would rely on their Gifts instead of ordinary magic for an attack on Tom’s—

Lover. Partner. Soulmate. Heart.

My darling.

Tom brushed his fingers down Harry’s cheek, as he was the only one who could reach through the wards, and then stood. He didn’t know how to track down the bootprints from the spoiled sanctuary, either, but he didn’t need to.

He had recognized the Lestrange Gift in the despoiling of the water. They could blight things, make them smell and rot.

Tom whirled and strode out of his house. He might have taken Harry with him, but he’d hesitated when he thought of what he must do. Harry might have moral objections to mental torture in a way that he didn’t to simply confronting purebloods with their prejudices.

Tom reached the edge of his wards and Apparated. He did wonder, as he landed, if the Lestrange wards would be closed against him, but everything was open and waiting.

Fools.

Tom half-closed his eyes and let his magic break its chains. A flood of power rather like the one he and Harry had used to enlarge the cavern poured out of him and splayed across the night sky. It reared above the Lestrange home and swayed back and forth, a great cobra.

Everyone in the Lestrange house at the moment would feel the pressure of Tom’s magic on their minds. They would know he was coming.

And that he was displeased.

Tom hadn’t walked most of the distance to the front door before it opened. Rodolphus bolted out and fell at Tom’s feet. Tom didn’t doubt he might have done that anyway, but he also thought that someone had probably shoved him.

“Please,” Rodolphus babbled. “We didn’t mean to make you this angry.”

“You thought I would not be?”

Tom’s voice emerged in a hiss that wasn’t Parseltongue, and which made Rodolphus bow his head until his face touched the earth. “No—yes—no—”

“I am losing patience, Rodolphus.”

“You don’t need to use Parseltongue to gain power, sir! We’re here, ready and willing to serve you! You don’t have to just keep being Minister! We would follow you anywhere! Your blood doesn’t matter when you have one of the Great Gifts! Please, sir, stop playacting for the masses and just take over the Ministry and magical Britain for good!”

Tom’s mind blanked for a moment as he stared at Rodolphus. He’d thought they’d destroyed the sanctuary out of hatred for Harry, petty jealousy, or fear of what the sanctuaries could become in the future and mean for Muggleborns and Muggles and magical creatures.

That they thought he should be their figurehead had never occurred to him.

It should have. Power in its bluntest form is all they understand, all they want to follow.

“Tell me, Rodolphus,” Tom said softly, and watched as the man relaxed. A mistake, but then, he was a fool from a family of fools. “Why do you think I kept the name Riddle instead of choosing the name Gaunt or Slytherin, both of which I had a right to?”

“You didn’t want to frighten people, sir,” Rodolphus said promptly. “They might think that you had an anti-Muggleborn agenda with either name, or that you were proud of a family like the Gaunts that was—unfortunate.” The distaste in his voice made Tom want to laugh aloud, but he managed to contain it. “But you can claim either name now, and we would follow you to the ends of the earth. Such power as you have! You can ditch that filthy half-blood and end whatever magic is letting you lend your Parseltongue to him. You don’t need him. You have us!”

Rage gripped and crushed Tom’s mind. He opened his mouth.

“What are you going to do to him for that insult, Tom?”

Tom spun around. Harry stood behind him, head cocked. He walked up and stood next to Tom, nudging Rodolphus with a boot. Rodolphus seemed to think it was Tom’s boot and huddled close for a moment, then looked up and scrambled back with a disgusted yell.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I felt my tracking charm go off and followed you.”

“You cannot have a tracking charm on me,” Tom said, momentarily distracted. “I would have felt anything on my skin, and I changed my clothes before I left.”

“I put it on your eyebrows.”

Tom stared at Harry, and felt as if his heart would beat its way out of his chest. He reached out and grabbed Harry’s arm, yanking him close, Harry came, hissing wordlessly in satisfaction as their chests touched.

“The other reason I left you behind is that I thought you would disapprove of what I would do to the Lestranges.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Mental torture.”

Harry laughed aloud, ignoring the way that Rodolphus flinched and whimpered. “Tom, there’s nothing you could do that would disgust me.”

Tom ignored Rodolphus, too, to lean over and kiss Harry with one hand behind his head so he couldn’t move away and spoil the kiss. By the end of it, Harry was flushed and smiling, and Tom was hissing soft words in Parseltongue about Harry’s magnificence. Harry cleared his throat and nodded to their audience.

“Do you think I care?”

“No, perhaps not.”

Tom smiled and faced Rodolphus. The man was staring up at him, frozen like a rabbit in front of a snake. Tom reached out with his Legilimency instead of with the rest of his magic, which still swayed above them like a cobra.

He dived deep into Rodolphus’s mind. The man knew some rudimentary Occlumency, but it wasn’t enough to keep Tom out, not like this. He pounced and raided and clawed, and Rodolphus screamed.

Tom gathered up all his own memories of people laughing and sneering at him in Hogwarts before he had revealed that he had the Slytherin Gift. He thought of the way that Harry had radiated despair when Tom had approached him at that first Ministry gala. He thought of the tears slipping down Miss Granger’s cheeks, the sorrow on Bane’s face, the way that Silverright had had to guard her name from the humans who had come to Gringotts.

He forced all of them into Rodolphus’s mind and bound them around the Lestrange Gift that he carried. Down, down, he forced them, and when he pulled away, Rodolphus flung back his head and wailed in agony.

“What did you do?” Harry hissed, close to Tom’s ear, close to his side, where he would be all the days of their lives if Tom had anything to say about it.

“Made him feel that he’s dirty,” Tom said. He watched as Rodolphus writhed on the ground, and satisfaction sang in him like a heartbeat. It had been so long since he’d indulged his taste for pain. “Every time he uses his Gift, he’ll feel it. Every time that he thinks about Muggleborns or magical creatures, he’ll feel the same things about himself that he used to feel about them. The self-loathing will grow and take root in him until it cripples every happy impulse he has and turns every joy into filth.”

Harry caught his breath. Tom glanced at him, wondering if this would be too much for his partner after all.

But Harry turned and looked up at Tom, and there was no mistaking the hardness beneath his robes.

Tom drew him in for another kiss, smiling as Rodolphus made a noise of despair, and Apparated them away.

It was not the most complete punishment he could have bestowed, perhaps, but it was the most long-lasting. Rodolphus would pay over and over again in years of agony for every moment of it that he had caused Harry.

Tom thought it a fair exchange.

Chapter Text

“Harry! Mate!”

Harry turned around with a smile. He hadn’t talked to Ron in several months; he’d started distancing himself from all his friends because he’d thought he was going to become a Squib and go into the Muggle world. But it was nice to see him now. “Hi, Ron.”

Ron came to a stop next to Harry and goggled at him. “I’m surprised that you’re in Hogsmeade,” he said after a minute.

“Why?”

“I thought the wards were…”

Harry could have said something about how the wards weren’t the problem, the spells that prejudiced purebloods had woven were, but he didn’t see the point. He shrugged. “It’s still uncomfortable, but not as much as Diagon Alley. Tom reckons that the purebloods who put up the spells here didn’t hate Giftless half-bloods as much.”

Ron hesitated. Finally he said, “You know it sounds a little mental to talk about the people who put up the spells hating anyone, right? They just wanted to protect us.”

Harry hid a sigh. Ron wasn’t a bad person, but he was someone who had grown up in a pureblood family, with the Weasley Gift—spell-creation—almost from birth, and had never had to worry about what name he would bear or how he would support himself.

“It might sound mental, but it’s the truth. You know that Hermione felt it so much she had to go back to the Muggle world?”

“Right, but she’s a Muggleborn, so she was never going to have a Gift.”

“My mother does.”

“Sort of? I just—the spells are there to protect us, Harry.”

Harry patted Ron’s shoulder. “Sure. And now Tom and I are creating places where different people can live, protected by different spells.”

A rustle of robes behind him made him turn around. Tom was coming out of a Hogsmeade shop that sold instruments but was apparently run by someone old enough to have seen the creation of the blood-prejudice spells in the village. He raised his eyebrows when he saw Ron and nodded to him.

“Ron Weasley, sir,” Ron said, looking a little awed.

“Ah, yes, Percy Weasley’s younger brother?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your brother is doing good work in the Ministry,” Tom said, and turned away from Ron with a slight but definite motion of his shoulders, focusing on Harry. “Darling, I was thinking that we might want to weave our blood into the wards for the sanctuary we’re going to set up on the edge of the village.”

Harry nodded. They’d discussed that plan before, but they hadn’t been sure that the prejudiced protective spells hadn’t been woven with blood. If they had, then Tom and Harry’s new wards might have conflicted with the ones on the edge of Hogsmeade.

“Isn’t using blood a bad idea?” Ron asked.

“Why is that, Mr. Weasley?” Tom held out his arm, elbow crooked in an obvious way, and Harry rested his hand on it. Ron goggled at that, too.

“I mean—only Dark spells use that kind of blood, right?”

“No, protective ones can also use it,” Tom said absently. Harry hid a smile. It was obvious that Tom didn’t care much about Ron. “The ones Harry and I are going to use are of that kind.”

“But do we need other spaces? Anyone who has a Gift can be here in Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley.”

“And what about the people who don’t have Gifts?”

Ron just shrugged, uneasy, his eyes darting between Tom and Harry. “I just don’t think blood protections are a good idea.”

Harry nodded and ignored him. Ron had been his friend all his life, but they’d drifted apart in the last few years since Harry could hardly stand to spend time in most of the magical areas where Ron wanted to work or visit family members. And Ron didn’t have ill-will towards Muggleborns or goblins or centaurs or the like, but he also wouldn’t think that their being uncomfortable in Hogsmeade was a problem.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“To create more space.”

Ron sighed gustily. “I just don’t think we need it.”

“Perhaps you do not,” Tom intervened. “But everyone else does.”

Ron stopped and shook his head at Tom, apparently caught between arguing with him and being intimidated by his position as Minister. “But—sir—if only a few people need it, why go to this huge expense of magic and time?”

“It’s not really a huge expense of either,” Harry said cheerfully. “We can expand space pretty quickly, and we can do it inside a tiny barrier, so we don’t need to purchase the land. And we recover quickly, too.”

“Mate…”

Harry clapped Ron’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Ron. We’ll talk sometime next week, all right? Hermione will be coming back to the magical world to stay, now that we have these sanctuaries. I think we should also meet up at my mum and dad’s house or something. Maybe Tuesday?”

“Um. Maybe Tuesday.”

Ron stood and watched them go, his forehead furrowed. Tom laughed a little, quietly, once he and Harry were most of the way to the end of Hogsmeade’s main street. “And why do you think he feels the way he does?” Tom hissed.

“Oh, I’m sure that it’s because he doesn’t like change but he doesn’t really know why he should oppose this. So his arguments are weaker than they would be if he were really prejudiced against Muggleborns and magical creatures.”

“You are so perceptive, my darling.”

Harry turned around and tilted his head back, and Tom bent down to kiss him. Harry thought he could hear a muffled yelp from the end of the street, and smiled a little. Ron wouldn’t be upset about Harry being with a man, but Harry being suddenly Gifted and with Minister Riddle was probably a bit harder to take.

*

“I wondered if you had considered the licensing and property laws inside the sanctuaries, Minister Riddle?”

“I haven’t yet, Miss Granger, but I would be pleased if you would enlighten me.”

Granger carefully looked at Tom as she sat down in the chair opposite him in the Minister’s office. Tom kept a smile on his face, but he felt his temper sharpen and chill. That was the look of someone who had been disregarded and talked over by purebloods so many times that she found it strange someone wanted to listen to her.

“Ah. Right.” Granger cleared her throat and became brisk again as she spread out a sheaf of parchment on his desk. “I was simply wondering if you knew that a lot of the laws on the books say only purebloods can establish businesses or buy the kinds of buildings that are needed for shops and restaurants and so on?”

“Oh, yes. But I wondered if you had noticed this particular clause…” Tom sifted through the parchments for a moment, then tapped his finger on the sentence he’d been looking for. “Please read it.”

“Pursuant to the above,” Granger read obediently, “purebloods of established Gifts shall be the only ones who may purchase buildings or establish businesses in the following territories: Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade, Knockturn Alley, Hogwarts…”

She reached the end of the list, and then looked up at him and laughed a little. “It doesn’t say anything about other areas?”

“No.” Tom smiled at her. “Since there are so few magical villages in Britain and even fewer areas that are completely magical with no Muggles, they didn’t think they needed to issue a blanket statement instead of naming them.”

“I have an idea for the sanctuary we could establish near Hogsmeade.”

“Yes?”

“It was hard on my parents when I was both away from them for ten months of the year and learning things I couldn’t tell them about,” Granger said quietly. “Establishing a sanctuary where Hogwarts students could live with their parents would be incredibly important. They could keep the connection to their families alive.”

“I agree that that is important, but given how hostile Hogwarts has become to Muggleborn students and others, do you think it’s the best idea to try and keep students going to that particular school?”

“Oh. Yes. But—it would take so long to establish another school…”

“It would take some years, certainly. But Harry and I could get started on creating it now. And Muggleborn students are not being pushed out of the school by the hostile spells yet. We would have time to create our own classes, hire our own professors, talk up the school’s reputation.”

Granger closed her eyes. Tom sat still. He thought she was about to start crying the way she had over the sanctuary in the Forest, and without Harry here, he didn’t know how to deal with it.

“Yes,” Granger whispered at last. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve dreamed of this. How much I want to teach History of Magic in a way that benefits the students.”

Tom smiled. “We will do what we can to make a number of dreams come true, Miss Granger.”

*

“We’re here to protect you…sir.”

It was hilariously obvious that the Hit Wizards didn’t know how to address him. Harry waved a hand at the nearest one, Anastasia Rowle, a tall blonde half-blood with icy blue eyes. “Oh, you can just call me Your Highness. No need for fancy titles.”

Rowle’s face tightened and she turned around to bark an order at one of the Hit Wizards behind him. They hadn’t been able to find enough half-blood and Muggleborn Aurors to fill out the complement of five that Tom thought necessary to defend him, so they’d given him Hit Wizards instead. Harry shook his head as he began to walk towards Hogwarts.

Today, he was going to speak with the professors and ask what they knew about the protective spells becoming hostile to Muggleborns and others. Tom was pessimistic about Harry’s chances of actually persuading any of the current professors to come teach for the new school, but that wasn’t why Harry was here. He just wanted to know what their perception was and use their words as confirmation for the news that he and Tom would spread.

Someone Apparated into being on the path behind them. Harry turned and dropped into a defensive crouch. It couldn’t have been Tom unless he had removed the tracking charm Harry had put on his wand, and Harry didn’t think he’d figured that one out.

And more to the point, the Hit Wizards who had surrounded him were falling back out of the way of the attacker, unpleasant sneers on their faces. Rowle stood at Harry’s side, but with her arms folded and her face in a heavy frown.

“Not going to defend me?” Harry asked. The figure in front of him was cloaked in dark grey and had already drawn their wand.

“I’ll do it if they use an Unforgivable,” Rowle drawled. “You don’t deserve to die. But they probably only want to maim you or disfigure you so Riddle no longer finds you attractive. You don’t deserve the position you have.”

“So loyal.” The Rowle Gift was an unyielding will that allowed them to remain loyal or keep pushing forwards through extreme pain or hardship.

“To those who deserve it.”

Harry snorted and turned to face the figure walking towards him. “You’ll see.”

He set up a shield hovering behind him, so that if any of the Hit Wizards decided to help the attacker they would have to take it down and cause a noise, and then charged forwards.

The attacker paused, then launched a Blasting Curse at him. Harry rolled on the ground underneath it and launched one of the spells that Sirius had taught him as soon as Harry was old enough to manage a hex. “Dolor oculorum!”

The attacker shrieked as their eyes began to swell shut. They would counter it, of course, given enough time. The hex was painful and disabling in the short term, but it didn’t require a special countercurse.

Harry didn’t intend to give them that time.

He came up right next to the attacker and kicked them in the groin. They crumpled, which at least said they were probably a wizard under the clothing. As he bent, Harry kicked him in the face, harder than he’d kicked him in the groin.

There was a long groan, and the wizard sagged back. Harry cast the Wand-Splitting Curse without hesitation, and cracked the attacker’s oak wand down the middle. Someone cried out behind him.

Harry smiled. They probably found his tactics beyond the pale, brutal and barbaric and just like a filthy half-blood.

He turned around. Rowle and three of the other Hit Wizards were gaping at him. The fifth was backing away in a manner that made Harry think they’d probably helped with setting up the attack.

Harry used a broad Stunner and Stunned three of his “guards” including the one who was backing off, then the one he’d left out beside Rowle. Then he pointed his wand at her.

“I didn’t—I didn’t have anything to do with this,” she whispered. She was holding her hands up.

“But you were going to stand back and let me possibly be killed because of your stupid beliefs,” Harry said, and Stunned her.

He looked at the Hit Wizards lying on the path around him, and sighed. Then he turned and walked over to the man he’d defeated. Flipping back his hood revealed a face he didn’t know, but with the classic high cheekbones and aquiline nose of an inbred pureblood.

Harry sighed again and went to Hogwarts. He would have to ask if he could use Professor McGonagall’s Floo to reach Tom.

*

“I don’t know if we should be doing this when we’re still angry, Tom.”

“Yes, we should.”

Harry smiled at Tom, his eyes bright and gentle, and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“I know that you think I might have died, but I didn’t. That’s the whole point, that their plot failed.”

Tom didn’t bother answering. The fact that the Hit Wizards had either known about the plot to kill Harry and stood aside or just not bothered to interfere had sunken underneath the surface of his skin and still rankled now, hours after Harry had contacted him through Minerva McGonagall’s Floo to reassure Tom that he was safe.

So they stood near a small patch of land surrounded by a stone wall on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. Miss Granger was with them, her mouth pinched tight as she looked back and forth between Harry and the outer buildings of the village. A group of witches and wizards had begun to gather around them, looking variously curious, hostile, and disbelieving.

“I already sacked the Hit Wizards who were so stupid as to stand aside this afternoon. Peter Mulciber, who attacked you, is in a holding cell and will be lucky if he isn’t sentenced to Azkaban.”

“Right. So do we need to do anything else?”

Tom twisted around and slammed his lips into Harry’s. There were incoherent protests from some of their watchers, but Tom didn’t care. He drew Harry roughly against him as he had before when they’d established their sanctuaries, but this time, he made it obvious how possessive his grip was, how close he was pressing.

Harry gasped a little and then gave as good as he got. Tom kissed him until he was sure that Harry’s head was swimming and he would have forgotten most of the arguments he intended to make, then drew back slowly, licking his lips. Harry’s eyes were bright and glassy, his hair standing out as though Tom had run his hand through it repeatedly.

Tom glared over Harry’s head at the audience. Some of them found extraordinary interest in trees or clouds or houses off to the side.

“Someone tried to kill my intended this morning,” Tom said flatly. “I have had enough of your blood prejudice, your prejudice against magical creatures, your idiotic belief that your Gifts make you superior. This is the end of that.”

He whirled to face the stone circle and held up his hand. Harry’s magic rose to meet his, bright and joyous.

Tom reminded himself that this still existed. He could be angry, he could be enraged, but Harry was full of bloody joy more often than not. He would always have Harry to bring him back to normality.

Right now, however, he didn’t care about anything but what was in front of them.

“Create the earth!”

The earth inside the stone circle expanded more rapidly than it had ever done before. Harry’s magic leaped over the wall and began to raise stones out of the ground, joined a moment later by Tom’s power.

Tom held Harry’s hand tightly as he watched their motes of silver power whirl around each other, flame and light at the moment instead of the water they had looked like when expanding the cavern under Gringotts. He poured rage and hatred and love and sorrow into the stones, and Harry breathed back the emotions and expended some of his own.

Tom could see the images in his mind, how Harry’s skin had stung and he had flinched from invisible glares and punches when he walked Diagon Alley or even through the corridors of Hogwarts.

His own rage rose, and Harry’s joy and sorrow crashed into it, entwining together like long-necked serpents.

Tom hadn’t pictured anything specific, only what he felt he wanted, and Harry was reaching back towards him with the same desire. Their magic danced together, smoothing off the edges that would have separated them, and then—

Then.

Tom opened his eyes with a gasp and stared at the building rising in the stone circle. It was like Hogwarts in some ways, with the corridors and the grounds that contained a lake and the slender towers at the corners. But the lines were clean, slender stone, and it had pavilions the wind could blow through, and Tom could see the glass windows glinting in the walls. He took a step forwards and nearly sagged.

“You’re the one who needs me now,” Harry whispered as he caught Tom and kept him from falling. “It’s all right. We did it. We built the kind of school we wanted. We just need to make sure we can protect it.”

Tom nodded and bowed his head. He was still breathing hard, caught up in the storm of emotions that had torn through him. Harry’s hand on his back was a steadying anchor when he wanted simply to blow away.

“Minister Riddle.”

Tom ignored the voice behind him. He was so tired he didn’t even recognize it.

But then Miss Granger stepped around Harry and looked at him, and Tom forced himself to meet her eyes. Harry would be upset if Tom ignored one of his best friends. “Yes, Miss Granger?’ he asked.

She looked him straight in the eye. “It would be my honor to help you raise the wards to protect this Academy.”

Tom half-smiled. They hadn’t discussed a name for their school; he had assumed it would take some time to choose one. But that Academy would be part of the name made sense. “As you will, Miss Granger.”

She nodded to him, and then she turned and marched towards the entrance of the school. The air around her sparked when she stepped over the wall. Tom blinked.

“I was thinking that we needed some protections right away, just in case we collapsed from the overload of emotion and magic,” Harry murmured behind him. He was the one to link his arms together around Tom’s waist this time. “You know Hermione will be a good professor?”

“I am rather counting on it.”

Harry smiled into the nape of Tom’s neck. “Of course, it’ll be a long time before our school can be a real competitor to Hogwarts.”

“If the number of their students keeps going down because of how hostile those protective spells are, then they’ll lose enough that they can’t go on functioning. It’s not like they can make their number up with students from abroad.”

Harry smiled again, and they stood watching as Miss Granger appeared at one of the windows of the Academy and waved to them.

*

“I am disappointed in you.”

It was a simple sentence, the kind of thing that Harry would have thought most people wouldn’t care about. At least, not the kind of people determined to attack him and bring him down. They would already know that they were risking Tom’s wrath.

But Tom’s words cut into the assembled Hit Wizards in a way that made them blink and flinch and lower their heads. It probably helped that Amelia Bones stood beside Tom, her arms crossed and her bearing radiating the kind of cold contempt that Tom didn’t.

At the moment.

Tom lifted his head, and transformed between one breath and another from the mild-voiced man he had been so far into the man Harry had seen the night they confronted Lestrange. Harry had to shift so that his own inappropriate reaction was hidden behind the fall of his and Tom’s robes.

“I could perhaps respect enemies who planned cleverly enough to get away with it,” Tom said, his voice etching his rage on the air. “I would have hunted you down and you would have died in duels with me, but I could have respected you.”

They would have died anyway, no matter if they tried to refuse the duels.

“And I could have respected it if you had come to me and expressed the fears and disappointments that I assume led you to attack Harry Evans. I might not have agreed, but I would have listened.”

That made a few faces brighten. Harry snorted. They still thought there was some way they were getting out of this.

Some of the Hit Wizards glared at him. Harry just grinned back.

“But you did neither of those. You simply stood back when my lover was attacked and never thought about what would happen if he won.”

“Oh, come on, Tom,” Harry said, and leaned around Tom to smile at Rowle, who was one of the “Hit Wizards” in the expanded office even though she had technically been sacked already. She scowled back at him. “You know that they never thought I might win? They think of me as lesser.”

“You are,” someone muttered in the back row.

From the way Tom turned his head, Harry was sure he knew exactly who had said that, but he didn’t single them out immediately. He let his eyes sweep dismissively back and forth over the Hit Wizards, and then he said quietly, “In one way, you will have what you wanted.”

“What?” croaked Rowle, looking startled.

“You wanted to have a Minister who would not have a formerly Giftless half-blood for a lover. Now you will not have one. I am stepping down, effective immediately.”

There was a wave of noise that Harry thought might actually be more powerful than the wave of magic he and Tom had unleashed to create the Academy. It meant that no one noticed him laughing, anyway.

“Sir, you can’t do this,” Madam Bones was saying, closer to hand, when Harry paid attention again. “You were duly elected and you have to serve—”

“Oh, come, Amelia. You know as well as I do that Ministers leave their offices early all the time when there’s a scandal and the like.”

“Of course, sir, but this isn’t—”

“It is.” Tom turned and looked at the Hit Wizards, who were still yapping, but shut up as they noticed the direction of his gaze. “The scandal of not being able to have Hit Wizards I can trust.”

“He was Giftless!” shouted someone in the back row, who might be the person who had said Harry was lesser.

“And now he’s not.”

There was more complaining, and then some begging and pleading. Harry wondered idly how many of them were just surprised, and how many were like Lestrange and had thought Tom wanted to be their figurehead. He supposed it didn’t matter, in the end. Tom just glittered at them and gave sharp-edged replies.

“Who is supposed to take over as Minister?” Madam Bones asked, when she had somewhat restored order by firing off loud bangs from her wand that sounded like fireworks.

“I believe the line of succession would nominate you, Amelia.”

That made some of the Hit Wizards look frightened, probably because they thought Madam Bones wouldn’t tolerate corruption in the same way Tom had. They were probably right, Harry thought, highly entertained. It was all they deserved.

“Minister Riddle—”

“Now, now, you can just call me Tom, Minister Bones. Mr. Riddle, if you want to be courteous.”

“Don’t you care at all about how this will destabilize magical Britain?”

“I did,” Tom said, “until these people decided I didn’t have the right to care.” He held out his hand to Harry, who took it, beaming. “I have better things to do than guess what direction the next knife is coming from.”

He and Harry walked towards the door of the expanded office, and the half-broken voices from behind them didn’t make an impression. But Minister Bones did ask one question that did.

“What are you going to do now, Tom?”

Tom smiled over his shoulder at her. Harry, breathless with laughter, thought he looked more handsome than he ever had.

“I’ve always been interested in becoming a professor.”

*

“It was rather impetuous, you know.”

Tom turned his head. He had come to Harry’s parents’ house to have dinner, and he and Harry had been sitting in the garden behind the house since then, quietly discussing the events of the day. Tom had been sitting against the leg of Harry’s chair, head leaning back so that Harry could stroke his hair.

Colton, Harry’s younger brother, either thought Tom was asleep or didn’t care he was present.

“Yeah, I know,” Harry said happily. He had been happy all day. Tom thought now that he should have resigned from his office as soon as he had given Harry Parseltongue. He would have been able to watch that smile with even more attention. “But so was that stupid plan where they tried to assassinate me.”

“Why did they try that?”

“They thought they had chains on Tom that they didn’t.”

“But—don’t you see that this is sudden?”

“Yes. I don’t care.”

“Why not? Help me understand, Harry. Mum and Dad are acting like they accept it, but it’s hard to—I just don’t understand why they would do that.”

Harry sighed and was silent for a bit, his fingers still moving through Tom’s hair. Tom half-wished that Colton would give up and go away, and half-wanted to hear the explanation he thought Harry was gathering the breath and thoughts to give.

“I assumed for a long time that I would inherit the Potter Gift,” Harry said at last. “And then I thought I might at least inherit the Evans one. But when it became clear that I wouldn’t inherit either, I was bitter. You can’t imagine how bitter I was.”

Even now, Tom thought with a curl of inner satisfaction, he will not tell his brother he is jealous of him. Or was jealous. But I know.

“But you know that we would have taken care of you!”

“Okay. So would you be willing to give up all the Galleons and property you’re going to inherit? Or your Gift?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know Mum and Dad would take care of you. You know they would find you a suitable guardian when they died.”

“Talk sense, Harry.”

“That instinctive disgust and revulsion you feel at the idea of having to depend on someone else? That’s what I felt, Cole. Only a lot stronger, because I had years to think about it and brood on what was going to happen.”

Colton was silent. Tom turned his head so that his lips were pressed against the line of Harry’s thigh. Harry nudged him without looking, although Tom knew it was with affection rather than irritation.

“I understand,” Colton whispered at last, sounding subdued. “I—I suppose you would take any hand that helped you out of that trap.”

“I would have, but Tom’s isn’t just any hand. He’s incredible, Cole. He gave me the ability to pay back the Gift he gave me, and protect the other people in society who are the most vulnerable. He brought Hermione back to the magical world. He’s wonderful.”

Tom let his mouth stretch in a smile. He would have to tease Harry, later, and ask Harry if he would have said those things if Tom were really asleep, unable to hear him. But the teasing would not be bitter on either side, because both of them already knew the answer.

“I suppose,” Colton said, and then sighed. “But at least you’re going to visit sometimes in between your new career of saving the world and your living with your handsome lover, right?”

“Of course. And you’ll visit in between studying for your classes as a trainee Auror—”

Tom almost laughed aloud.

“And chatting up some pretty witch.”

“Ginny Weasley said she might go out on a date with me. She had a crush on you for the longest time, you know.”

Tom decided that Ginny Weasley would not be visiting their house any time he was absent.

“Until she found out I was Giftless and going to stay that way, yeah.”

“Oh.”

There was silence, and then Harry gently slid Tom’s head off his lap and stood to embrace his brother. Tom stretched and yawned as if he were just awakening, and Harry’s brother nodded to him, doing an admirable job of concealing a grimace.

“Minister.”

“I’m not, remember.”

“Oh. Of course. Um. Be good to my brother.”

Tom took Harry’s hand and held Harry’s eyes, not Colton’s, as he leaned forwards to press a kiss to Harry’s knuckles. “I desire to be nothing else.”

Harry beamed at him. Colton probably turned and slipped out of the garden, but Tom honestly didn’t remember seeing him go.

It didn’t matter. He was busy with Harry’s mouth.

*

Harry lay awake in their bed, cradling Tom close. For once, the paranoid bastard had fallen asleep before Harry, and his soft breathing echoed in Harry’s ears. Harry thought he could bow his head and listen to it forever.

The stars beyond the window were as bright as the ones in the fairy tales Sirius had told Harry when he was little, when Harry still believed he might develop a Gift if he looked up at the stars and the moon and wished hard enough.

He’d endured years of bitterness, years convinced that he wasn’t as good as everyone else. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Because it had come to this. He had Tom. He had the support of his family, as confused as it was. He had one of his best friends back in the magical world. He had the promise of work in the future that was as beautiful as it was meaningful.

He even had Tom free of the political office that had taken up so much of his time in the past few weeks.

Tom, who stirred now and lifted his head. Harry lowered his head and kissed him, and Tom gave a sleepy hiss, not quite awake. It humbled Harry, how Tom trusted him to rest here in his arms like this and not be completely vigilant.

“Harry?’

“I’m here, Tom.”

“You won’t leave me.”

“I’ll be here always, Tom.”

Tom mumbled a little more, and Harry thought he had already slipped back into sleep. But then he said, as clear as a mountain stream, “I love you.”

Harry’s heart leaped. He spoke with no doubt of his words’ truth, for all the short length of the time they had known each other. “I love you, too.”

Tom gave him a sleepy smile, pillowed his cheek on Harry’s stomach, and slid into slumber again. Harry stroked his hair and looked up at the stars.

The night didn’t seem bright enough to contain his joy.

The End.