Chapter Four of “Lightning and War’- Haruspex

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Three.

Chapter One.

Title: Lightning and War (4/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, a few het and slash background pairings mentioned
Content Notes: Established relationship, angst, violence, dimension travel
Rating: R
Summary: Harry and Tom are pursuing Harry’s cousin Jonquil Potter into Tom’s dangerous, paranoia-ridden world. In addition to finding Jonquil, they need to deal with Dumbledore, Tom’s associates, and dangerous fluctuations in Harry’s magic. Sequel to Jonquils and Lightning.
Author’s Notes: This story involves a lot of background that won’t make much sense without having read the prequel. At the moment, I don’t know how long this story will be or if it will be the last in the series.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Four—Haruspex

“I want you to tell me what that was, Harry.”

“How can I tell you something I have no idea of myself?”

Tom paused. He’d been sure that Harry knew the source of that odd ripple that had traveled through his magic after his duel with Black, and that the main problem would be getting him to speak the truth. But Harry sat with his head between his hands, a shiver wracking him. Perhaps he was speaking the truth now.

Tom circled around and knelt down in front of him. Harry blinked and lifted his head. “It looks wrong to see you on your knees.”

“I only need the right incentive,” Tom murmured, and enjoyed the sight of Harry’s face flushing bright pink even though he had no intention of fucking him right now. He glided his hand down Harry’s ribs. “What did the ripple feel like?”

“As though my magic had woken up and was trying to rip its way out of my body the way it would a cocoon.”

“I wish you hadn’t sacrificed so much of your magic to stabilize the portal.”

“Well, if I hadn’t, then neither of us would be here at all,” said Harry, and his hands were clenched in front of him. “Can you just try to not make this a bigger deal than it already was?”

“Something is wrong with your magic. Of course I want to help you heal it.”

Harry met his eyes for a second, then turned his head away, nodding. “Yes, fine. I just don’t want you to act as though I’ve been keeping information about this from you deliberately. If something had happened right after I stabilized the portal, I would have told you.”

Tom nodded, appeased. That wouldn’t keep him from watching out in the future to make sure that Harry didn’t hide more of it from him, of course. “Fine. Now I want you to lie down on the bed. I need to find a mouse.”

Harry had started to do as Tom instructed, but now he turned his head. “A mouse? Why?”

“As a blood sacrifice for the ritual to tell what happened to your magic.”

“Tom. Don’t do that.”

Tom paused and turned back around, spinning neatly on one foot. Harry was leaning towards him, hanging off the bed. His eyes were brilliant, and if he didn’t have magic sparking around him at the moment, well, he didn’t need it. He had enough determination to stop a charging griffin in its tracks.

“You can’t tell me that you care that much about a mouse’s life.”

“I care enough not to want you to sacrifice anything for me, no matter how tempting it might be,” Harry snapped.

“And I admire your compassion, but I’ll hit it with the Killing Curse. It’s not as though it’ll suffer.”

“It’s still blood magic.”

“Yes. The sort of sacrifice that I used to appease the oracle and open the portal that took me to your second world. Or did you manage to forget that in the agony of falling in love with me?”

Harry dropped his head back with a clench of his teeth. Yes, from the sound of things, he had forgotten that. Tom beamed at him and went to the cage that he kept ready in a corner of the house’s second room. It was full of mice in stasis, along with a few rats and small birds; certain rituals worked better with either larger sacrifices or feathered ones. Tom scooped up one of the mice and carried it into the bedroom.

Harry was lying down only insofar as reclining against a mound of pillows constituted that. He had his arms folded and his gaze fixed on Tom.

“You know that not watching might make you feel better about this?”

“No. It deserves to have someone witness its death.”

“It’s in stasis, Harry. It’s not even going to know the spell’s coming.”

Harry didn’t move his body or his eyes. Tom sighed and struck the mouse with a casual Killing Curse, then dropped it in the middle of a small table that he used exclusively for ritual and cut open the belly. Drawing out the entrails made Harry cover his mouth with his hand for a moment.

“What, divining by entrails wasn’t a common practice in your time?” Tom asked, glancing over. The mouse’s entrails had told him nothing, as a matter of fact—they usually didn’t, being too small—but he wasn’t about to let the chance to go to waste. He channeled the blood spilling from the small, slit body into the groove that circled the edge of the table.

“It might have been. I wouldn’t know. Divination rubbish.”

“Divination isn’t rubbish if you practice it the right way,” Tom corrected him, but absently. He had other things to worry about right now.

The blood groove for the table finally filled completely; one mouse was just enough to manage it. Tom laid aside the gutted mouse and bowed his head. When he calmed and centered himself, the words were waiting in his head. They were different every time, the calling upon the terrifying Dark power that answered questions such as these.

Tom never intended to stop casting the spells or making the sacrifices, though.

“Sanguis, sanguis, quod cenat sanguinem, responsum sanguis.”

The air around him stirred. Tom opened his eyes in time to see the blood being swallowed, sucked out of the groove around the edge of the table like it was being drawn up a straw.

“Tom, what the hell—”

Tom held up his hand. The white fire took form around his fingers as he watched, and he turned around and let the fire flow towards Harry.

It was a good thing that Harry didn’t have his wand in hand at the moment, or Tom knew he would have fought. As it was, he did raise his palm in front of him as if he thought he could block the stream of light.

The light shone around Harry and danced in circles that reminded Tom of some of the ones that fellow Slytherins had drawn in the dorms at night—never anyone who was very serious, of course, because those rituals weren’t meant for public eyes. But this particular sacrifice turned Harry’s skin transparent and let Tom watch how the magic flowed under his skin.

And the disturbing ripples in the middle of it.

Tom sighed and reached out, catching Harry’s chin when he tried to jerk his head to the side. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “You did lessen your magic when you stabilized the portal, you know. And you also upset it.”

“Upset it?” Harry stared at Tom as if he had suddenly stopped speaking English.

“Snarled it, the way you might your hair—” Tom stopped and made a show of peering at Harry’s hair. “Well, the way ordinary people might snarl their hair. I think yours is pretty much permanently tangled.”

Harry rolled his eyes at him. “Fine. What does that mean? Is it a disease? Is there something I have to do to fix it?”

“It means that you’re going to have fluctuations for a while. Think of your magic as a pool that got disturbed with the throw of a stone. Only yours is more like a boulder. It’s going to take a long time for those ripples to die down, and while they’re still moving, your magic is going to be subject to fluctuations.”

“Fluctuations?” Harry’s hand tightened on Tom’s in a way that finally said he seemed to be taking this seriously. Tom gently unclenched his fingers and leaned over to kiss his forehead and the faded mark of the scar that Tom Riddle in another world had used to claim Harry. Tom liked to touch it, smooth it, and think about what kind of claim he had on Harry, a deeper one.

“Yes. Disturbances in your magic the way you felt tonight when you dueled Shara. That means that you will have to be careful in battle. You might suddenly be in pain and unable to fight your enemies.”

“Doesn’t sound good.” Harry’s voice was low.

“No.” Tom paused, because he knew what was coming even if Harry didn’t, and he liked the anticipation. “That means that you’re going to need the bodyguards that I put on you tomorrow.”

“What.”

“Oh, yes,” Tom said. “We can’t have you falling apart in battle after all, not when you’re carrying my heart around with you. I think that Shara will be one of them. She’s impressed enough by you that she wants to watch you and figure out how to imitate you. She’s not going to attack you right away even if she sees you have a fluctuation right in front of her, the way it happened tonight.”

“You are not going to stick guards on me, Tom.” Harry bared his teeth, and there was a flare behind them that looked almost like a remnant of the white light from the divination ritual.

“It can’t have been the only time in your life that you had them. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. I seem to remember some memories I watched when you let me use the Angelfire on you. Guards when you left your relatives’ home? Guards during the war, when my counterpart was trying to kill you?”

“I don’t want them.”

“Unless you can convince me that your magic isn’t going to fluctuate anymore and possibly endanger you in the middle of battle, then you need them.”

“How can I promise you that when I don’t really know when it’ll happen myself?”

“Exactly.”

Harry let his head fall back with a long hiss. He said to the ceiling, “Coming to Jonquil’s world was supposed to eliminate the need for stupid things like this.”

Tom smiled and sat down beside him, tracing one finger along the shell of his ear to see Harry start and shiver. Harry then swore at him. Tom primly ignored that, lacing his fingers together on his knee. “I hope that you see I’m only trying to keep you safe for your own good, Harry. And mine. What do you think would happen if I saw you wounded?”

Harry stared at him. “Nothing? I mean, I would be wounded?”

Tom rolled his eyes. Harry understood so much about the cramped conditions he had lived under in his first world, but at the same time, he acted as though he couldn’t see other natural consequences of his behavior. “I would lose control, Harry. It was hard enough for me to act gracious and kind to your cousin because you wanted me to, or to Dumbledore because you had known a version of him. The mere thought of you being wounded, possibly killed—I will kill someone else.”

“Not an exaggeration,” Harry said a second later, sounding stunned.

“Not at all.”

*

Shit. People in Harry’s first world—namely, Hermione and Kingsley—had once tried to argue with him about him needing guards because the public’s morale would take a hit if they saw Harry wounded. But when they said he needed bodyguards for the sake of other people, he didn’t think this was what they had had in mind.

“Could you not do that, please?”

Tom smiled at him like a fox. Harry groaned and didn’t glance over at the dead mouse on the table next to him, because that was just more proof of what Tom was perfectly willing to do in the name of guarding him.

“What if I asked you not to?”

Tom shook his head. “I’ve been able to be controlled around you because there’s been no large provocation, Harry. Seeing you wounded? Would be one.” He then examined his nails and hummed under his breath, as if waiting for Harry to make some other objection.

Harry said softly, “You treat even someone you love this way.”

Tom looked up at him quickly. Then he reached out and clasped Harry’s arm and said, “It’s because I love you that I treat you this way.”

“Right.”

“I never thought I would find someone I could ever love, Harry. And you want me to treat you lightly now and act as though you being hurt would be a matter of no importance to me? That’s not the way it works.” Tom’s voice sank. “I’m never going to let you go. I’m never going to let you get hurt in a way I could help. Yes, I would lash out at the person who wounded you if you don’t have guards. That’s the way I am.”

Harry hesitated, then nodded slowly. He didn’t like it much, but he did understand. It was sort of the way he had to try and help someone else in need, even if Tom didn’t like it or Ron and Hermione scolded him for it. He had to do it.

“You’ll have guards who respect your power,” Tom said quietly. “I know it seemed as if none of my people did, except Shara after your duel, but there are some. You’ll have what you need.”

To stay safe, is what Tom didn’t say immediately after that. Well, Harry could hardly blame him. Tom Gaunt with a broken heart was probably no safer than Tom Riddle with a broken soul.

“I do understand,” Harry said, after a minute of struggling with it. “And if this is what you need to stay sane when we go into battle, then I’ll do it.”

Tom’s smile made his face glow with a soft light. “Thank you.”

*

“The article came out this morning.”

Harry extended an impatient hand. To his surprise, it wasn’t a copy of the Daily Prophet that Tom put into it, although from things Tom had said Harry knew that newspaper was familiar to people in this world. Instead, it was a paper that looked like little more than a rag, called the Trumpet, with a logo of what looked like a fat little cherub blowing a horn.

But the headline was as spectacular as anything his own Prophet had ever published and run under Rita Skeeter’s byline.

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE: LOVER OF GELLERT GRINDELWALD?

Harry blew out his breath slowly. “I know Malfoy wasn’t confident about finding someone who would go for this bargain. But he found someone, I see.” He glanced at the byline, but other than the fact that the last name was Flint, he didn’t find anything familiar about it.

“There are always people whose need for money outweighs their fear of the political consequences.” Tom was leaning back so that his feet were hooked under the table and his chair was balancing on its hind legs. Harry hid a grin. Tom looked about three years younger than he really was, right now. “What are you laughing at?”

That’s the problem with having an observant lover. Harry shook his head. “I’m just pleased that you’re getting what you wanted with a minimum of fuss.” He handed the paper back to Tom.

“There will be a lot of fuss before it’s all done, I’m sure.” Tom’s eyes were narrowed, and he looked like a cat an invisible hand was stroking. “Which is what we want.”

“Yes.” Harry looked again at the article. It sounded as though whoever had written this was as breathless as Rita Skeeter about revelations, but Harry could understand why. Apparently those letters they’d retrieved from Bagshot had a lot of information in them.

Harry could only read a few of the quotes about eternal love and longing and domination of the Muggles before he flinched away, though. He pushed the paper back to Tom and asked, “How are we going to get Jonquil away from the Order of the Phoenix?”

Tom leaned back in his seat and stared up at the ceiling. “I should have suspected you would crush my triumph with the reminder of your cousin.”

“I want to make sure she gets home safely.”

“Do you still care that much about her?”

“Enough to make sure she gets home safely. I wouldn’t abandon you for her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

From the way Tom started, it was what he’d wanted to ask, only he didn’t know any graceful way to do so. He reached up and gently ran his thumb over the bump of Harry’s wristbone. “You’re still too compassionate to someone who would have loved to take your place at my side,” he said, but his voice was mild.

“Someone who felt desperate enough to run away to this world, and might be held and interrogated by people who have no reason to be kind to her.” Harry held Tom’s eyes, and raised an eyebrow high enough that Tom wouldn’t be able to ignore him. “So what’s the plan?”