[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Twelve and One, Harry/Tom Riddle, R, 4/7

[lomonaaeren]

Part Three.

Part One.

Title: Twelve and One (4/7)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily and Merope/Tom Riddle Sr.
Content Notes: Angst, past minor character death, violence, fairy tale AU
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 3400
Summary: AU. King James Potter has twelve daughters, each more beautiful than the last, and all under a devastating curse. He also has one son, who serves as his father’s steward. Harry has begun to wonder if his sisters will ever be free from the curse, until Prince Thomas Slytherin comes seeking a consort. (Very) loosely based on the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Author’s Notes: This is one of “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year. It will have seven parts.

Part Four

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Neither do I,” Harry said, and then shrugged when Tom glared at him. “Well, I thought you were going to ask if I did any second. You have to admit that you’ve asked for my opinion on everything else.”

Tom turned and studied what was in front of them again instead of speaking, so Harry decided to study it with him. “That” was an enormous tree, or rather the shadowy silver figure of one, looming into the air higher than the blue hills. The problem was that it appeared to have nothing to do with the ground. The roots unfolded and stretched out in rippling curls far above the earth. Harry didn’t know if they could have fit under the grass that passed for soil in the elven underworld anyway. The branches drooped high above them, and seemed to be studded with the diamond outlines of leaves.

“Perhaps we do not need to know what it is,” Tom murmured after yet more study. “Perhaps it has nothing to do with our quest.”

Harry eyed him. “You don’t believe that.”

“I do not.” Tom’s smile darted across his face like the slash of a blade. “But it is true that I see no obvious connection.”

“I do.” Harry nodded to the nearest branch, which hung a good distance above their heads, and the outlines of the leaves upon it. “See how those leaves look more tattered than the rest of them? Well, the next set of twins to be born after Coral and Delphinium, whose gift is music, were Emerald and Flora, and their gift is healing.”

“So we’re supposed to—heal the tree?”

“It’s possible.” Harry kept his voice absent because his eyes were still scanning. Emerald’s gift was healing plants, but so far, the means of freeing a set of twins had been pretty close together. There ought to be an animal that would match Flora’s healing gift.

He made it out at last, a shadowy form in the exact center of the tree’s trunk where the great branches divided. It was a peregrine, at least if one accepted that falcons could stretch to giant proportions, and a peregrine was the animal Flora had been healing the day before he and Tom left. He nodded. “I think we’ll need to heal both of them.”

“Fine.” Tom turned to him with his arms crossed. “Do you have any suggestion for how to reach them?”

Harry ignored Tom’s impatience for a few minutes, studying the roots of the tree. No help there, it seemed. The roots ended far above the grass—

But not above the other trees, Harry realized after a moment. He hadn’t seen them, truly hadn’t seen them, because the tree in the sky was so overwhelming that it had made him ignore them. But there were other trees here, a slender silver forest, more substantial than the great one, and their branches towered to within a few feet of the roots.

“We’ll have to climb one of those trees,” Harry murmured, nodding to the forest.

“And how do you think we are going to clear the last space between the roots and the top of the tree? I haven’t brought any magic that would allow me to fly.”

Harry shrugged. “I haven’t, either, but there must be a way to overcome this. You told me that no curse would come without a way to break it.” Elves seemed to like that better, the same way they liked marrying people for their beauty and magic rather than their personalities. Harry was growing thoughtful about how much lately he had been glad that he wasn’t an elf, after long years of wishing he was more like one.

Tom broke in on his musings. “So we climb and then…what? Jump?”

Harry watched the shadowy falcon stretch its wings and shift from one foot to another, and smiled. “Maybe not.”

*

“I want you to know that this is beneath the dignity of a prince.”

“That’s why I’m the one climbing ahead of you. Yes, Tom, I understand that.”

“You shouldn’t be doing this, either.”

Harry only rolled his eyes and eyed the distance ahead of him. Pine branches crackled beneath his hand. Despite looking so ethereal, the silver forest had turned out to be almost distressingly real, sticking his palms full of splinters and making bark slip under his feet.

And there was still an insurmountable distance between the top of the tree where Harry crouched and the roots. The falcon was out of sight now, the branches of the hovering tree intervening, but Harry didn’t care. He had a plan to change that.

“Why are you doing this when you’re a prince?”

“Steward,” Harry murmured, casting his mind back to the mews at home.

“It infuriates me when you say that.”

“Hold your tongue,” Harry snapped back, and Tom did, maybe because no one else had ever told him that before. Harry took a deep breath, called all his memory into his lungs, and screeched like a peregrine falcon.

There was a shifting of wings above them.

“You are mad,” Tom hissed. Hopefully not loudly enough to alert the falcon, though, Harry thought dispassionately.

“And proud of it,” Harry agreed, then screamed again.

The gigantic beak eased over the side of the branch, and the falcon stared down at them. Harry stared back. Looking into eyes larger than his head was an experience, but on the other hand, this was no worse than meeting the predatory gazes of the hawks in the mews, who would have hunted him if they were big enough. Harry screamed one more time, and the falcon extended a talon towards him.

Awkwardly, Harry saw, and felt a surge of victory, knowing that he had guessed correctly. The bird was injured. It seemed to have a dangling wing, and as its claws curled around Harry—and then Tom—and lifted them up, Harry saw some kind of festering wound on the other leg as well.

“You are mad,” Tom kept repeating behind him, in a dull voice. “It’s going to kill us.”

“It’s not squeezing hard enough to hurt us, and peregrines usually kill after a dive,” Harry disagreed, and smiled up at the falcon as it set them down on the branch beside it. “Now. I hope you can hear me,” he added, raising his voice a little. “Can I help you with that wing?”

The falcon stared at him, tilting its head slowly in an inquisitive direction. Harry kept up the mild smile on his face, and repeated the request when he thought it might be fading from the falcon’s brain. Then the peregrine gave a soft, almost sleepy noise, and extended its wing so that it was resting on the branch between them.

“Thank you!” Harry called, and bent close to examine the wound. It did seem to be a snapped bone—a bad injury, but if he could heal it cleanly the way Flora would have healed the smaller bird’s wing, then there should be no problem with the falcon flying again. The festering wound on its leg would be more of a problem.

“What do you expect me to do?” Tom’s voice was cool.

“Oh, you could lean out and get a look at the leaves of the tree,” Harry said. “I know less about plants than animals.”

Tom drew in a deep breath that sounded as if it was shaking him all through. Then he nodded and walked towards the farthest branches of the tree, which curled out like roads. Harry, meanwhile, settled himself with his hands over the wound.

He would have to use a human spell, since he had none of the native elven magical talent that let Flora heal animals. He murmured, “Episkey,” concentrating with all his strength.

The falcon screeched and tore its wing away from him. Harry hissed and rolled, clinging to the branch with both knees. This wasn’t the first time he’d had to do something like this, sadly. He’d once hung for thirty minutes from a rafter while the bucking horse beneath him worse himself out.

“Harry!”

“I’m all right,” Harry called back to Tom. The falcon was between them and he couldn’t see Tom at the moment, but he concentrated on making his voice reassuring. The bird shifted and stared, and Harry looked towards the wing, which had dipped back down towards him when the falcon evidently decided against taking off.

There was no longer a wound in the feathers, and the bone looked whole. Harry caught his breath and looked up towards the falcon. “Would you let me heal your leg?” he whispered.

“Honestly, you sound as though you’re asking for a favor,” Tom muttered. He must have good hearing, since Harry was surprised the falcon had heard him. But with his eyes fixed on immense golden ones, he had no time to spare for thoughts about Tom.

The falcon slowly extended the leg, watching him all the while. Harry drew a deep breath and climbed over claws that looked as big as tree roots—well, ordinary tree roots, not the ones humping through the sky around him right now—and bent down to consider the wound. This one looked like a bite, or like someone had thrown very precise shards of glass at the falcon. Harry frowned as he wondered about the cause, but then shrugged. Either he could heal it or he couldn’t, but he didn’t need to sit around wondering.

“Thank you,” he told the falcon softly. He held out his hands again, this time hovering over the wound, and said, “Episkey!”

The falcon didn’t jerk and scream like before, but this time it was obvious that it was because the wound hadn’t been healed. Harry scowled and bent closer, ignoring the way Tom snarled his name. Well, perhaps one or two of the jagged holes on the very edge of the injury had closed, but no more than that.

“I think we’ll probably have to work in concert,” Harry said, standing back and scowling at the wound. “Heal the leaves and heal the falcon at the same time.”

“Fine,” Tom said, his voice unexpectedly close and so sharp that Harry started and nearly fell from the tree branch. “Now get away from that thing.”

Harry had long known that animals were more sensitive to elven and human moods than others believed, and he had it proven again when the falcon screeched at Tom and leaned close, wings slightly spread and beak gaping. Tom, who had been picking his way around behind the falcon’s tail, froze. Harry sighed, grabbed his arm, murmured, “Forgive us,” to the falcon, and tugged Tom over to stand next to him.

“Stop irritating the giant bird that sits right next to you and holds your life in its talons,” he hissed.

“I was concerned about you.” Tom sounded choked as he stared at the claws that had slammed down right next to his head.

“Then be concerned about me from over here.” Harry hesitated. “I need your help. I only know the one healing spell, and it’s not working on this second wound, and it won’t work at all on plants.”

Tom took a step towards him, eyes fixed on him in that way that made the air around him seem to heat up again. Harry licked his lips and did his best to ignore the sensation. They weren’t alone right now; they had a huge falcon looming over them. “What did you say you need from me, Harry?”

There was nothing for it. Harry gritted his teeth and muttered, “Your help.”

“That’s what I thought you said. And it should be possible because there are the life-debts between us to make a conduit for potentially incompatible magic.” Tom stepped behind him, letting his hands rest on Harry’s shoulders in a way that made Harry shiver. He felt them there and not there at the same time. “Not that I think we’ll have a problem with that.”

“Problem with what?”

He received an answer, but not in words. Tom closed his eyes and hummed softly to himself, then sang a high-pitched note. At the same moment, Harry felt something within him throb and respond to the note like an echo.

“There you are,” Tom whispered, his head near Harry’s neck, making Harry long to move and stretch. “Follow my lead.”

Again Harry wanted to ask a question, but this time, the low note sang to him, and even though he had no good experience with music or gift for it, Harry found himself singing back. It wasn’t with his voice. It was with blood and bone and the hands that he found clasped beneath Tom’s and the sudden spiral of awareness that spread out from them, up and towards the distant sky and the screams of far birds and the edges of the blue hills.

Hills and sky and birds…all of it was, in some sense, a pattern stitched on emptiness. Harry and Tom, their awareness flowing into each other’s, understood and accepted that. For Tom, it was an old realization come to new life. For Harry, it was a revelation. He had known he wasn’t good at magic and he had thought of it as something completely distant and separate from himself.

Now he knew he could do any magic that he wanted as long as he could rearrange the patterns.

In front of them were particular stitches that they wished would be different. Harry and Tom surveyed the wound on the falcon’s leg, and saw it as a disruption in the neat pattern of a weaving—perhaps a place where someone had tugged all the sewing out in a particularly violent manner. That would not do. But they would have to do the reweaving at the same time as another trailing pattern of stitches, which marked the place where the giant tree’s leaves were becoming unraveled.

However, it was not impossible for them, merely a stretch for their strength. They reached out together, and the power rose from the depths of their souls, which were woven from the same loom of magic and insight that everything around them was. They were partially different, but partially not. They belonged here, and they sang notes that were true and cast power that was more than power as they altered the weaving.

The falcon made a low, surprised sound as the wound in its leg began to knit. The tree swayed as its leaves were created anew. And that was what it was: true silver, true gold, true leaf, true talon, spun out of air and applied. Not picking up the dangling threads, because that would be a task for a lesser being of lesser strength, but renewing.

There were no words for the song that ran through them, or the note as the threads rang into place. It was more, it was sweeter, than any note Harry had hoped to sing in his lifetime.

Suddenly he was Harry again, breathing separately from Tom, and aware of his body as a thing that existed, holding hands and bones and trembling, exhausted muscles. He swallowed and forbore from leaning back against Tom, even though he wanted to. That last, joined memory of strength was gone beyond recall and actually unweaving itself in his memory, he thought. There would be no way that he could comprehend it as he had when he’d lived it.

But at least he had lived it. There was that. And the falcon was spreading its wings with a joyous cry, and the silver leaves tossing in the breeze had a sense of joy to their movement, as well.

The falcon reached under a wing and picked up something that Harry worried, for a second, was a gigantic internal organ from some past meal, it was so green. But then he realized it was a dangling emerald, ornamented in silver with a curling design of flowers. He touched it, and it bounced once in his hand, then softly dissolved into air.

Emerald and Flora were free.

Harry turned to Tom, ready to say that he thought the falcon would bear them back to the ground if they asked politely, but the words froze in his throat at the expression on Tom’s face. And the gentle but inexorable way that Tom backed him up against a crook of a branch, something as big as the trunk of any tree on the ground.

“Your magic,” Tom murmured, and brushed the back of his hand down the air alongside Harry’s cheek. It made Harry jump. The sensation was almost but not quite too much, like being tickled, even though Tom made no contact with his skin. “I’ve never felt someone blend like that with me, so strong, so radiant. I want…”

“Whatever you want, we can discuss it on the ground,” Harry interrupted. His heart was hammering so fast for a moment that he wondered madly if the falcon might mistake him for a mouse and attack him.

“I have so much to say to you,” Tom said. “But for right now, this will do.”

He leaned forwards and sealed his lips over Harry’s.

Harry gasped. The sensation pouring into him was exactly like being tickled with a kiss, and he found himself arching his back, the scrape of the bark against his skin not like bark either, and Tom’s hands overwhelming as they fastened on either side of his throat, and his head spinning, and his sight narrowing, and Tom’s eyes filling up the world…

Harry closed his hands hard over Tom’s wrists and wrenched them away. The world returned, but swaying and dizzy, and Harry didn’t think that was all caused by standing on a tree branch. Harry glanced away, gulping air.

“You know what I want,” Tom said, his voice dark, compelling. Harry remembered how they had been joined together when weaving the magic and closed his eyes.

He had never regretted his own decision not to marry, because it had seemed so impossible. Everything that someone noble or elven valued—beauty, magic, power, intelligence, political competence—he didn’t have. If he had been a servant born, it would have been different, and Harry could have had a happy life with a man or woman who valued skill with animals and cooking and conversation and laughter.

It was wrenching, a jolt, to realize that he had come up against someone who actually did value his magic. Or at least the magic that they had in common.

Harry swallowed. “Give me time to think.”

“You need time to think? Truly?” Tom asked, and his voice would have told Harry of the thunder of his need even if his hands didn’t.

“Yes, because this is nothing like I thought I would ever run into!” Harry snapped back. He had a little of his mental balance now, not least because he was holding Tom’s hands away from him. The hands seemed to be the conduit for the magic that had thrown him so far off-balance, maybe because that was the way Tom had touched him when they blended their magic to weave the talons and the leaves anew. “And you might still change your mind. You might sleep with me now and then choose one of my sisters as your consort.”

“And sleeping with me now would be so bad?”

Harry hesitated. It really, really wouldn’t, said the tide of his blood and the warmth in his cheeks and the sweetness in his mouth and the spinning in his head. He hadn’t thought of it before, because, well, two royals generally didn’t unless it would be a permanent arrangement. Casual liaisons involved servants or soldiers.

“Harry?” Tom was brushing his hand directly across his cheek now, which wasn’t as intense as it had been but was still pretty incredible.

Harry hesitated one more time. Then he thought, We’re the only ones here, and who else is going to know? We’re the only ones who could tell them. We’re—

Tom licked the corner of his mouth, and Harry gasped and knew the battle was lost. He swallowed and nodded. He reached out and held Tom’s forearms for a moment, making him be still and catching his eyes.

“If you decide at any point that you don’t want this because of who I am, then you need to tell me,” Harry said, clearly and distinctly.

Tom nodded at once, although from the small smile playing on his lips, Harry didn’t think he would back away. Harry turned to ask the falcon to carry them to the ground.

Meanwhile, he was aware, all too aware, of the simmering heat at his back, and the hand that gently roamed down his chest.

I want him so much. And surely it’s not wrong if it’s just once.