Chapter Thirty-One of 'His Darkest Devotion'- Wands

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirty.

Chapter One.

Title: His Darkest Devotion (31/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily, Molly/Arthur, Ron/Hermione, possibly others
Content Notes: Extreme AU, soulmate-identifying marks, angst, violence, torture, gore, minor character deaths
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Harry Potter has been hiding in plain sight all his life, since he carries the soul-mark of Minister Tom Riddle on his arm—and a fulfilled soul-bond will double both partners’ power. His parents and godfather are fugitives, members of the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry is a junior Ministry official feeding the Order what information he can. No one, least of all him, expects Harry to come to the sudden notice of Minister Riddle, or be drawn into a dangerous game of deception.
Author’s Notes: This is a long fic and an extreme AU, as you can see from the summary. The different facets of the AU will be revealed slowly, so roll with the differences at first; in time, all should be revealed.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Thirty-One—Wands

“And you’re sure that this is the wand Dumbledore was carrying?”

Minerva eyed the Minister with more skepticism than she had expected to have when she Flooed him and asked him to come to the school. Minister Riddle had seen Peter’s memory and also had probably had the chance, over the years, to examine Albus’s wand for himself. Yet he was letting his hand barely hover over the wooden box on the desk, and his eyes were narrow enough to glint in the light from the fire like a predator’s.

“I’m sure, Minister.” Minerva heard her voice come out snappish, and sighed. Instinctively, she glanced at Harry, who stood leaning against the far wall of her office. “Perhaps you could tell him, Mr. Potter?”

“I never really got to examine Dumbledore’s wand closely.” Harry smiled at her to take any possible sting out of the words and walked over to the desk, leaning an elbow on it to peer into the box himself. Even in her irritation, Minerva noticed the way that Riddle shifted over to make room for his soulmate. “But I remember that it had a certain aura.”

“An aura.”

“Yes. It felt more alert than most wands do.” Harry glanced at her over his shoulder. “Of course, most wands have that for the person who holds them. But I could sense the one from Dumbledore’s wand even when I was at a distance.”

“All right. So what?”

“You will not treat my soulmate disrespectfully, Headmistress,” Riddle murmured, without looking away from the wand.

Minerva caught her breath and in the end said nothing, because she supposed she should have known better than to react like that. She was too used to thinking of Harry as a student instead of an adult and someone who was in a much more responsible position now than he’d ever worked in at the Ministry.

Harry, though, rolled his eyes at Riddle and turned to look at her. “Please, Headmistress, excuse my soulmate. He’s still suffering from years of being left alone and needing to do whatever he could to survive.”

From the way Harry jumped a moment later, Riddle had sent a pretty sharp response down the bond. But all Harry did was stare at him stubbornly, and Riddle turned away with a snort and a mutter.

Minerva carefully held back any reaction and said, as neutrally as she could, “Has the aura on this wand changed?”

“It feels dead now,” Harry murmured, holding out his hand and letting his fingers hover above the wand in its box. His look was curious enough that Minerva studied him covertly. Harry just tilted his head and contemplated the wand, though, and didn’t look as though he was getting any special insight from the thing. “I almost wonder if Dumbledore could have substituted an ordinary wand for the one he had…” He glanced at Riddle.

Riddle shook his head briskly. “Even if he had known that someone was watching him and wanted to stage a loss of his real wand for their benefit, he was too desperate to get this one back. It has to be the real thing.”

Harry nodded, and then they stared at each other in silence, doubtless exchanging thoughts down the bond. Minerva carefully concealed her envy as she had her emotions earlier. She had lost that bond when Elphinstone died, and sometimes it still nagged at her like a broken bone.

“Given that,” Riddle said slowly, as if he was continuing the silent conversation aloud, “I think we should probably leave this wand here instead of taking it into custody.”

Harry nodded, a smile quirking up his mouth for a second, and then turned to Minerva. “Do you mind holding it if Professor Pettigrew agrees, Headmistress?”

“Of course not. Why would I?”

“Dumbledore might come back for it.” The Minister was watching her closely enough that Minerva had to resist the impulse to straighten her shoulders and snap her chin up. She wasn’t one of his guards or his followers. “He certainly knows it was lost in Hogwarts even if he doesn’t know who has it right now. And you can see from the memory how good he is at wandless magic.”

“Let him come.” Minerva didn’t recognize the grinding tone of her own voice, and apparently neither did Riddle or Harry, from the way they were staring at her. Minerva put up her back, and didn’t care how much doing it reminded either of them of her Animagus form. “I’ve had quite enough of him.”

“That won’t be enough to defeat him, though, Professor McGonagall.”

Harry looked worried. For her. The mere thought of a former student worrying over her ability to defend herself made Minerva want to hiss and claw. She managed to calm down enough to offer Harry a thin smile. “I know that. But I spent the night introducing some new defenses to Hogwarts after Peter showed me his memories.”

“Did you forget I needed to approve all new defenses?”

Minerva turned and looked at the Minister. He was all coiled, cold power, and although he was smiling, she knew all about the shadows behind that smile. Not being part of Albus’s Order anymore hadn’t left her ignorant.

Even if she privately thought that the smile had got less cold since Riddle had found his soulmate.

“That’s why I documented all of them on this parchment,” Minerva said, taking it out and laying it down in front of her with a bit of a flourish. “As well as the passage in the Hogwarts Charter where it says new defenses may be installed on an emergency basis and approved later.”

Riddle only nodded, as if he’d never given her a reason to feel threatened, and leaned over the parchment to review them. Minerva sighed out and caught Harry’s eye. Harry shrugged a little, as if asking how much she wanted him to change Riddle.

In truth, Minerva had never thought that anyone could change him this much. Harry was doing a remarkable job so far.

“Why this ward against Summoning Charms?” Riddle asked.

Minerva turned back to him. “Albus was attempting to use wandless magic to Summon his wand back. The ordinary charms on the school only prevent younger students from Summoning the furniture and anything larger with a burst of accidental power. I want to make sure that we’ll pick up on wandless magic, and purposeful magic, too, in the future.”

Riddle regarded her for a moment with his eyes as flat and calm as a snake’s. “Resourceful, Headmistress,” he said, and then went back to tracing his finger down the list of improvements she’d made.

Minerva sat behind the desk and tried her best to keep from feeling as if she’d be called before the entirety of the Wizengamot in a short time. She caught Harry’s sympathetic grimace, and he nodded to her, leaning over to murmur, “You’ve impressed him.”

Riddle hissed something in Parseltongue, and Harry started. Then he rolled his eyes and moved away from Minerva. Minerva could only assume that Riddle had declared his soulmate off-limits from being too close to anyone.

Again, it was less than she’d thought he’d do should he ever discover that soulmate, given how desperately he had searched after the criminals had burned off the mark on his chest. She entertained a wistful vision of what might have happened if Harry’s parents and Albus had let them meet years ago.

Then she shook herself. She would do more good focusing on the future, which might include an attack by Albus, than the past.

*

“What do you know of him?”

Harry shot Tom an annoyed look. When they could both speak silently down their bond, it was only showing off to speak in Parseltongue in front of someone else, not necessary for secrecy. Professor Pettigrew was already shaking slightly, even though he was behind his desk in his own office, where Tom and Harry had come to meet him.

“Answer the question, Harry.”

You don’t have to hiss and frighten him like that, Harry said down the bond, and continued before Tom could say whatever he was going to say, I know him as a professor at Hogwarts, and he was patient and helped most people learn Transfiguration well enough that a lot of them got higher than an Acceptable on the OWLS. And I know that he used to be my parents’ friend, but he refused to join the Order. That caused a rift between them.

“Smart enough to avoid Albus from the beginning, then,” Tom hissed. “I like him more than I thought.” And he turned to Peter, who was holding very still now to keep himself, as Harry knew, from shaking. “Tell me, Professor Pettigrew, what alerted you to Dumbledore trying to break into the school?”

A curious look crossed Pettigrew’s face, but then he relaxed. “I’m sorry, sir, I forgot that I didn’t include that in the memory. Fawkes did. He came and showed me an image of the attack coming up the secret tunnel from behind the statue of the humpbacked witch, and then he carried me there.”

“Carried you?”

“I transformed into a rat.”

Harry shot annoyance down the bond at Tom. Even if Pettigrew had meant that Fawkes had carried him in human form, that was still perfectly possible for a phoenix. It didn’t mean Pettigrew was lying, and Harry disliked that Tom seemed to be trying to set him up.

Tom’s pleasant expression never varied, even as he said down the bond, All part of making sure that Albus didn’t use him, darling. “It didn’t occur to you that a phoenix who used to belong to Albus Dumbledore might be on his side, instead of yours, and manipulating you into letting his former master into the school?”

Pettigrew straightened up for the first time and gave Tom an odd look. “No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t follow Dumbledore out of the school,” Pettigrew said. “So he didn’t want to be his companion anymore. After the revelations that have come out about Dumbledore and the Order, I can’t really say that I’m surprised.”

“You speak of companions and not pets.”

“Phoenixes aren’t pets, sir.”

“And you don’t think I would know more about them than you?” Tom leaned forwards, and his voice abruptly became the kind of savage snarl that Harry had heard him use to eviscerate people in the Wizengamot. “Given that I am the one who once had the mark of a phoenix on his chest and would have made a study of them?”

Pettigrew clenched his hands in his lap, at least from the motion of his shoulders, but his face remained blank and hard to read. “Forgive me, sir, but no, I don’t think so. Or else you’re trying to confuse me for some reason. Phoenixes really aren’t pets. They’ll endorse someone’s actions for a while, but Fawkes brought me there, showed me Dumbledore was a danger, and blessed me in the end after I came out of the Headmistress’s office. It was perfectly true that I’d done what he wanted.”

“Blessed you?” Harry asked. “How?”

Pettigrew gave him a slightly more comfortable smile than any look he’d given Tom. Then again, he’d been the man’s student, so Harry supposed it made sense that Pettigrew was more comfortable with him. “When I left the Headmistress’s office, Fawkes was waiting on the gargoyle. I started to tell him I wasn’t defending the school again that night, but he flew over, rubbed his head against me, and sang softly. Then I slept better than any night I can remember.”

Tom raised his eyebrows and caught Harry’s eye. “That is indeed something I did not anticipate.”

“Seriously, stop speaking in Parseltongue just to intimidate someone who’s plenty intimidated by you already,” Harry snapped.

Pettigrew blinked, and stopped shaking. Tom tilted slowly back in his chair, fingers laced across his knees, attention entirely focused on Harry to the point that the bond was vibrating. Soulmates should present a united front in public, he said down the bond.

Maybe people whose soulmates aren’t aresholes to random bystanders can do that all the time.

Tom frowned at him, but Pettigrew had nodded to Harry, and Harry asked him a question while hopefully he was in a more relaxed mood and would be happy that Harry had taken his part. “What did you feel from Dumbledore’s wand after you had it?”

“That it had an active aura,” Pettigrew replied. “It was almost humming.”

“It felt inert when we examined it in the Headmistress’s office.”

“She said the same thing.” Pettigrew visibly thought about it. “With one person’s perspective against three other people’s, then I have to concede I was wrong. Just because it felt that way to me doesn’t mean it was.”

“Why would it feel differently to you?” Tom’s voice was cool, but at least he was speaking English this time.

“Because I was perhaps still overwhelmed by the battle last night? I couldn’t believe I’d survived.” Pettigrew shook his head a little. “I’m good at Transfiguration, sir, not much else. I could have easily mistaken the wand’s aura. For one thing, I don’t know much about wandlore.”

“You defeated one of the most powerful wizards in Britain, and you call yourself weak?”

“Untalented, sir.” Pettigrew’s face was calm and set. “I know that there was a lot of luck in surviving the way I did, especially that I was able to get Grindelwald free and that he distracted Dumbledore after that. If I hadn’t managed to steal the wand, things would have been very different.”

The bond throbbed in Harry’s head, and a strong peppermint flavor filled his mouth. He managed to keep from snorting, but barely. Tom didn’t know what to do with someone who admitted faults and weakness and that he might be wrong. He certainly didn’t get that kind of humility from the pure-bloods.

“What would happen, do you think, if we asked you to cast with the wand in front of us?” Harry asked.

Pettigrew gave him an assessing glance that reminded Harry abruptly that, untalented or not, very few students had got away with cheating or carelessness in Pettigrew’s Transfiguration classes. “I don’t know. It might not respond to me at all.”

“But you think it might?”

“If I wasn’t mistaken about the aura it had.”

“A good thing I brought it with us, then,” Tom said, and took the wooden box he’d borrowed from McGonagall out. He opened it with a flourish like a Muggle magician producing a trick. Pettigrew blinked, uncertain again. Harry sighed.

Don’t compare me to a Muggle.

Why are you so determined to overset him? I think we can see by now that he’s not a traitor Dumbledore planted.

Tom ignored him, extending the box to Pettigrew. Pettigrew studied the wand for a moment, then reached out a hand. The wand levitated from the box before he could touch it and smacked into his palm.

There was a chorus of distant voices that reminded Harry, for a moment, of phoenixes singing together, and then sparks like a wildfire rained from the end of the wand. Pettigrew yelped and managed to turn it so that it was pointing away from them. Harry watched the red and gold cascade, and had to smile. “Gryffindor colors?”

“Those were the colors of the sparks when I got my first wand, too.” Pettigrew stared. “I swear, Minister, I didn’t mean to attack you.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Tom said, straightening his robes, and Pettigrew looked nervous again.

Seriously, stop being a fucking arsehole.

Tom didn’t reply, but he did twitch his shoulder in an annoyed way and then modulate his tone when he spoke again. “No, Professor Pettigrew, I know there was no attack intended. But I am curious about why the wand felt so dead to us and is so alive with you. May I?” He held out his hand for the wand.

Pettigrew started to hand it to him, but the wand abruptly clung to his fingers. Pettigrew blinked and shook his hand. The wand continued to cling. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost stammering. “Really, this is most unexpected.”

Tom eased his hand back, his expression calm, for all that behind it, Harry could feel his mind running furiously. “Interesting. Most wands will submit easily enough to an inspection.”

“Yes. And I want this one to, too!” Pettigrew pulled the wand free from his fingers and tried to hand it over again. This time, the wand appeared to have cemented both of his hands to the wood. Pettigrew looked more than a little aghast. “I really have no idea what’s happening. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a good thing,” Harry interrupted, before Tom could make Pettigrew the subject of some kind of experiment.

“Oh?” Tom looked at him, while the bond sang a sharp note.

“It means that we can be sure the wand doesn’t want to go back to Dumbledore,” Harry said, glancing at Tom, and plucked the bond himself. You know that he would be more dangerous if he was armed.

He is dangerous enough for figuring out a way to resurrect the soulmate bond, but you are right, Tom said, and nodded. “That is true, although I would still like to examine it, to determine why it was so inert when we tried to sense it.”

“I’d like to make sure you have the chance to do so, Minister. Let me try something.” Pettigrew shut his eyes.

Harry had some idea of what he was going to try, having seen his demonstration on the first day of class with him, and thought it a bit clever. Sure enough, when Pettigrew changed into a rat, the wand clattered to the desk, and Tom reached out and snatched it up before Pettigrew could change back into a man.

“Fascinating,” Tom breathed.

Harry shifted towards him, trying to figure out why, but thought he had when he was close to it. If someone had asked him whether it was a plain piece of wood or a wand, he would have said that it was a plain piece of wood without hesitation, or else a wand that had been broken and then subjected to a Reparo Charm. You couldn’t fix a wand that way, but Harry knew people who had tried when they were in Hogwarts.

“What do you think you’ve learned about it, sir?” Pettigrew had transformed back, smoothly, on the other side of the desk.

“Its loyalty is to you and only you,” Tom said. “I am not sure why, but I agree with my soulmate that it doesn’t want to return to Dumbledore. I thought perhaps I would sense some hostility to my handling it, but no, it simply remains dead.” He turned, aiming the wand at the far wall. “Reducto!”

There was nothing, not even a trace of the sparks that had rained from it when Pettigrew picked it up. Harry, because he was polite like that, glanced at Pettigrew for permission before he reached out and picked up the wand. He aimed it himself and murmured, “Lumos.”

No reaction. He might as well have picked up a twig from the forest floor.

“I do know a little bit about wandlore,” Tom said, as he handed the wand back to Pettigrew. “And I know this is highly unusual.”

“Do you think—well, perhaps it was that I simply stole the wand from Dumbledore, Minister? Rather than won it?”

“Stolen wands wouldn’t give their allegiance to another wizard or witch in the way that a conquered one would, that much is true.” Tom was still watching the wand with a calculating gaze that reminded Harry of the way he used to think Tom did everything: cool, utterly detached from the world and consequences. “But they wouldn’t feel dead, either. I think that this wand wanted to make sure no one but you could use it, Professor Pettigrew.”

“I—see.” Pettigrew frowned at the wand, and then shrugged. “I’ll keep it safe, to make sure that Dumbledore can’t easily access it even if he does sneak into the school, sir.”

“The Headmistress said the same, but I’m not sure that any place here would match that definition of safety from him.”

“I’m going to take it to Gringotts.”

Tom nodded. “I see.” He stood. “Thank you, Professor.”

“Thanks,” Harry added, with a smile at Pettigrew, who nodded back to him with a strange little smile on his face. Harry wondered if maybe Pettigrew was glad to see that being the Minister’s soulmate was working out well for him, given that Harry had been his student and he might have worried about the consequences.

That made something in Harry relax. Whether Pettigrew had ever been brave enough to speak out against the Order’s idea that Harry had to maintain a distant stance towards his soulmate (or had even known about it), he approved now.

Sometimes, it was just nice to have more confirmation that people in the Order had been a bit mad.

*

“So why were you so interested in Pettigrew’s wand?”

They were lying in Tom’s bed after they’d made love, and Tom had been drifting towards sleep, wondering in the back of his mind if he would see another of Harry’s memories. Harry’s words, however, yanked him back to awareness.

And Harry was sending sharp flicks of interest down the bond, so he obviously wasn’t ready for sleep himself yet. Tom yawned. “This is what you wish to discuss now?”

“I didn’t do it earlier, did I?”

Tom smiled a little as he recalled the sweetness that was sharing orgasm with his soulmate, and shook his head. “Very well. There were rumors that when Dumbledore dueled Grindelwald and took that wand from him, it was the Elder Wand.”

“The Elder Wand? Like in the fairy story?”

“Fairy stories are sometimes true,” Tom whispered, his breath glancing over Harry’s ears and stirring shivers from him that made Tom wish he had nothing else to do in the world but this. “Or did you think that all the stories about soulmates were rubbish when you didn’t have one?”

“I knew people who were soulmates,” Harry countered. He shifted, and Tom concealed a smile at the burgeoning hardness against his thigh. “I don’t know anyone who believes in the bloody Deathly Hallows.”

“Remind me to introduce you to someone who does.”

“What?”

Tom chuckled. “Did you know someone at Hogwarts named Luna Lovegood?”

“Of course.” Harry narrowed his eyes after a second. “You’re saying that she believes in the Deathly Hallows?”

“I don’t know the girl personally.” Tom let his chin rest in the crook of Harry’s neck, only moving when Harry gave him an irritable shove. “But her parents certainly do. They’ve made it their lives’ work to seek them.”

“And do what with them?”

Tom shrugged. “If there are people in the world with a pure academic interest in such powerful objects, the Lovegoods are them. They want to behold them, I suspect. Photograph them. Talk to the people who own them. Write about them. That’s all.”

“And you think I should meet them?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“This is a time of prophecy,” Tom intoned in the deepest and gravest tone he could, and got Harry to stare at him with wide eyes for three whole seconds before the bond gave the truth away and Harry hit him over the head with a pillow. Tom ducked, laughing, giddy—for the first time in his life, perhaps—and overwhelmed by the surge of love and normality.

That he had to lived to do something like this with his soulmate…

“The real reason.”

“It’s not far off what I told you.” Harry hefted the pillow threateningly, and Tom shook his head. “No, I mean it. We have a prophecy in play, and while it might not come true, we should be prepared for it. We have the Elder Wand apparently seeking retirement, rather than coming out of it, and rejecting Dumbledore. I’m at least willing to listen to what people who have dedicated their lives to studying the Hallows say.”

“It might not come true?”

“It was something I was thinking, but I wasn’t sure until I saw the memory that Pettigrew put in the Pensieve.” Tom wrapped his hand around Harry’s and tugged gently until Harry was lying against his chest, head tucked in the corner of Tom’s own shoulder. “Fawkes approached Pettigrew to fight for him. What does that tell you?”

“That phoenixes are really good at seeing potential?”

“That at least one legend about phoenixes is true,” Tom said, while kissing the faded scar on Harry’s forehead for the cleverness of that answer. “They cannot act directly to influence the world, at least not without help. Fawkes could have done something to have barred Dumbledore’s entrance to the school. Instead, he sought out someone who was supposed to help him, and who did manage it.”

“Would he do something to bar Dumbledore’s entrance, though?” Harry bit his lip, his brow wrinkling, so that Tom had to kiss it again. “I mean, he used to be Dumbledore’s companion.”

“That has nothing to do with it now,” Tom said. “He obviously opposes him. No, the legend I was referring to, Harry, is that phoenixes are agents of fate and destiny. They choose people to help them, to play certain roles. But taking too much direct action would, according to that particular tale, destroy the world.”

“Let’s avoid that, right,” Harry said, while the bond trembled a bit in the back of Tom’s mind. “But why?”

“Phoenixes are too much,” Tom said simply. “Too much fire, light, life. They’re immortal, and they’re the only creatures we’re aware of in the magical world who are so without draining someone or something else. Vampires have to live on blood, Dementors on souls, sea serpents on that special kind of water the Muggles are making so much noise about lately. Phoenixes can exist without that, though.”

“I know other creatures who can be immortal without that kind of draining.”

“What?”

“Soulmated couples who love each other enough and have enough power.”

Tom kissed him, and the kiss got complicated and interesting enough that he nearly forgot his point. But Harry pulled back, with a faint smile Tom was never going to get enough of, and asked, “Phoenixes?”

Tom cleared his throat. “Soulmated couples bonded at that level still need each other and can’t be immortal alone. One of them dies if the other does, even if they were immortal up until that point. Phoenixes are responsible for their own rebirth. Not even the Killing Curse does anything except cause them to burn. Nothing else we know of is like that. The theory—”

“Or legend.”

“Is that they must have far more powerful magic than anything else we know of to maintain that state. Imagine them turning that magic on the world. They might regenerate the whole world. Or they might destroy it in their quest to make it immortal.”

“You think that’s their quest?”

Tom snorted and tugged gently on a lock of Harry’s hair. Harry shook the bond, but then yawned. He had too little energy to even muster resentment right now, Tom thought.

Well, I always knew that I would be good at shagging my soulmate.

Harry punched him in the shoulder with a closed fist and repeated, “Well? Is that their quest?”

Tom shook his head. “No. They do want to regenerate the world, but that means different things depending on the phoenix. Some of them serve one version of reality, some another. They use those people they think proper for the roles and play the games to avoid confronting one another and ending everything in disaster.”

“Are there only two sides?”

“I assume there are as many sides as there are phoenixes,” Tom murmured. “But right now, I suspect the only sides that need concern us is the one that wants Dumbledore to triumph and the one that doesn’t, represented by Fawkes.”

“It’s interesting that you don’t say Fawkes’s side is the one that wants us to win.”

Still so clever, even in this state. Tom nodded. “I don’t think we can be sure of that. Our triumph and Dumbledore’s not triumphing might be the same thing, or they might look very different. And I doubt Fawkes would answer our questions.”

“Do you think—”

Harry stopped, but Tom knew from the light flooding in through his side of the bond that he was still awake, so he looked down. Harry bit his lip and rolled slightly over on his side to return the glance. “Do you think that’s the reason you had a phoenix as your soul-mark? Together, we have the power to change the world? Or destroy it?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said, his hand getting tangled in Harry’s hair again. He pulled gently this time, and Harry huffed and shut his eyes. “This is only one of the legends about phoenixes, and I wouldn’t think it was the true one if we didn’t already have some evidence about the way Fawkes used Pettigrew as his tool. I’ve never known for sure what my soul-mark meant.”

Harry just nodded, but there was a muddled mix of emotions in the bond that made Tom spread his hand out over his shoulder and keep it there in a quiet hold. Harry finally sighed and said, “I wonder if the phoenix meant me. That’s something I couldn’t help wondering when my parents told me that you’d been born with a black-and-white phoenix on your chest. I grew up with the stories about phoenixes as symbols of Light and only Light, but the black feathers…”

“You wondered if you had the capacity for Dark Arts. And now you wonder if you have the capacity for that immense destruction.”

“Yeah.”

That was a hoarse whisper, and that wouldn’t do. Tom rearranged them so that they were still lying chest-to-chest but he could see Harry’s face. Harry fisted his hands in the sheets and didn’t look away, despite the fine tremble that Tom could tell was invading his muscles.

“Soul-marks are rarely unambiguous,” Tom said, and he let his fingers fall on the words that decorated Harry’s wrist. The soft blue flames sprang into existence. Tom didn’t think it was his imagination that they were feathered on the tips now, though, or that they were a deeper blue, more the color of ocean water than lightning. “Yours is a rare case. What my phoenix meant, I don’t think anyone will truly know. Dumbledore and your parents interpreted it one way. I interpreted it another.”

“What was your interpretation?”

“That my soulmate would be someone with whom I could share power of all kinds, the Light and the Dark, love and pain.”

Harry smiled, and his eyelids drooped a little, perhaps worn out by the thick emotion as much as the sex they’d had before that. “That’s a good interpretation.”

Tom kissed his forehead again and watched as Harry drifted off. He wondered, as he did, what would happen the next time they faced Dumbledore, and what part Fawkes, or some other phoenix who shared the same desired version of reality, might call on them to play.

But only one thing terrified him now, and that was losing Harry. He would have been consumed with doubt if he had thought he had to bear the burden of deciding the world’s fate alone.

As two, the doubt burned, and hope, Tom’s private phoenix, rose from the ashes.