[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Genius by the Numbers, Harry/Tom Riddle, R, 4/6 or 7

[lomonaaeren]

Part Three.

Part One.

Title: Genius by the Numbers (4/6 or 7)
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, Tom/OFC, and Sirius/Remus
Content Notes: AU (the Potters live), angst, violence, family drama, infidelity, past minor character death, dubious consent
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4800
Summary: AU. Harry Potter, as the eldest brother of the Girl-Who-Lived, has always felt like the average person in his family of geniuses. He has a plan that might change that, but meanwhile, he has to contend with his partially estranged family as he attends his sister’s wedding. And contend, too, with his sister’s fiancé, Tom Riddle.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year, and should have three parts, to be posted over the next three days.


Thank you again for all the reviews! And goddamn it, this just grew another chapter.

Part Four

“Hello, traitor.”

Honestly, that sally from Diana was so pathetic that Harry just ignored it, and kept walking towards the long blue couch across the room from her. It seemed that they wouldn’t gather in the dining room this time. Mum and Dad were sitting on the silvery couch that was usually kept for guests, with Diana between them. Violet lounged on a chair that was half a circle away from them, looking bored.

Mum and Dad did both turn their heads when Riddle pranced through the door after Harry. Their stuffy expressions almost made the wanker’s presence worth it.

“This is a meeting for family only,” Mum said.

“Well, technically he’s family,” Harry said. “Technically your son-in-law.” Their stuffy expressions became more stuffed-up, and he flopped onto the blue couch, resisting the urge to cackle.

Riddle sat down a cushion away from him, studying Harry’s parents as if he had never met them before. Harry gave in to the urge to sigh. Just once, he would like it if someone listened to him and did what he wanted. He didn’t want Riddle to cause trouble. He was already in enough.

On the other hand, if there was that much trouble, what exactly could Riddle add?

Harry was still contemplating that when Diana spoke up, her voice soft. “Tom, when are you going to disassociate yourself from Harry and come back to me?”

“The ancient vows are for life. You knew that when I told you I wanted one.”

Harry gave Riddle a disgusted look. It was so obvious now how easily Riddle had manipulated Diana when he’d told her that he wanted an ancient vow, all the time intending to catch Harry in the trap instead. Harry got back an oblique dark-eyed look in return, and turned sharply away from him.

“There must be some way we can reverse this.” Dad sounded weary. “Some way that we can bring peace to the family again.”

“But I told you how, Dad.” Violet had that particular catch she got in her voice when someone didn’t listen to her. “Just accept Harry and Tom as part of the family. And accept that Harry is more powerful than you thought he was.”

“Powerful enough to bind Tom Riddle to him?” Mum sounded as if she didn’t know whether to accept that or not. On the one hand, Harry thought, exhausted beyond measure, she probably thought that would exempt Riddle from any blame, and they could still get him to take care of Diana somehow. On the other hand, that would mean admitting that they’d misjudged Harry’s power and intelligence.

“How can I have a future without Tom at my side?” Diana whispered.

“He can still be in the same room as you at family gatherings. It’s simple.”

“I don’t think your contributions to the conversation are doing much at this point, Violet.” Mum’s voice was exhausted, the way that Harry felt, and her eyes continually flickered back and forth between him and Tom as if she would notice some way to separate them if she just stared long enough. “Diana is right that can’t have a future without Tom.”

“Why would you assume that I’d be interested in babysitting your spoiled daughter?” Riddle’s voice was light. “Although I suppose it isn’t her fault that you’re such terrible parents. You’ve managed to raise a spoiled, lazy daughter and emotionally scar your son.”

“Leave me out of this,” Harry said fervently.

“But how can I, Harry? They deserve to hear it. They deserve to hear that when you discovered incredible magic, your first thought was to hide it from them, and doubt your capacities because they’ve told you and over how stupid you are.”

“What?” Lily puffed up like a quail. “We have never said that to him.”

“Well.” Riddle considered her. “I did think you smart enough to understand that you have implied it, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Stop it, Riddle,” Harry hissed out of the corner of his mouth.

“But why should I? Your mother is being fascinatingly obtuse. It’s about time that she was confronted with the results of her neglect, darling.”

“You call him darling?”

Riddle cast Diana a glance. “Yes. I needed a word that hadn’t been tainted by association with you, love. I’m sure that you understand. You are, after all, a genius.”

Violet laughed, which was the opposite of helping. Harry elbowed Riddle hard in the ribs and turned to his family. “Remus and Sirius both said that the ancient vows can’t be undone. I don’t want this git, but I’m stuck with him. I don’t have to live with him, though, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sticking around to suppress Diana’s magic.”

“You’re sure?” Riddle murmured, voice low and dangerous. “When you haven’t even asked me?”

“Oh, but it would make me happy.”

Harry made sure that his voice went up in a cheerful little chirp at the end, while Riddle stared at him with narrowed eyes. Then Riddle said, “You need not think that you are the only one who gets a say in this marriage.”

And Harry lost it.

He could feel himself losing it, as though someone had broken a strap in him that had been holding back some of the flood. He spun to face Riddle, and heard Mum gasp. He didn’t know if that was because of the look on his face or if his magic was getting out of control.

He didn’t care.

“You didn’t ask if I wanted this marriage, you arsehole!” he yelled. “You didn’t ask if I wanted to be humiliated in front of all those people! You didn’t ask if I wanted someone bound to me from the rest of my life, someone I always have to think about even when I don’t want him kissing and touching me—”

“Riddle kissed you before the wedding?”

“Oh, shut up, you wanker!” Harry snapped at his father without taking his eyes from a stunned Riddle, and James Potter did, maybe just in sheer surprise. “You’re someone who doesn’t give a shit about anyone else, Riddle, and somehow you think that makes you charming? Someone anyone would want? Someone I want to spend time around when he offers me nothing but continual disrespect and belittlement?”

Riddle had gone pale, but he hadn’t moved or taken his eyes off Harry. “And yet, you are willing to put up with treatment like that from your family.”

“That was my choice,” Harry said, even as his parents made faint protesting noises. “You weren’t! None of this is my fault, all of it’s yours! None of this is something I wanted.”

He closed his eyes on the end of the last sentence, his anger draining away. What did it matter? Riddle wasn’t going to listen to him, and his parents weren’t, either. He was still going to be the disobedient son who had betrayed his sister, and she was still going to be the broken little girl who couldn’t keep her magic under control.

Maybe more broken than ever, after this. Harry couldn’t imagine that being betrayed in front of the officiant would do anything good for her state of mind.

“We do not disrespect and belittle Harry.”

Riddle shifted next to him, and Harry opened his eyes. If he was about to get up and storm out of the room, then that could be a hopeful sign. Maybe it meant that he was reconsidering the marriage and would get as far away from Harry as the vow would allow him.

But Riddle was looking at his parents with a contemplative, deadly expression. Because, of course, dealing with the other Potters was probably easier for him than coming up with an answer to the question Harry had handed him, Harry thought.

“Yes, you do,” Riddle said. “Almost the first thing Diana told me was that her brother wasn’t as smart as she was. It’s so intelligent to go down into the Chamber of Secrets, chasing an older student with more knowledge of Dark Arts than you have, and with no backup.”

“I was trying to save Georgina!” Diana snaped.

Georgina, Harry remembered dimly. Georgina Fawcett, yes. That had been the name of the sixth-year Slytherin who had died when she opened the Chamber and tried to reverse the ritual that had trapped Riddle in the diary.

“How did you know you could? What made you think that there was anything worth doing down there, or that you could face Fawcett?” Riddle shook his head. “What took you down into the darkness was your obsessive need to play heroine, Diana. Nothing more.

“Then again, that’s hardly surprising considering that your parents have filled your head with nonsense from the time you were a baby. Thinking of themselves as geniuses. Teaching you that you were. Insisting that being a genius was the only worthwhile thing to be.”

“And why would you argue against that?” Mum’s eyes were wide, as if she was trying to spy some way through this mess and out the other side. “You’re a genius yourself. You don’t want someone to talk down to you, to—”

“No,” Riddle said, a dark smile playing along the sides of his mouth while his eyes shone crimson. “But neither do I feel the need to assert my uniqueness, as though intelligence made me better than someone else.”

He probably just thinks all his insults to those people within the privacy of his head, Harry decided.

“Why talk her brother down to me? It wasn’t as though I knew Harry at that point, or that he was in fact an unregarded genius.” Riddle flashed Harry a warm glance that made him wish for the crimson-tinted one Riddle was giving his family instead. “It led to an unfavorable first impression. But I was also an unknown, someone who had been trapped in a diary for fifty years and didn’t have any allies, so I let her prattle on.”

“Why describe it as prattling when you wanted to marry me less than a day ago?” Diana demanded in a choked voice.

“Because I never wanted to marry you,” Riddle said. “I thought it would be a good political move, but as for love and all that rot…” He shook his head. “You appealed to me as someone famous and powerful whom I could manipulate. Perhaps I might have tried molding your intelligence once you outgrew the teenage moodiness. But I never saw anyone I wanted to marry until I found out the truth about Harry.”

“You keep referring to the truth and that he’s an unregarded genius,” Violet said. “But Harry’s not good at one subject like the rest of us. What are you talking about?”

Riddle turned to Harry. “Well, darling? Do you want to tell them? It will probably be your only chance to get the respect from them that you’ve been chasing.”

Yes, Harry had wanted to tell them, but not like this. He stared at Riddle, but Riddle only sat there.

“It’s not real,” Diana said, with a little toss of her head that might have been meant to distract attention from her tear-bright eyes. “Harry drew him in and trapped him the way he made us think he’s a good person.”

Harry reached a breaking point again, and stood up. “Did you wonder why her magic suddenly calmed down again yesterday?” he asked his parents.

“I thought Tom had done something,” his mother said, hesitantly.

“I knew he hadn’t,” Violet said. “I thought she just decided to exert her will because she wasn’t getting what she wanted by behaving like a petulant child.”

“Violet.”

“You say my name whenever you don’t want me to be honest, Dad.” Violet shrugged. “I’m only trying to live up to the higher principles that you insisted I had to learn.”

“I did something,” Harry said. “I imagined the figure of a zero closing in around Diana and herding her magic back inside her body. That was what kept her from shaking the dining room apart. You might think me, Mum, Dad.”

“I might if what you had said made the least amount of sense.” Dad squinted at him. “What the hell are you talking about? You can’t do anything by imagining a number.”

“When you’ve cracked Heller’s Theorem,” Harry said, “you can.”

“But that’s a bit of childish nonsense that Heller came up with in his dying years.” Suddenly Violet was paying a lot more attention to the conversation than she had so far. “There’s nothing there to crack.”

Harry turned to look at her, glad for the interest in her face compared with the absolute disbelief in their parents’. “That’s what you might think. But I discovered that numbers can have multiple symbolic significances, and if your mind is flexible enough to manipulate them, then you can cause physical effects in the world.”

“But if numbers have different significances, then that means that you’ll get a different result each time.”

“Exactly. That’s why you need to focus hard on what you want to happen, not just on letting something random result.”

Violet looked distressed. “Equations don’t have different results each time.”

Harry started to answer, but Dad broke in, with a sound of doubt running through his words that Harry hated. “Harry, this is ridiculous. If you are going to make the claim to be a genius, stop teasing your sister and show us some real magic.”

Harry saw Riddle make an aborted motion out of the corner of his eye, but he turned his head and glared at him hard enough that Riddle froze. Riddle had got him into this; now the least he could do was hold off and let Harry answer the challenge in his own way.

Harry cupped his hands in front of him and thought, Nine.

The figure of a nine blazed in his mind, and Harry fed magic into it, lighting it up until it shone. Then he let his fingers fall, and water welled out between them, dripping to the floor. Everyone stared as it coiled into a long stream like the tail of a nine and then back on itself, flowing and continually interchanging, but leaving a small blank pool in the middle.

“There,” Harry said, and lifted his eyes to his parents’. “You can conjure water with Aguamenti, but you can’t get it to behave like that.”

Diana had no expression on her face, one of the few times that Harry had ever seen that particular thing happen. Dad was blinking hard, and Mum had her hand over her eyes.

Are they sorry that they mistreated me?

Then his mother dropped her hand and said, “This must be some trick.”

Harry felt the words like a blow in the center of his stomach, and stared at her numbly. Did she think he was out to steal Diana’s glory the way she thought Harry had stolen Diana’s husband?

“Water doesn’t behave that way,” Mum stated with calm confidence. “That means that there must be an illusion here.” She drew her wand and pointed it at the figure 9 made of water on the floor before Harry could say anything. “Finite Incantatem!”

The charm hit the water, and it vanished after one last flow around the figure. Mum squinted at where it had been as if expecting the illusion to break.

“It disappeared,” said Diana. “So it couldn’t be caused by Arithmancy, could it? Arithmantic equations don’t disappear when you aim your wand at them.”

“Because they’re only ink on paper,” said Riddle. “But this is magic, which can be ended with Finite Incatatem the same way most other simple spells can be. You fool.”

Harry was looking at his parents, though. Dad was shaking his head rapidly back and forth. Mum was the one who said, “Arithmancy can’t do that.”

“It’s no Arithmancy I understand,” Violet whispered from her chair. She still sounded like her world was breaking apart, and Harry would have said something to comfort her, if Mum hadn’t interrupted.

“Exactly. Harry, stop trying to trick your sisters and accept that just because you’re not as smart or talented—”

Zero, Harry thought desperately, caging his own power as it tried to rage out of him. Riddle’s hand touched his shoulder. Harry shrugged out from underneath it.

The Arithmancy magic wasn’t going to impress them. The strongest reaction it appeared to have caused was Violet’s distress. The equations that Harry had planned, that he’d studied and tailored so carefully so that when he completed them his personality would change to become more acceptable to his family, were going to be useless.

That left only one set of them. And Harry hadn’t wanted to pursue them, hadn’t wanted to accept that no matter what he did, he wouldn’t be good enough for his family.

He turned away and marched out of the room. He could hear Violet asking questions that were probably about Arithmancy, and Diana whining about something, and his parents giving weary answers.

The kind of patient weariness that they always had around his sisters. Around him, the patience was extinguished.

Why had he ever thought he would fit in?

Harry began to run. No one tried to stop him, although his parents had probably hoped for some sort of decisive confrontation out of today. The door was right in front of him soon enough, and Harry bolted out onto the grass and straight towards the Apparition point.

“Harry!”

That was Riddle. Harry ignored him; he was just one more complication that Harry couldn’t deal with right now. He spun on his heel and let the magic of Apparition pull him, flying, through space.

*

He ended up in his ritual circle, set up in a dim, shaded place deep in the Forest of Dean. This was the one place he could come to whenever he felt jangled and out of sorts, the way he felt now.

Although it had never been this bad before.

Harry sat down in the middle of the circle, his legs propped up so that his chin rested easily on them and his arms wrapped around his legs. He probably looked like a child, and he certainly felt like one, but he felt he’d earned a bit of childishness.

He’d wanted to make things better. He’d made them worse.

He’d wanted to be a genius like the rest of his family. He’d only proven that they’d never consider him one.

He’d wanted his parents to regret abandoning him with Sirius and Remus, to be proud of him. That was never going to happen.

He’d wanted some sort of close bond with his sisters, or the indifference to turn his back on them. Instead, he’d stolen what Diana held most dear, and confused and puzzled Violet. If she ever asked him questions about his new Arithmancy, he thought it would just be in an effort to steady and stabilize the kind of Arithmancy she already understood.

And in the middle of it all, he was stuck in a bloody unwanted marriage.

Harry felt his anger narrow and pinpoint that bloody marriage vow like a dragon breathing a steady stream of fire. He rose to his feet, shaking, his hands clasped together and wrenching until he hurt his wrists.

There was no way to break an ancient vow, was there? He couldn’t do anything because it was Riddle’s magic and not his that was bound?

Fuck that. He had done the impossible once before.

He could do it again.

Harry snatched up his wand and Transfigured a stick that was lying within the boundaries of the circle to have a sharp, pointed tip. The boundaries were only loosely-piled stones, which he rearranged in symbolic patterns when he wanted to activate it, and he could easily have reached outside it. But for the equations he had in mind, only a stick from within the circle would do.

“Harry?”

Riddle.

Harry turned and floated the rocks into stacks of stones piled flat on top of each other, a single stone on each level. He surrounded himself with a silent, protective set of ones, joined to the one person in the circle, and when Riddle strode up to the edge of the circle and tried to reach through it, his hand was thrown back with a flash and a roar.

Riddle cradled his visibly burned hand and stared at him. “Harry? Please. They’re not worth it, in any case. We don’t need them.”

“No, I needed them, and you made sure I couldn’t have them,” Harry snapped. “Fuck off, Riddle.”

“The roots of your alienation from them were set long before I entered the picture, and you know it.”

Harry suspected that might be true, but he blinked furious tears away and ignored Riddle. Instead, he scratched the first equation in the dirt.

11+2= 13.

As he drew the last figure, a steady hum rose from the ground in front of him. Harry grinned savagely. He hadn’t known that would happen, but he couldn’t say he minded, any more than he minded the light that had tossed Riddle away from the boundaries of the ritual circle. If he made his point with thunder and lightning, then Riddle might get the message.

“Harry? What are you doing?”

Harry directed a slashing look at Riddle that actually made him recoil of his own will. Harry then drew the second equation, the growling rumble growing louder as he completed it and drew a line to connect the two equations.

4+9= 13.

A human figure and a joined pair in the first equation. A symbol of foundations and stability, as four legs would hold up a table better than two and four legs made an animal sturdier than a human, and a flowing, connected figure, like the one he had placed the water in earlier, in the second equation.

And both adding up to the number that Harry nurtured only one association for: destruction, bad luck, chaos.

“Harry, tell me what’s going on.”

He took the time to glance at Riddle again and smiled fiercely to see an iridescent shell of magic bubbling around him. So. Riddle was feeling the effects of the equations already, although he probably didn’t know what they were.

Harry crouched down and added the third equation at an angle to the other two.

12+1= 13.

Twelve was a number he’d landed on as a figure of good luck and balance. He’d been twelve when he’d managed to join the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Twelve when he’d made a firm friend in his own House, Neville Longbottom. Twelve when he’d heard that a Mind-Healer had helped Violet speak full and regular sentences.

Twelve, plus the singular one who had come to unbalance him.

The growling of the equations was louder than thunder now, more like a waterfall. Harry looked at Riddle and found him pacing back and forth outside the boundary, staring at Harry as if his stare would make Harry melt on the spot and spontaneously cancel the ritual.

“I can be so good to you,” Riddle breathed. “All you have to do is give me a chance, Harry.”

Harry shook his head. “You’ve already shown that you don’t care what I think.” He raised his voice to be heard above the magic. “It’s time for me to show you that I don’t care about people who take my freedom from me.”

Glaring at Riddle, not looking down at the lines he was drawing in the dirt because he knew the exact position of the numbers so well, he completed the triangle that linked the equations.

The roar that arose nearly unbalanced him in return. Harry did have to turn back to the figures, to the three equations and the triangle rising from beneath them, floating them into the air on a slab of dirt and making the numbers glow with rich, buttery light.

Harry extended his hands, fighting to hold his balance. He could have used other equations that would add up to the number thirteen, but he had chosen exclusively ones that used one number that was much bigger than the other because he’d wanted this lack of balance. And the triangle beneath them added to it, a shape with an odd number of sides.

But also a powerful magical number. Number of a trinity, of morning and afternoon and evening, of two parents and a child—

Pain struck him and blew through him, as insubstantial as fire. Harry ground the pain out in himself in what felt like flickering sparks.

Harry slammed his hands together and roared out a wordless noise of pain and anger and denial. The emotions burned around him, spectral blue flames that arose and turned red and raced down the equations to their destined end.

Harry focused all of the magic on the ancient vow that bound Riddle’s magic to his.

May it take all the bad luck that thirteen can draw upon it, threefold!

Riddle screamed. Harry glanced over just enough to see that he had staggered to his knees, his arms wrapped around his head.

Harry smiled, and then the equations blew up.

The figures of 13 dissolved in sparks, and the sparks piled around Riddle and formed what looked like a miniature of the stone wall Harry had constructed around the edges of his circle. These stones, though, were made of more flames, and they bent inwards and eagerly began to consume the iridescent shell that had surrounded Riddle for several minutes.

Harry felt the moment that the ancient vow tying them together parted. So much bad luck and destruction drawn on it broke the bonds.

Harry laughed, at the same moment as the magic backlash destroyed the sparkling walls around Riddle and traveled towards him.

He’d planned for this, though. Harry lazily lifted a hand, and the triangle of dirt bearing the three equations that now were blank on the far side of their equals signs turned and spun to meet the backlash.

The magic chewed through the equals signs and then into the numbers nearest them. Harry watched, viciously satisfied, as the 2 disappeared, burned up, and left him uncoupled and free, a singular human being standing on his own two feet, on the other side of it.

The second wave hit the 9 in the second equation, and whirled around and around, drawn into its whirlpool and repeating curve, and then dissolved it. Harry rocked a little, but the 4 remained, and stabilized the foundation underneath him, a table with four legs, strong, unbroken.

It was a weak third wave that hit the third equation, but it was enough to eat the 1, and leave Harry, without the addition of Riddle, balanced and whole, afloat on his lucky number 12. He tilted his head back and laughed. He felt the bad luck that might have been his wisp away like smoke, consumed and overpowered.

He was free.

Harry patted the triangle gently and erased the lines that connected the remaining numbers, leaving the dirt to crumble back into the ground. Then Harry opened one of the stacks of stones and strode over to Riddle.

Riddle stared at him from the ground, dazed. He licked his lips and murmured, “Have you wished bad luck upon me for the rest of my life?”

Harry snorted. He heard the softest of whizzing noises behind him as the drawn figures of the 11, the 4, and the 12 left the ground and rotated around his head, blazing. Harry stretched out his hands and gathered their magic into himself.

He felt—centered. Drained. Whole in a way that he hadn’t felt in years, not since he had begun to realize that he would never be a genius like his sisters.

At the moment, he was that, and more than that.

Harry raised his eyebrows at Riddle. “No. I broke the ancient vow, and if you try to reintroduce any sort of magical claim over me again without my permission, then the backlash will probably render you a Squib. But it’s dormant bad luck, unless you provoke it.”

“Without your permission, you said. You might welcome me without that?”

Riddle’s voice was low and charged with passion. Harry shook his head. “You are certifiably insane, you know that?”

“Drawn to your magic. Drawn to you.”

Harry lifted a dubious eyebrow. “Uh-huh. Well, if that’s true, then you’ll have to meet me on equal ground, Riddle. No more sneaking about and kissing me against my will. I’m in control here, not you.”

Riddle’s eyes were as wide as full moons. He looked down and nodded.

Harry turned away with a snap and strode towards a place far enough away from the circle’s residual magic that he could safely Apparate, his heart singing inside him.

He was free. And he had the magic to guard and defend himself in case Riddle decided to pull some shit like this again.

He had the magic to guard and defend his heart against his family, even.

But Harry was no longer sure that he had to try to change his personality or grow his intelligence with equations. Look at what he had been able to accomplish by himself.

I should be enough for anyone.