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lomonaaerenTitle: Mirabilis
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing these characters for fun and not profit.
Content Notes: Massive AU (Harry Potter as the older sibling of the Girl-Who-Lived, living Potter parents), light angst, discussion of violence and child abuse
Pairing: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily
Rated: R
Wordcount: 4700
Summary: As Harry becomes the person Tom always knew he could be, Tom revels in the wonder he inspires in everyone—Tom included. Sequel to "Genius By the Numbers."
Author’s Notes: This is one of my Litha to Lammas fics for this year, a series of fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It's the sequel to a previous fic called "Genius by the Numbers," and I suggest that you don't try to read this one without having read that story. The title comes from the phrase annus mirabilis, a remarkable or miraculous year.
Mirabilis
"Are you with Harry Potter?"
Tom turned around with a polite smile. The witch behind him had blonde hair and silver eyes, and she clutched Harry's book in front of her as if it was a shield against unimaginable terrors. Her gaze focused on Tom for a second, and then roamed away to where Harry was leaning against the table the bookshop had set up for the signing, joking with Neville Longbottom. No one was queuing at the moment, but Tom had the feeling that they would be, as soon as the bookshop had its afternoon rush.
Harry's book explaining Heller's Theory and the different magical results that could be achieved with practical Arithmancy was just that popular.
"Yes," Tom said, preening internally that he could say that. "Harry will sign the book if you want, but he needs to know your name."
"Oh, he already knows it. It's the Nargles who might not."
Tom had just started to frown when Harry called out, "Luna!" and leaped away from the table like someone had cast the Killing Curse at him. He ran over and hugged the woman, breathing in as if to smell her scent from her hair. Tom narrowed his eyes.
He knew Harry was bisexual, and that they hadn't made a formal commitment of any kind after the marriage vow that Harry had managed to break. The fact remained, however, that Harry was his.
"Hello, Luna," Harry said, and drew back to smile down at her. "You don't need to buy a copy of the book, you know. I have one with your name on it."
Tom wanted to sigh. There was also a talk that he and Harry needed to have about the profit motive.
"That's sweet of you, Harry, but I want my name on this one." Luna held out her copy, which looked as if already had dogeared pages and scribbles in ink on the cover. Tom supposed he couldn't fault her dedication. "And my mother's."
Harry's face softened. "Of course." He reached out and picked up the quill from the table. It had been shaped with Arithmancy so that it always had dried ink on the end which turned wet the minute it approached paper or parchment. Harry considered the enchantment simple and had tried several times to explain it to Tom, but Tom didn't understand it. "Do you want 'Luna and Pandora Lovegood,' or something else?"
Lovegood. Tom studied Luna with new interest. He'd heard of this girl, and even briefly remembered her from Hogwarts--his second time, when he had incarnated again after coming out of the diary. However, he had been too busy establishing his backstory as a poor orphan trapped in the Horcrux and binding the Girl-Who-Lived tightly to him to pay her much attention.
She was dotty, Tom remembered. Mental. But one of Harry's dear friends, probably because Harry had felt he deserved nothing better than to be an outcast.
And more to the point, Harry had spoken of her with the kind of affection he gave his sister Violet, and not at all as someone he wanted to take to his bed.
"My mother's name," Lovegood said in a dreamy voice. "A space. Then my name. Then a space, and the name Selene."
"Why Selene?" Harry asked, writing busily. Tom admired the line of his neck and shoulders, and wondered again that someone who was such a genius with Arithmancy, so handsome, so powerful, hadn't been snapped up long before Tom came on the scene. Then again, that meant fewer murders Tom needed to arrange.
"That's the name Rolf and I are going to give our daughter."
Harry paused in his writing and looked up with genuine joy. "You're pregnant, Luna? Congratulations!" He leaped around the table to hug her again.
Tom stirred restlessly. Of course that was good news in its way, since it made it all the more unlikely that Lovegood would be a rival for Harry's affections. But did Harry have to act so enthusiastic and good-natured and as if he was going to hug everybody in sight?
Lovegood laughed aloud. "Of course not, Harry! I couldn't be out in public for the first three days of each month if I was pregnant, in case the moon spies on me. I just know that we'll have a little girl and that's what we're going to name her."
Normally, Tom knew, Harry would draw back from such a mistake embarrassed about having made it. But now he just laughed and shook his head. "If you say so, Luna."
"I know so. Meanwhile, you might want to give your children strong, protective names. They'll have to face storms in life."
Harry turned charmingly red. "I haven't considered children, Luna."
"You might want to." Lovegood patted his cheek and turned around. "Because there are lots of storms," she added over her shoulder. "Now I'm going to go home and try to make that equation you talk about on page 32 work."
"I could give you--"
"I wouldn't dream of standing in the way when there's someone who wants to speak to you," Lovegood said, and floated away.
Harry looked around as if he had no idea what she meant, but his eyes fell on Tom then, and he flushed a little. "Oh," he said. "Um. You can come up and speak to me if you want to, Tom. Of course."
Tom took his time sauntering up to the table, and enjoyed the way Harry's eyes strayed over his body, apparently unable to stop himself. Harry was entertaining, ever and always. "Didn't I tell you how many people would come to buy your book?" he murmured, leaning against the table and touching the leather cover of one of the books on the table. A Guide to Practical Arithmancy was bright blue, with silver on the front that picked out the letters in the title, the name of its author, and the several numbers that surrounded both in a corona. Tom traced the loop in the Y in Harry's name and smiled at him.
"Yes, you did." Harry's smile was rueful, but the way it made his eyes light up was anything but. "You were right, again. I feel like I should pay for dinner or something, but we did that last time you were right about something."
Longbottom cleared his throat softly. Tom knew without looking that he was embarrassed about the flirting Tom and Harry were doing.
He didn't need to be, but neither did he need to get over his embarrassment. As far as Tom was concerned, Longbottom mattered only because he had been a friend to Harry when no one else had. He did not exist outside that friendship.
"Let me get you out of the bookshop, and I will tell you what you can do for me," Tom said softly, touching Harry's cheek.
"Well, I'm going home," Longbottom said loudly. "It was nice to see you, Harry."
He turned and didn't sprint but also didn't saunter towards the front of the building. Harry sighed and stared at Tom. "I should make you do something for me in recompense for frightening my friends away."
"What would you like me to do?" Tom smiled at him, his eyes probably bright and overly adoring, but he couldn't help it. He would do anything for Harry, and he'd relish nothing more than the opportunity to prove it. "We could share the same bed tonight."
Harry flushed and ducked away. He had accepted kisses from Tom, touches, flirtation in public, wanks in private, declarations that they belonged together, but they hadn't had sex yet.
Tom was patient. He knew it would happen when Harry felt more comfortable. And if Tom had to keep proving himself Harry's friend and ally and companion and ideal lover for years, he would do that.
Some people might not understand why. But Tom did not care about them. His heart beat to one kind of music, and he had only ever in his life wanted to follow one man.
When he is ready, I will be here.
*
"What do you think they're doing here?"
Harry's agitation was obvious, even through the Parseltongue, which he had finally used his Arithmantic magic to give himself some months back. Tom caressed his hair and slowly down to the nape of his neck, watching in fascination as Harry's eyes fluttered and he turned his head to seek Tom's touch, which he once would have pulled away from.
"I don't know," Tom answered, looking at the Potters, who were approaching the front of the Magical Menagerie, the shop where Harry had once worked. He still sometimes went there to help the owner out, but between the success of his book and the families who had suddenly decided that Harry existed to tutor their brats in Arithmancy, he no longer needed the job to survive. "I am concerned that they apparently knew you would be coming today. You aren't there often anymore."
Harry nodded, and then pulled away from Tom with a sigh. "I suppose we can't know unless I go and ask them," he muttered.
"Or I could go and ask them," Tom said sweetly. With Legilimency, he also knew he would get a truthful answer, unlike Harry.
Harry rolled his eyes at him. Tom rolled his back. Harry looked tempted for a long second, before he shook his head and straightened as if standing up under an immense burden.
"It's a temptation," Harry admitted in a voice that hovered near a breath of sound. "But I need to know that I can face them for myself and not back down like I did for most of my childhood."
Tom sighed, annoyed that Harry had found the one explanation he wouldn't be able to resist. Harry cast him a fond look as they walked towards the door of the Magical Menagerie. "I know you would spare me from it if you could," he muttered, stepping in behind his family. "But we would both like me less if you did."
That was also the truth. Tom briefly lamented that he had come as close as he could to falling in love with someone who knew all these inconvenient things.
James and Lily Potter, when they came in, were looking around, lost, as if they had never seen Crups and Kneazles before. Diana was cooing over a pen of kittens, and Harry's youngest sister, Violet, stood off to the side, looking bored in a way that probably meant she was running numbers through her head. She was the first one to see Harry.
"Harry!" She gave him a tight smile. "Have you come to tell me about your Arithmancy the way you promised?"
Harry had time for a smile and a, "We'll do that when we're home and can concentrate on your books," before his parents ruined it. Tom watched them in boredom of his own. It might not be as intellectually stimulating to kill them as to watch Harry deal with them and who he would become in doing so, but it would make things more exciting for Tom. Briefly.
"Harry!" His mother had a smile on her face that might have been more convincing if she didn't keep glancing back and forth between Harry and Diana. She still thinks she has to defend her daughter from her supposedly non-genius son? Tom yawned. "We wanted to know if you would come out to dinner with us."
Harry blinked at her. "In public? In Diagon Alley?"
The bewilderment in his voice told Tom, as even Legilimency could not have, how rare such times had been during Harry's childhood. Tom bared his teeth. Most people looking at him would mistake it for a smile, but that didn't mean it was.
Diana glanced up briefly from the Kneazle kitten she was cuddling, and then back down at it in fierce determination.
"Of course!" James looked as if he was about to clap Harry on the back, but then caught Tom's eye and didn't. "We want to celebrate the success of your new book."
"The book that you told me would fail when I was writing it," Harry observed.
Tom snarled softly. That hadn't been something he knew about, and he had been sure that he knew about every Floo call and owl exchanged between Harry and his parents. One must have escaped his notice. He moved forwards to stand next to Harry, and stared at James over Harry's shoulder. James cleared his throat and pretended that he had wanted to look off to the side instead of dealing with Harry's question.
"Well, it's all different now that you've had a success, of course," Lily blundered in. Her smile was fixed, her eyes flickering back and forth between Harry and Tom as if she assumed that would somehow let her understand. "I mean--you must see that your book seemed wildly unlikely to be a success when you were writing it, Harry."
"What Mum means," Violet explained, "is that she still doesn't believe you could really use Arithmancy better than me or be more of a genius than her precious baby girl."
"Violet," James said, at the same moment Lily said, "That's not true!"
"I've found the things Violet says more likely to be true." Harry had stopped staring at his parents, and had a resigned smile on his face. "But it's not true that I use Arithmancy better than you, Violet. I just use it differently."
"Huh," Violet said.
"Harry--"
"I would keep quiet if I were you," Tom hissed at Lily Potter, so enraged that he could no longer stay in English. He felt Harry grab his hand and squeeze it, but at the moment, he didn't dare look that way. It was taking all Tom's control to keep his magic from bursting through his skin, and if he turned to Harry and saw the darkness of abandonment in his eyes, then Tom would destroy his parents.
"They can't understand you," Harry pointed out.
From the frightened turn of Diana's head, Tom thought that perhaps she could, that some fragment of her Parseltongue ability might have survived the loss of her Horcrux. But he nodded and eased back as much as he could. He wanted his enemies to back off at the sight and sound of him, not stare at him in bewildered fear the way Lily was doing right now.
"Don't threaten my wife," James said, which at least proved he was smart enough to recognize the tone of Parseltongue.
"Tell your wife to--"
"Arguing is boring," Violet said. "Can we just go home now? Harry doesn't want to eat lunch with us. And I have a new book to read."
"I'd like to eat lunch with you," Harry said firmly. "But Mum and Dad and Diana can head home any time, sure."
Tom wanted to laugh at how completely Harry's simple words destroyed the Potters' confidence. Diana jerked and almost dropped the kitten. James stared at them, and Lily took a step back, a small cry escaping her throat.
This is why I should let Harry take revenge on them, Tom exulted, leaning his head for a moment against the side of Harry's neck. Because it's better for him, and for me. And it destroys them so completely.
"Yeah, I'd like to eat lunch with you," Violet said. "Maybe you can explain why you're not better at Arithmancy when you wrote a book about it."
Harry laughed and gestured her over to him. "I'm not the one who took an Outstanding on my Arithmancy OWL."
"But you're the one who wrote a book about it," Violet repeated, using the words like an unanswerable talisman.
"Harry," James and Lily said together, and then fell silent as Harry looked at them.
"Go away, no one wants you here," Violet told her parents, and hooked her arm determinedly around Harry's. "Does Riddle have to come, too? Could he stay home while you and I talked about Arithmancy? It won't be very interesting to him."
"I always find Harry interesting," Tom purred.
Violet stared at him, then obviously shook her head as she dismissed that and pulled Harry out of the shop. Tom lingered for a moment to look at Diana and the Potters.
None of them met his eyes. His former fiancee's shoulders were hunched, and she was communing with the kitten in her arms as if her life depended on it. James and Lily had lost their words somewhere, and didn't find them in time to prevent Harry and Violet from walking out the door, already beginning to chat about numbers.
"Don't come near him again," Tom said.
It wasn't the same as revenge. It was a warning. And one that he hoped they would disregard, so he could watch Harry tear them to shreds again.
Harry poked his head back through the door of the shop. "Tom? Are you coming?"
Tom gave the Potters one more smile, which only James looked up to meet, and then followed his lover and the only other interesting person in the Potter family.
*
"But it's simple."
"To you and Violet," Tom said peaceably, looking up from the small table in the flat where Harry had once again spread out scraps of paper with numbers written on them. Harry was sitting in the chair on the other side, glaring at Tom. "But I don't have the kind of genius I would need to make sense of this Arithmancy."
Harry frowned at him. “I promise you, Tom, it’s not that you’re not a genius.”
Tom smiled, despite knowing that for Harry, those words had an awful note attached. Harry had been told, over and over, that he wasn’t a genius because he didn’t have an instinctive talent for some form of magic. That he’d had to develop it through training made him all the more impressive to Tom, but some of the Potters were idiots for all their vaunted gifts.
“That kind of genius, I did say.” Tom leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms above his head, working out the kinks that had happened while bent over the table to peer at the numbers Harry had written. Harry’s eyes lingered appreciatively on his muscles, and Tom gave him a soft, lascivious smile that made Harry smile back.
How different from the early days when I’d show off for him, and he would do nothing but shy away.
“I have other kinds,” Tom added. “For example, the kind that makes me want to demand a performance from you, right now, of the kind of things that Arithmancy can do.”
“A performance, hmmm?” Harry took one of the scraps of parchment and turned it over, stroking his fingers across it for a second as he smiled at Tom.
“Yes,” Tom said, and didn’t even curse himself when his voice came out breathless. This was one of the reasons he was with Harry, after all, Harry’s capacity to delight and surprise. “Yes, give me what you’ve got.”
“I’m tempted to conjure a bed, but you would get the wrong idea,” Harry murmured, and bent to his work.
He looked like a striking hawk when he did this, something Tom had told him before and Harry had never believed. Someday Tom would get a Pensieve and show him. But for now, all Tom wanted to do was watch the way that magic built around Harry in an invisible storm, and his eyes stared down at the numbers, and his hands formed soft cages and called down from the potential all that he wanted to be.
The parchment in front of Harry at the moment held a 5 and a 4 and a 1. Tom stared at them in fascination, not knowing what Harry would do with them. He sometimes made the equation the important thing, sometimes the individual numbers, and he had the flexibility of mind and imagination to shift the meanings he saw in them. A 5 didn’t always mean the same thing, and neither did any other number. Tom had seen him wield two-digit numbers as unique integers, and as combinations of the two numbers that made them up, and as both in the middle of the same equation. There was no telling what would happen next.
Harry linked together the numbers with long swathes of ink that bound them in what seemed to be separate eggs with jumping ropes swirling around them. Not an equation, then. But Tom had never seen those particular drawings before, either. He settled down to watch, with fascination as heavy as desire in his belly.
Harry brought his hands sharply together above the parchment, and all that storm-potential shifted and formed. Tom gasped aloud as a cat coalesced right in between Harry and the parchment and stared up at him, then at Harry.
It was obviously based on a Kneazle, taller and heavier than a regular cat, but that was where the resemblance ended. The eyes were brilliant violet, and the black fur crackled with soft strokes of lightning as the cat paced slowly back and forth across the table. It ended up facing Tom and opened its mouth.
Tom was prepared for it to vomit lightning at him and had already raised a shield, but somehow what did emerge from its mouth was more startling. A smooth baritone voice asked, “What is always broken when speaking of it?”
Tom blinked, and then said, “Silence.”
The cat bowed its head to him, and swished its tail once. Then it turned and looked at Harry. “Why have you called me into being, creator?” it asked. Its voice might have had hints of a purr, but it was deep enough that Tom thought he could hear striations of anger in it as well.
Harry bowed his head a little in turn. “I wanted to see if I could,” he said simply.
The riddle-cat paused and flared its claws out over the surface of the table. Then it said, “That is well-answered. I shall go away now,” and turned and sprang through the window that Harry had been keeping open for the breeze.
Tom watched it go, his heart thundering in his chest. He knew that the symbols Harry had drawn on the paper must have been, partially, to bind the life within the creature and make it permanent, but he didn’t think Harry had ever done something like that before.
“What did you think of the symbols as?” Tom whispered hoarsely, when long moments had passed and Harry was looking a little worried, as if he thought that he might have angered Tom.
“Four for the four legs,” Harry whispered back. “Five for the curls and twists of lightning it would carry about it. One for the one purpose it has in the world, to ask questions that may be riddles and may simply be profound.”
Tom shivered. He could never have done something like that, even if he had the power of Arithmancy to use the way Harry did.
That was what Harry didn’t seem to understand. Even if someone else did learn to do exactly as he did, his creations would still be unique, because no one’s mind worked the same way. Tom might have made a different creature, if he’d had Harry’s gift, but not the riddle-cat. And not out of the same numbers. And not for the same reasons.
The thought made Tom…
So damn hot.
Harry saw it in his eyes, and recognized the emotion, even though he might not have known exactly what inspired it. He let go a long swallow, and stared at Tom. Tom stared back, waiting for Harry to glance away and pretend ignorance the way he always did, or at least come over and just take care of it with a quick wank. Again, the way he always did.
Except, this time, he went on staring, and then his eyes lit up with an answering fire.
“I think,” he said, standing up and stretching much the way Tom had earlier, which made Tom’s eyes follow his muscles, “that I could do with company in bed.” And he held out his hand.
Tom stood up and stumbled over his own robes, going to him. His hands were shaking with pleasure and awe.
He had once thought the sweetest sensation possible was the surrender of a defeated enemy. Now he knew it was going to someone who was surrendering of his own free will, and taking you with him, so it wasn’t really a surrender at all.
*
Harry made love as fiercely as he did Arithmancy.
Somehow, it surprised Tom. It shouldn’t have. It was all there in Harry’s movements, in the way his eyes shone when he thought no one was looking, in the way that he had broken free from his abusive family and the supposedly unbreakable marriage vow Tom had once enforced on him and reality itself.
But there they were, tangled together in the bed, and Harry’s eyes were ablaze, and his face was red and shining, and his mouth was open with its panting, and Tom shuddered and arched his back as he felt Harry inside him, thrusting, giving that performance Tom had hinted and teased about earlier.
No one else had ever seen Harry like this, Tom was certain. No one else had ever known exactly what Harry was, when his masks fell and he made love secure in himself and without the whisper in the back of his head that he wasn’t worthy of consideration because he wasn’t a genius like the rest of his family.
Tom grabbed him and held him as he shuddered his way through an orgasm, faster and harder than he ever had. He would have been embarrassed about that except that this was Harry, and Harry would never laugh at him.
Harry, in fact, was looking at him with eyes just as full of awe in the moments before he closed them and shook. Tom sank his teeth into Harry’s shoulder and snarled, the sound muffled in flesh, shared by it, as Harry cried out.
Harry was his. He would not be leaving.
Harry fell on top of him and raked Tom’s shoulders with his fingernails, opening trails that might bleed and would surely scab. Tom didn’t care. Not when he looked at that bite mark, not when he thought about the kind of power and magic and might he was holding in his arms.
That thought, though, gave him the strength to ask what he’d never managed to so far.
“I know what you are,” he whispered, mouthing and nuzzling Harry’s throat. If that was so he didn’t have to look into Harry’s eyes, so what? No one else would ever know it, except Harry. “I know why I’m with you. But why are you with me? Why did you choose me after you made me sane? You didn’t need to.”
“You don’t know?”
Harry’s astonishment pulled Tom’s attention back to his face. Harry cupped his cheek gently with one hand, and Tom swallowed as he realized that Harry was still inside him. A privilege he had allowed no one else, ever.
“You’re the one who taught me to recognize myself,” Harry said, his voice as solemn as a song. “The one who let me know that I didn’t have to bow to the will of my family and what I could do was really extraordinary. Sure, you didn’t go about it the right way at first.” He stared at Tom, and Tom knew he wouldn’t forget the unbreakable marriage vow. Or rather, “unbreakable.” Tom smiled winsomely at him.
“But when we got past that,” Harry said, and fell silent for a minute. His fingers stroked slowly along Tom’s cheek, but they didn’t relax Tom, not now. He was poised, quivering, waiting for the final revelation that would justify his choices.
“You’re the one who trusted me to repair his soul,” Harry said finally, and bowed his head to kiss Tom on the lips.
There was reverence in that kiss. Trust. Understanding.
Tom twisted himself up and kissed back, just as passionately, just as needily, just as reverently.
For a man who had once thought he would never revere anything except himself, this was more than enough.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing these characters for fun and not profit.
Content Notes: Massive AU (Harry Potter as the older sibling of the Girl-Who-Lived, living Potter parents), light angst, discussion of violence and child abuse
Pairing: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily
Rated: R
Wordcount: 4700
Summary: As Harry becomes the person Tom always knew he could be, Tom revels in the wonder he inspires in everyone—Tom included. Sequel to "Genius By the Numbers."
Author’s Notes: This is one of my Litha to Lammas fics for this year, a series of fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It's the sequel to a previous fic called "Genius by the Numbers," and I suggest that you don't try to read this one without having read that story. The title comes from the phrase annus mirabilis, a remarkable or miraculous year.
Mirabilis
"Are you with Harry Potter?"
Tom turned around with a polite smile. The witch behind him had blonde hair and silver eyes, and she clutched Harry's book in front of her as if it was a shield against unimaginable terrors. Her gaze focused on Tom for a second, and then roamed away to where Harry was leaning against the table the bookshop had set up for the signing, joking with Neville Longbottom. No one was queuing at the moment, but Tom had the feeling that they would be, as soon as the bookshop had its afternoon rush.
Harry's book explaining Heller's Theory and the different magical results that could be achieved with practical Arithmancy was just that popular.
"Yes," Tom said, preening internally that he could say that. "Harry will sign the book if you want, but he needs to know your name."
"Oh, he already knows it. It's the Nargles who might not."
Tom had just started to frown when Harry called out, "Luna!" and leaped away from the table like someone had cast the Killing Curse at him. He ran over and hugged the woman, breathing in as if to smell her scent from her hair. Tom narrowed his eyes.
He knew Harry was bisexual, and that they hadn't made a formal commitment of any kind after the marriage vow that Harry had managed to break. The fact remained, however, that Harry was his.
"Hello, Luna," Harry said, and drew back to smile down at her. "You don't need to buy a copy of the book, you know. I have one with your name on it."
Tom wanted to sigh. There was also a talk that he and Harry needed to have about the profit motive.
"That's sweet of you, Harry, but I want my name on this one." Luna held out her copy, which looked as if already had dogeared pages and scribbles in ink on the cover. Tom supposed he couldn't fault her dedication. "And my mother's."
Harry's face softened. "Of course." He reached out and picked up the quill from the table. It had been shaped with Arithmancy so that it always had dried ink on the end which turned wet the minute it approached paper or parchment. Harry considered the enchantment simple and had tried several times to explain it to Tom, but Tom didn't understand it. "Do you want 'Luna and Pandora Lovegood,' or something else?"
Lovegood. Tom studied Luna with new interest. He'd heard of this girl, and even briefly remembered her from Hogwarts--his second time, when he had incarnated again after coming out of the diary. However, he had been too busy establishing his backstory as a poor orphan trapped in the Horcrux and binding the Girl-Who-Lived tightly to him to pay her much attention.
She was dotty, Tom remembered. Mental. But one of Harry's dear friends, probably because Harry had felt he deserved nothing better than to be an outcast.
And more to the point, Harry had spoken of her with the kind of affection he gave his sister Violet, and not at all as someone he wanted to take to his bed.
"My mother's name," Lovegood said in a dreamy voice. "A space. Then my name. Then a space, and the name Selene."
"Why Selene?" Harry asked, writing busily. Tom admired the line of his neck and shoulders, and wondered again that someone who was such a genius with Arithmancy, so handsome, so powerful, hadn't been snapped up long before Tom came on the scene. Then again, that meant fewer murders Tom needed to arrange.
"That's the name Rolf and I are going to give our daughter."
Harry paused in his writing and looked up with genuine joy. "You're pregnant, Luna? Congratulations!" He leaped around the table to hug her again.
Tom stirred restlessly. Of course that was good news in its way, since it made it all the more unlikely that Lovegood would be a rival for Harry's affections. But did Harry have to act so enthusiastic and good-natured and as if he was going to hug everybody in sight?
Lovegood laughed aloud. "Of course not, Harry! I couldn't be out in public for the first three days of each month if I was pregnant, in case the moon spies on me. I just know that we'll have a little girl and that's what we're going to name her."
Normally, Tom knew, Harry would draw back from such a mistake embarrassed about having made it. But now he just laughed and shook his head. "If you say so, Luna."
"I know so. Meanwhile, you might want to give your children strong, protective names. They'll have to face storms in life."
Harry turned charmingly red. "I haven't considered children, Luna."
"You might want to." Lovegood patted his cheek and turned around. "Because there are lots of storms," she added over her shoulder. "Now I'm going to go home and try to make that equation you talk about on page 32 work."
"I could give you--"
"I wouldn't dream of standing in the way when there's someone who wants to speak to you," Lovegood said, and floated away.
Harry looked around as if he had no idea what she meant, but his eyes fell on Tom then, and he flushed a little. "Oh," he said. "Um. You can come up and speak to me if you want to, Tom. Of course."
Tom took his time sauntering up to the table, and enjoyed the way Harry's eyes strayed over his body, apparently unable to stop himself. Harry was entertaining, ever and always. "Didn't I tell you how many people would come to buy your book?" he murmured, leaning against the table and touching the leather cover of one of the books on the table. A Guide to Practical Arithmancy was bright blue, with silver on the front that picked out the letters in the title, the name of its author, and the several numbers that surrounded both in a corona. Tom traced the loop in the Y in Harry's name and smiled at him.
"Yes, you did." Harry's smile was rueful, but the way it made his eyes light up was anything but. "You were right, again. I feel like I should pay for dinner or something, but we did that last time you were right about something."
Longbottom cleared his throat softly. Tom knew without looking that he was embarrassed about the flirting Tom and Harry were doing.
He didn't need to be, but neither did he need to get over his embarrassment. As far as Tom was concerned, Longbottom mattered only because he had been a friend to Harry when no one else had. He did not exist outside that friendship.
"Let me get you out of the bookshop, and I will tell you what you can do for me," Tom said softly, touching Harry's cheek.
"Well, I'm going home," Longbottom said loudly. "It was nice to see you, Harry."
He turned and didn't sprint but also didn't saunter towards the front of the building. Harry sighed and stared at Tom. "I should make you do something for me in recompense for frightening my friends away."
"What would you like me to do?" Tom smiled at him, his eyes probably bright and overly adoring, but he couldn't help it. He would do anything for Harry, and he'd relish nothing more than the opportunity to prove it. "We could share the same bed tonight."
Harry flushed and ducked away. He had accepted kisses from Tom, touches, flirtation in public, wanks in private, declarations that they belonged together, but they hadn't had sex yet.
Tom was patient. He knew it would happen when Harry felt more comfortable. And if Tom had to keep proving himself Harry's friend and ally and companion and ideal lover for years, he would do that.
Some people might not understand why. But Tom did not care about them. His heart beat to one kind of music, and he had only ever in his life wanted to follow one man.
When he is ready, I will be here.
*
"What do you think they're doing here?"
Harry's agitation was obvious, even through the Parseltongue, which he had finally used his Arithmantic magic to give himself some months back. Tom caressed his hair and slowly down to the nape of his neck, watching in fascination as Harry's eyes fluttered and he turned his head to seek Tom's touch, which he once would have pulled away from.
"I don't know," Tom answered, looking at the Potters, who were approaching the front of the Magical Menagerie, the shop where Harry had once worked. He still sometimes went there to help the owner out, but between the success of his book and the families who had suddenly decided that Harry existed to tutor their brats in Arithmancy, he no longer needed the job to survive. "I am concerned that they apparently knew you would be coming today. You aren't there often anymore."
Harry nodded, and then pulled away from Tom with a sigh. "I suppose we can't know unless I go and ask them," he muttered.
"Or I could go and ask them," Tom said sweetly. With Legilimency, he also knew he would get a truthful answer, unlike Harry.
Harry rolled his eyes at him. Tom rolled his back. Harry looked tempted for a long second, before he shook his head and straightened as if standing up under an immense burden.
"It's a temptation," Harry admitted in a voice that hovered near a breath of sound. "But I need to know that I can face them for myself and not back down like I did for most of my childhood."
Tom sighed, annoyed that Harry had found the one explanation he wouldn't be able to resist. Harry cast him a fond look as they walked towards the door of the Magical Menagerie. "I know you would spare me from it if you could," he muttered, stepping in behind his family. "But we would both like me less if you did."
That was also the truth. Tom briefly lamented that he had come as close as he could to falling in love with someone who knew all these inconvenient things.
James and Lily Potter, when they came in, were looking around, lost, as if they had never seen Crups and Kneazles before. Diana was cooing over a pen of kittens, and Harry's youngest sister, Violet, stood off to the side, looking bored in a way that probably meant she was running numbers through her head. She was the first one to see Harry.
"Harry!" She gave him a tight smile. "Have you come to tell me about your Arithmancy the way you promised?"
Harry had time for a smile and a, "We'll do that when we're home and can concentrate on your books," before his parents ruined it. Tom watched them in boredom of his own. It might not be as intellectually stimulating to kill them as to watch Harry deal with them and who he would become in doing so, but it would make things more exciting for Tom. Briefly.
"Harry!" His mother had a smile on her face that might have been more convincing if she didn't keep glancing back and forth between Harry and Diana. She still thinks she has to defend her daughter from her supposedly non-genius son? Tom yawned. "We wanted to know if you would come out to dinner with us."
Harry blinked at her. "In public? In Diagon Alley?"
The bewilderment in his voice told Tom, as even Legilimency could not have, how rare such times had been during Harry's childhood. Tom bared his teeth. Most people looking at him would mistake it for a smile, but that didn't mean it was.
Diana glanced up briefly from the Kneazle kitten she was cuddling, and then back down at it in fierce determination.
"Of course!" James looked as if he was about to clap Harry on the back, but then caught Tom's eye and didn't. "We want to celebrate the success of your new book."
"The book that you told me would fail when I was writing it," Harry observed.
Tom snarled softly. That hadn't been something he knew about, and he had been sure that he knew about every Floo call and owl exchanged between Harry and his parents. One must have escaped his notice. He moved forwards to stand next to Harry, and stared at James over Harry's shoulder. James cleared his throat and pretended that he had wanted to look off to the side instead of dealing with Harry's question.
"Well, it's all different now that you've had a success, of course," Lily blundered in. Her smile was fixed, her eyes flickering back and forth between Harry and Tom as if she assumed that would somehow let her understand. "I mean--you must see that your book seemed wildly unlikely to be a success when you were writing it, Harry."
"What Mum means," Violet explained, "is that she still doesn't believe you could really use Arithmancy better than me or be more of a genius than her precious baby girl."
"Violet," James said, at the same moment Lily said, "That's not true!"
"I've found the things Violet says more likely to be true." Harry had stopped staring at his parents, and had a resigned smile on his face. "But it's not true that I use Arithmancy better than you, Violet. I just use it differently."
"Huh," Violet said.
"Harry--"
"I would keep quiet if I were you," Tom hissed at Lily Potter, so enraged that he could no longer stay in English. He felt Harry grab his hand and squeeze it, but at the moment, he didn't dare look that way. It was taking all Tom's control to keep his magic from bursting through his skin, and if he turned to Harry and saw the darkness of abandonment in his eyes, then Tom would destroy his parents.
"They can't understand you," Harry pointed out.
From the frightened turn of Diana's head, Tom thought that perhaps she could, that some fragment of her Parseltongue ability might have survived the loss of her Horcrux. But he nodded and eased back as much as he could. He wanted his enemies to back off at the sight and sound of him, not stare at him in bewildered fear the way Lily was doing right now.
"Don't threaten my wife," James said, which at least proved he was smart enough to recognize the tone of Parseltongue.
"Tell your wife to--"
"Arguing is boring," Violet said. "Can we just go home now? Harry doesn't want to eat lunch with us. And I have a new book to read."
"I'd like to eat lunch with you," Harry said firmly. "But Mum and Dad and Diana can head home any time, sure."
Tom wanted to laugh at how completely Harry's simple words destroyed the Potters' confidence. Diana jerked and almost dropped the kitten. James stared at them, and Lily took a step back, a small cry escaping her throat.
This is why I should let Harry take revenge on them, Tom exulted, leaning his head for a moment against the side of Harry's neck. Because it's better for him, and for me. And it destroys them so completely.
"Yeah, I'd like to eat lunch with you," Violet said. "Maybe you can explain why you're not better at Arithmancy when you wrote a book about it."
Harry laughed and gestured her over to him. "I'm not the one who took an Outstanding on my Arithmancy OWL."
"But you're the one who wrote a book about it," Violet repeated, using the words like an unanswerable talisman.
"Harry," James and Lily said together, and then fell silent as Harry looked at them.
"Go away, no one wants you here," Violet told her parents, and hooked her arm determinedly around Harry's. "Does Riddle have to come, too? Could he stay home while you and I talked about Arithmancy? It won't be very interesting to him."
"I always find Harry interesting," Tom purred.
Violet stared at him, then obviously shook her head as she dismissed that and pulled Harry out of the shop. Tom lingered for a moment to look at Diana and the Potters.
None of them met his eyes. His former fiancee's shoulders were hunched, and she was communing with the kitten in her arms as if her life depended on it. James and Lily had lost their words somewhere, and didn't find them in time to prevent Harry and Violet from walking out the door, already beginning to chat about numbers.
"Don't come near him again," Tom said.
It wasn't the same as revenge. It was a warning. And one that he hoped they would disregard, so he could watch Harry tear them to shreds again.
Harry poked his head back through the door of the shop. "Tom? Are you coming?"
Tom gave the Potters one more smile, which only James looked up to meet, and then followed his lover and the only other interesting person in the Potter family.
*
"But it's simple."
"To you and Violet," Tom said peaceably, looking up from the small table in the flat where Harry had once again spread out scraps of paper with numbers written on them. Harry was sitting in the chair on the other side, glaring at Tom. "But I don't have the kind of genius I would need to make sense of this Arithmancy."
Harry frowned at him. “I promise you, Tom, it’s not that you’re not a genius.”
Tom smiled, despite knowing that for Harry, those words had an awful note attached. Harry had been told, over and over, that he wasn’t a genius because he didn’t have an instinctive talent for some form of magic. That he’d had to develop it through training made him all the more impressive to Tom, but some of the Potters were idiots for all their vaunted gifts.
“That kind of genius, I did say.” Tom leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms above his head, working out the kinks that had happened while bent over the table to peer at the numbers Harry had written. Harry’s eyes lingered appreciatively on his muscles, and Tom gave him a soft, lascivious smile that made Harry smile back.
How different from the early days when I’d show off for him, and he would do nothing but shy away.
“I have other kinds,” Tom added. “For example, the kind that makes me want to demand a performance from you, right now, of the kind of things that Arithmancy can do.”
“A performance, hmmm?” Harry took one of the scraps of parchment and turned it over, stroking his fingers across it for a second as he smiled at Tom.
“Yes,” Tom said, and didn’t even curse himself when his voice came out breathless. This was one of the reasons he was with Harry, after all, Harry’s capacity to delight and surprise. “Yes, give me what you’ve got.”
“I’m tempted to conjure a bed, but you would get the wrong idea,” Harry murmured, and bent to his work.
He looked like a striking hawk when he did this, something Tom had told him before and Harry had never believed. Someday Tom would get a Pensieve and show him. But for now, all Tom wanted to do was watch the way that magic built around Harry in an invisible storm, and his eyes stared down at the numbers, and his hands formed soft cages and called down from the potential all that he wanted to be.
The parchment in front of Harry at the moment held a 5 and a 4 and a 1. Tom stared at them in fascination, not knowing what Harry would do with them. He sometimes made the equation the important thing, sometimes the individual numbers, and he had the flexibility of mind and imagination to shift the meanings he saw in them. A 5 didn’t always mean the same thing, and neither did any other number. Tom had seen him wield two-digit numbers as unique integers, and as combinations of the two numbers that made them up, and as both in the middle of the same equation. There was no telling what would happen next.
Harry linked together the numbers with long swathes of ink that bound them in what seemed to be separate eggs with jumping ropes swirling around them. Not an equation, then. But Tom had never seen those particular drawings before, either. He settled down to watch, with fascination as heavy as desire in his belly.
Harry brought his hands sharply together above the parchment, and all that storm-potential shifted and formed. Tom gasped aloud as a cat coalesced right in between Harry and the parchment and stared up at him, then at Harry.
It was obviously based on a Kneazle, taller and heavier than a regular cat, but that was where the resemblance ended. The eyes were brilliant violet, and the black fur crackled with soft strokes of lightning as the cat paced slowly back and forth across the table. It ended up facing Tom and opened its mouth.
Tom was prepared for it to vomit lightning at him and had already raised a shield, but somehow what did emerge from its mouth was more startling. A smooth baritone voice asked, “What is always broken when speaking of it?”
Tom blinked, and then said, “Silence.”
The cat bowed its head to him, and swished its tail once. Then it turned and looked at Harry. “Why have you called me into being, creator?” it asked. Its voice might have had hints of a purr, but it was deep enough that Tom thought he could hear striations of anger in it as well.
Harry bowed his head a little in turn. “I wanted to see if I could,” he said simply.
The riddle-cat paused and flared its claws out over the surface of the table. Then it said, “That is well-answered. I shall go away now,” and turned and sprang through the window that Harry had been keeping open for the breeze.
Tom watched it go, his heart thundering in his chest. He knew that the symbols Harry had drawn on the paper must have been, partially, to bind the life within the creature and make it permanent, but he didn’t think Harry had ever done something like that before.
“What did you think of the symbols as?” Tom whispered hoarsely, when long moments had passed and Harry was looking a little worried, as if he thought that he might have angered Tom.
“Four for the four legs,” Harry whispered back. “Five for the curls and twists of lightning it would carry about it. One for the one purpose it has in the world, to ask questions that may be riddles and may simply be profound.”
Tom shivered. He could never have done something like that, even if he had the power of Arithmancy to use the way Harry did.
That was what Harry didn’t seem to understand. Even if someone else did learn to do exactly as he did, his creations would still be unique, because no one’s mind worked the same way. Tom might have made a different creature, if he’d had Harry’s gift, but not the riddle-cat. And not out of the same numbers. And not for the same reasons.
The thought made Tom…
So damn hot.
Harry saw it in his eyes, and recognized the emotion, even though he might not have known exactly what inspired it. He let go a long swallow, and stared at Tom. Tom stared back, waiting for Harry to glance away and pretend ignorance the way he always did, or at least come over and just take care of it with a quick wank. Again, the way he always did.
Except, this time, he went on staring, and then his eyes lit up with an answering fire.
“I think,” he said, standing up and stretching much the way Tom had earlier, which made Tom’s eyes follow his muscles, “that I could do with company in bed.” And he held out his hand.
Tom stood up and stumbled over his own robes, going to him. His hands were shaking with pleasure and awe.
He had once thought the sweetest sensation possible was the surrender of a defeated enemy. Now he knew it was going to someone who was surrendering of his own free will, and taking you with him, so it wasn’t really a surrender at all.
*
Harry made love as fiercely as he did Arithmancy.
Somehow, it surprised Tom. It shouldn’t have. It was all there in Harry’s movements, in the way his eyes shone when he thought no one was looking, in the way that he had broken free from his abusive family and the supposedly unbreakable marriage vow Tom had once enforced on him and reality itself.
But there they were, tangled together in the bed, and Harry’s eyes were ablaze, and his face was red and shining, and his mouth was open with its panting, and Tom shuddered and arched his back as he felt Harry inside him, thrusting, giving that performance Tom had hinted and teased about earlier.
No one else had ever seen Harry like this, Tom was certain. No one else had ever known exactly what Harry was, when his masks fell and he made love secure in himself and without the whisper in the back of his head that he wasn’t worthy of consideration because he wasn’t a genius like the rest of his family.
Tom grabbed him and held him as he shuddered his way through an orgasm, faster and harder than he ever had. He would have been embarrassed about that except that this was Harry, and Harry would never laugh at him.
Harry, in fact, was looking at him with eyes just as full of awe in the moments before he closed them and shook. Tom sank his teeth into Harry’s shoulder and snarled, the sound muffled in flesh, shared by it, as Harry cried out.
Harry was his. He would not be leaving.
Harry fell on top of him and raked Tom’s shoulders with his fingernails, opening trails that might bleed and would surely scab. Tom didn’t care. Not when he looked at that bite mark, not when he thought about the kind of power and magic and might he was holding in his arms.
That thought, though, gave him the strength to ask what he’d never managed to so far.
“I know what you are,” he whispered, mouthing and nuzzling Harry’s throat. If that was so he didn’t have to look into Harry’s eyes, so what? No one else would ever know it, except Harry. “I know why I’m with you. But why are you with me? Why did you choose me after you made me sane? You didn’t need to.”
“You don’t know?”
Harry’s astonishment pulled Tom’s attention back to his face. Harry cupped his cheek gently with one hand, and Tom swallowed as he realized that Harry was still inside him. A privilege he had allowed no one else, ever.
“You’re the one who taught me to recognize myself,” Harry said, his voice as solemn as a song. “The one who let me know that I didn’t have to bow to the will of my family and what I could do was really extraordinary. Sure, you didn’t go about it the right way at first.” He stared at Tom, and Tom knew he wouldn’t forget the unbreakable marriage vow. Or rather, “unbreakable.” Tom smiled winsomely at him.
“But when we got past that,” Harry said, and fell silent for a minute. His fingers stroked slowly along Tom’s cheek, but they didn’t relax Tom, not now. He was poised, quivering, waiting for the final revelation that would justify his choices.
“You’re the one who trusted me to repair his soul,” Harry said finally, and bowed his head to kiss Tom on the lips.
There was reverence in that kiss. Trust. Understanding.
Tom twisted himself up and kissed back, just as passionately, just as needily, just as reverently.
For a man who had once thought he would never revere anything except himself, this was more than enough.
The End.
