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lomonaaerenTitle: Evidence of Absence
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle
Content Notes: AU (no Voldemort), angst, obsessive Tom, Defense professor Tom Riddle
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Note: The title comes from the saying, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“Tom, my dear boy, I wonder if you would mind giving me your observations of a student.”
Tom blinked slowly, pulling his attention away from Nagini, who was coiled up around his feet at the professors’ table and telling him all about the hunt she’d had last night. “Pardon, Albus?” he asked, stirring a spoon through the remains of the omelet on his plate. He was no longer hungry.
“A student.” Albus gave him a slightly condescending smile. “The reason all of us are here?”
Tom lifted a shoulder in a shrug. He and Albus had achieved a truce over the years, one created more by the worn grooves of habit and working together than any cordiality. “Yes, all right, Headmaster. Which one?”
“Harry Potter.”
Tom blinked a little. Harry Potter was in his NEWT Defense class, but nothing remarkable. He had got an Acceptable on his OWL, that was all. He kept his head down in the class, turned in average essays, won perhaps forty percent of the duels that Tom set him to with other members of the class, and was headed for nothing more important than some kind of Ministry desk job, or perhaps one at the prank shop that his father ran with Sirius Black. “What about him?”
“His parents are worried about him.” Albus gazed across the Great Hall at the noisy, chattering Gryffindor table. Tom looked with him, but honestly couldn’t even pick out Potter’s head at this distance, so little impression had the boy made on him. “Apparently he’s been sneaking out at night, and he’s also had problems at home.”
Tom made a slightly irritated noise. “I’m not his Head of House. Why not ask Minerva?”
“Because she tried to follow him, and he gave her the slip. And she’s had him into her office for tea and biscuits, and he still refuses to confess.”
Tom’s interest grew a little. He had a prickly sort of friendship with Minerva, like two hedgehogs who had decided to travel together for a time, and he knew she was good at using that tea-and-biscuits routine to get her Gryffindors to talk. It was also more than a little odd that a boy whose greatest skill was, as Tom had heard, on the Quidditch field would manage to evade an experienced professor. “In her Animagus form?”
Albus nodded.
Tom tilted his head, interest sharpened. That no doubt was why Albus had given him this task, because he knew Tom would stop at nothing once his interest was engaged, and he was more than good enough to follow a sneaking student.
“Yes, all right, Albus,” Tom said, eyes scanning the Gryffindor table again. There, he thought he saw a shock of wild black hair that might be Potter. “I’ll follow him tonight, assuming he goes out, and report his destination to you.”
Albus smiled at him. “Thank you, my dear boy. I knew I could count on you.”
“You smell of irritation,” Nagini said from under the table. “I don’t like it.”
Tom ran a hand down her neck. “No matter, my dear one. Albus has asked me to investigate a mystery, but has done it in a patronizing way.” He felt her tongue dart against his palm in acknowledgement.
No one at the table with him flinched. The general population in magical Britain might think of Parseltongue as a Dark Art, but to his colleagues, it was simply another Thursday morning.
*
When he thought about it, Tom supposed there was one thing that had stood out to him about Potter before Albus’s request. His first two years at Hogwarts, he’d been one of the bright-eyed, endlessly-rushing Gryffindors who had assumed they would automatically be good at everything they wanted to be good at. Tom had taught them better in his Defense classes, but Potter had adapted and even seemed to enjoy the challenge. Tom remembered marking him, near the end of a second year, as one of the rare students who might display real prowess at Defense in the future and would need careful guidance.
Then he had come back at the beginning of third year much quieter, and that had started his slide into Acceptables and losing most of his practice duels. Tom had even forgotten, up until this point, that he had once thought he might apprentice Potter.
Tom’s eyes narrowed as he revised his records. Potter’s marks and essays and duels were average. Carefully so. There was no fluke where he had done well on an exam or got a spell more easily than other students did, even though that was the case for every other student in the class, and even though Tom had heard from Minerva and Filius when he asked this morning that it did happen for Potter in Transfiguration and Charms.
He’s hiding. So skillfully I never noticed.
Tom tore himself away from his desk with a snarl. He hated being tricked. He hated more being tricked in such a way that he would never have noticed if not for Albus calling his attention to the situation.
Yes, he and Albus cordially disliked each other and launched such ploys against each other all the time, but that—that was Albus. Tom respected him as a wizard of incredible power, and it made sense that he was a worthy opponent for Tom.
A seventh-year student, who had only been attempting to actively conceal his interest in Defense, or his power, or whatever it was, for a few years now?
Tom would find out.
*
Tracking Potter was indeed not easy.
Tom knew that the boy had an Invisibility Cloak, and he had assumed that was what had made Minerva lose track of him when she’d tried to follow him as a cat. But no, the boy simply cast charms with an incredible ease that blurred the air behind him and smoothed out his tracks and actually made Tom stop for a moment and turn back towards the castle, forgetting what in the world he was out here for.
That one only lasted until Tom came out of the immediate area where it had been launched, proving that the spell’s area of effect was a sphere perhaps a meter across. But it made Tom jerk to a stop and grind his teeth.
Because there was no spell like that. Never mind that such a spell shouldn’t have been able to get past the barriers that, as a trained Occlumens, he could raise against it, although he had probably only been able to shake off the effect once he moved outside the sphere because of his Occlumency.
No, the spell literally did not exist.
Tom stalked after Potter, muffling his own footsteps and his scent with spells, using a Disillusionment Charm with enough power behind it to make someone’s eyes water if they did try to look at him. He could feel something he hadn’t felt in years stirring. More than obsession, more than desire to solve a puzzle, more than determination to pull a poor student up the class rankings.
Hunger. He wanted to find Potter and strip him of his secrets.
He followed Potter into the Forbidden Forest through long, twisting, branch-choked paths and game trails. Tom was frowning by the time he reached the end of it, in a larger clearing carpeted with shining green grass that might have been a unicorn birthing spot.
What had Potter gone to such great lengths to hide? Enthrallment to a vampire? Selling illicit goods to a smuggler? Hunting and poaching unicorns? Tom would almost have bet on that one, considering the strength of Potter’s defenses and the look of the clearing.
He almost stumbled on Potter, kneeling in the middle of the grass. Tom managed to withdraw to the shelter of a tall oak just in time and watch the boy as he flung back his hood.
Even then, Potter glanced warily around, turning in a complete circle on his knees, before he turned back to face the taller grass on the other side of the clearing where it let back into the Forest.
Tom watched intently, hands clenched in front of him, and saw the moment when the grass stirred and trembled. He held his breath.
Out came a beautiful green serpent, covered over with golden ripples and spots like light on the surface of running water. Tom estimated her as not much smaller than Nagini. He had never seen her kind before.
Enchanted, he watched her crawl towards Potter, who continued to kneel in one place with a miserable expression. Tom wondered now if this snake perhaps bit Potter and injected some kind of euphoric venom in exchange for something he could bring her. It was his best guess for what was going on.
Unless, of course, the serpent was some smuggler’s familiar, come to lead Potter deeper into the Forest—
“You have returned.”
For a wild moment, Tom thought the snake had sensed him and was speaking Parseltongue to him, but then he realized she was swaying slowly in front of Potter, speaking directly to him, and her voice was full of delight.
“Yes. I did say I would.”
Tom sucked in a harsh breath. Potter was responding. In Parseltongue.
Tom knew there were no other Parselmouths in Britain. He knew because he had searched for them wildly, obsessively, and the only ones he had ever found were the remains of his mother’s pitiful family. He had held back from killing Morfin, although it had been hard, as he had held back from killing the Riddles. Instead, he had gone away to make himself ultimately great, to pursue paths and the deeper magic that no one among mortals wielded anymore. That search had given him what he sought—except other Parselmouths.
Tom was content to be alone in the possession of his power. But his longing for other Parselmouths had been intense and continual. Tom had come to guess that that longing was itself part of the gift, a mirror of the longing that drove serpents to seek out speakers. Tom could have had a dozen familiars if Nagini were not so jealous.
And here was one of them, right under his nose, so skillfully hidden that Tom might have missed him entirely, except that Albus had asked him to look into this mystery.
Tom felt scorched by the flames of his own yearning, but he managed to remain still and listen to Potter and the snake’s conversation. He had plenty of time to intercept Potter on his way back to the castle.
“Why are you so sad?” The serpent was entwining herself around Potter, his legs and his arms and his chest and his neck, surrounding her words with little coos of wonder that Tom had never heard any of the snakes he spoke with utter.
“Because it’s getting harder to hide.” Potter’s hand smoothed gently down the snake’s scales, and then he gave in and hugged her back with his arms, as much as one could hug such a mass of shifting coils. “I find myself having to concentrate to make sure that I don’t speak Parseltongue instead of English if I’m near a painting or picture of a snake, or even one of the Slytherins’ crests, sometimes. And I had a little rat snake following me around the castle the other day.”
“You’re mine. They can’t have you.”
“I know that, Esmeralda.” Potter lowered his head so that his chin rested somewhere on her upper neck. “But you’ll have to find someone else when I leave this country.”
“This island?” Esmeralda evidently didn’t understand. Tom suspected that he himself had only heard the word as “country” because he was familiar with human concepts of nations, which Esmeralda wouldn’t be.
The thunderstorm of panic that had broken in him when Potter spoke of leaving almost made Tom step out and reveal himself. He managed to weather it and continue listening. He had to hear this.
“Call it that, yes.” Potter’s hand found a place on Esmeralda’s body that evidently made her writhe with joy. He sighed and removed his hand. “You’ll need to find someone else to talk to. I know that Professor Riddle, up in the castle, is a Parselmouth.”
“No! You’re mine! You can’t leave!”
Tom cast a silent spell, glad that he had his wand’s handle already projecting from its holster and didn’t need to move much. The spell burst in a cloud of blue light, invisible to anyone but the caster, over Potter and Esmeralda’s heads. A brilliant skein of green, embroidered with gold, appeared.
It was a familiar bond, and one of the strongest Tom had ever seen. At least, on one side, the side that projected from Esmeralda.
But on the other side, the one that should have connected her to Potter, the skein was unraveled, drifting threads all that remained of it. Potter had evidently been picking it apart as fast as it could form.
Rage drove Tom out of the trees at last. That the boy could reject such a gift, such devotion—
Potter was on his feet in seconds, moving to shield Esmeralda, his wand in hand and a wordless spell Tom didn’t know flying towards Tom in a cloud of glowing pink motes. Tom blocked it with an all-purpose shield and strode towards Potter.
Potter’s eyes widened as he recognized Tom, and immediately his wand sagged in his hand and a sheepish look came over his face. “Professor!” he gasped. “I’m so sorry! I know we aren’t supposed to be sneaking out of bounds after curfew, but Ron dared me to come to the Forest, and it’s so brilliant, all these trees here, and this awesome snake—”
“Do not lie to me,” Tom hissed at him. “I know you and what you are.”
You are what I have been searching for all my life.
Potter blinked and blinked. “Sorry, sir, what did you say?”
“You know exactly what I said. I know that you’re a Parselmouth. Speak to me in the native tongue of your soul, Harry.”
Tom registered dimly that he probably should have called the boy by his last name, as he always did in class. But too much had changed within him in the last half hour. Harry was a Parselmouth, and bonded to one of the most beautiful serpents Tom had ever seen, and the creator—he must be—of the spell that had delayed Tom and the one he had just fired—
Tom wanted him, with a frenzy that only grew worse when he remembered that Harry had spoken of leaving Britain.
Harry’s eyes shuddered shut, and his whole body drooped, but this time, not as a disguise. Tom had never seen such honest despair on anyone’s face. Esmeralda promptly wrapped herself around Harry’s legs and hissed, showing a pair of proper fangs that Tom greatly admired. He wondered what the effect of her venom was.
“Leave him alone, speaker!”
“I will, as soon as I have understood his thought process,” Tom soothed Esmeralda as best as he could, while keeping an eye on Harry. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
Harry’s eyes slowly opened, and although he looked like someone marching to execution, he faced Tom. Tom discovered that he could appreciate Gryffindor bravery after all, at least when it was wrapped up in such a tempting package. Had Harry’s eyes always been that green?
“You can tell people, if you want,” Harry said, his voice wavering, and Tom felt so intoxicated that another Parselmouth was speaking with him at last that he nearly didn’t understand the words. “I just ask that you wait until after I take my NEWT exams, so I can get out of the country and stand a good chance of really starting over again somewhere else.”
Tom stared at him. Then he shook his head. “Being a Parselmouth is hardly illegal. You should know that.”
Harry licked his lips and stooped down to half-cradle Esmeralda, who was still hissing threats at Tom. “But my parents hate it.”
Tom took a step forwards, and then stopped. He had been on the verge of swearing that he would kill James and Lily Potter for Harry if that was what he wanted. He needed to get control of himself. “Explain.”
Harry closed his eyes and sat back down on the grass, probably to be near the comfort of his familiar who he was nonetheless determined to reject. Esmeralda wrapped him in a curtain of emerald splattered with gold in seconds. Tom sat down facing Harry, having less objection to that than he normally would, given the pristine condition of the grass.
“I don’t know why I have this,” Harry whispered, his voice stumbling over itself, his hisses graceless. “No one in my family has ever had it, and I know that you’re not supposed to be a Parselmouth unless you inherit the gift from Slytherin’s line. But in the summer between my second and third years, suddenly I learned that I could speak to snakes. I found one in the garden and understood what it was saying. I thought maybe it was a magical species that was speaking English, but neither of my parents could understand it. Neither could my brother or sister.
“Then my mother realized what was going on, and she was so afraid that I thought she was going to faint. She hates snakes. My father—I don’t think he used to, to hear him tell it, but one day in his sixth year, a bunch of Slytherins grabbed him and kept him shut in a pit with venomous snakes for three hours.”
Tom remembered that incident. He had verbally flayed the Slytherins and used a fairly nasty nightmare curse on them in response, because the snakes had been sheltering under his protection. But he had not thought they had left such a mark on the elder Potter.
“They told me to get rid of it,” Harry whispered. “I thought maybe I could do that magically, like going to a Healer or something. But when we tried, they said we couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Of course not,” Tom snapped, leaning closer. He dared not touch Harry yet, not with Esmeralda wrapped so firmly around him that it looked as if he might not be able to move his arms, but Tom burned to do so. “It is a magical gift, one of the rarest. Why did the Healer not report this to me?” He had a network of spies spread out across Britain, hunting for many things, Parselmouths foremost among them.
“My father Obliviated her.”
Tom hissed a threat that would have been impossible to translate to English, one involving both venom and constriction. Harry stared at him with wide, watery eyes, and looked away.
“What happened then?” Tom demanded.
“We tried a few other things to get rid of it. Curses, mostly. They didn’t work, of course.” Harry gestured bitterly at his mouth as if trying to yank his Parseltongue out through it. “Then they decided that if I had to have it, I had to hide it. You know there’s loads of people who still think all Parselmouths are Dark wizards. They said they didn’t want that life for me.”
“You would have been under my protection, in Hogwarts.”
“Dad said that would be worse.” Harry hesitated, and raised his eyes to Tom’s face for what felt like the first time in a long time, although rationally, Tom knew he had only looked away for a few seconds. “That you would never let me go once you found me.”
Tom’s body burned with the thrill of those words. He reached out and clasped Harry’s free left hand, ignoring the hisses from Esmeralda. It was worth it, to touch Harry.
“You made yourself look average in my class,” he murmured.
Harry nodded, his back painfully straight, despite the hunched posture he was sitting in and the awkward way Esmeralda was wound about him. “I knew it had to be average. If I did as well as I did in my first and second year, you’d pay too much attention to me. If I did really bad, then you’d spend more time with me to try and bring me up to par with the other students.”
Tom leaned nearer still. He could have lost this. Harry’s ruse had worked. Tom had looked straight past him.
Someone clever enough, at thirteen, to fool a brilliant, paranoid professor into overlooking him. Someone clever enough to invent new spells and never reveal a hint of them. Someone who spoke Parseltongue.
Tom wanted to knock Harry to the ground and climb atop him, but he held himself back, yet again. “And then Esmeralda?”
Harry swallowed hard, a motion that Tom’s obsessive eyes traced, too. “I had this—drive to get into the Forbidden Forest. I had no idea why. But one night I couldn’t resist anymore, and I went. She was waiting for me. She said magic itself had created her and called her up out of the Forest, because there was no other familiar who stood a chance of getting through to me.”
“That’s what happened,” Esmeralda said proudly. “He’s mine.”
Tom trembled. He had heard of such things, whispers in some of the oldest books he had discovered in the Chamber of Secrets, but even Salazar barely spoke of it. It seemed as though it was too sacred to be more than hinted at.
Sweet Merlin, he wanted Harry.
“You realize that your hiding is done?” Tom asked, tenderly, leaning near enough that he could touch the back of Harry’s neck. “That your father’s words are true, and I will not let you go?”
Harry’s eyes fluttered, and he let out what might have been a short sob. Tom paused.
“I wanted to come to you,” Harry whispered. “I wanted it so badly. I was so lonely. I don’t know why—“
“Parselmouths are meant for the company of our own kind,” Tom said soothingly, adding yet another to the tally of impressive things he knew about Harry. He had known exactly where another Parselmouth was, and he had resisted. He was strong of will. He was also loving, to try and obey his parents and not increase their fear even with the urge to find another Parselmouth driving him.
Tom just needed to show Harry that he could refocus that love on Tom, and everything would be all right.
“Mum and Dad are going to be so disappointed, though,” Harry whispered, even as he swayed towards Tom, yielding in every line of his body.
“I will be with you when you confront them,” Tom promised, tracing the curve of Harry’s cheek with his fingers. Esmeralda hissed softly, and Tom smiled down at her. “And I think Esmeralda will be, as well. Did you keep her in the Forest to protect her?”
“And—and because I knew she was trying to form a familiar bond with me. I couldn’t hide her, and I couldn’t have left her behind if she was my familiar. But Mum and Dad would never have—”
“I will come with you,” Tom said again, barely holding back other promises. He would have liked to say that he intended to go to James and Lily Potter and demand the hand of their older son in marriage, but he sensed Harry wasn’t quite ready to hear that yet.
Harry shuddered all over and leaned forwards, embracing Tom. Tom had never encountered another human whose touch was not distasteful; even Morfin Gaunt had made his body flinch in disgust, rejecting a Parselmouth so filthy.
So unworthy.
Yes, he was unworthy of me. Harry is so much more.
“I am coming!” Esmeralda said, her head dancing as she unwound from Harry and flowed around them both. “I am coming with you, and the bond will be sealed!”
Tom hid a smile. He was willing to bet that the next time he cast the spell to see familiar bonds, he would see a great, sparkling canopy of green and gold uniting them both.
“Come, Harry,” he said. “You have someone to walk at your side from now on. I promise it.”
Harry bit his lip and stood, uncertain, eyes on Tom. Tom caressed his face, his neck down to the pulse point, then up again to his lips, and watched Harry’s look grow less uncertain, more drowsy, his eyes falling shut.
“Come,” Tom repeated. “Nagini will want to meet you.”
Harry gave a half-chuckle, perhaps thinking of what Nagini would make of him and Esmeralda, and started walking. Tom stayed perfectly in pace with him, helped by the arm he had wound around Harry’s shoulders.
I could have lost this. I might never have found him.
He might have, but he hadn’t, and now he had another Parselmouth, an incredibly clever, strong-willed, beautiful companion capable of great love.
Companion? Lover, soon.
Yes, soon. When Harry was ready. But with the urge to seek a Parselmouth companion driving them both, Tom didn’t think it would take long.
And his parents’ fears would not be allowed to stand in the way. Tom smiled a little, thinking of what he would say to James and Lily Potter, and then his smile changed to a different kind as he looked at the young man watching him from the corner of one brilliant green eye.
I would enjoy terrifying them. But Harry—
He mattered more to Tom than frightening his enemies, and he always would.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle
Content Notes: AU (no Voldemort), angst, obsessive Tom, Defense professor Tom Riddle
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Note: The title comes from the saying, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“Tom, my dear boy, I wonder if you would mind giving me your observations of a student.”
Tom blinked slowly, pulling his attention away from Nagini, who was coiled up around his feet at the professors’ table and telling him all about the hunt she’d had last night. “Pardon, Albus?” he asked, stirring a spoon through the remains of the omelet on his plate. He was no longer hungry.
“A student.” Albus gave him a slightly condescending smile. “The reason all of us are here?”
Tom lifted a shoulder in a shrug. He and Albus had achieved a truce over the years, one created more by the worn grooves of habit and working together than any cordiality. “Yes, all right, Headmaster. Which one?”
“Harry Potter.”
Tom blinked a little. Harry Potter was in his NEWT Defense class, but nothing remarkable. He had got an Acceptable on his OWL, that was all. He kept his head down in the class, turned in average essays, won perhaps forty percent of the duels that Tom set him to with other members of the class, and was headed for nothing more important than some kind of Ministry desk job, or perhaps one at the prank shop that his father ran with Sirius Black. “What about him?”
“His parents are worried about him.” Albus gazed across the Great Hall at the noisy, chattering Gryffindor table. Tom looked with him, but honestly couldn’t even pick out Potter’s head at this distance, so little impression had the boy made on him. “Apparently he’s been sneaking out at night, and he’s also had problems at home.”
Tom made a slightly irritated noise. “I’m not his Head of House. Why not ask Minerva?”
“Because she tried to follow him, and he gave her the slip. And she’s had him into her office for tea and biscuits, and he still refuses to confess.”
Tom’s interest grew a little. He had a prickly sort of friendship with Minerva, like two hedgehogs who had decided to travel together for a time, and he knew she was good at using that tea-and-biscuits routine to get her Gryffindors to talk. It was also more than a little odd that a boy whose greatest skill was, as Tom had heard, on the Quidditch field would manage to evade an experienced professor. “In her Animagus form?”
Albus nodded.
Tom tilted his head, interest sharpened. That no doubt was why Albus had given him this task, because he knew Tom would stop at nothing once his interest was engaged, and he was more than good enough to follow a sneaking student.
“Yes, all right, Albus,” Tom said, eyes scanning the Gryffindor table again. There, he thought he saw a shock of wild black hair that might be Potter. “I’ll follow him tonight, assuming he goes out, and report his destination to you.”
Albus smiled at him. “Thank you, my dear boy. I knew I could count on you.”
“You smell of irritation,” Nagini said from under the table. “I don’t like it.”
Tom ran a hand down her neck. “No matter, my dear one. Albus has asked me to investigate a mystery, but has done it in a patronizing way.” He felt her tongue dart against his palm in acknowledgement.
No one at the table with him flinched. The general population in magical Britain might think of Parseltongue as a Dark Art, but to his colleagues, it was simply another Thursday morning.
*
When he thought about it, Tom supposed there was one thing that had stood out to him about Potter before Albus’s request. His first two years at Hogwarts, he’d been one of the bright-eyed, endlessly-rushing Gryffindors who had assumed they would automatically be good at everything they wanted to be good at. Tom had taught them better in his Defense classes, but Potter had adapted and even seemed to enjoy the challenge. Tom remembered marking him, near the end of a second year, as one of the rare students who might display real prowess at Defense in the future and would need careful guidance.
Then he had come back at the beginning of third year much quieter, and that had started his slide into Acceptables and losing most of his practice duels. Tom had even forgotten, up until this point, that he had once thought he might apprentice Potter.
Tom’s eyes narrowed as he revised his records. Potter’s marks and essays and duels were average. Carefully so. There was no fluke where he had done well on an exam or got a spell more easily than other students did, even though that was the case for every other student in the class, and even though Tom had heard from Minerva and Filius when he asked this morning that it did happen for Potter in Transfiguration and Charms.
He’s hiding. So skillfully I never noticed.
Tom tore himself away from his desk with a snarl. He hated being tricked. He hated more being tricked in such a way that he would never have noticed if not for Albus calling his attention to the situation.
Yes, he and Albus cordially disliked each other and launched such ploys against each other all the time, but that—that was Albus. Tom respected him as a wizard of incredible power, and it made sense that he was a worthy opponent for Tom.
A seventh-year student, who had only been attempting to actively conceal his interest in Defense, or his power, or whatever it was, for a few years now?
Tom would find out.
*
Tracking Potter was indeed not easy.
Tom knew that the boy had an Invisibility Cloak, and he had assumed that was what had made Minerva lose track of him when she’d tried to follow him as a cat. But no, the boy simply cast charms with an incredible ease that blurred the air behind him and smoothed out his tracks and actually made Tom stop for a moment and turn back towards the castle, forgetting what in the world he was out here for.
That one only lasted until Tom came out of the immediate area where it had been launched, proving that the spell’s area of effect was a sphere perhaps a meter across. But it made Tom jerk to a stop and grind his teeth.
Because there was no spell like that. Never mind that such a spell shouldn’t have been able to get past the barriers that, as a trained Occlumens, he could raise against it, although he had probably only been able to shake off the effect once he moved outside the sphere because of his Occlumency.
No, the spell literally did not exist.
Tom stalked after Potter, muffling his own footsteps and his scent with spells, using a Disillusionment Charm with enough power behind it to make someone’s eyes water if they did try to look at him. He could feel something he hadn’t felt in years stirring. More than obsession, more than desire to solve a puzzle, more than determination to pull a poor student up the class rankings.
Hunger. He wanted to find Potter and strip him of his secrets.
He followed Potter into the Forbidden Forest through long, twisting, branch-choked paths and game trails. Tom was frowning by the time he reached the end of it, in a larger clearing carpeted with shining green grass that might have been a unicorn birthing spot.
What had Potter gone to such great lengths to hide? Enthrallment to a vampire? Selling illicit goods to a smuggler? Hunting and poaching unicorns? Tom would almost have bet on that one, considering the strength of Potter’s defenses and the look of the clearing.
He almost stumbled on Potter, kneeling in the middle of the grass. Tom managed to withdraw to the shelter of a tall oak just in time and watch the boy as he flung back his hood.
Even then, Potter glanced warily around, turning in a complete circle on his knees, before he turned back to face the taller grass on the other side of the clearing where it let back into the Forest.
Tom watched intently, hands clenched in front of him, and saw the moment when the grass stirred and trembled. He held his breath.
Out came a beautiful green serpent, covered over with golden ripples and spots like light on the surface of running water. Tom estimated her as not much smaller than Nagini. He had never seen her kind before.
Enchanted, he watched her crawl towards Potter, who continued to kneel in one place with a miserable expression. Tom wondered now if this snake perhaps bit Potter and injected some kind of euphoric venom in exchange for something he could bring her. It was his best guess for what was going on.
Unless, of course, the serpent was some smuggler’s familiar, come to lead Potter deeper into the Forest—
“You have returned.”
For a wild moment, Tom thought the snake had sensed him and was speaking Parseltongue to him, but then he realized she was swaying slowly in front of Potter, speaking directly to him, and her voice was full of delight.
“Yes. I did say I would.”
Tom sucked in a harsh breath. Potter was responding. In Parseltongue.
Tom knew there were no other Parselmouths in Britain. He knew because he had searched for them wildly, obsessively, and the only ones he had ever found were the remains of his mother’s pitiful family. He had held back from killing Morfin, although it had been hard, as he had held back from killing the Riddles. Instead, he had gone away to make himself ultimately great, to pursue paths and the deeper magic that no one among mortals wielded anymore. That search had given him what he sought—except other Parselmouths.
Tom was content to be alone in the possession of his power. But his longing for other Parselmouths had been intense and continual. Tom had come to guess that that longing was itself part of the gift, a mirror of the longing that drove serpents to seek out speakers. Tom could have had a dozen familiars if Nagini were not so jealous.
And here was one of them, right under his nose, so skillfully hidden that Tom might have missed him entirely, except that Albus had asked him to look into this mystery.
Tom felt scorched by the flames of his own yearning, but he managed to remain still and listen to Potter and the snake’s conversation. He had plenty of time to intercept Potter on his way back to the castle.
“Why are you so sad?” The serpent was entwining herself around Potter, his legs and his arms and his chest and his neck, surrounding her words with little coos of wonder that Tom had never heard any of the snakes he spoke with utter.
“Because it’s getting harder to hide.” Potter’s hand smoothed gently down the snake’s scales, and then he gave in and hugged her back with his arms, as much as one could hug such a mass of shifting coils. “I find myself having to concentrate to make sure that I don’t speak Parseltongue instead of English if I’m near a painting or picture of a snake, or even one of the Slytherins’ crests, sometimes. And I had a little rat snake following me around the castle the other day.”
“You’re mine. They can’t have you.”
“I know that, Esmeralda.” Potter lowered his head so that his chin rested somewhere on her upper neck. “But you’ll have to find someone else when I leave this country.”
“This island?” Esmeralda evidently didn’t understand. Tom suspected that he himself had only heard the word as “country” because he was familiar with human concepts of nations, which Esmeralda wouldn’t be.
The thunderstorm of panic that had broken in him when Potter spoke of leaving almost made Tom step out and reveal himself. He managed to weather it and continue listening. He had to hear this.
“Call it that, yes.” Potter’s hand found a place on Esmeralda’s body that evidently made her writhe with joy. He sighed and removed his hand. “You’ll need to find someone else to talk to. I know that Professor Riddle, up in the castle, is a Parselmouth.”
“No! You’re mine! You can’t leave!”
Tom cast a silent spell, glad that he had his wand’s handle already projecting from its holster and didn’t need to move much. The spell burst in a cloud of blue light, invisible to anyone but the caster, over Potter and Esmeralda’s heads. A brilliant skein of green, embroidered with gold, appeared.
It was a familiar bond, and one of the strongest Tom had ever seen. At least, on one side, the side that projected from Esmeralda.
But on the other side, the one that should have connected her to Potter, the skein was unraveled, drifting threads all that remained of it. Potter had evidently been picking it apart as fast as it could form.
Rage drove Tom out of the trees at last. That the boy could reject such a gift, such devotion—
Potter was on his feet in seconds, moving to shield Esmeralda, his wand in hand and a wordless spell Tom didn’t know flying towards Tom in a cloud of glowing pink motes. Tom blocked it with an all-purpose shield and strode towards Potter.
Potter’s eyes widened as he recognized Tom, and immediately his wand sagged in his hand and a sheepish look came over his face. “Professor!” he gasped. “I’m so sorry! I know we aren’t supposed to be sneaking out of bounds after curfew, but Ron dared me to come to the Forest, and it’s so brilliant, all these trees here, and this awesome snake—”
“Do not lie to me,” Tom hissed at him. “I know you and what you are.”
You are what I have been searching for all my life.
Potter blinked and blinked. “Sorry, sir, what did you say?”
“You know exactly what I said. I know that you’re a Parselmouth. Speak to me in the native tongue of your soul, Harry.”
Tom registered dimly that he probably should have called the boy by his last name, as he always did in class. But too much had changed within him in the last half hour. Harry was a Parselmouth, and bonded to one of the most beautiful serpents Tom had ever seen, and the creator—he must be—of the spell that had delayed Tom and the one he had just fired—
Tom wanted him, with a frenzy that only grew worse when he remembered that Harry had spoken of leaving Britain.
Harry’s eyes shuddered shut, and his whole body drooped, but this time, not as a disguise. Tom had never seen such honest despair on anyone’s face. Esmeralda promptly wrapped herself around Harry’s legs and hissed, showing a pair of proper fangs that Tom greatly admired. He wondered what the effect of her venom was.
“Leave him alone, speaker!”
“I will, as soon as I have understood his thought process,” Tom soothed Esmeralda as best as he could, while keeping an eye on Harry. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
Harry’s eyes slowly opened, and although he looked like someone marching to execution, he faced Tom. Tom discovered that he could appreciate Gryffindor bravery after all, at least when it was wrapped up in such a tempting package. Had Harry’s eyes always been that green?
“You can tell people, if you want,” Harry said, his voice wavering, and Tom felt so intoxicated that another Parselmouth was speaking with him at last that he nearly didn’t understand the words. “I just ask that you wait until after I take my NEWT exams, so I can get out of the country and stand a good chance of really starting over again somewhere else.”
Tom stared at him. Then he shook his head. “Being a Parselmouth is hardly illegal. You should know that.”
Harry licked his lips and stooped down to half-cradle Esmeralda, who was still hissing threats at Tom. “But my parents hate it.”
Tom took a step forwards, and then stopped. He had been on the verge of swearing that he would kill James and Lily Potter for Harry if that was what he wanted. He needed to get control of himself. “Explain.”
Harry closed his eyes and sat back down on the grass, probably to be near the comfort of his familiar who he was nonetheless determined to reject. Esmeralda wrapped him in a curtain of emerald splattered with gold in seconds. Tom sat down facing Harry, having less objection to that than he normally would, given the pristine condition of the grass.
“I don’t know why I have this,” Harry whispered, his voice stumbling over itself, his hisses graceless. “No one in my family has ever had it, and I know that you’re not supposed to be a Parselmouth unless you inherit the gift from Slytherin’s line. But in the summer between my second and third years, suddenly I learned that I could speak to snakes. I found one in the garden and understood what it was saying. I thought maybe it was a magical species that was speaking English, but neither of my parents could understand it. Neither could my brother or sister.
“Then my mother realized what was going on, and she was so afraid that I thought she was going to faint. She hates snakes. My father—I don’t think he used to, to hear him tell it, but one day in his sixth year, a bunch of Slytherins grabbed him and kept him shut in a pit with venomous snakes for three hours.”
Tom remembered that incident. He had verbally flayed the Slytherins and used a fairly nasty nightmare curse on them in response, because the snakes had been sheltering under his protection. But he had not thought they had left such a mark on the elder Potter.
“They told me to get rid of it,” Harry whispered. “I thought maybe I could do that magically, like going to a Healer or something. But when we tried, they said we couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Of course not,” Tom snapped, leaning closer. He dared not touch Harry yet, not with Esmeralda wrapped so firmly around him that it looked as if he might not be able to move his arms, but Tom burned to do so. “It is a magical gift, one of the rarest. Why did the Healer not report this to me?” He had a network of spies spread out across Britain, hunting for many things, Parselmouths foremost among them.
“My father Obliviated her.”
Tom hissed a threat that would have been impossible to translate to English, one involving both venom and constriction. Harry stared at him with wide, watery eyes, and looked away.
“What happened then?” Tom demanded.
“We tried a few other things to get rid of it. Curses, mostly. They didn’t work, of course.” Harry gestured bitterly at his mouth as if trying to yank his Parseltongue out through it. “Then they decided that if I had to have it, I had to hide it. You know there’s loads of people who still think all Parselmouths are Dark wizards. They said they didn’t want that life for me.”
“You would have been under my protection, in Hogwarts.”
“Dad said that would be worse.” Harry hesitated, and raised his eyes to Tom’s face for what felt like the first time in a long time, although rationally, Tom knew he had only looked away for a few seconds. “That you would never let me go once you found me.”
Tom’s body burned with the thrill of those words. He reached out and clasped Harry’s free left hand, ignoring the hisses from Esmeralda. It was worth it, to touch Harry.
“You made yourself look average in my class,” he murmured.
Harry nodded, his back painfully straight, despite the hunched posture he was sitting in and the awkward way Esmeralda was wound about him. “I knew it had to be average. If I did as well as I did in my first and second year, you’d pay too much attention to me. If I did really bad, then you’d spend more time with me to try and bring me up to par with the other students.”
Tom leaned nearer still. He could have lost this. Harry’s ruse had worked. Tom had looked straight past him.
Someone clever enough, at thirteen, to fool a brilliant, paranoid professor into overlooking him. Someone clever enough to invent new spells and never reveal a hint of them. Someone who spoke Parseltongue.
Tom wanted to knock Harry to the ground and climb atop him, but he held himself back, yet again. “And then Esmeralda?”
Harry swallowed hard, a motion that Tom’s obsessive eyes traced, too. “I had this—drive to get into the Forbidden Forest. I had no idea why. But one night I couldn’t resist anymore, and I went. She was waiting for me. She said magic itself had created her and called her up out of the Forest, because there was no other familiar who stood a chance of getting through to me.”
“That’s what happened,” Esmeralda said proudly. “He’s mine.”
Tom trembled. He had heard of such things, whispers in some of the oldest books he had discovered in the Chamber of Secrets, but even Salazar barely spoke of it. It seemed as though it was too sacred to be more than hinted at.
Sweet Merlin, he wanted Harry.
“You realize that your hiding is done?” Tom asked, tenderly, leaning near enough that he could touch the back of Harry’s neck. “That your father’s words are true, and I will not let you go?”
Harry’s eyes fluttered, and he let out what might have been a short sob. Tom paused.
“I wanted to come to you,” Harry whispered. “I wanted it so badly. I was so lonely. I don’t know why—“
“Parselmouths are meant for the company of our own kind,” Tom said soothingly, adding yet another to the tally of impressive things he knew about Harry. He had known exactly where another Parselmouth was, and he had resisted. He was strong of will. He was also loving, to try and obey his parents and not increase their fear even with the urge to find another Parselmouth driving him.
Tom just needed to show Harry that he could refocus that love on Tom, and everything would be all right.
“Mum and Dad are going to be so disappointed, though,” Harry whispered, even as he swayed towards Tom, yielding in every line of his body.
“I will be with you when you confront them,” Tom promised, tracing the curve of Harry’s cheek with his fingers. Esmeralda hissed softly, and Tom smiled down at her. “And I think Esmeralda will be, as well. Did you keep her in the Forest to protect her?”
“And—and because I knew she was trying to form a familiar bond with me. I couldn’t hide her, and I couldn’t have left her behind if she was my familiar. But Mum and Dad would never have—”
“I will come with you,” Tom said again, barely holding back other promises. He would have liked to say that he intended to go to James and Lily Potter and demand the hand of their older son in marriage, but he sensed Harry wasn’t quite ready to hear that yet.
Harry shuddered all over and leaned forwards, embracing Tom. Tom had never encountered another human whose touch was not distasteful; even Morfin Gaunt had made his body flinch in disgust, rejecting a Parselmouth so filthy.
So unworthy.
Yes, he was unworthy of me. Harry is so much more.
“I am coming!” Esmeralda said, her head dancing as she unwound from Harry and flowed around them both. “I am coming with you, and the bond will be sealed!”
Tom hid a smile. He was willing to bet that the next time he cast the spell to see familiar bonds, he would see a great, sparkling canopy of green and gold uniting them both.
“Come, Harry,” he said. “You have someone to walk at your side from now on. I promise it.”
Harry bit his lip and stood, uncertain, eyes on Tom. Tom caressed his face, his neck down to the pulse point, then up again to his lips, and watched Harry’s look grow less uncertain, more drowsy, his eyes falling shut.
“Come,” Tom repeated. “Nagini will want to meet you.”
Harry gave a half-chuckle, perhaps thinking of what Nagini would make of him and Esmeralda, and started walking. Tom stayed perfectly in pace with him, helped by the arm he had wound around Harry’s shoulders.
I could have lost this. I might never have found him.
He might have, but he hadn’t, and now he had another Parselmouth, an incredibly clever, strong-willed, beautiful companion capable of great love.
Companion? Lover, soon.
Yes, soon. When Harry was ready. But with the urge to seek a Parselmouth companion driving them both, Tom didn’t think it would take long.
And his parents’ fears would not be allowed to stand in the way. Tom smiled a little, thinking of what he would say to James and Lily Potter, and then his smile changed to a different kind as he looked at the young man watching him from the corner of one brilliant green eye.
I would enjoy terrifying them. But Harry—
He mattered more to Tom than frightening his enemies, and he always would.
