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Chapter Forty—Agents

“I’ve tried. I’ve tried and I can’t find him.”

Albus hated the pathetic sound of his own voice as it broke on the last words. He took a deep breath and forced his mind into the calm state that he would usually use for meditation, again. He had to concentrate. The blue phoenix wouldn’t aid him unless he could make a good case for this. It would probably see too much direct action as unacceptable.

But Albus had been searching for nearly a week since the announcement that Tom and Harry intended to seek immortality, and he hadn’t found a trace of Gellert. The magic Fawkes had given him had allowed him to disappear completely. Even when Albus had drawn near to the place where their emotional bond led, or seemed to lead, there was nothing there except a leafy, trampled clearing in the Forest of Dean.

“Please,” Albus said quietly, sitting down in the middle of the clearing and staring up at a point in the sky where the blue phoenix might appear if it chose. “Lend me the strength and grace to find him. A tool, like the tuning fork you gave me. Or a sign to point the way. It doesn’t matter. I must find him.”

Albus sat so still for so long that he didn’t think there would be a response. And then the air slightly above and to the left of a tree began to glow.

Albus held back his sob of relief, clasped his hands, and bowed his head. If nearly praying to the phoenix got him help, he didn’t care how desperate or broken-down it might make him look.

The pinpoint of blue coalesced into a sharp, hard flame, and then dived towards Albus and landed on the earth beside him. The phoenix canted its neck to stare at him, motionless fire on its neck like a garland of knives.

“Do you enjoy asking me for help?”

Albus bowed his head. “No.”

“And yet, you allowed your bondmate to slip through your fingers yet again, and along with him, any chance of saving the world.”

Albus felt his throat go rigid with terror. “It’s too late? There’s nothing I can do?”

“Not unless I help you. He has hidden from you too well.” The phoenix swiveled its head, hard sapphire eyes searching the air for a moment. “I did not think that another of my kind would step on the other side of this fight.”

Albus nodded grimly. “I believe Fawkes thought I would serve his purpose at first, hence why he was my companion so long. But it has become clear that he believed in a corrupted vision of fate and may even want the prophecy that proclaims Riddle and Harry’s victory to come true.”

“It will not come true if you can push through into the refuge that your bondmate has established for himself.”

It took a moment for Albus to understand what the phoenix was implying. Then his back stiffened. “He—he stole the magic I put together with the Order of the Phoenix to create a refuge like the one we had?”

“You could say that.” The phoenix ruffled its feathers and radiated something like cool amusement, although Albus didn’t understand why. Then again, he was beneath the phoenix and might never understand. “The fire he took from my enemy is keeping him safe and within the boundaries of the refuge. I will give you fire to find you way inside.”

“Thank you, Great One.”

The phoenix didn’t respond, but turned and plucked a single sapphire feather from its side. It tossed the feather high into the air, and Albus watched as it drifted towards him, edged with white flame, somehow knowing he should resist putting his hand out to catch it until the last moment.

The feather touched his hand and burst into fire. Albus jerked back instinctively, but then realized he didn’t feel any heat. The white brilliance spiraled off his hand and outlined a doorway in the air.

“Good luck. Do not betray my vision.” The echoes of the blue phoenix’s words lingered behind as it took flight once more.

Albus bowed his head in its direction, took a deep breath, and stepped through the doorway as it reached his height.

*

“So you’re confident your translation of the ritual is accurate?”

“I’m confident it’s as accurate as I know how to make it.”

Pandora’s pronouncement was less reassuring than Harry would have liked. On the other hand, he knew that Tom was impatient to get on with the ritual that would make Harry a Parselmouth, and he trusted his soulmate not to let anything happen to him. If Tom had been less than confident in Pandora’s translation, he would have insisted on waiting.

They stood in the gardens behind the Lovegood house, not far from Luna’s workshop. She had come to watch, in fact, peering down at the circle they were using with shadowy blue eyes. Harry smiled at her once; she nodded to him and went back to watching Tom, apparently because she thought him the most interesting person here.

The circle had been laid out with a variety of snakeskins, inscribed all around with runes made of white stones and arranged sticks. Harry had to admit he didn’t know a single one of them. Ancient Runes had been one of those classes at Hogwarts where holding back and hiding any kind of skill to keep himself safe from his soulmate had also meant he didn’t understand much, if any, of the deeper mysteries.

Then again, since this ritual apparently hadn’t been used in generations, maybe that wasn’t a surprise.

Pandora Lovegood was humming under her breath as she scattered handfuls of crushed herbs and flowers onto the snakeskins. Harry watched with his hands tucked into his armpits. The air had begun to get cold around them, and he didn’t think it came from any natural weather.

“Harry.”

Harry turned to face Tom. Their bond was bright and crystalline, and Tom stood with his hand on Nagini’s head as she coiled beside him. Her darting tongue brushed against Tom’s hand, and Harry realized, with a start, that he felt the sensation down the bond as well as if their bodies were entwined in bed.

“Tom?” he whispered.

“I will ask you one last time if you want to go through with this,” Tom said quietly. “I want you to, you know that—” and the bond filled with his desire, as thick as honey “—but it could be dangerous, and I want you to know I won’t think less of you for turning aside.”

Harry took a deep breath. There were reasons against it, he knew: the age of the ritual, the possible uncertainty of Pandora’s translation, the fact that he could understand Parseltongue already and speaking it himself wasn’t something he’d allowed before even as a dream.

But there was the fact that Tom wanted it, with desire that surged through their bond like a tide.

And there was the fact that Harry himself wanted it, which was something he hadn’t known he would find in the depths of his soul. But circumstances had denied him his serpent Animagus form. They’d denied him interaction with Tom at anything more than a superficial level until recently. He wanted this.

Tom seemed to realize it at the same moment Harry did, and Harry supposed his decision must be bleeding down the bond. Tom smiled with triumph and gestured at the circle. “You’ll be ready to take your place, then.”

Harry nodded once, and again, more firmly. He glanced at Luna as he stepped into the circle. If she said it was dangerous, then he would back off. And he was convinced that she would if she really thought so, whether or not he needed Parseltongue to perform the ritual that would find her her soulmate.

But she only smiled at him, so Harry stood in the center of the circle and watched Pandora walk around the outside of it, scattering more and more flowers.

The smell of them began to get to Harry. He found himself closing his eyes without realizing he’d done it, and then blinking them open again. His breath was coming faster and faster, and he clutched his head for a second to make sure that he was standing upright.

Harry? Tom’s mental voice was tense and sharp.

I’m all right, Harry sent back, but he was already beginning to feel as if he was drifting in time and space.

Tom had said something at one point about that being part of the ritual, though, so Harry did his best to relax. He found himself focusing on Niagni, who was slithering slowly around the outside of the circle. Her hissing was soft and seemed to match the curls of invisible smoke drifting through Harry’s brain.

“Relax, child of the sun…relax, child of the phoenix…”

Harry’s hand went dreamily to his wrist as he remembered that part of his imaginary soul-mark was the phoenix. Tom’s had been the real thing, of course, but the people who hated him had burned it away.

That had been one of the reasons Dumbledore had feared Tom and declared that Harry couldn’t be his soulmate. Because Tom had murdered people, and Harry couldn’t be the soulmate of a murderer, because he was a good person and his parents were good people.

But a phoenix was about so much more than just goodness and light, wasn’t it? Harry found his steps moving in time now with Nagini’s slithering; he was dancing in the circle as she was dancing outside it. And that was an odd thing to think, wasn’t it? She wasn’t dancing because snakes didn’t have feet; they couldn’t dance.

But they could, if the right music was played…

Harry took a deep breath and found sleep curling into his lungs. He was on the ground, although he didn’t remember sitting. Or falling? No, he thought he had sat. He looked up and discovered that a snake was in front of him.

For a moment, he thought it was Nagini reflected in a mirror somehow. Mirrors had been part of the setup that he remembered Pandora talking about. But this snake was smaller, and her scales were a pale white edged with green, not Nagini’s dark green. Harry found himself holding out a hand he hadn’t realized he was going to extend.

The snake bit him.

The venom cleared Harry’s head, and he sat up with a shout. Suddenly his hand was throbbing, and a long needle of pain was shooting straight up his arm. Harry didn’t want to know what would happen when it reached his shoulder. He reached up, not knowing if he was about to grab the wound or try to squeeze the snake to death.

Harry!

Harry slowed down, panting. Tom was here, he reminded himself. Tom would never have agreed to do this ritual if he thought it would cost him his soulmate. He wanted Harry alive more than he wanted Harry to be a Parselmouth.

That’s right, my dear, I do. Tom’s voice was as clear and sharp as tempered steel, waking Harry up even better than the poison. Hold still. You won’t die.

Harry breathed through the pain, eyes squinted almost shut. Sometimes he thought the snake was there; sometimes he thought it had faded, and might never have been a real serpent in the first place, but a trick of light and shadow. He gasped when the poison reached his shoulder, and then something seemed to spread over his skin.

He was wearing a mantle of scales.

He was down on the earth, on his belly.

Harry shuddered with something that wasn’t revulsion, and wasn’t quite delight. He tried to turn his head, and found that it was heavier than it had any right to be, and his tongue was dating in and out of his mouth without his consent. He knew suddenly how a snake could dance without feet. The rhythm pulsed through his stomach, and Harry turned his heavy, new, serpentine body to follow it.

There was a path, stretching ahead of him. Harry could see flickers of stone and trees and dirt and many places that other snakes had traveled. It was as if he had suddenly become aware of a direction that had been there all his life, but for some inexplicable reason, he’d never bothered to travel there. He flowed towards it, and the direction rose up around him and embraced him.

Sounds flowered to life in his head, pulsed along his tongue like the rhythm pulsing through his body, and Harry found out that—

That he could hiss, and the hissing was also called speaking, and the words made sense, and he could say—

*

“Tom.”

The word slid past Tom with the softness that only Nagini had ever given it.

In wonder, panting, Tom stared at Harry, whose entire being had become brilliant points of light for a long moment. But their bond had stayed as alive and fresh as ever, so Tom hadn’t panicked.

And now Harry turned to him, and spoke his name in Parseltongue.

Tom stepped forwards and stretched out a hand. Harry took it, reaching across the boundary of the circle. Tom heard Pandora gasp sharply and wondered if they had disrupted the ritual without meaning to.

But when he glanced at her, she was smiling and had inclined her head in his direction. “Congratulations, Minister. Your soulmate has Parseltongue now, and it is a gift that ensures you can never be parted again.”

Tom thought of asking her what that meant, but honestly, he would probably only get the kind of gibberish she was famous for. He pulled Harry into his arms, and Harry sighed and rested his head on Tom’s shoulder.

“Darling?” Tom whispered, aware of Nagini swaying in delight at his side that this was a conversation she could understand.

“Yes, darling?” Harry asked back, lifting his head and grinning at Tom, and Tom had to lower his head and kiss him; there was no way around it.

Harry stiffened in his arms, and Tom remembered a moment later that Luna and Pandora Lovegood were in the same garden with them. But then he melted, and Tom stroked the back of his head and answered Nagini’s excited murmurs of, “Will he spend more time with me now?” with his own soft, reassuring hiss.

Harry stepped slowly back from the kiss, one hand braced on Tom’s chest, and answered Nagini on his own. “I’ll make sure that we can both spend more time with you.”

Nagini’s tongue darted out in the instant before she flung herself at Harry’s legs. Harry didn’t jump or cry out the way Tom had assumed he would. Instead, he bent down and touched Nagini’s scales gently in the exact same places that Tom knew she liked to be touched. Nagini wound her neck around Harry’s legs and hissed in contentment.

“You are my brother,” Nagini said. “If I am Tom’s familiar and you are his soulmate, then we are siblings.”

Harry was smiling as he straightened up. He started to say something else, whether in English or Parseltongue Tom wasn’t sure, but someone cleared her throat, and Harry started and turned around.

Luna Lovegood had one hand on her shoulder, where Tom assumed her soul-mark probably was, although it was concealed by her shirt. “Are you going to conduct the ritual that can help me find my soulmate?” she asked. “Now that you’re a Parselmouth?”

“I can do that if you want,” Harry said.

Luna closed her eyes and nodded slowly, her hand rubbing back and forth as if the mark might pain her. “Yes,” she whispered. “Please.”

Harry glanced at Tom, and the bond sang in the corner of Tom’s mind. Ready to begin another ritual that might be even more ancient and harder to navigate than this one was?

Tom had no choice but to kiss him again.

*

“I—I don’t know what to say, mate. That Snape is holding Remus somewhere and that’s the reason he hasn’t come back to you…”

Lily watched Sirius’s eyes cloud over, and wished that James would stop going on about Sirius’s bad luck. Of course he deserved to be consoled and made much of when he had suffered such a disappointment, but he and James would usually have handled that by getting drunk together and playing pranks. Constantly dwelling on it when Sirius wouldn’t even touch the Firewhisky he had in front of him wasn’t helping anything, and it wore on Lily’s nerves.

“Yeah, well.” Sirius took a deep breath and swallowed a gulp of the Firewhisky, then slammed the mug onto the kitchen table and leaned forwards. “I’ve been thinking, and I think Remus never would have come back even if old Snape wasn’t keeping him under the Draught of Living Death.”

James blinked. So did Lily. She felt his side of their bond shoot up in pure bewilderment like fireworks for an instant, and soothed him without thinking about it, and without taking her eyes off Sirius.

This was what had been off all evening, she thought. Sirius had been building up to say something deep and grave, and James had just thought he wanted to talk about how terrible Snape was.

(Lily had thought a little about Severus once she heard that he was the one who’d stabbed Sirius, and then never again. There wasn’t a way to think about him that didn’t hurt).

“Why not?” James asked. “I know he’s the one who rejected your bond, but it’s been thirty years. He’s had time to come to terms with—”

“I was an idiot, James. I tried to use my soulmate as a weapon. He was—right to reject me.”

A ringing silence hung over the table. Lily stared at Sirius and wondered if she’d ever heard him say something so heartfelt before. Sirius’s eyes were shut tight, as if he didn’t want to hear James’s reaction, and he slammed his mug back up to his mouth and took another long pull of Firewhisky. But he didn’t laugh, and Lily was sure that he had meant it.

“I mean, yes,” James said a minute later. He was floundering, the bond between him and Lily tight and filled with static, and Lily reached over and took his hand. His finger smoothed over her knuckles for a second before Jams took a deep breath and continued, “You were an idiot, but everyone’s an idiot at fifteen. He should realize that and be able to forgive you.”

“How do I know that he ever had the chance?” Sirius asked tiredly. “How do I know how long he’s been under the Draught of Living Death? Maybe Snape dosed him the minute Remus caught up with him. I can’t know, James. And of course we’ll try to find Snape and make him pay for this, but that won’t bring Remus back, and it can’t erase the time we’ve lost.” He swallowed more Firewhisky and laced his fingers together. “And now I realize exactly what idiots we were a lot more recently than fifteen.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about our idiotic decisions to try and keep Harry away from his soulmate. I cast that stupid spell that could have unraveled their emotional bond. And you kept him away from Riddle because of vague fears about Dark Lords and secret battles and—whatever nonsense was running through Dumbledore’s head. And you wish that anyone else were Harry’s soulmate, don’t you? I can see it. You hate him, James.”

“Not my son! Never my son.”

“I meant Riddle, and you know it.” Sirius leaned in and glared. “Come on, James. Even though you know perfectly well now that he’s not a Dark Lord, you still hate Riddle. Why? What do you think is going to happen?”

“He’s not a good person!” James burst out, and even Lily flinched from the tide of hatred and red-white rage that ran down their bond. “Harry is! He should have been matched with someone like, I don’t know, Hermione or Luna Lovegood or Molly and Arthur’s eldest. Why in the world does he have a soulmate like Riddle? I don’t like it, I don’t understand it, and I hate him!”

Sirius sat back with his eyebrows rising in the silence that followed that one. Lily cleared her throat, because she had to. “I love you, James,” she said, “but this is another time when you’re being an idiot after you were fifteen.”

James glared at her.

“Think about it,” Lily said. “If Harry is a good person, and you’re convinced of that—”

“I am!”

“Isn’t the more logical conclusion that his soulmate is a good person, too, and we really have misjudged Riddle just because of what Dumbledore said?”

“You looked up his voting record the same way I did, Lils. You saw what kinds of laws he supported and what speeches he made when someone was going to oppose him!”

“Yes, and Harry knew that before we did, and fell in love with the man.” Lily sighed. She felt as if she had been walking carrying a burden on her shoulders for a hundred years. “Harry forgave us when we almost murdered him. He forgave Riddle for things that might have been worse but didn’t affect Harry personally. I think we have to accept that Harry is perhaps the only soulmate Riddle could ever have, but Riddle is also the only one Harry could ever have. And obviously, the only one he wants.”

“And what happens when Riddle fucks up again and breaks Harry’s heart, huh?” James tossed his hands in the air, ripping away the one Lily was holding. “Are you going to be sitting here mouthing empty platitudes when what we really need is a way to keep our son safe from this Dark Lord in training?”

Lily blinked. She hadn’t realized that was behind James’s fury, which was ridiculous when she was bonded to him.

She opened their bond the widest it could go, and felt the current of James’s fear. He was raging like a wildfire to avoid confronting that fear for Harry, and the idea that Riddle would break Harry, reject their bond, do something that would mean Harry would be worse off than before he’d found Riddle at all.

Lily took both of James’s hands in her own again and leaned across to kiss him. “I understand,” she whispered to him. “You love our son so much, and you’re still convinced Riddle is terrible for him, and you don’t know how to heal Harry from a loss like that if it happens, and that frightens you. But, James, you have to let the idea that Riddle is a Dark Lord go.”

“You saw what he did to me! You saw—”

“I saw him trying to repay you for the pain that you caused Harry in the past.” Lily sat slowly back in her chair, making James stand and shuffle awkwardly over to join her. Sirius was staring down into his Firewhisky, face filled with old bitterness, Lily saw out of the corner of her eye, but right now, she couldn’t care about that. She had to kiss James and say, “He was defending his soulmate.”

“He didn’t have to do it in such a—Dark way.”

“I don’t think Riddle knows how else to be.” Lily took a deep breath and confessed the thing she knew James most wouldn’t want to hear. “And I think that we had a part in making him that way, James, since we were some of the people who kept his soulmate from him. Maybe he would have been calmer and more willing to listen to people like us or Albus if he’d had Harry earlier in life.”

James’s face darkened to match Sirius’s, and he ripped his hand away from her. Lily simply stood up when he would have retreated and stared at his back. James turned around and sat sulkily down next to her in response.

“We can’t do anything to change that,” James muttered. “Does he expect us to invent a Time-Turner that can go back a decade and give Harry to him?”

“I think that he’d settle for an apology, or just our treating Harry like he matters and taking the fact that they’re soulmates seriously in the future.”

“Yeah,” Sirius spoke up, making Lily jump. She’d been watching the shadows chase themselves across James’s face, and honestly had forgotten Sirius was there. “That’s what I was saying. We have to stop acting like it’s some great crime that Harry was born with Riddle’s name on his wrist. Maybe you’ll never like the bastard. Hell, I don’t. But we have to accept him and we have to live with it gracefully.”

“All this because Snape stabbed you?” James asked, a little fretfully.

“All this because I could have had that with Remus if I’d been more accepting and understood him more, instead of trying to force him to live the way I thought was funny,” Sirius snapped, and swallowed the rest of his Firewhisky, and stood, and stomped over to the door.

Lily thought of following him so that he wouldn’t have to leave in such a bad mood, but James had a look of revelation on his face and a tide of it flowing through the bond, so she sat where she was and raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh,” James said at last. “It’s—if we made Harry try to leave Riddle, he would be feeling like Sirius does about losing Remus right now.”

It wasn’t perhaps the deepest revelation or the most useful that James could have come to, but honestly, Lily didn’t care, as long as it was the basis for changing things. She nodded and leaned her head on James’s shoulder.

“And then he really would never forgive us,” James whispered into Lily’s hair. “And any chance we might have of making sure that he isn’t hurt by Riddle being a bastard of a budding Dark Lord would be gone.”

“Yes, you can think of it that way,” Lily murmured.

James stroked her shoulder for a long moment as he thought about it. Finally he nodded. “I’ll apologize tomorrow,” he said.

Lily sighed, and curled close to her soulmate, and wished she could believe that Sirius would ever again feel something like this.

She couldn’t. But she could at least believe that Harry was feeling a version of it, and be glad.