Chapter Forty-One of 'His Darkest Devotion'- Versions

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Forty-One—Versions

“You’re ready for the ritual?”

Harry nodded, hearing the things that Tom wouldn’t voice underneath his light tone. They were sitting in Tom’s bedroom, both of them in bed, Tom naked under the covers and Harry in a light set of robes he could tuck easily aside to sleep or wank or piss or…do other things.

“No one’s performed it in years. Decades, perhaps.” The bond between them thrummed and turned the blue color of ice.

Harry reached out and put his hand over Tom’s. “If you’re that nervous about it, then I won’t perform it.”

Tom stilled. His eyes darted to Harry’s face, then away. There was a long pause that was silent and still only in the physical bedroom, not in the bond between their minds, which bounded and swayed like an iced rope in a high wind.

“You would give up political clout with Madam Moonwell, and a promise to your friend Luna, to—”

“You’re my soulmate, and you come first.”

Tom bowed his head until his chin was resting against their joined hands. Harry waited, reaching up to gently trace the curve of Tom’s cheek. Sometimes he felt as if Tom was the stronger one between the two of them. He was the one who had never given up his longing for his soulmate, his certainty that his soulmate was out there, while Harry had in some senses given up as soon as he understood what the name on his wrist meant.

But now and then, Harry thought that his years of longing and waiting and struggle and self-sacrifice had tempered him in a way that Tom had never been, and he was their strength as he floated now in the silence of the bond with Tom.

“No,” Tom said at last. “I’m confident that you can perform the ritual properly.”

“Then why try to talk me out of it?” Harry asked as gently as he could.

Tom stood up, his movements restless, and walked away from Harry towards the window. He stood looking out almost blindly at the enchanted view, which currently showed a night sky dotted with stars. Harry waited on the bed, and was rewarded by the bond calming and thrumming now with a gentle vibration as Tom obviously fed thought and self-control into it.

“I don’t know why that worry came to me so suddenly,” Tom said at last. “I know that the ritual hasn’t been performed in decades, but if that was a major concern of mine, I would have voiced it before now.” He turned around, his back resting against the windowsill, and stared at Harry. “And you would have if you’d felt afraid of it.”

Harry nodded. “Does it feel like a mental attack? Someone like Dumbledore trying to make you doubt what we should do?”

“No.” Tom closed his eyes and tilted his head. The bond shook a little as he spooled magic out of their combined puddle and towards some distant goal. Harry waited.

Tom finally opened his eyes and breathed, “No. If anything, I think I was thinking of this in terms of a warning, as something that wanted to prevent us from doing the ritual for excellent reasons.”

“A warning from whom?”

Tom was about to answer that when a blossom of fire and light abruptly unfolded in the middle of the room.

Harry flung himself off the bed, rolling, his own portion of their magic coming up around him in defensive walls tight to his skin that moved with him. He made it to his feet to see that Tom had his hand raised, rather than his wand, and a shape of brilliant black and green was coiled around his arm, a summoned viper.

But the fire turned out not to be the first attack from an enemy after all, or at least Harry didn’t think it was. He found himself staring in astonishment at a very familiar bird who had perched on the back of the chair near the desk.

“Fawkes?”

Fawkes tilted his head back and sang. Warmth and light flooded Harry’s soul the way Fawkes’s flame had already flooded the room. He held out his arm without thinking about it, and Fawkes flew over and landed just above his elbow, clinging with his claws and crooning, staring intently into Harry’s face.

“Harry.”

Tom still had his hand raised, Harry realized. He sighed and shook his head at Tom. “You can’t really think that Fawkes would have come here with the intention of harming us,” he said, trailing his fingers down the bristling red-and-gold feathers of Fawkes’s neck.

“I certainly can,” Tom said tightly. “He was Dumbledore’s phoenix.”

Harry started to respond to that, but Fawkes spun around to face Tom and shook his tail as he began to scold Tom with sharp chirps jolted up from his chest. Harry blinked and stared. He had no idea what Fawkes was “saying,” but Tom seemed to understand better, if the flush on his cheeks was any indication. His cheeks were a brilliant dark red, although the bond didn’t convey any emotion to Harry except astonishment.

“What did he say?” Harry asked, when Fawkes had finished scolding and was sitting on Harry’s arm grooming himself.

“He, ah, let me know that he could have killed us easily without revealing himself if he’d wanted to.” Tom cleared his throat. “And that apparently he was only Dumbledore’s phoenix in that he thought Dumbledore would send the world down the path Fawkes wanted.”

“So he’s—”

“An agent of fate, yes.” Tom stared at the phoenix. Fawkes had moved on to preening his tail feathers, and seemed determined to ignore everything aside from that. “Just as some of the legends about phoenixes say.”

“Why couldn’t I understand what he was telling you?”

“Phoenixes can keep everything private if they want to,” Tom murmured. “Their communications, their intentions, speech to one member of a soulmated pair, visions they would share with other people…he couldn’t have stopped me from telling you about it, I don’t think, but he could definitely make it so that no one else could understand it unless I told them directly.”

Harry nodded and touched the magnificent bird’s back. Fawkes looked up at him with a little trill. “Fawkes, do you know why Tom was born with the soul-mark of a phoenix? There are so many different reasons, and we’ve been trying to figure it out.”

“That’s what you want to ask him?”

Harry heard Tom, but only distantly. Fawkes’s eyes had locked on his, and they were so deep and wide and brilliant that Harry felt as if he had fallen into a sea of fire. He saw a vision of many phoenixes, in every shade from red to black, sweeping over that sea, and he saw how they flickered out of existence, or hatched in mid-flight from one that fell to ash, or swarmed up from the flames, or combined with each other and became one swooping, diving figure.

Harry staggered back from the vision and let out a sharp breath. Fawkes flew away to land on the back of the chair again with a little trill.

“Harry? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Harry whispered. He understood what Tom had meant about not being able to share the exact communication from a phoenix, even though it had sounded like Fawkes had talked to Tom in a way that was closer to words. This was so wide and separate and other. “I think you had that soul-mark because we had so much power to change the world.”

“That was certainly an interpretation that I considered.”

“I know, but you told me that you puzzled over the black and white feathers.” Harry shook his head. “I don’t need to puzzle over it now. We have the ability to bring great change and terrible change to the world, Tom. Both at once. Fawkes doesn’t even know for certain which one it will be.”

“Again, that is not something new—”

“It was…it was…” Harry struggled for a moment with how to frame the vision in words. Fawkes warbled softly, and that seemed to settle and clarify Harry’s mind. “Not even phoenixes know which version it might be,” he said finally. “Yes, there’s a prophecy, but it might not—it might not come true, Tom. It depends on which version of reality rules the world at the moment it tries to happen. Phoenixes can influence that version. Different ones act against each other as agents of fate, trying to make particular fates happen. And different realities can swap back and forth from moment to moment at particularly crucial—I don’t know, I suppose you would call them intersections. New phoenixes might be born from the intersections.”

Tom blinked, once, twice. “So Fawkes associated with Dumbledore because he believed Dumbledore might help to bring about the version of reality Fawkes wanted?”

Fawkes flapped his wings emphatically.

Harry nodded. “And now we have the power to make his reality come true instead. But it’s not certain. And I think there’s a phoenix helping Dumbledore.”

Fawkes shook his tail.

“A phoenix that opposes Fawkes,” Harry said, all the more certain now. He didn’t really need Fawkes’s bobbing head and coo as confirmation, but it was nice to have it anyway. “That might be what we were sensing, or you were. The worry. There’s not one stable version of the world right now. There are two that are competing for primacy.”

“That makes no sense. Or we would be alternating back and forth between them. We would have two sets of memories.”

“We likely will when we get close enough to the center of the other version,” Harry said quietly. His mind was burning with insight, as if the phoenixes that Fawkes had shown him had left behind literal trails of enlightenment. “Right now, only Albus Dumbledore and anyone close to him will be living in that version.”

“How do we make sure that the version where the prophecy doesn’t come true triumphs?”

Harry glanced at Fawkes. Fawkes fluttered back to him, but didn’t land on his arm this time, hovering above Harry. His wings were beating so fast that Harry felt the warm downdraft in his face, and Fawkes crooned softly at him before he turned and soared out the window, into the night.

“Harry?”

“I think,” Harry said, breathing it out slowly, “that that’s something we have to figure out on our own.”

*

Tom watched from beneath half-lowered eyelids as Molly and Arthur Weasley shifted uncertainly, nervously, before him. “And you can give me no information that might lead to me locating Albus Dumbledore?”

Arthur opened his mouth, but Molly shot him a hard look. Then she turned to Tom and said, with a little half-bow of her head that he thought was more due to the office of the Minister than to him, “We can tell you what we know of him. But that isn’t the same as saying we know where he is now. He never acted this…mad when he was with us.”

“For my hunters to have this much trouble locating him, I think he is in a folded dimension much like the one the Order used for its refuge.”

Molly Weasley folded her arms and met his gaze evenly. “That’s entirely possible. I wouldn’t presume to say where he is or isn’t. But we know that he isn’t in the same refuge that we were living in.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we were the last ones to leave it, and it’ll have unraveled now, without someone to go back and occupy it within a certain period of time.”

Tom felt his eyebrows twitch. He leaned back and stared at them. “And you never said anything about this before?”

“We didn’t think to mention it, no.” Molly seemed to wilt a little, but she was still stubbornly meeting him eye to eye. “We did say something to the Aurors about how the refuge was vulnerable in our initial interview, but I don’t know what they did with that information.”

Not brought it to me. Tom wondered for a moment if he would have to deal with more Order sympathizers among his Aurors, but dismissed the notion a moment later. Reports had been piling up unread on his desk as he dealt with Wizengamot politics, the matter of Sirius Black, Harry’s parents, and most of all with his soulmate himself. “Very well. Did he ever confide in you how many similar refuges he might have established at other points or places?”

Arthur shook his head, looking older than Tom knew he was. “He—he wasn’t very trusting of us when it came to the end of things, was Albus. Even before he started to act…mad…he was keeping secrets and telling us certain things that simply weren’t true, like that he had sent Lily and James to seek pardons from you so they could spy on the Ministry from the inside.”

Tom snorted before he could stop himself. Molly Weasley nodded firmly, and Tom found himself liking her. Perhaps she could fill some of the hole in Harry’s life that the departure of his best friends had created.

“Very well. Then you will teach my Aurors, and through them me, to recognize the telltale signs of such a refuge.”

“Is that wise? Molly…”

Molly ignored her husband, staring at him fixedly. “And what will you do with Albus when you find him?”

“Give him a chance to face me in a duel,” Tom said calmly. “Or should I say, us.” There was no doubt that Harry would insist on coming with him.

“He deserves a trial!”

“I would not trust any cell to hold him, even one in Azkaban. And after all, dying in a duel is the chance that he presented to Harry, isn’t it? I am only returning the favor.”

Molly glared at him some more. Tom looked back calmly. To Harry, he would defend himself, attempt to justify and explain. In front of the Wizengamot, he would do what he must to make his course of action sound palatable to those who needed to hear it spoken that way.

To members of the Order who had been a part of Harry nearly dying in that disastrous duel, he need say nothing.

“He deserves a trial,” Molly finally repeated, sounding a little uncertain now. “It would help convince people like us, the ones who were rebels only a short time ago, of the legitimacy of your regime.”

Tom rolled his eyes, and then blamed Harry for that as they stared at him in shock. He would never have made such a juvenile gesture only a few months ago.

On the other hand, if juvenile gestures were part of the way to keep his soulmate bonded to him forever, he would perform them every day.

“People like you are the only ones who’ve questioned the legitimacy of it. Well, people like you and blood purists like Arcturus Black, who can’t stand the idea that a half-blood is Minister. Do you want to be like him?”

“Of course not!” Molly sat bolt upright and stared at him. “But we know about your voting record, too. We know what kind of man you are. I’m amazed Harry puts up with it, to be honest,” she added with a little huff.

His damn voting record, once again. Tom wished, as he had wished before, that he had known his soulmate would come from such a stubbornly and rigidly moral background. He would have voted differently and done his best to make himself more acceptable to Harry and his friends and family if he’d known.

Then again, Dumbledore would probably have suspected him of being evil anyway. And he might have managed to poison Lily and James and Molly and Arthur and Harry’s friends the same way.

“I’m not going to give Dumbledore a trial,” Tom said. “I will do my best to give him a painless death.” If only because leaving Dumbledore alive long enough to fight him and Harry was not a good idea, no matter how much pain Tom wished to cause him.

Molly started to speak again, but Arthur laid his hand over hers. She glanced at him, and Tom recognized the faces of a pair speaking down their emotional bond. Molly gave a long sigh and turned to face him.

“Do you promise that you’ll do your best to give Albus a painless death?” she asked.

“I promise, but for Harry’s sake, not yours,” Tom said, unable to keep in his sneer. “You don’t have any useful information to give me.”

“I do, actually.” Molly leaned forwards, eyes on him. “It’s true that I don’t know whether Albus made any other dimensional refuges or where they would be located if he did. But I do know the signs of one and how to know when you’re getting close to one.”

“You couldn’t offer that before?”

“You hadn’t really done anything to indicate that you deserved to know it.”

Tom bit back his own disgust at the self-righteous expression on her face. Alienating Harry’s friends and family wouldn’t help him, he repeated firmly to himself. He would simply have to live with this and hope that once Albus was dead, Harry’s friends would be a little less smug. “Very well.”

Molly nodded. “When you draw close to a dimensional refuge, you’ll feel the sensation of someone pulling on your skin and your robes, and a coldness in the air at the height of your mouth…”

*

“Your former allies are the most irritating sort of people.”

Harry glanced up and gave Tom a small smile as he slammed the door of the drawing room behind him. “Molly and Arthur? They were frustrating?” He put down his book. “But not too much, or you would have been raging when you got in here.” As it was, the emotional bond gave off small sparks of blue and gold, but not the icy blackness or blazing red that it would have if Tom was truly enraged.

“Not too much,” Tom said, and spent a moment glaring out the window before spinning around and stalking across the room to Harry. Harry licked his lips and felt his heart pound crazily as he stood, reaching out with one hand.

Tom grabbed him and drew him near, kissing him hard enough to make Harry feel as if he was about to faint. Then he drew back and put his hands on Harry’s shoulders, staring deeply into his eyes.

“What is it?” Harry whispered.

“I know that you said you’re ready to do this ritual. I trust you when you say you’re ready.”

“But?” Harry gently stroked his arm.

Tom swallowed. “No one has performed this ritual in decades. We know it requires a Parselmouth, but not exactly what else it requires. We’re working with Pandora’s best guess. If it was a tested and true ritual that carried no risk, I would have used it long since to find you.”

“It requires two Parselmouths,” Harry murmured. “You would have had to go out of the country to find someone else who could help you with it.”

“I wouldn’t have cared.”

Harry nodded and stepped closer to Tom, staring up into his eyes, not dismissing his fears but making Tom look at him and keep looking at him instead of glancing away. “I know it worries you,” he said gently. “I’m not completely sure how it will work. But I trust Pandora, and I want to help Luna. Not only because she’s one of my friends, but because I understand exactly how frustrating and upsetting it is to be denied your soulmate.”

Tom clutched at his shoulders, as if he was thinking about some of the ways that he might have lost Harry forever. Harry leaned against his chest and listened to his heartbeat for a long moment before stepping back and looking into Tom’s eyes again.

“You’re ready?”

Tom nodded, and the bond became like glassy honey again. He had only used the irritation with Molly and Arthur to essentially hide in a corner with his own uneasiness, Harry knew.

“Yes. Let’s do this.”

*

Harry stood across the circle from Tom, the plants of the Lovegood grounds behind them. It was a beautiful, shining night, a full moon riding above them, turning the air more the color of a dark blue velvet cushion in a jewelry box than absolutely black. Tom found himself staring up at the moon and wondering for a moment what happened to Remus Lupin, in his enchanted sleep, when the moon was up.

Tom shook his head and turned back to Harry. He had made the commitment to this ritual. Even in his thoughts, he wouldn’t back away from it now.

Harry turned towards Luna Lovegood and nodded. She walked towards the both of them, wearing a set of pale blue robes that left her soul-mark, on her shoulder and curling down her back, bare. It was a beautiful, curling vine ornamented with flowers of the same color as the robes. It also looked generic enough that it didn’t surprise Tom that she hadn’t found her soulmate yet.

Lovegood stepped into the middle of the circle, and the magic around Tom came to shocked attention. He dug his nails into his palms to keep from reacting.

Lovegood’s magic was already stirring, reaching out. It was visible now as a streaming white-blue banner rather like the Northern Lights Tom had seen once. It soared from her shoulders in a direction that…

It was blocked.

Perhaps there is more than one reason she has not found her soulmate, Tom thought, directing it down the bond, and meeting and soothing Harry’s shock as he realized what the signs of this meant.

I didn’t even know that you could block someone’s soulmate bond, Harry thought, subdued. I wonder why the Order didn’t try that with me…

There isn’t a way to block a realized bond, Tom said absently, engaged in feeling out the brilliant blue magic streaming from Lovegood’s shoulders with his own power. It frizzled and swooped at him, not liking his interference, but the path that it made across the silent evening sky was easy enough to follow. There is a way to prevent someone from recognizing the mark that their soulmate bears, even if they look exactly alike, even if they are looking right at it.

Harry hissed down the bond and coiled higher and higher with Tom. Both of them were chanting in Parseltongue now, the ritual compelling the words automatically from their bodies. Their minds and magic were free to engage in the discussion they were having now, and to trace that banner of power. I don’t understand why someone would want to do that to Luna. She’s so…

It is entirely possible that it originated on the other end, Harry.

Harry returned bleak understanding as sharp as obsidian. If it did, and if they objected to Luna because she’s, I don’t know, more sensitive than the average witch, then I’ll rip them apart.

Tom sent back a noncommittal answer of withdrawing power, like the tide going down a beach. Harry so far had kept few of his vengeance-fueled promises, something that might be a liability when they fought Dumbledore.

Besides, Tom had a suspicion, one that was growing stronger as he noted the direction the banner of magic was pointing, and he wondered if Harry really would be able to keep any promise to rip them apart.

*

Harry hovered invisibly, cocooned in the magic of the ritual, over the Longbottoms’ house, and felt as if his heart was breaking.

Neville blocked her? Why?

From what you told me of the young man, I doubt it was him, Tom said. He sounded distracted. Harry suspected Tom was feeling currents of magic and seeing things that Harry couldn’t, both because he had less experience with rituals and because the familiarity of the Longbottom house and gardens overrode other visions he might have seen. He seemed desperate for his soulmate. I would suspect—

His parents.

Harry shut his eyes more tightly. Neville had been gentle and quiet, and there had been times Harry had wished he could tell Neville about his soul-mark, because he seemed like he might have taken it better than anyone else in Harry’s life. And Luna…she’d been a good friend. They both deserved their soulmates.

He took a deep breath, or the equivalent of one, and twisted towards Tom, who in this perspective was a seething mass of blue ice lit with glorious white fire. Why would they have an objection to Luna?

Not her, I am almost certain, Tom murmured, and began to follow the banner of blue-white magic down again. Harry went after him, still heartsick. But her grandmother is very involved in the politics of the Wizengamot.

Harry cursed bitterly. Yes, that would be it. He remembered Alice Longbottom’s desperation to keep Neville out of politics and take no side.

Yes, he could understand why someone wouldn’t want to be swept up by the delusions of war that the Order and Dumbledore had promoted. But objecting so strongly to someone being involved in government that they would try to keep their son’s own soulmate from him…

At least my parents really did believe Tom was a madman, no matter how misguided they were. The Longbottoms would have kept Neville from Luna just because her grandmother is a politician.

Tom nudged him gently, and Harry realized that he was probably projecting sadness and rage down the bond. He tried to pull back his emotions, but he could no more shut the bond between them than he could leave Luna and Neville to suffer, and Tom wrapped himself around Harry, quiet and close.

We will fix this. I promise.

Harry nodded, and joined Tom in the final “flight” around the Longbottom gardens that would confirm the banner extended to the house. In fact, they saw the window that it projected from, leading straight through the glass.

The window of Neville’s room.

Harry pulled back at last, and let Tom sweep him back to their bodies. He opened his eyes and blinked, aware that his eyes stung dryly, and that his throat hurt from the chant. He reached out and accepted the glass of water Tom had conjured for him gratefully.

Tom bowed to Luna, who had folded her arms and stood waiting for the answer, as regal as a queen. “Miss Lovegood, we have your answer. The bond was blocked at the far end by your soulmate’s parents, who wanted to remain out of politics and most likely objected to your grandmother’s prominence in that arena.”

“His name?”

“Neville Longbottom.”

Luna’s eyes widened and filled. Harry glanced away before her tears ran down her cheeks. It didn’t seem right to witness that.

“Is the bond still blocked?” Luna asked quietly.

“To most people,” Tom said gently. “You could tell someone else that you were soulmates, and they would not believe it. But not to you, not now that you know it exists. Find him and show him your soul-mark, Miss Lovegood, and you will recognize each other.”

Luna took a deep breath, then said, “I’m going to him tonight,” and conjured a scarf that wrapped around her shoulders and covered her soul-mark. In seconds, she had sprinted out of the circle and towards the edge of the wards around the Lovegood grounds.

Harry sighed out slowly, and leaned his head for a second on Tom’s shoulder. Tom rubbed his arm and turned to face Pandora, who was watching intently from the edge of the circle. “That is enough for you, Mrs. Lovegood?”

“Yes,” Pandora whispered, and turned around and walked away with her shoulders shaking. Harry thought that she probably wanted to cry in peace.

He flexed his fingers, sighed, and leaned more heavily on Tom as they went home. He wanted a shower, food, and sleep, in that order.

Only that?

Harry stifled laughter as he looked up at Tom’s eyes and felt the movement of magic between them—and warmth, and desire.

He was so glad to have his soulmate.

Yes, perhaps one thing more, he thought back, and let Tom Apparate them, cradled safe in his soulmate’s magic and arms.