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Chapter Forty-Three—Balances

He was running through a dark thicket, and the thicket swayed around him and brushed against his face and pushed him back, and he was strangling with fear and hatred and running and he knew he couldn’t get away—

Song. Light.

Peter blinked and lifted his face, and realized he was crouching next to his bed in the middle of his own quarters at Hogwarts, not running madly through the woods. Of course, he thought, of course he was a professor at Hogwarts and not a traitor, not the servant of some mad Dark Lord. Of course. He climbed to his feet, hands shaking.

He blinked harder when he realized that Fawkes was sitting on his headboard, neck tilted back and voice throbbing in a way that made it seem as if someone could have heard him far beyond Peter’s quarters. Peter blinked harder and shook his head. He shouldn’t be worried about that right now, he knew, as shreds and shards and shadows fell away from his mind. He should be concerned about the wildly changing realities around them, and the way that they could drive people mad.

I’m only not going mad right now because Fawkes is with me, and his magic is enough to stabilize things.

Peter took a gasping breath and stood back to stare up at Fawkes. “All right. I’m here now. What would you have me do?”

Fawkes flew down so that he was on the bed in front of Peter, never stopping his song. Peter expected to smell burned cloth, but nothing like that happened. Instead, Fawkes turned and offered him one of the brilliant feathers dangling from his tail.

Peter blew out a long breath. “You want me to go with you.”

Fawkes’s head tilted back further, and there was a grinding shudder beyond the bedroom. Peter swallowed. Perhaps Hogwarts was changing and collapsing on them. Or it could if the shifting realities didn’t get solved. And Fawkes seemed to think that Peter going with him would solve it.

Peter licked his lips and held out his hand to grasp Fawkes’s tail feathers. “You might be going to regret this,” he whispered. “I was never as strong as the others, or as intelligent. I didn’t agree to be part of Albus’s Order mostly because I was afraid and I thought it was wrong of him to try recruiting us when we were teenagers, not because—”

Fawkes raised his wings, and they were elsewhere.

*

Minerva shuddered, her head buried in her hands. She knew it was childish, but it felt almost as if she wouldn’t have to confront reality, if only she didn’t raise her head.

“Minerva.”

That voice was as low and deep as the tolling of a bell. Minerva rested her back against the wall of the cell, told herself she had been in Gryffindor, and managed to sit up.

Harry’s pitiless eyes stared in at her from beyond the bars. Minerva clenched her fists. She had been wrong, most furiously wrong, about what kind of person he was and what kind of soulmate to Tom Riddle he would make. She knew now that he had only helped drag the world further towards darkness, not bring Riddle into the light.

The bloody prophecy.

“I would expect a little more respect from you, Mr. Potter.” Her voice was shavings of iron on her lips.

Harry paced a little closer, his smile wide and mocking. Minerva didn’t think it was her imagination that she saw large, venomous snake fangs behind his lips. Who knew what Dark Arts he had worked on himself in the pursuit of immortality? “But didn’t you tell me to call you Minerva, the last time I was at Hogwarts? Don’t you remember?”

She did remember. Riddle and Harry had come to Hogwarts after they had defeated Albus, and Minerva, joyously, had told them to call her Minerva. Well, Riddle probably already would have, but Harry had been intimidated, still, by the professorial relationship that had once lain between them.

Had pretended to be intimidated.

“What do you want with me?” Minerva whispered. She had asked the question before and received no answer. She didn’t truly expect to receive one now. But she still had to ask. “Why do you think that you can—”

“Someone has to pay for what Dumbledore did. He died too quickly.”

Minerva stared at him. “I don’t know what you mean. I never knew about your soul-mark or that the Order was holding you apart from your soulmate.”

“But you helped create the environment at Hogwarts that made everyone obey Albus bloody Dumbledore as blindly as if he were a Dark Lord,” Harry said softly, and then giggled. The giggle was gone in seconds, and he crouched down on the other side of the bars, staring at Minerva with a slightly dreamy smile that was the most frightening thing she had ever seen. “And among those people were my parents.”

Were. Minerva shuddered and closed her eyes again.

“Yes, Tom and I got rid of them,” Harry whispered, sounding almost tender. “Made them pay for their years of lying and moaning about how hard it was to have a child who bore the name of a Dark Lord on his wrist. Fools. They could have made me loyal to them forever by raising me kindly and teaching me that the Dark Arts were a source of strength. But instead, they had to act as if I was a burden to them. And neither Tom nor I will ever forgive them.”

“Harry,” Minerva whispered, wondering why she was still trying to reason with him. A teacher to the end, some thought in the depths of her mind mocked her. “They were your parents. I’m sure they tried to keep you safe because they thought that Minister Riddle would try to manipulate you.” The way he has.

“They were fools,” Harry repeated, and then stirred with what looked like impatience and stood up. “Well, I won’t say that it hasn’t been fun, Minerva. But the time has come for you to pay, you see.”

He was staring down the tunnel of what had once been Hogwarts’s dungeons, now repurposed by their two Dark Lords. Minerva turned and stared with them.

She didn’t know for sure what she was looking at as the wave of dark blue scales crept forwards. It looked like a snake, yes, but she could also make out hunched legs that dragged it forwards at various points. And when it opened its mouth and hissed, she saw serrated teeth like a shark’s marching into the back of its throat.

“Sirius spent his last moments begging for a kinder fate for you, if that gives you any comfort,” Harry said lazily.

“What does this one do?” Minerva whispered.

Harry shrugged. “The sshafalnass will consume you, but it won’t destroy you. You’ll stay in its stomach, and contribute magic to our project of rebuilding Hogwarts.” He giggled again. “We’re making you into the equivalent of a battery, if that helps you understand.”

Minerva straightened her shoulders. She could do nothing about this, she supposed, except meet death with all the dignity she could muster.

The creature halted outside the cell. Harry dissolved the bars with a touch of his hand, and the snake-lizard lunged forwards, jaws parting so wide that Minerva thought she could see the bottom of its throat—

And she woke.

Minerva lay clutching the sheets of her bed in both hands, breathing hard, hoarse breaths that quickly turned to sobs.

It had been a dream.

She knew it had. She knew that the shadows hovering around her weren’t reality, that Harry and Minister Riddle hadn’t ever come to her and acted like Dark Lords, and she didn’t know why she had so much trouble, for a second, remembering that.

Perhaps because they are Dark Lords, whispered a voice in the back of her head, and just because they didn’t kill you with that creature doesn’t mean that they won’t kill you some other way.

Minerva rolled over, miserable, and tucked her hand beneath the pillow, her breath quickening again, wondering when Harry would make her pay for her part, as he saw it, in his parents’ deception.

*

Peter came out of the fire with Fawkes in the middle of what he thought at first was a cavern. It was so brilliant and huge and echoing that he blinked back and forth, trying to decide why there were torches set in the walls of a random cave, and why they glittered and reflected off those walls when he heard no trickle of water.

Then he realized that the light was reflecting off coins, and he stumbled backwards and sat down.

They were in the middle of a huge vault at Gringotts.

“What in the world are you doing?” Peter whisper-yelled at Fawkes. “Exactly what good am I going to do you if I get myself killed?”

Fawkes ruffled all his feathers up and looked down his beak, or seemed to, at Peter. Then he tilted his head back and sang again, a rumbling, bubbling tumble of notes that whipped away the fear that had been eating Peter alive.

Peter still stood up and shook his head, though. “I can’t rob Gringotts. If that’s what you even want me to do,” he added hastily, suddenly aware that Fawkes might have another reason.

Fawkes fanned his tail out and danced slowly back and forth on the perch he’d found, on a huge mound of Galleons that looked ancient. His song continued to waver up and down, and Peter turned his head in a direction that it communicated to him without words, stretching his hand out, not knowing why.

Something slapped into it.

Peter winced and waited for one of the curses that he had always heard protected Gringotts vaults to harm him. Maybe the coin would start to burn his skin, or melt it. Maybe it would just wither his hand and the whole thing would fall off. He couldn’t even summon fear at the thought, he was so overwhelmed already.

But instead, it simply sat there, slender and cool. Peter finally breathed in and lifted his hand so that he could see the object in the light of the torches and the fire blazing away from Fawkes.

It was the Elder Wand.

Peter swallowed, and forced down the sticky lump of disbelief and terror that seemed to sit in his throat. He stared at Fawkes. Fawkes had stopped dancing, and even his song trembled to a stop as Peter listened. He inclined his head, neck kinked like a snake’s, brilliant eyes focused on Peter’s.

Peter thought he knew why. Fawkes had brought him this far and given him a chance to reclaim the wand. But what came after this had to be his choice.

“You’re sure that I can make a difference?” Peter whispered. “That you haven’t wasted your time coming to me?”

Fawkes’s tail spread like a peacock’s, and flame spread with it. Peter found himself staring at a vision framed in that fire, in what seemed to be a forest clearing. On one side of it stood Dumbledore with a blue phoenix on his shoulder, and Peter flinched at the sight of the bird without knowing why.

On the other side, stumbling as if against a great wind, were Minister Riddle and Harry. Peter could see the magic around them, leaping and dashing forces of power that surged forwards and enveloped Dumbledore and the blue phoenix—

And fell short.

Peter gulped and looked at Fawkes. “They’re going to lose, aren’t they? Because phoenixes have too great an effect on the world.”

Fawkes bobbed his head and crooned at Peter.

“But you could bring me in to help. Because that isn’t direct interference. And if Riddle and Harry have lasted this long, they’re strong enough that just a little thing might turn the balance.” Peter shivered. “Maybe.”

Fawkes turned, and for a second, Peter was afraid that the magnificent bird would fly away and leave him here. But instead, Fawkes extended his tail, and his crooning bubbled up into joyous song.

Peter swallowed one more time, stared down at the Elder Wand that felt like a cool stick in his hand, and reached out and grabbed hold of Fawkes’s tail.

*

Tom knew they were losing.

He could feel it in the thoughts that swirled through his head. He was thinking more and more of how to make Harry’s parents pay for what they had done to Harry, how to torture Black for the spell that he had used to unravel their bond, how to hunt down Weasley and Granger in the Muggle world and tear them apart. More than he was thinking of how to oppose Albus, who was the one doing this to him.

Tom stretched out a hand, and Harry’s shakily clasped it. He smiled at Tom, once, and then turned and drove back a wave of blue-fringed darkness that had broken at them from across the clearing.

Tom promised himself that if they died, he would make sure that he killed Harry himself, in the moments before the unraveling bond would pull him after his soulmate. Harry shouldn’t have to feel the crippling agony that came from the death of a full bond.

“Have you given up, Tom?”

Tom managed to turn his head, despite the heavy currents swirling in the air, and glare at Albus. The man sighed and shook his head. The phoenix on his shoulder shone like a transparent glass over something blue and much deeper than the ocean, deeper than magic itself. Tom shuddered at the thought of what lay underneath that, and how it might harm the world if it was unleashed on it.

“Never, Albus,” Tom said, and he bent towards the earth and hissed out what was more a summoning than a normal incantation.

The earth broke and heaved, and brilliant red serpents crawled out of it, winding for a moment about Albus’s feet. He stumbled, but the blue phoenix tilted back its head and poured out song to the skies, and the serpents faded away. At the same moment, Tom felt a dull pain blooming underneath his breastbone, and slammed a hand over it.

His bond with Nagini was unraveling.

“No,” Harry said in Parseltongue, and curled their joined magic around Tom and pulled him straight, somehow. Tom took a deep breath and sent a pulse of love and reassurance to Nagini. He doubted she would survive his death, but at least she wasn’t here for Albus to torture, which he probably would, with his irrational hatred of snakes.

“You would have less pain if you gave up,” Albus said gently. “If you accepted that there are some battles you cannot win, and that I would kill myself before I permitted two immortal Dark Lords to exist in our world.”

“We’re—not immortal,” Harry said, and he leaned for a moment against Tom, while an invisible wind picked up the leaves and swirled them around everyone present in the clearing, except that damnable phoenix, who shook itself free of such mortal detritus and stared at Tom with unfathomable eyes.

“You will be, soon enough. You announced your intention to seek immortality.” Albus came a step forwards. The riverbank was almost under his feet. It came as a shock to Tom how far Albus had advanced, while he and Harry hadn’t even managed to get across the stream that divided them. “And you are Dark. Can you not feel it?”

Tom shivered. He knew, with one part of himself, that the shadows grinding his brain into powder were created by that damn blue phoenix, and that he wasn’t the monster Albus was trying to paint him as.

With another part of him, he shuddered and reached out to embrace it.

Why shouldn’t he? Albus had created a whole indoctrinated Order based on the fear that Tom Riddle would go Dark. Why shouldn’t he prove them right, and take what he’d always wanted? Harry was foremost, yes, but Harry was his now. Why not reach out and grasp power with as open a hand as he could?

“Tom.”

Harry’s voice was distant and tinny, calling him back. Tom blinked and shook his head, and then laughed sharply at the expression of disappointment on Albus’s face, leaning back against his soulmate.

“If it was that easy to turn someone Dark, you would have convinced more people that I was worth fighting against,” he murmured.

“It is only a brief gap between realities in which you aren’t.” Albus lifted his wand, and it shone with the same kind of blue-fringed black flame as was filling the air around the phoenix now. “You will become as you were meant to become. The prophecy that Sybill spoke will come true. The future will be as it was meant to be.”

The phoenix spread its wings and sang a delightful song. Tom found himself swayed by it. He could see the serpents writhing beneath his feet, the chasms opening up, the torture spells that he could pass and make legal…

He jerked himself back. “Why does that bird want this future?” he asked, to distract himself.

“It does,” Albus said simply, and then began to weave his wand in the patterns of a curse.

Tom fell back against Harry, and clasped his hand again. They would have to raise a defense like a wall against Albus, backed by the power of the phoenix, and he was tired, and he didn’t want to do this, but there was no choice, except to turn his back on being the person he wanted to be and take up the mantle of the Dark Lord that Albus was trying to foist on him.

Would it be so bad a choice?

Tom blinked what felt like frustrated tears from his eyes, much to his continued frustration, and stood up straight as Harry leaned against him. Yes, it would be so bad a choice, if only because it was the one Albus wanted. He would die fighting. So would Harry.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have to kill Harry. Perhaps they would both go at the same time.

A small sound came from the other side of the clearing.

Tom didn’t turn to face it, not wanting to remove his attention from Albus and the blue phoenix, but his shoulders did relax a little when he heard Harry whisper, “Fawkes?” Maybe the damn bird had brought them some help, as out of character as that would be.

*

Landing in the clearing was the most terrifying thing Peter had ever done in his life.

It looked pretty fucking different when it wasn’t a vision, he had to admit. Harry was leaning against Minister Riddle on the other side of the clearing, panting steadily, and Peter had to fight the temptation to turn his head away to give them privacy. There was no privacy now, and there couldn’t be, not when Dumbledore was already turning towards him and lifting his wand, and the blue phoenix was turning its head—

Fawkes sang. Peter had the instruction leap into his mind, and he probably would have heeded it even if Fawkes hadn’t given it to him, because it was just common sense. Don’t meet his eyes.

Peter flung himself to the ground and rolled, arm over his eyes. He badly wanted to transform, but he wouldn’t be able to hold the Elder Wand if he did, and the wand was trembling in his grasp with an eagerness that showed how badly it thought it would be needed and how much it wanted to be part of the action.

A second, clashing song invaded the clearing and competed with Fawkes’s, and Peter heard a voice in the back of his head whispering, All you are is a failure, a disappointment, you refused to join the Order, you were just a professor at the school and nothing else, you lost all your friends—

“Because I didn’t want to join some shit, sure,” Peter said, keeping his head clear probably because of the Elder Wand or Fawkes’s continuing music or some combination of the two. He forced his way back to his feet, and turned to face Minister Riddle and Harry, and concentrated. He would probably have only one chance to cast a spell before he would have to flee, because Dumbledore would certainly try to take the Elder Wand.

And it could not end up back in Dumbledore’s grasp again.

Peter took a deep breath. “Amoveo magicam sine mure ex corpore!”

That wasn’t a spell. It was more or less bastardized Latin he had strung together and was hoping would work. But this was a moment of light and phoenix song and pausing between two different realities. If it didn’t work now, then it never would have.

The magic in Peter’s body shimmered and then shot out of him. Peter sagged to his knees as he watched the Elder Wand spreading out the wave of power and splitting it between Minister Riddle and Harry.

And magnifying it. Peter knew as well as he knew the rhythms of his own pulse that he didn’t have that much magic in his body. But the Elder Wand could do whatever it wanted, apparently, or whatever its master asked of it.

When enough magic had left him that Peter felt cold, he reached for the last bit that was left, the bit he had asked the spell to reserve, and transformed. He ran madly as a rat into the forest, and hid beneath a root, shivering and clinging with all four feet to the earth.

The Elder Wand clattered to the ground beside him.

Peter blinked at it and then stretched out his nose and whiskers and sniffed. It smelled like magic and smug satisfaction.

Would it have remained with me after all if I had stayed and fought?

The Elder Wand rolled towards him and snuggled up against him. The only thing Peter could compare it to was another rat snuggling up against him.

He found that he couldn’t care about it, that he was too tired and dazed to care about it. He barely managed to curl himself up, with his tail around his body, before the exhaustion seized him and dragged him away.

*

Harry braced himself as Professor Pettigrew’s magic surged into him. He knew it would hurt. He might not have read as much about magical theory as Tom had, but holy shit, it would hurt. There was no way to absorb someone else’s magic, even when freely offered, without that kind of pain.

He felt a single hot slice traveling through him, like being cut with a knife, and then it faded.

Fawkes pranced in place on his branch and swept his tail and his voice back and forth, making it perfectly obvious who they had to thank for that.

Harry straightened up and laughed aloud. The shadows crumbled from his mind. He felt himself flooded with light and reality again, the real reality, the life he had lived, and the tangled, complicated feelings he had for his parents and Sirius, and the emotional bond that sprang into life between him and Tom like a third phoenix and sang.

It didn’t guarantee that they would win. But it meant that they had been suddenly refreshed, and while the phoenix might be an unstoppable force, Dumbledore was still mortal. His magic had to be growing tired.

Harry reached behind him and felt Tom’s hand waiting for his, the way he had known it would be because of the bond. They leaned against each other briefly, and then they turned and faced Dumbledore as one.

Dumbledore’s face was wan and grey. His breathing sounded as if he was on the verge of panting. The phoenix flapped its wings abruptly and rose from his shoulder, and Harry braced himself for another attack.

But instead, the phoenix turned and streamed upwards into the air, vanishing between one twist of light and another. Harry blinked after it, and the last of the shadows in his mind burned to ash.

Do you have any idea what’s going on? he asked Tom down their bond, noting absently that the communication was easier than it had been for what felt like hours.

I think it realized it couldn’t win, and it withdrew rather than continue the fight.

Harry blinked again. He had thought the bird too stubborn to do something like that, but then, he could still say that he knew little of the motivations of phoenixes. The knowledge that Fawkes had fed him had burned through his mind and left a trail behind instead of staying.

So, he was still cautious, wrapping the magic close around both him and Tom, as they turned to face Dumbledore. But for the first time in those hours, or days, of clashing realities, Tom’s emotions tasted of hope.

*

Albus fell back one step, and another.

No, he thought, the fact pounding hollowly through him and flooding his veins with something colder than the Killing Curse. They can’t win. They can’t condemn the world to their endless reign…

It would have been better if they’d said something as they came forwards, if Tom had laughed and bragged, if Harry had sneered or said something cutting about Albus keeping him away from his soulmate. But they didn’t. They simply pressed on, silently, relentlessly, and Albus’s robe lifted in the wind blowing from them.

Gellert! he screamed into the void as hard as he could, and silence came back.

“Die, Albus.”

The words echoed from the trees and the ground, and Albus spared a moment to think that he couldn’t have understood them if they were in Parseltongue, the way they sounded, and Harry had never been a Parselmouth, so why was he speaking the same words at the same time as Tom—

And then a sharp-edged blade swept through him, and cut him in half, and brought all reality to a halt for him, now and forever.