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lomonaaerenTitle: Immaculate
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom, others in the background
Content Notes: AU (no Voldemort), trauma, angst, blackmail, emotional manipulation, sexual humiliation, Occlumency, Legilimency, drama, Slytherin Harry
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Voldemort never existed. Harry was in Slytherin at Hogwarts, but failed most of his OWLS and left after fifth year. Now, semi-estranged from his family, he works in a low-level job at the Ministry, unknowingly using intense Occlumency simply to survive from day to day. Master Legilimens Tom Riddle, called to the Ministry to interrogate a criminal, finds himself more than intrigued by the young man with a quiet mind and deep secrets.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Litha to Lammas” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It will most likely have six chapters. Note that while the blackmail and sexual humiliation discussed in the content notes don’t take place between Tom and Harry, they will come up, and that this is a very dark fic.
Immaculate
“Potter.”
Harry raised his head from the pile of parchment in front of him and stood up when he saw Gawain Robards there. It wasn’t often that the Head Auror, James Potter’s right-hand man in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, came to this depth of the Ministry, where Harry worked on correcting typos in reports and memos. “Yes, sir.”
Robards eyed him for a long moment. Harry stood still and kept his face blank and his body still. It was a lot easier than it once would have been, when he was a nervous little boy on his way to Hogwarts for the first time.
That boy was dead, and he had deserved to die.
“Why your father thinks you’re the right one for this, I have no idea,” Robards finally muttered, and turned away. “Come on. Tom Riddle’s coming to interrogate a prisoner, and you’re to escort him to the holding cells.”
Harry didn’t say anything as he followed. Even he had heard of Tom Riddle, of course. Riddle was a master Legilimens, so good that some people said he was more or less like a telepath now, and could sense your thoughts just by looking at you. The Ministry must have found a criminal who was an Occlumens and in charge of some pretty important secrets to be willing to pay for his services.
Tom Riddle had never met a mind he couldn’t crack open and scoop out the insides of.
It was well-meaning of his father to try and bring Harry to Riddle’s attention and give him some kind of promotion out of the bowels of the Ministry, but it wouldn’t work. Nothing would except time travel.
And even then, Harry wasn’t sure whether he would have gone back and saved his past self. He had been so weak, so cringing. He’d have made an effort to give him a different set of lessons, maybe, but in the end, he would have still had to die.
“Come on, Potter.”
Harry tucked away his thoughts and sped up to follow Robards. The Head Auror was a busy man and didn’t have all day.
*
Tom stood in the Atrium and grimaced as the thoughts of passing people bombarded him.
He was, of course, a master of Occlumency as well as Legilimency, and he had his shields wrapped carefully around his mind from top to bottom. But his Legilimency had grown so powerful that Tom didn’t need eye contact or the spell to read minds, and his magic extended around him in an invisible aura. He heard shopping lists being recited in the heads of those who passed, a pregnant witch’s inner debate on what to name her unborn child, the agitation of Aurors headed out to a case, a Squib’s envious thoughts on magic…
It was as tedious and small as always.
That was one reason Tom made a point of answering some of these interrogation requests, however, when he could simply have stayed in his warded and shielded house alone all day. The minds of those he pried open at least tended to be concerned with larger matters.
“Mr. Riddle, sir. Thank you for coming.”
The Head Auror was bowing in front of him, while his mind churned over restlessly with ideas of duties and resentment that his people hadn’t managed to crack open this criminal’s mind. Tom smiled a little and looked at the young man behind Robards, who was also bowing.
Wild dark hair, green eyes that might have looked handsome if they were less blank, and pale skin. And something wrong with him.
Tom would have frowned, but ordinary people tended to attach the slightest meaning to his least gesture. He nodded. “You have come to lead me to the prisoner?”
“Mr. Potter will do it. Tom Riddle, Harry Potter.” Robards waved a hand, already turning away. “The holding cells on Level Eight, Potter.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tom eyed the boy—well, all right, young man, he was probably in his twenties—with a little more interest as they headed towards the lifts. From the name, he was a relative of James Potter, the Head of the DMLE, and Lily Potter, known in circles like Tom’s for her research into esoteric magic. Their son? It at least explained why he was apparently getting duties like leading a world-famous Legilimens to the holding cells.
It didn’t explain what was wrong with him. But the flow of passing thoughts was giving Tom a headache. He would figure it out once they were in the lifts and he only caught flashes of unimportant sendings from people on the floors the lift slid past.
They stepped into the lift, and Potter glanced at him once, as if to make sure Tom was comfortable and not about to shut his trailing robes in the door, before he punched the button for the eighth floor. The lift shut and began to descend.
And Tom reeled against the back wall.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
No, he was not. Tom straightened, his eyes wide. If it hadn’t been from the scattered thoughts he was still picking up from people who worked on the floors they were passing, he would have thought he had suddenly lost his magic.
Potter’s mind was silent.
Tom had felt nothing like it for decades. In fact, not since he had left Hogwarts and daily contact with the only other Occlumens he had ever met who was skilled enough to keep him out, Albus Dumbledore himself.
“Who are you?” Tom demanded.
Potter continued to look at him, green eyes blank, with nothing behind them. “Harry Potter, sir. My father is the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.” The lift reached the eighth floor and started to open, but Tom hit the button harshly and held the door shut.
Potter stood there. Not even curiosity had made its way onto his face. But he was still gazing straight at Tom, so Tom took a step forwards and dived into his gaze.
He realized he was holding his breath, and would have scowled at himself for the idiocy if he could have done it without Potter seeing. This was only a fluke. The boy had better-than-normal Occlumency for some reason. But once he was inside Potter’s mind, then Tom would be able to see his thoughts. He would be like everyone else.
He was not.
Tom found himself standing at the foot of looming mental walls, as black and glossy as obsidian, making him feel small. He reared and sent a blast of magic at the walls. They didn’t rock. They didn’t reflect his probe. They simply absorbed it.
Tom had never seen Occlumency like this. He had had no idea that it was possible to achieve.
He took a step back, into his own mind again, and realized that Potter was still staring at him with quiet blankness. “Are you all right, sir?” he repeated, his voice inflectionless, polite. “Are you ready to get out of the lift and proceed to the holding cells now?”
Tom blinked. He would have thought that Potter would respond with some acid sarcasm about Tom’s inability to keep his magic to himself. Someone with Occlumency like that couldn’t have achieved it without intense study, which meant he would know the courtesies among mental mages, too.
But Potter only held the door open and waited for him, no expression on his face, his eyes as sheer as those walls.
Tom walked slowly out of the lift, waiting for Potter to strike at his back. Perhaps he hadn’t offered any kind of response because he didn’t plan to offer Tom any courtesy, either.
But Potter simply followed and left him at the door of the right holding cell with a slight tilt of his head.
Tom watched his retreating back, partially because his sheer bewilderment still spun like a whirlwind in his head, and partially in regret that Potter’s refreshing silence was gone and he was at the mercy of other thoughts that yammered at him in belligerent voices.
How in the world…
But it was a mystery to be solved for later. Tom opened the door and attuned himself to the mind of his prey that waited on the other side.
*
“Harry! I heard you met Tom Riddle himself! What was he like?”
“Hello, Bella,” Harry said, and hugged his sister. “I’m fine, thanks for asking, and I hope that you’re also fine.”
Bella—whose name was Isabelle, but trying to get her to actually use it was impossible—rolled her eyes at him and said, “I’m fine, you’re fine, everyone’s fine. Get to the story I haven’t heard yet, Harry.”
“I met him briefly when I was escorting him to a holding cell on the eighth floor. We were in each other’s presence for maybe five minutes. That was all. He was a man.”
“But he’s the handsomest wizard in Britain over fifty!” Bella flourished some magazine at him that Harry had to grab to look at before he could make out the image on the cover. A collage of faces, and he supposed that Tom Riddle’s was one of them, but he couldn’t tell which one. The man truly hadn’t made that much impression on him. “He’s been on the list for at least ten years! You must have noticed!”
Harry shot her a hard look. Bella looked down with a sigh, her wild black curls tumbling over her eyes. “No, I haven’t told Mum and Dad,” she mumbled.
Harry just nodded. “See that you don’t.”
Bella tossed her head back and sighed, not beneath her breath. She didn’t do anything beneath her breath, as far as Harry was aware. “They wouldn’t care. You know they wouldn’t.”
Harry said nothing. It was true that his parents probably wouldn’t care that he was gay, specifically. But questions about that would lead to questions about why he had left Hogwarts when he was fifteen, the first Potter ever to fail so many exams, and he wasn’t ready for them to ask those.
They already thought it had something to do with his having asked the Hat to be Sorted into Slytherin, just so that he could have some distinction from the rest of his relentlessly Gryffindor family. And the fact that they were right meant that Harry had to hold the rest as quiet and close as he could.
“Harry!”
Natalie, his younger sister, who had just finished her third year at Hogwarts, came running into the room and threw herself at Harry. Harry bent down and hugged her. “Hello, Natty.”
“No one calls me that anymore.”
“What do they call you?”
“Natalia.”
It was exactly the kind of nickname calculated to drive their mother mad. She was already concerned that her daughters wouldn’t be taken as seriously in Hogwarts as they should be, with their still-powerful accidental magic and being half-bloods, and she wanted the kinds of careers for them that she had.
Since it’s no longer possible for her to hope for that for me.
The thought dissolved as his mother stepped into the Floo room, flashing Harry a harassed smile. “Hi, Harry. If you could go into the dining room and set the table? Bella, put that magazine away. Natty—”
“Natalia!” Natalie pulled away from Harry and folded her arms. She had hair as bright as her mother’s and a temper that blazed brighter. “I don’t want to be called Natty anymore. It sounds like a child.”
“You’re about to be punished like a child in a minute.”
“Send me to my room without dinner, I dare you. You know that I’ll just get Hector to sneak something in for me.”
“I’ve told Hector and told him that he’s not to do that,” Mum began, leaning forwards a little and raising her voice as if she thought that would really work to shut Natalie down. In Harry’s experience, his family were great devotees of hopeless causes.
Bella caught Harry’s eye and looked at the door to the dining room, and Harry nodded and followed her. The short corridor beyond opened up into a room so large that Harry felt as if he were back somewhere that he didn’t clearly remember. The golden beams supporting the ceiling arched overhead, and the table, which could seat twelve people and was made of the same golden wood, sprawled in the middle of the carpet.
“Hector made spaghetti.”
Harry nodded and smiled. The smiles were automatic. Bella glanced at him as if she didn’t believe the one he wore, but she didn’t ask questions. Instead, she went to put the magazine away in her room.
Harry began to take out the plates from the cabinets.
“Harry! How did it go with Riddle?”
Harry turned around with another meaningless smile for his father, who was emerging from the door that led upstairs. “Hi, Dad. It was fine. He was polite, but he had a bit of a funny turn in the lift.”
“He did? What did you do about it?”
“I asked him if he was all right,” Harry replied as he took out the forks from the drawer near the end of the counter. He could have let Hector set the table, or asked him to. The Potters’ elf would probably feel annoyed that he hadn’t. But Harry knew his mother asking him to set the table was a way of trying to include him in the family. “He straightened up after a second and didn’t say anything, so he must have been fine.”
His father sighed explosively and flung himself into a chair at the table, watching as Harry floated the plates over. “Harry…”
“Yes, Dad?”
Dad shook his head unhappily. “I sent you to escort Riddle because I was hoping you would talk to him. Integrate yourself a little. Get yourself out of the depths of the Ministry. I—I would do something more, but you know I can’t be seen as giving you too much favoritism.”
“I didn’t ask you for favors that are subtle or open, Dad.”
Harry began setting out the forks and spoons next to the plates. After a moment, he summoned napkins, too. Natalie would need them at the very least, if they were having spaghetti.
“You can’t be content to be a paper-pusher all your life.”
“Why not? I don’t have the marks to be anything else, since I never took my NEWTS.”
“Why!” Dad banged his hands down on the edge of the table and leaned forwards with his eyes blazing. Harry looked at him without moving. He’d seen worse things. “What the hell happened? Why didn’t you—”
“Dear!”
Harry could have withstood the interrogation, but he was glad that his mother had intervened. Dad drew back from the table and gave him a despairing glance.
“I just don’t understand you,” he whispered. “Whatever happened, Harry, we have tried to help. But you keep resisting everything we do. It’s as if you want to stay in a lowly Ministry position all your life.”
“It’s nothing you can help,” Harry said, which was the truth. It would be easiest if his family would accept that and give up on their silly efforts to change things. But from the jut of Dad’s jaw, it wouldn’t happen.
Gryffindors, the lot of them. It had taken years for that voice to stop echoing with a particular tone and particular inflections in Harry’s mind. But it didn’t matter, not when he had achieved his task of stripping the inflections away from it.
“Dear! Marlene is getting out of her bath!”
Dad sighed, and went to help with Harry’s youngest sister, the “surprise” baby who had come along last year.
Bella ducked back into the dining room, looking at him from the corner of her eye while she found more napkins. “Did you tell him anything?”
“No.”
Bella sighed unhappily. “Harry, you can’t just—shut everything away for the rest of your life. Not tell them anything. What happens when you want to date someone? Are you going to sneak around and hide it?”
I’m not going to be dating anyone, so the question’s not going to come up.
But Bella wouldn’t understand if he said that, would want to know why, even though she knew more than anyone else in the family about the secrets Harry was hiding. And Harry didn’t feel like making his chest burn with shame and his wand hand itch with the urge to cast a Flaying Curse on himself.
He shrugged, and took the extra napkins from her. Bella sighed again, but went to get the cups.
And Harry settled in for another evening where he would let warmth play around the walls that kept him safe, and watch them stare at him in incomprehension, and count the moments until he could retreat to his own safe, quiet flat.
*
“Harry Potter? I don’t know much of anything about him, sir.”
Tom frowned and settled back on the divan near the hearth. If he was watching someone else in the Floo rather than kneeling with his own head in the flames, he could usually prevent himself from picking up on their thoughts. And he was particularly interested in keeping out of contact with Augustus Rookwood’s mind. The man was a useful spy in Tom’s network, but his mind felt as though he had rolled in rotting flesh.
“You must have heard the name,” Tom prompted.
Rookwood nodded. “Of course, sir.” They all called him “sir,” these former enemies and conveniently powerful people whose minds Tom had seized, rewritten, and sometimes scooped out to fill the empty spaces with his own thoughts. “But only in the context of his parents. Harry Potter’s never come to my attention.”
Tom just barely refrained from shaking his head. Rookwood wouldn’t be lying, but the Unspeakables, on Tom’s command, kept track of all the books on Occlumency and Legilimency in Britain, and who was reading them. “Who would know?”
Rookwood was silent, thinking (such as it was). Then he popped his head up and gave Tom an exuberantly childish grin. “I’d think Blaise Zabini or Theodore Nott, sir. They were in his year at Hogwarts.”
“And the rivalries between Slytherin and Gryffindor Houses are less intense than they were in our day?”
Using “our” made Rookwood feel included, and Tom could see his chest swelling despite not being closer to the hearth. “I don’t know, sir. But Potter was a Slytherin, too, so they’d likely know him.”
Tom blinked. No Potter in living memory had gone anywhere but Gryffindor, except for those who had married into the family. And Lily Evans Potter had certainly been a Gryffindor herself. “Slytherin?”
“Yes, sir. It was odd at the time. Remarked.” Rookwood shrugged. “But you get odd choices by the Hat sometimes, and everyone reckoned it had been one of those rare mistakes when Potter failed his OWLS.”
“He failed his OWLS,” Tom replied, slowly. That rarely happened unless the student in question was stupid or simply didn’t study, and no one who had raised Occlumency walls like Potter’s could possibly fit either category.
“Yes, sir. I remember hearing about it because people were talking about it everywhere. Apparently he did pull passing marks in Care of Magical Creatures and Potions, but that was it.”
Tom dismissed Rookwood and sat staring at the wall for a long minute after Rookwood closed out the Floo call with an obsequious bow. Why would Potter have done that? Too much study in one area alone, too much concentration on Occlumency?
But what would have caused that when he was still a schoolboy? It would have made sense if he had become an Unspeakable or had joined his mother’s research into esoteric magic, and even then, wouldn’t have happened until he was an adult.
Compared to the secrets that Tom had wrenched out of the criminal they’d brought him in to interrogate yesterday, Potter’s possible secrets were in every way deeper and more tantalizing. And for the first time in years, Tom couldn’t simply reach out and yank them from someone’s head.
Tom began to smile, and it was hard to stop.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom, others in the background
Content Notes: AU (no Voldemort), trauma, angst, blackmail, emotional manipulation, sexual humiliation, Occlumency, Legilimency, drama, Slytherin Harry
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Voldemort never existed. Harry was in Slytherin at Hogwarts, but failed most of his OWLS and left after fifth year. Now, semi-estranged from his family, he works in a low-level job at the Ministry, unknowingly using intense Occlumency simply to survive from day to day. Master Legilimens Tom Riddle, called to the Ministry to interrogate a criminal, finds himself more than intrigued by the young man with a quiet mind and deep secrets.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Litha to Lammas” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It will most likely have six chapters. Note that while the blackmail and sexual humiliation discussed in the content notes don’t take place between Tom and Harry, they will come up, and that this is a very dark fic.
Immaculate
“Potter.”
Harry raised his head from the pile of parchment in front of him and stood up when he saw Gawain Robards there. It wasn’t often that the Head Auror, James Potter’s right-hand man in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, came to this depth of the Ministry, where Harry worked on correcting typos in reports and memos. “Yes, sir.”
Robards eyed him for a long moment. Harry stood still and kept his face blank and his body still. It was a lot easier than it once would have been, when he was a nervous little boy on his way to Hogwarts for the first time.
That boy was dead, and he had deserved to die.
“Why your father thinks you’re the right one for this, I have no idea,” Robards finally muttered, and turned away. “Come on. Tom Riddle’s coming to interrogate a prisoner, and you’re to escort him to the holding cells.”
Harry didn’t say anything as he followed. Even he had heard of Tom Riddle, of course. Riddle was a master Legilimens, so good that some people said he was more or less like a telepath now, and could sense your thoughts just by looking at you. The Ministry must have found a criminal who was an Occlumens and in charge of some pretty important secrets to be willing to pay for his services.
Tom Riddle had never met a mind he couldn’t crack open and scoop out the insides of.
It was well-meaning of his father to try and bring Harry to Riddle’s attention and give him some kind of promotion out of the bowels of the Ministry, but it wouldn’t work. Nothing would except time travel.
And even then, Harry wasn’t sure whether he would have gone back and saved his past self. He had been so weak, so cringing. He’d have made an effort to give him a different set of lessons, maybe, but in the end, he would have still had to die.
“Come on, Potter.”
Harry tucked away his thoughts and sped up to follow Robards. The Head Auror was a busy man and didn’t have all day.
*
Tom stood in the Atrium and grimaced as the thoughts of passing people bombarded him.
He was, of course, a master of Occlumency as well as Legilimency, and he had his shields wrapped carefully around his mind from top to bottom. But his Legilimency had grown so powerful that Tom didn’t need eye contact or the spell to read minds, and his magic extended around him in an invisible aura. He heard shopping lists being recited in the heads of those who passed, a pregnant witch’s inner debate on what to name her unborn child, the agitation of Aurors headed out to a case, a Squib’s envious thoughts on magic…
It was as tedious and small as always.
That was one reason Tom made a point of answering some of these interrogation requests, however, when he could simply have stayed in his warded and shielded house alone all day. The minds of those he pried open at least tended to be concerned with larger matters.
“Mr. Riddle, sir. Thank you for coming.”
The Head Auror was bowing in front of him, while his mind churned over restlessly with ideas of duties and resentment that his people hadn’t managed to crack open this criminal’s mind. Tom smiled a little and looked at the young man behind Robards, who was also bowing.
Wild dark hair, green eyes that might have looked handsome if they were less blank, and pale skin. And something wrong with him.
Tom would have frowned, but ordinary people tended to attach the slightest meaning to his least gesture. He nodded. “You have come to lead me to the prisoner?”
“Mr. Potter will do it. Tom Riddle, Harry Potter.” Robards waved a hand, already turning away. “The holding cells on Level Eight, Potter.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tom eyed the boy—well, all right, young man, he was probably in his twenties—with a little more interest as they headed towards the lifts. From the name, he was a relative of James Potter, the Head of the DMLE, and Lily Potter, known in circles like Tom’s for her research into esoteric magic. Their son? It at least explained why he was apparently getting duties like leading a world-famous Legilimens to the holding cells.
It didn’t explain what was wrong with him. But the flow of passing thoughts was giving Tom a headache. He would figure it out once they were in the lifts and he only caught flashes of unimportant sendings from people on the floors the lift slid past.
They stepped into the lift, and Potter glanced at him once, as if to make sure Tom was comfortable and not about to shut his trailing robes in the door, before he punched the button for the eighth floor. The lift shut and began to descend.
And Tom reeled against the back wall.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
No, he was not. Tom straightened, his eyes wide. If it hadn’t been from the scattered thoughts he was still picking up from people who worked on the floors they were passing, he would have thought he had suddenly lost his magic.
Potter’s mind was silent.
Tom had felt nothing like it for decades. In fact, not since he had left Hogwarts and daily contact with the only other Occlumens he had ever met who was skilled enough to keep him out, Albus Dumbledore himself.
“Who are you?” Tom demanded.
Potter continued to look at him, green eyes blank, with nothing behind them. “Harry Potter, sir. My father is the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.” The lift reached the eighth floor and started to open, but Tom hit the button harshly and held the door shut.
Potter stood there. Not even curiosity had made its way onto his face. But he was still gazing straight at Tom, so Tom took a step forwards and dived into his gaze.
He realized he was holding his breath, and would have scowled at himself for the idiocy if he could have done it without Potter seeing. This was only a fluke. The boy had better-than-normal Occlumency for some reason. But once he was inside Potter’s mind, then Tom would be able to see his thoughts. He would be like everyone else.
He was not.
Tom found himself standing at the foot of looming mental walls, as black and glossy as obsidian, making him feel small. He reared and sent a blast of magic at the walls. They didn’t rock. They didn’t reflect his probe. They simply absorbed it.
Tom had never seen Occlumency like this. He had had no idea that it was possible to achieve.
He took a step back, into his own mind again, and realized that Potter was still staring at him with quiet blankness. “Are you all right, sir?” he repeated, his voice inflectionless, polite. “Are you ready to get out of the lift and proceed to the holding cells now?”
Tom blinked. He would have thought that Potter would respond with some acid sarcasm about Tom’s inability to keep his magic to himself. Someone with Occlumency like that couldn’t have achieved it without intense study, which meant he would know the courtesies among mental mages, too.
But Potter only held the door open and waited for him, no expression on his face, his eyes as sheer as those walls.
Tom walked slowly out of the lift, waiting for Potter to strike at his back. Perhaps he hadn’t offered any kind of response because he didn’t plan to offer Tom any courtesy, either.
But Potter simply followed and left him at the door of the right holding cell with a slight tilt of his head.
Tom watched his retreating back, partially because his sheer bewilderment still spun like a whirlwind in his head, and partially in regret that Potter’s refreshing silence was gone and he was at the mercy of other thoughts that yammered at him in belligerent voices.
How in the world…
But it was a mystery to be solved for later. Tom opened the door and attuned himself to the mind of his prey that waited on the other side.
*
“Harry! I heard you met Tom Riddle himself! What was he like?”
“Hello, Bella,” Harry said, and hugged his sister. “I’m fine, thanks for asking, and I hope that you’re also fine.”
Bella—whose name was Isabelle, but trying to get her to actually use it was impossible—rolled her eyes at him and said, “I’m fine, you’re fine, everyone’s fine. Get to the story I haven’t heard yet, Harry.”
“I met him briefly when I was escorting him to a holding cell on the eighth floor. We were in each other’s presence for maybe five minutes. That was all. He was a man.”
“But he’s the handsomest wizard in Britain over fifty!” Bella flourished some magazine at him that Harry had to grab to look at before he could make out the image on the cover. A collage of faces, and he supposed that Tom Riddle’s was one of them, but he couldn’t tell which one. The man truly hadn’t made that much impression on him. “He’s been on the list for at least ten years! You must have noticed!”
Harry shot her a hard look. Bella looked down with a sigh, her wild black curls tumbling over her eyes. “No, I haven’t told Mum and Dad,” she mumbled.
Harry just nodded. “See that you don’t.”
Bella tossed her head back and sighed, not beneath her breath. She didn’t do anything beneath her breath, as far as Harry was aware. “They wouldn’t care. You know they wouldn’t.”
Harry said nothing. It was true that his parents probably wouldn’t care that he was gay, specifically. But questions about that would lead to questions about why he had left Hogwarts when he was fifteen, the first Potter ever to fail so many exams, and he wasn’t ready for them to ask those.
They already thought it had something to do with his having asked the Hat to be Sorted into Slytherin, just so that he could have some distinction from the rest of his relentlessly Gryffindor family. And the fact that they were right meant that Harry had to hold the rest as quiet and close as he could.
“Harry!”
Natalie, his younger sister, who had just finished her third year at Hogwarts, came running into the room and threw herself at Harry. Harry bent down and hugged her. “Hello, Natty.”
“No one calls me that anymore.”
“What do they call you?”
“Natalia.”
It was exactly the kind of nickname calculated to drive their mother mad. She was already concerned that her daughters wouldn’t be taken as seriously in Hogwarts as they should be, with their still-powerful accidental magic and being half-bloods, and she wanted the kinds of careers for them that she had.
Since it’s no longer possible for her to hope for that for me.
The thought dissolved as his mother stepped into the Floo room, flashing Harry a harassed smile. “Hi, Harry. If you could go into the dining room and set the table? Bella, put that magazine away. Natty—”
“Natalia!” Natalie pulled away from Harry and folded her arms. She had hair as bright as her mother’s and a temper that blazed brighter. “I don’t want to be called Natty anymore. It sounds like a child.”
“You’re about to be punished like a child in a minute.”
“Send me to my room without dinner, I dare you. You know that I’ll just get Hector to sneak something in for me.”
“I’ve told Hector and told him that he’s not to do that,” Mum began, leaning forwards a little and raising her voice as if she thought that would really work to shut Natalie down. In Harry’s experience, his family were great devotees of hopeless causes.
Bella caught Harry’s eye and looked at the door to the dining room, and Harry nodded and followed her. The short corridor beyond opened up into a room so large that Harry felt as if he were back somewhere that he didn’t clearly remember. The golden beams supporting the ceiling arched overhead, and the table, which could seat twelve people and was made of the same golden wood, sprawled in the middle of the carpet.
“Hector made spaghetti.”
Harry nodded and smiled. The smiles were automatic. Bella glanced at him as if she didn’t believe the one he wore, but she didn’t ask questions. Instead, she went to put the magazine away in her room.
Harry began to take out the plates from the cabinets.
“Harry! How did it go with Riddle?”
Harry turned around with another meaningless smile for his father, who was emerging from the door that led upstairs. “Hi, Dad. It was fine. He was polite, but he had a bit of a funny turn in the lift.”
“He did? What did you do about it?”
“I asked him if he was all right,” Harry replied as he took out the forks from the drawer near the end of the counter. He could have let Hector set the table, or asked him to. The Potters’ elf would probably feel annoyed that he hadn’t. But Harry knew his mother asking him to set the table was a way of trying to include him in the family. “He straightened up after a second and didn’t say anything, so he must have been fine.”
His father sighed explosively and flung himself into a chair at the table, watching as Harry floated the plates over. “Harry…”
“Yes, Dad?”
Dad shook his head unhappily. “I sent you to escort Riddle because I was hoping you would talk to him. Integrate yourself a little. Get yourself out of the depths of the Ministry. I—I would do something more, but you know I can’t be seen as giving you too much favoritism.”
“I didn’t ask you for favors that are subtle or open, Dad.”
Harry began setting out the forks and spoons next to the plates. After a moment, he summoned napkins, too. Natalie would need them at the very least, if they were having spaghetti.
“You can’t be content to be a paper-pusher all your life.”
“Why not? I don’t have the marks to be anything else, since I never took my NEWTS.”
“Why!” Dad banged his hands down on the edge of the table and leaned forwards with his eyes blazing. Harry looked at him without moving. He’d seen worse things. “What the hell happened? Why didn’t you—”
“Dear!”
Harry could have withstood the interrogation, but he was glad that his mother had intervened. Dad drew back from the table and gave him a despairing glance.
“I just don’t understand you,” he whispered. “Whatever happened, Harry, we have tried to help. But you keep resisting everything we do. It’s as if you want to stay in a lowly Ministry position all your life.”
“It’s nothing you can help,” Harry said, which was the truth. It would be easiest if his family would accept that and give up on their silly efforts to change things. But from the jut of Dad’s jaw, it wouldn’t happen.
Gryffindors, the lot of them. It had taken years for that voice to stop echoing with a particular tone and particular inflections in Harry’s mind. But it didn’t matter, not when he had achieved his task of stripping the inflections away from it.
“Dear! Marlene is getting out of her bath!”
Dad sighed, and went to help with Harry’s youngest sister, the “surprise” baby who had come along last year.
Bella ducked back into the dining room, looking at him from the corner of her eye while she found more napkins. “Did you tell him anything?”
“No.”
Bella sighed unhappily. “Harry, you can’t just—shut everything away for the rest of your life. Not tell them anything. What happens when you want to date someone? Are you going to sneak around and hide it?”
I’m not going to be dating anyone, so the question’s not going to come up.
But Bella wouldn’t understand if he said that, would want to know why, even though she knew more than anyone else in the family about the secrets Harry was hiding. And Harry didn’t feel like making his chest burn with shame and his wand hand itch with the urge to cast a Flaying Curse on himself.
He shrugged, and took the extra napkins from her. Bella sighed again, but went to get the cups.
And Harry settled in for another evening where he would let warmth play around the walls that kept him safe, and watch them stare at him in incomprehension, and count the moments until he could retreat to his own safe, quiet flat.
*
“Harry Potter? I don’t know much of anything about him, sir.”
Tom frowned and settled back on the divan near the hearth. If he was watching someone else in the Floo rather than kneeling with his own head in the flames, he could usually prevent himself from picking up on their thoughts. And he was particularly interested in keeping out of contact with Augustus Rookwood’s mind. The man was a useful spy in Tom’s network, but his mind felt as though he had rolled in rotting flesh.
“You must have heard the name,” Tom prompted.
Rookwood nodded. “Of course, sir.” They all called him “sir,” these former enemies and conveniently powerful people whose minds Tom had seized, rewritten, and sometimes scooped out to fill the empty spaces with his own thoughts. “But only in the context of his parents. Harry Potter’s never come to my attention.”
Tom just barely refrained from shaking his head. Rookwood wouldn’t be lying, but the Unspeakables, on Tom’s command, kept track of all the books on Occlumency and Legilimency in Britain, and who was reading them. “Who would know?”
Rookwood was silent, thinking (such as it was). Then he popped his head up and gave Tom an exuberantly childish grin. “I’d think Blaise Zabini or Theodore Nott, sir. They were in his year at Hogwarts.”
“And the rivalries between Slytherin and Gryffindor Houses are less intense than they were in our day?”
Using “our” made Rookwood feel included, and Tom could see his chest swelling despite not being closer to the hearth. “I don’t know, sir. But Potter was a Slytherin, too, so they’d likely know him.”
Tom blinked. No Potter in living memory had gone anywhere but Gryffindor, except for those who had married into the family. And Lily Evans Potter had certainly been a Gryffindor herself. “Slytherin?”
“Yes, sir. It was odd at the time. Remarked.” Rookwood shrugged. “But you get odd choices by the Hat sometimes, and everyone reckoned it had been one of those rare mistakes when Potter failed his OWLS.”
“He failed his OWLS,” Tom replied, slowly. That rarely happened unless the student in question was stupid or simply didn’t study, and no one who had raised Occlumency walls like Potter’s could possibly fit either category.
“Yes, sir. I remember hearing about it because people were talking about it everywhere. Apparently he did pull passing marks in Care of Magical Creatures and Potions, but that was it.”
Tom dismissed Rookwood and sat staring at the wall for a long minute after Rookwood closed out the Floo call with an obsequious bow. Why would Potter have done that? Too much study in one area alone, too much concentration on Occlumency?
But what would have caused that when he was still a schoolboy? It would have made sense if he had become an Unspeakable or had joined his mother’s research into esoteric magic, and even then, wouldn’t have happened until he was an adult.
Compared to the secrets that Tom had wrenched out of the criminal they’d brought him in to interrogate yesterday, Potter’s possible secrets were in every way deeper and more tantalizing. And for the first time in years, Tom couldn’t simply reach out and yank them from someone’s head.
Tom began to smile, and it was hard to stop.
