[From Litha to Lammas]: Immaculate, 3/6, NC-17, Tom/Harry

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Three

Tom was thoroughly bored by the time that the Potters reentered the scene. Apparently Lily Potter was wrestling with her youngest daughter, who didn’t want to go to sleep, and the middle one knew nothing of Harry’s secrets, and Bella sat there in sullen silence with her arms folded. Tom had little to do but imagine idle revenge on Harry Potter.

He looked up when James and Harry walked into the dining room, and then he froze, staring at Harry.

Harry, whose eyes were bright and hard, and who smiled at him as if he was enjoying the way that Tom’s eyes clung to his movements. Who smiled. Who seemed to have altered his Occlumency to let emotions through.

Tom reached out, unable to help himself.

His Legilimency bounced from walls as immaculate as ever. But this time, they were in a different configuration. Tom didn’t get the visual of them marching in a perfect circle around Harry’s mind. Instead, they were slanted and joined to each other, and Tom did catch a glimpse of thoughts running like water through them before he was pushed out again.

“Why did you influence me to ask you for dinner, Mr. Riddle?”

James’s voice was tight and unforgiving. That was also unexpected. Although he didn’t want to turn his eyes away from Harry, Tom offered a faint smile to James and decided to nudge his mind a little. “I really did want to talk to your son, Mr.—”

And he froze, because there were Occlumency walls of the same kind around James’s mind. Tom’s Legilimency could no more go through them than it could through Harry’s.

“You were saying, Mr. Riddle?”

Tom shook off his shock. It had been a long time since he’d had to rely on charm instead of Legilimency, but he did manage to say, “I think Harry has immense talent in the arts of the mind. And it seems that no one has bothered to encourage him in exercising them. In fact, if anyone has encouraged him since he came out of Hogwarts, I would be surprised.”

Perfect. James looked stricken. Tom kept his smile in place, but his eyes slid back to Harry.

Harry was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, and his jaw was thrust out, and Tom knew he hadn’t been forgiven. He wished that Harry’s control of his Occlumency was imperfect enough that Tom could project a thought to him offering an apology.

But then again, if his control was less perfect, Tom would not have found him so fascinating.

James stumbled through excuses about how unexpected it had been for Harry to fail his OWLS, and then Lily and the sisters came in, and Tom was able to immerse himself in a very different kind of atmosphere. He did notice that he could no longer pick up thoughts from Lily or the girls, no longer nudge them in any direction (although he wouldn’t have tried with the toddler’s mind, as children of that age always had a chaotic rush of thoughts). Harry’s Occlumency had spread out to encircle them, too.

Tom had never heard of another Occlumens who could do that. Many couldn’t even defend the whole of their own minds, having to section off certain portions and defend their worst memories or deepest secrets instead.

He watched Harry throughout the meal whenever he didn’t have to look directly at someone else he was speaking to or his own cutlery, and he burned.

*

“Harry can escort you to the Floo, then, Mr. Riddle.”

Harry rose to his feet with alacrity. It had been what he’d wanted in any case, after watching Riddle reclaim much of the position he’d held with Dad through sheer charm alone. Harry had things to say to him, and no one else needed to hear them.

“Of course,” Riddle said, and bowed his head one more time to Mum and Bella and Natalie. He’d managed to speak to each of them, Mum about her work and Bella about her ambitions to become a professional Quidditch player after Hogwarts and Natalie about what it was like to be in Gryffindor House as a rising fourth-year, since Riddle had been in Slytherin. He’d even listened gravely to Marlene babbling to Mum. All of them beamed at him now. “Thank you for inviting me to dinner.”

“You’re welcome,” Mum said, giving Riddle a harassed smile before she turned and started working with Dad to wrestle Marlene off to bed. Harry suspected she would already have been there, but she’d thrown such a fit about the bath she’d had to take that she’d been allowed to stay up.

Riddle turned and smiled at Harry. “Shall we, Harry?”

The look in his eyes was thick with eagerness. Harry made sure not to shake his head, because of the way other people in the room would take that, but he wanted to. The man must want to crush his mind or figure out how Harry was using Occlumency to bat back his Legilimency. He wanted some kind of—nemesis, maybe. Or equal.

Harry had no intentions of being either, except in that he was equal to defending the minds of people Riddle wanted to read.

“Of course. Let me lead the way, sir.”

It was only going into the Floo room, but the air between them was tense, and Harry wasn’t surprised when Riddle drew his wand to cast a Privacy Charm around them. Then Riddle looked at him and smiled. “It’s good to see you awake.”

Weird. Riddle sounded more like a cheap villain from the Muggle cinema every second. But Harry merely smiled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your Occlumency was so thick that you were crushing all your emotions, weren’t you?” Riddle’s voice was a little breathless. Harry blinked. “But then you managed to figure out how it worked, and you shielded the minds of your family members. I have never seen anything like that. I have never seen an Occlumens who could reach beyond his or her own mind. How did you do that?”

“Working on analogy with what you can do, sir,” Harry said, and let his smile become poisonous. Riddle only stared at him and looked fascinated. Weirdo. “I know that your Legilimency tendrils reach outside your own head all the time.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can feel them?” Harry wondered if no one had ever told Riddle that before. Then again, if he was so fond of scrambling his enemies’ minds, maybe people who did feel it forgot what they’d felt before they could tell him. “It’s obvious.”

Riddle’s eyes widened, and Harry thought he caught a glimpse of a red light in them. Further weird. Then again, he’d never met someone who was a master Legilimens like Riddle was. Maybe that happened to all of them.

Merlin knew that strange things had happened to Harry since he had apparently mastered a branch of mental magic without even knowing it.

“You may have revolutionized the theory of Occlumency,” Riddle said softly. “I would like to meet with you again, to discuss this.”

“No.”

“What?”

Riddle seemed utterly astonished. Harry smiled with teeth. That, too, was probably a result of being a master Legilimens. He just assumed he could get anything he wanted by making people want to oblige him. Well, Harry had had lots of new experiences today. It would be helpful to return at least one of them to sender.

“I have no interest in discussing Occlumency with you,” Harry said, his words light. “Some people might say I owe you for waking me up, as it were, but you manipulated my father’s mind to get him to invite you here, and I don’t owe you shit. You probably would have manipulated Mum and Bella, too, at the very least.”

“I know one of your secrets.”

Harry reacted without knowing how he’d done it (but then again, that was almost par for the course, since he had no idea how his repression had turned into Occlumency, either). Suddenly he was closing walls around Riddle’s mind, and Riddle gasped and lifted one hand in what looked like surrender.

“Don’t suffocate me,” Riddle snapped. “I know that you’re gay. It was in your sister’s mind. But I don’t know why you kept that secret. Your parents don’t have a reputation as the sort of idiots who would object.”

Harry let Riddle’s mind go with a slight feeling of relief, only some of which was at the fact that that was the only secret Riddle had pulled from Bella. He didn’t know how long he could have contained someone as powerful as Riddle with his version of hovering Occlumency shields. “It’s not that.”

“What is it, then?”

Harry considered the hunger in Riddle’s eyes, and wondered if he could actually expose his secrets to the man. Riddle didn’t seem like the sort who would share them around, if only because he would want to possess them, and secrets became less valuable when they were shared. And then there was the possibility that he would leave Harry alone.

But one check on some of the burning currents stopped by his Occlumency walls warned Harry not to chance it. Facing that, what he had done, his own weakness, would destroy him. Riddle might spread the gossip around after all if he saw Harry sobbing and curled in on himself, or demand some kind of price if he thought Harry was in his debt. Harry shook his head.

“What?” Riddle took a long step forwards.

“I don’t want to tell you,” Harry said. “Leave.”

“I have never found someone else who could be my equal,” Riddle said in a soft, coaxing tone. “And you must be wondering now how to use your Occlumency to make your life better. I am a better Legilimens than an Occlumens, but I am still the most experienced teacher you are likely to find in the Mind Arts. Meet with me. Talk with me. I can show you things you have never dreamed of.”

Oh Merlin, I was right. He does want some kind of equal.

Harry snorted. “I have no intention of using Occlumency to change my life right away. I need to think about this and make a careful decision, not one that you want to hurry along for the sake of knowing something.”

“But now that you know what it is, you’ll have to change things.”

Riddle sounded so baffled. Harry raised an eyebrow and called back the full walls that had surrounded his mind for years now.

Emotions flowed and burned out. Coolness settled over him, draped him. Harry felt relief at that, too, before the relief was gone. At least this was familiar.

“I can be satisfied with my life the same way I’ve been satisfied with it for years,” he said calmly to Riddle, who was staring at him. “Please excuse me.”

“Your family won’t let you get away with that.”

“I can be different around them than I am in the office.” And Harry would have to, at that. Riddle was right that Dad, in particular, would spot the change and demand that Harry change back, but the more dangerous people who would notice something was off were those like Nott, in the Ministry, who could report to him.

The images burned in Harry’s mind like a poisonous potion in his stomach, but his Occlumency let him examine them dispassionately and then dismiss them. He would survive. If he had to spend years locked down under Occlumency in the Ministry, he would do that, and survive.

Riddle stared at him some more. Then he said softly, “I’ll be seeing you, Harry Potter,” and vanished through the flames.

Harry shook his head and turned back to the dining room, already moving and changing his Occlumency walls. Riddle was weird, but Harry wasn’t a puppet, wasn’t politically powerful or useful, and wasn’t going to be drawn into his equal or nemesis nonsense, whatever he might want with that. Everyone said that Riddle was eminently practical. He wouldn’t keep flinging himself at walls like those of Harry’s Occlumency just because he was frustrated that he didn’t know something.

Harry’s life had been easier than he could have imagined these past few years, being the useless little nobody of the Potter family and the Ministry, in that he’d managed to live through it. He wouldn’t let Riddle drag him away from that.

You remember why—

Harry stamped that thought out of existence, and went to bid his family good night.

*

Tom woke up and for a moment blinked at the ceiling, wondering why he felt as if he had awoken from some wonderful dream. Thanks to his control of his own mind, he rarely dreamed anymore.

Then he remembered, and sat up with a shiver of pure fascination and desire curling down his shoulders and spine.

Doing Occlumency beyond one’s own mind was impossible. Tom had never even read a book that considered the possibility in a theoretical sense, because everyone knew that Occlumency was the defense of one’s mind from the inside. You defended others’ minds by teaching them how to Occlude. And few people could master those fundamentals, which was one reason that Tom had made such a good living for as long as he had.

You couldn’t defend others’ minds. Except if you were a young man who didn’t even know that what he had been doing was Occlumency.

The smile accompanied Tom through his shower and his breakfast and his reading of his owl post, which included another request to go to the Ministry and crack open the mind of a high-ranking Wizengamot member who was being investigated by the Aurors for taking bribes. He didn’t try to shake it.

It was true that Harry might make Tom’s daily life more difficult to impossible, if he decided that he should Occlude the minds of everyone in existence. But even if he had, Tom would still have wanted to talk to him, explore magic with him, work out exactly what had happened to make his Occlumency different from so many other people’s—

Learn his secrets.

Tom made a wry face as he dressed in the black robes with silver edging that he wore when he wanted to make a point of how rich and respected he was. He had learned nothing of Harry’s secrets so far except that he was gay, a relatively trivial thing.

Then Tom examined his face in the mirror and asked himself if it was so trivial, after all. He knew that Harry liked men. It meant he had a way to connect with Harry in a way that a woman would not have had.

A small smile crawled over his face. Tom had not bedded many people, mostly because the chatter of their minds distracted him, and hearing either mindless admiration of his own features or the ambition to use him to get ahead was distracting and disheartening. But now…

He could be with someone who could make his mind as silent as he wanted. Tom had overlooked that benefit in his quest to learn Harry’s secrets, but he would not now.

He was still smiling as he flung the powder into the hearth and called out, “Ministry Atrium!”

*

“I heard that Riddle was over at your house yesterday evening.”

Once again, it was Theodore Nott who had come bearing the message. Harry looked up. “He was.”

Nott shifted. Harry looked back at him until it seemed as if he would say nothing else, and then returned to his paperwork.

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing except what he already knew,” Harry said. He didn’t know for sure if Nott was a good enough Legilimens to detect lies, but it didn’t matter. Harry hadn’t told Riddle anything except what he already knew. Riddle had learned the truth in other ways, but those were ways that Harry didn’t have to admit to.

Nott shifted again, frowning. Harry waited, his hands folded and at rest on the desk. What did it matter if he got these reports corrected now or tomorrow? It was restful, being a disappointment.

“You know what he would say if Riddle learns something.”

“He may come and question me himself, if he wants,” Harry said. There was a time he would have done anything to avoid that. But the walls around his mind were smooth and firm, and he knew he could hold them in the face of his past if he could hold them in the face of a master Legilimens.

“He doesn’t answer to you.”

Harry let his eyes fall. “Of course, Nott. I’m sorry. I’m—”

“A disappointment and a nuisance, from the day that you got Sorted into Slytherin,” Nott snapped, and then spun on his heel. Harry watched him go before he picked up his quill again. Once, that encounter would have left him stuttering and lost for the rest of his day, the way that seeing him had put Harry off his OWLS, but now he used red ink to make another neat correction and laid that report aside.

He was calm. He would remain calm and yield to whatever he had to say.

*

Tom stood observing quietly as Theodore Nott walked away from Harry’s office. That was interesting. Nott had seemed sincere when he’d told Tom that he rarely had contact with Harry, and what Tom had picked up from around Nott’s shields had also been sincere about the way that Nott despised Harry. And Harry’s sister had seemed sure that not only was Harry gay, but that Harry hadn’t dated anyone since Hogwarts.

On the other hand, she didn’t know about Harry’s Occlumency shields. It stood to reason that she wouldn’t necessarily know the truth about other parts of Harry’s life, either.

“Was he competition?” Tom asked lightly as he stepped into the office.

Harry looked up at him. His eyes were once again backed by the bright, blank shields. Tom smiled at him. He knew something about what lay behind them, but no one else did, and he had to admit, savoring that secret was delicious.

It would be better when he knew the rest of Harry’s secrets, of course. But this was a good start.

“Competition? He’s not a good Legilimens, sir.”

Tom raised an eyebrow, but even with the way that Harry’s Occlumency suppressed his thoughts and emotions, it seemed an innocent question. Harry hadn’t guessed the sexual angle at which Tom could approach him, then.

“Not what I meant,” Tom said, and conjured a chair before Harry could offer the one he was sitting in again, “but it doesn’t matter. I have come for the first of many theoretical discussions I hope to have with you.”

“I wouldn’t be useful to you for them, sir.”

Tom’s smile warped. No, Harry certainly wouldn’t. Harry was literally a different person when locked behind his walls. He stared at Tom without interest, and as if he had no memory of what had passed at the Potters’ house last night. Tom found himself lifting his own magic and stopping it with an effort. He could not break through Harry’s walls the way he had depended on for so many years.

So he would have to persuade Harry to part with his secrets.

“Perhaps you could listen to me speculate on something, then?” he asked.

“If you think that’s a good use of your time, sir, then I do, too.”

Harry stared at him with dull eyes that made Tom want to smash something. But he restrained his own violent impulses, which wouldn’t get him far with Harry, and nodded. “Very well. Legilimency has always been thought of as one of the Outer Arts—magic that takes place outside the head. In this way, it resembles dueling spells and the vast majority of ordinary magic.”

Harry stared at him, as motionless as a snake.

“Occlumency, by contrast, is one of the few Inner Arts, spells that take place entirely inside the wizard or witch. Healing is sometimes considered another, but not always, since after all Healing spells can affect outer wounds and tend to be cast by a Healer rather than by the wizard or witch with the injuries.”

Tom paused. Harry stared at him.

It was infuriating. But Tom smoothed his outrage back under control and shot Harry a thin smile. “There have been numerous attempts to make one of the Outer Arts become one of the Inner Arts. For example, an experienced Legilimens might try to interrogate his or her own mind. Or a dueling spell might be imagined and cast on the body from the inside, as a shield that covers the mind from the psychological harm of seeing someone fall in a battle, rather than cast on the outside. But they have all failed. Many magical theoreticians have assumed the barrier between Outer and Inner Arts is implacable, as close to a law of nature as magic comes.

“But you, Harry.” Tom’s voice turned caressing despite himself. “You managed to cross the barrier in the other direction, something that people have certainly attempted, but which, once again, has not been possible. How did you do it? How did you turn an Inner Art into an Outer one?”

Harry’s eyes widened, and Tom knew that some of his barriers were shifting. He hadn’t managed to congratulate himself on it when a blast of wandless magic shoved him out of the office and into the corridor. Tom gasped and caught himself with a hand on the wall, struggling to find his feet.

He glanced up. Harry had come to stand in the doorway, and his eyes were wide open and hot and—

Tom’s instinctive reach still crashed against a wall that he wouldn’t have suspected under the surface of Harry’s eyes, and it hurt. No stone, this; it was as if he had gone for a swim in a bed of hot lava.

“Never speak to me like that again,” Harry snapped, his voice vibrating. The stone of the wall next to his right hand cracked.

Tom had to work hard to keep his eyes on Harry’s instead of the crack proceeding along the wall. It seemed that when Harry’s immaculate shields were in place, they kept not only his emotions and reactions but his magic at bay.

That made no sense, as impressive as the demonstration of self-control was in one way. Magic like this should have been tamed long before age fifteen, the one at which Harry had begun working on his walls, at least from what Tom understood.

Or…

Or was the magic exploding out of Harry like this related to what had happened at age fifteen? The Occlumency had frozen Harry’s control of it then and hadn’t allowed either the magic or the control to mature?

“Don’t speak to you about magical theory?” Tom asked slowly, while his mind raced and tried to understand what was going on with Harry’s magic at the same time as he understood Harry’s words. “I am aware that few people would have discussed it with you before because they considered you a failure, but—”

“No!” Harry’s eyes blazed, and Tom suspected he would find no walls behind them now if he reached out, but he wasn’t about to try. “As if you—as if you’re thinking about—touching me!”

Tom blinked. “All right,” he said. His theory that Harry hadn’t dated anyone since Hogwarts was looking more likely. Maybe Harry associated this with someone trying to use him, even though Tom hadn’t intended it that way at all. “I would still like to come by for discussions of magical theory now and then, if I may? Your Occlumency is unusual and fascinating.”

Harry transformed in front of his eyes. One moment he was staring at Tom as if he wanted to throw him through a wall. And the next moment, all the tension bled out of his limbs and all the cleverness out of his eyes, and he blinked, as blank as one of those walls.

“Sorry, sir?”

Tom took a step forwards, then stopped. Even if Harry’s magic was more under his control now than when he wasn’t using his Occlumency, Tom wouldn’t gain what he wanted by threatening Harry. “You know what I mean.”

“Sorry, sir, I don’t. I’m no Occlumens.”

And he didn’t sound as if he were lying.

His Occlumency is good enough that I can’t tell when he’s telling the truth and when he’s not.

Tom clenched his hands. For someone who had survived since he was young through the ability to tell when his opponents were lying and ultimately through the ability to rewrite their minds, he hated the sensation that he was swimming in unfamiliar waters. Harry could spill all his secrets right now, and Tom wouldn’t know it.

Harry must have lifted some of the walls a little, because he gave Tom a small, mean smile.

Tom swallowed his irritation. Harry was still the greatest prize, the most interesting person, Tom had come across in decades. When he could flawlessly defend himself, enemies had largely ceased to hold Tom’s interest.

“I would like to offer you dinner at my house, then,” he said.

Harry’s smile disappeared as if it had never been. “I wouldn’t be a good or entertaining dinner companion to you, sir. I’m afraid that my parents never managed to properly instruct me in manners, either.”

“At least do me the courtesy of pretending that you know what I’m talking about.”

“It would indeed be pretense, sir.”

Tom took a step forwards again before he could stop himself. Harry stared back at him, and the walls were probably back in place and firm stone once again. And Tom wouldn’t get his way by threatening or bribery.

A challenge. A real challenge. He had wanted one, and he couldn’t complain when he had been complaining in the first place about the lack of one.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” Tom said, and turned and walked away from the office door, already planning his next seduction attempt. It had been a long time since he’d thought of anything that way, but Harry was worth it.

*

Riddle is fucking weird.

Harry stared at the book that sat in front of him. It was so ancient that it was bound in planks of wood, or at least planks of leather as hard as wood. The covers stood a good inch or so above the silvery pages lying within. When Harry reached out a cautious hand and picked up the top one, it seemed to thrum in his fingers.

The book had no title or author, either, and the handwriting inside was so ornate that Harry had had trouble making it out when he looked. But he could see in the end that it was about Occlumency and Legilimency.

Inside the small protected space at the center of what Harry now knew were his Occlumency barriers, he could feel a spark of curiosity. He was allowing himself to feel that much, and had been since Riddle’s owl had delivered the ridiculously large and expensive-looking book an hour ago.

But he didn’t intend to read it or follow up with Riddle. Harry knew Riddle’s type, for all that the man had just been a distant, famous figure until they’d met at the Ministry. Riddle would want all of Harry’s secrets, in the end.

There were some Harry carried which had originated with him but were no longer strictly his. Riddle couldn’t have them. And Harry would be sending his weird book back to him tomorrow.

He heard footsteps in the corridor, and had a moment to reflect on the absurd fact that he was so popular lately when he realized he knew those footsteps.

Harry shifted the barriers in an instant. Now he was breathing and blinking as he spread paperwork across the top of the book. Now he was looking up and nodding as he paused in the doorway of the little office.

“Always knew that you weren’t meant for much,” said Draco Malfoy.

“Yes, sir.”

Malfoy laughed and strode into the room. He sat down in the chair across from Harry’s desk that Riddle had conjured, propping one leg up on the other. “How does it feel, Potter? To be here, away from all the prestige that you probably thought awaited you as the son of the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and without any prospects of getting anything better without your OWLS or NEWTS?”

“Awful, sir.”

“I like the way you call me sir.”

Harry breathed and blinked. “Yes, sir.”

Malfoy leaned closer abruptly. His breath stirred the papers that Harry had plastered over the cover of the book, but didn’t move them away. “I heard Riddle is sniffing around you. You had better never tell him what happened. If you so much as hint—if Theodore or someone else tells me that you’ve so much as hinted…”

Harry breathed and blinked. “No, sir.”

“What’s that?” Malfoy’s hand clapped down to rest in the middle of the desk with a loud sound, but Harry didn’t jump or stir.

“No, sir. I won’t betray you. I won’t say anything to anyone or drop a hint.”

Malfoy studied him for a second, but then nodded. “Good. I suppose that your keeping silent for seven years is probably a good indication, but I don’t like the way Riddle keeps coming back. Why does he come back?”

“My dad thought he could offer me some good career prospects, that maybe I would be interested in Occlumency and Legilimency when I haven’t been interested in anything else. He had me escort Riddle to a prisoner whose mind he looked into. He came to dinner at our house for the same reason. He told me that he doesn’t understand someone who doesn’t fawn over him. And I don’t.”

“Because you did your fawning over me in your time, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just remember it, Potter. See that you remember it.”

Harry breathed and blinked and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Malfoy turned and left the office.

Harry began correcting reports again. He stood up when he left the office, Riddle’s book clasped in his arms, so that he could send it back to its owner. He found an owl in the small common office kept for Ministry personnel’s use on the eighth floor, with a tunnel that led to the air and the light, and watched the owl as long as he could while it flew down the tunnel.