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lomonaaerenTitle: Green and Golden
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: AU, wingfic, soulmate universe, violence, angst
Wordcount: 3000
Summary: In a world where your wings match your soulmate’s, Harry gets his wings in second year—just in time to see a shade emerge from the diary with the same ones.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This prompt is from Kyndyll, who asked for a world where wizards have wings and the color of your wings indicates your soulmate and Harry's wings match/compliment Riddle's. Hope you enjoy.
Green and Golden
Harry was beyond glad that he wasn’t one of those people who got their wings at eleven, since that would have meant he’d have had them growing when he was with the Dursleys. Muggles didn’t grow wings, and Harry cringed at the thought of what they would have shouted at him, while he scrambled to understand something he had no context for.
Hermione had explained, though, that your wings didn’t really grow until you started puberty. She did have a pair of wings when she started Hogwarts, small and neat and capable of being folded under her clothes. Their feathers were bright silver with red tips. But she was older than Harry by almost a year, after all.
Fred and George had helpfully showed Harry their own wings when they were on the train, the first pairs he’d seen up close. Adults mostly kept them tucked under their clothes. Wings were small and for gliding unless you used magic to enlarge them, Fred told him. Only a few people did since then the wings would drag along your feet and prevent you from sitting in chairs or competing at professional Quidditch.
“Forge and I have the same wings, of course,” Fred had told Harry, his head turned so that he could see the bright golden wings projecting out from beneath his robes. They were gold only until you got near the bottom, though, Harry saw. Then they turned bright red. George smiled and flashed his wings at Harry, and yeah, they were exactly the same as Fred’s. “Twins are always soulmates.”
Harry had blinked. “Soulmates?”
Fred and George had exchanged concerned glances, and George asked, “They didn’t tell you about this, whoever raised you?”
“My family are Muggles. They wouldn’t know.”
Fred and George had been a little appalled, but they’d willingly taken over teaching Harry about the wings, how you got them when you started growing up—they were vaguer about it than Hermione was later—and the person who had identical wings to you was your soulmate. The person who could help you grow to be the strongest and best person you could be, Fred said.
Harry had been a little relieved to learn that it didn’t mean the twins were dating each other.
The older students tended to spend all their time with each other once they had wings that matched, Harry noticed, watching the couples who sat in the Gryffindor common room, and the friends, and the people like Percy and Oliver Wood, who apparently were sort of friends but also argued all the time. Harry wasn’t sure what to call them.
He both anticipated and dreaded growing his wings. He was half-convinced they would be utterly clear, without any color at all, which would mean that his soulmate was dead. Or he might not grow any, which would mean he didn’t have anyone who matched him.
Harry wished he did, and wished he did, and wished he did, lying in bed in the Gryffindor Tower, and in the infirmary after he’d faced Quirrell and Voldemort. Voldemort didn’t have any wings at all, of course, since he was just growing out of the back of Quirrell’s head. And Professor Dumbledore had said that Quirrell’s wings had just been stumps, burned and charred. That was what possession did to you.
Harry shivered at the thought.
*
Of course, because it was him, Harry ended up with something worse than clear wings or nonexistent ones.
He woke up in the middle of the night during his second year, after the rumors that had started that he was the Heir of Slytherin, and felt the itching cover his back.
His wings were growing!
Harry sneaked out of bed and raced into the bathroom. Ron had grown his wings already, which matched Hermione’s and made them argue even worse. Seamus had his, but he was hiding them, which was something some people did when they didn’t immediately know who their match was and they wanted their soulmate to see them first of all. Dean and Neville didn’t have them yet.
At least Harry wasn’t the last boy in his year to get them.
The itching grew worse and worse as Harry turned on the lights and stumbled over to a mirror. He tore off his pyjamas and cast the spell that Madam Pomfrey had taught everyone in first year which relieved the itching of growing wings. You could use a gentler version of it to groom the feathers, too, when the wings had finished growing and the itching wasn’t so bad anymore.
He felt something like skin peel away from the middle of his back, which was weird. But Ron hadn’t described what growing his wings was like at all, except for the itching. Maybe this was normal.
Harry just wanted to be normal in one thing. For his soulmate to be someone kind and calm and ordinary.
He turned around and glanced over his shoulder into the mirror, casting the other spell Hermione had taught him, which would float a mirror off to the side, too, so that he could make sure to see the full colors of his wings.
When he saw them, Harry felt as though Dudley had punched him in the gut.
He had wings, yes, normal-sized ones about a meter from tip to tip. They were unfolding from his shoulder blades, and when he concentrated on them, he could move them up and down. They sent a soft, cool breeze over his face, like they were supposed to.
But where there should have been feathers, the wings were just leathery, unfolding in bright fans like a bat’s. Or a dragon’s. Harry reached up a shaking hand and touched one. It moved under his hand. He tugged on the edge, and felt a surge of pain that ran down into his back.
Real. They’re mine.
I’m a freak like always.
Harry privately thought that his wings were beautiful, a dark green near the tips that widened rapidly into bands of clear and shining green as you looked down the fans of them, until in the center, there was an arching bow like a rainbow’s that was pure gold. The same rainbow was repeated on each wing. When Harry lifted them and let the light on the ceiling flash through them, he was dazzled at how bright they were.
But no one else that he’d ever heard of had wings like this. Harry folded them and bowed his head. Then he pulled his robes back over them and went to his bed, knowing he would have to get used to sleeping on his stomach and to the small and squishy package of his wings resting in the middle of his back.
I just wanted to be normal, he thought sadly, and fell asleep wondering if his wings were like this because he really was the Heir of Slytherin, or because he was a Parselmouth, or because he was the Boy-Who-Lived, or for some other reason.
*
Have you got your wings yet?
Harry stared down at the words in the diary. He knew already that Tom Riddle was sixteen, the age most people had got their wings by. But they had been talking about something else entirely, Riddle’s memories of classes on Charms and the right way to hold your wand if you wanted to give the charm more power, and the question seemed strange.
As Harry watched, the words dissolved, and Riddle wrote in a neat, curving line, It’s all right if you haven’t. There are people even my age who don’t have them.
Harry sat there and thought about it and didn’t answer. On the one hand, Riddle had been helpful so far, giving what he knew about the Heir of Slytherin. And he must be awfully smart to have figured out how to create something like the diary at sixteen.
On the other hand, Harry really didn’t trust Riddle’s insistence that Hagrid had been the one setting the monster on people. And if he had lied about one thing, he might lie about something else. Besides, someone else could find the diary, the way Harry had found it lying in the bathroom. What if Harry told Riddle the truth, and then Riddle told the other person about Harry’s freakish wings?
No, the risk was too great.
Harry?
No, Harry wrote. Some other people in my year have them, though.
And the conversation moved on.
Later, when someone stole the diary from Harry’s trunk, he felt unspeakably grateful that he hadn’t confessed anything terribly incriminating.
His wings would remain a secret for the rest of his life, if he had his way.
*
And then came the moment in the Chamber when Riddle was standing as a shade next to the diary, and Ginny was lying motionless on the floor, and Riddle was laughing at Harry about how he was Lord Voldemort.
His laughter cut off abruptly.
Harry sat up, hunched, still holding Ginny’s hand. He was prepared to duck and run for his wand with his eyes closed if Riddle had stopped laughing because the basilisk had arrived. It was all he could really do.
But no, Riddle was staring at something that looked like it was—Harry’s shoulder? Harry glanced down and realized that his robes had torn. It might have happened when he came down the tunnel, or scrambled past the cave-in.
“You do have your wings,” Riddle whispered.
Harry sneered at him. Voldemort was always getting distracted by irrelevant things, he thought. “What? Going to laugh at me for being a freak?” Sometimes, if he said the word first, he could take away some of the sting. Not that often, though.
Riddle didn’t respond, or not with words. He reached back and peeled away the top layer of his robes, and his own wings spread from his back.
Dragon-shaped wings. Wings that, even in the muddled light of the Chamber and the fact that Riddle wasn’t fully solid yet, shone bright green, clear green, and gold in the middle, in an arching half-circle shape.
“Harry,” Riddle said softly.
Harry found himself raising his wings in an almost involuntary response, while his head whirled along independently and a boulder sank in his stomach.
Of course he was matched somehow to the wizard who had killed his parents. He was a freak among freaks, the worst of them all. At least Riddle was just a sociopath and a—a regular person who had developed those wings first. Harry was his victim but as bad as a sociopath himself.
Riddle was stepping forwards with a weird look on his face. He looked enchanted, Harry decided, and it wasn’t a look that really belonged there. “If you knew,” he breathed, “how long I’ve waited…Oh, Harry.” His voice was a deep croon.
“I don’t care,” Harry said, and forced himself to fold his wings and put them away, even though it was strangely difficult when Riddle had his out. He remembered, vaguely, that Ron and Hermione often argued with their wings spread, and if one of them spread theirs first, the other always followed. “You’re my worst enemy. The shade of my worst enemy. This changes nothing.”
“Why should it not?” Riddle’s eyes were blazing like the torches. “If you knew how much I wanted someone, needed someone.” His voice dropped. “I knew I was special when I saw that my wings were like a dragon’s and so different from anyone else’s. And I knew that the person I matched with had to be special, too.”
“I would never date you, you wanker.”
Riddle looked taken aback. Then he smiled. His face was already more solid than it had been a minute ago, Harry saw, feeling sick. “It doesn’t have to be dating, not until you’re older. Soulmates bring out the best potential in each other, remember? And I know that we can help each other, Harry.” Again his voice was a croon.
If someone had spoken to Harry like that when he was a kid, and told him he was special and prized, would he have listened to them?
Probably.
But that was the one good thing about being raised by the Dursleys and told you were a freak all your life. You learned to recognize it when someone just wanted to take advantage of you. Dudley had used to be able to fool Harry by pretending to be his friend. Aunt Petunia had sometimes fooled him when he was younger by pretending that she cared about his injuries and she just had to talk to Uncle Vernon and things would get better.
They always, always laughed at him. It never, ever worked.
“Get fucked,” Harry said fiercely, and reached for Ginny’s hand.
Riddle recoiled. His eyes were open wide, his face fresh and wounded. It looked genuine. But lots of things did. Harry bared his teeth and snarled at Riddle like the dragon that his wings insisted he was.
“You’ll change your tune,” Riddle said softly, and then turned and faced the statue of Salazar Slytherin. “Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts four!”
*
Later, Harry was glad that Fawkes’s tears had healed the wound on his arm, so that Madam Pomfrey didn’t have an excuse to examine him. It would have been hard to hide his wings then, and he didn’t trust that Madam Pomfrey would keep the secret. She would probably feel the need to tell just one person, who would tell the others.
After all, last year the way he fought Quirrell for the Philosopher’s Stone hadn’t stayed secret. Why should Harry trust that this would?
Professor Dumbledore talked to him for a long time about the diary and choices. Harry asked about the similarities between him and Riddle, just concentrating on the Parseltongue, and breathed a little easier when Professor Dumbledore told him his theory about Voldemort transferring some of his powers to Harry the night his parents had been killed.
We’re not soulmates. I’m corrupted and twisted, he affected me, but I’m not the same as him.
Harry had choices, the way Professor Dumbledore said. He proved them by using his own dirty sock to make Lucius Malfoy free Dobby. Someone who was a bad person wouldn’t have done that, he told himself. Tom Riddle wouldn’t have done that.
Professor Dumbledore finally told him he could go to the infirmary. Harry did, but mostly to check on Ginny. Mrs. Weasley was still there, and she hugged him fiercely—Harry was glad that school robes were so thick and he’d cast Repairing Charms on his—and told him how much they owed him for saving Ginny, with tears on her cheeks.
Harry also overheard a scrap of conversation that he didn’t think he was supposed to. Mr. Weasley was talking to Madam Pomfrey, and the mediwitch was murmuring, “You know what happens in cases of possession, Arthur.”
“But surely—she’s so young—she hasn’t grown them yet—”
“I’m sorry,” Madam Pomfrey said, in a tone of awful finality. “Her wings will have burned. They’ll never come in now.”
Mr. Weasley bowed his head. Harry did, too, although he didn’t think Mrs. Weasley, who was still hugging him, noticed. He felt sad for Ginny.
But he also felt that maybe having your wings never arrive wasn’t all bad. Not when sometimes you got news like the news Harry had had.
*
At three in the morning the night after the Chamber, Harry stood in the infirmary bathroom and stared at his wings, spreading them out so he could see them. They looked the same as they had the first time he’d looked at them, the same as Riddle’s. Green and shimmering gold, so innocent, colors that other people would probably admire.
Harry quietly folded his wings and tucked them away. He would learn spells to hide them better, and also spells to make them appear transparent, the way that someone’s wings would when their soulmate had died. He wouldn’t be able to hide that he had them forever, but he could bloody well hide what they meant.
Fred’s words from last year drifted through his head.
The person who can help you grow to be the strongest and best person you can be.
Harry smiled a little grimly. Well, Riddle was that, wasn’t he? Or Voldemort, whichever one of them was supposedly Harry’s soulmate. Harry was going to be the best person he could be because of him.
Nothing like his parents’ murderer. Never someone selfish, who just did whatever he wanted because he thought no one should be able to stop him. Never someone who fit into Slytherin, no matter what the Sorting Hat thought.
Harry was going to be the best Gryffindor, the best friend to Ron and Hermione, the best protector of other people, that he could. And in the end, his freakish wings would just spur him on. He couldn’t fly with them, any more than anyone could who didn’t enhance them with magic, but he could use them to drive him higher anyway.
Never like you, Riddle, Harry thought viciously in the direction of someone who couldn’t hear him. It didn’t make it any less important that Harry was saying it. That was also his choice. Never yours.
Harry wove the spell that would hide his wings’ presence on his back to a casual glance or touch, and turned and walked back into the hospital wing. He paused to check on Ginny. She was pale, and still deep in a magical sleep Madam Pomfrey had said would heal her. But she was all right.
So am I, Harry thought, and chose to go back to his own bed, and chose to lay down, and chose to start thinking about how he’d beat his assigned fate.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: AU, wingfic, soulmate universe, violence, angst
Wordcount: 3000
Summary: In a world where your wings match your soulmate’s, Harry gets his wings in second year—just in time to see a shade emerge from the diary with the same ones.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This prompt is from Kyndyll, who asked for a world where wizards have wings and the color of your wings indicates your soulmate and Harry's wings match/compliment Riddle's. Hope you enjoy.
Green and Golden
Harry was beyond glad that he wasn’t one of those people who got their wings at eleven, since that would have meant he’d have had them growing when he was with the Dursleys. Muggles didn’t grow wings, and Harry cringed at the thought of what they would have shouted at him, while he scrambled to understand something he had no context for.
Hermione had explained, though, that your wings didn’t really grow until you started puberty. She did have a pair of wings when she started Hogwarts, small and neat and capable of being folded under her clothes. Their feathers were bright silver with red tips. But she was older than Harry by almost a year, after all.
Fred and George had helpfully showed Harry their own wings when they were on the train, the first pairs he’d seen up close. Adults mostly kept them tucked under their clothes. Wings were small and for gliding unless you used magic to enlarge them, Fred told him. Only a few people did since then the wings would drag along your feet and prevent you from sitting in chairs or competing at professional Quidditch.
“Forge and I have the same wings, of course,” Fred had told Harry, his head turned so that he could see the bright golden wings projecting out from beneath his robes. They were gold only until you got near the bottom, though, Harry saw. Then they turned bright red. George smiled and flashed his wings at Harry, and yeah, they were exactly the same as Fred’s. “Twins are always soulmates.”
Harry had blinked. “Soulmates?”
Fred and George had exchanged concerned glances, and George asked, “They didn’t tell you about this, whoever raised you?”
“My family are Muggles. They wouldn’t know.”
Fred and George had been a little appalled, but they’d willingly taken over teaching Harry about the wings, how you got them when you started growing up—they were vaguer about it than Hermione was later—and the person who had identical wings to you was your soulmate. The person who could help you grow to be the strongest and best person you could be, Fred said.
Harry had been a little relieved to learn that it didn’t mean the twins were dating each other.
The older students tended to spend all their time with each other once they had wings that matched, Harry noticed, watching the couples who sat in the Gryffindor common room, and the friends, and the people like Percy and Oliver Wood, who apparently were sort of friends but also argued all the time. Harry wasn’t sure what to call them.
He both anticipated and dreaded growing his wings. He was half-convinced they would be utterly clear, without any color at all, which would mean that his soulmate was dead. Or he might not grow any, which would mean he didn’t have anyone who matched him.
Harry wished he did, and wished he did, and wished he did, lying in bed in the Gryffindor Tower, and in the infirmary after he’d faced Quirrell and Voldemort. Voldemort didn’t have any wings at all, of course, since he was just growing out of the back of Quirrell’s head. And Professor Dumbledore had said that Quirrell’s wings had just been stumps, burned and charred. That was what possession did to you.
Harry shivered at the thought.
*
Of course, because it was him, Harry ended up with something worse than clear wings or nonexistent ones.
He woke up in the middle of the night during his second year, after the rumors that had started that he was the Heir of Slytherin, and felt the itching cover his back.
His wings were growing!
Harry sneaked out of bed and raced into the bathroom. Ron had grown his wings already, which matched Hermione’s and made them argue even worse. Seamus had his, but he was hiding them, which was something some people did when they didn’t immediately know who their match was and they wanted their soulmate to see them first of all. Dean and Neville didn’t have them yet.
At least Harry wasn’t the last boy in his year to get them.
The itching grew worse and worse as Harry turned on the lights and stumbled over to a mirror. He tore off his pyjamas and cast the spell that Madam Pomfrey had taught everyone in first year which relieved the itching of growing wings. You could use a gentler version of it to groom the feathers, too, when the wings had finished growing and the itching wasn’t so bad anymore.
He felt something like skin peel away from the middle of his back, which was weird. But Ron hadn’t described what growing his wings was like at all, except for the itching. Maybe this was normal.
Harry just wanted to be normal in one thing. For his soulmate to be someone kind and calm and ordinary.
He turned around and glanced over his shoulder into the mirror, casting the other spell Hermione had taught him, which would float a mirror off to the side, too, so that he could make sure to see the full colors of his wings.
When he saw them, Harry felt as though Dudley had punched him in the gut.
He had wings, yes, normal-sized ones about a meter from tip to tip. They were unfolding from his shoulder blades, and when he concentrated on them, he could move them up and down. They sent a soft, cool breeze over his face, like they were supposed to.
But where there should have been feathers, the wings were just leathery, unfolding in bright fans like a bat’s. Or a dragon’s. Harry reached up a shaking hand and touched one. It moved under his hand. He tugged on the edge, and felt a surge of pain that ran down into his back.
Real. They’re mine.
I’m a freak like always.
Harry privately thought that his wings were beautiful, a dark green near the tips that widened rapidly into bands of clear and shining green as you looked down the fans of them, until in the center, there was an arching bow like a rainbow’s that was pure gold. The same rainbow was repeated on each wing. When Harry lifted them and let the light on the ceiling flash through them, he was dazzled at how bright they were.
But no one else that he’d ever heard of had wings like this. Harry folded them and bowed his head. Then he pulled his robes back over them and went to his bed, knowing he would have to get used to sleeping on his stomach and to the small and squishy package of his wings resting in the middle of his back.
I just wanted to be normal, he thought sadly, and fell asleep wondering if his wings were like this because he really was the Heir of Slytherin, or because he was a Parselmouth, or because he was the Boy-Who-Lived, or for some other reason.
*
Have you got your wings yet?
Harry stared down at the words in the diary. He knew already that Tom Riddle was sixteen, the age most people had got their wings by. But they had been talking about something else entirely, Riddle’s memories of classes on Charms and the right way to hold your wand if you wanted to give the charm more power, and the question seemed strange.
As Harry watched, the words dissolved, and Riddle wrote in a neat, curving line, It’s all right if you haven’t. There are people even my age who don’t have them.
Harry sat there and thought about it and didn’t answer. On the one hand, Riddle had been helpful so far, giving what he knew about the Heir of Slytherin. And he must be awfully smart to have figured out how to create something like the diary at sixteen.
On the other hand, Harry really didn’t trust Riddle’s insistence that Hagrid had been the one setting the monster on people. And if he had lied about one thing, he might lie about something else. Besides, someone else could find the diary, the way Harry had found it lying in the bathroom. What if Harry told Riddle the truth, and then Riddle told the other person about Harry’s freakish wings?
No, the risk was too great.
Harry?
No, Harry wrote. Some other people in my year have them, though.
And the conversation moved on.
Later, when someone stole the diary from Harry’s trunk, he felt unspeakably grateful that he hadn’t confessed anything terribly incriminating.
His wings would remain a secret for the rest of his life, if he had his way.
*
And then came the moment in the Chamber when Riddle was standing as a shade next to the diary, and Ginny was lying motionless on the floor, and Riddle was laughing at Harry about how he was Lord Voldemort.
His laughter cut off abruptly.
Harry sat up, hunched, still holding Ginny’s hand. He was prepared to duck and run for his wand with his eyes closed if Riddle had stopped laughing because the basilisk had arrived. It was all he could really do.
But no, Riddle was staring at something that looked like it was—Harry’s shoulder? Harry glanced down and realized that his robes had torn. It might have happened when he came down the tunnel, or scrambled past the cave-in.
“You do have your wings,” Riddle whispered.
Harry sneered at him. Voldemort was always getting distracted by irrelevant things, he thought. “What? Going to laugh at me for being a freak?” Sometimes, if he said the word first, he could take away some of the sting. Not that often, though.
Riddle didn’t respond, or not with words. He reached back and peeled away the top layer of his robes, and his own wings spread from his back.
Dragon-shaped wings. Wings that, even in the muddled light of the Chamber and the fact that Riddle wasn’t fully solid yet, shone bright green, clear green, and gold in the middle, in an arching half-circle shape.
“Harry,” Riddle said softly.
Harry found himself raising his wings in an almost involuntary response, while his head whirled along independently and a boulder sank in his stomach.
Of course he was matched somehow to the wizard who had killed his parents. He was a freak among freaks, the worst of them all. At least Riddle was just a sociopath and a—a regular person who had developed those wings first. Harry was his victim but as bad as a sociopath himself.
Riddle was stepping forwards with a weird look on his face. He looked enchanted, Harry decided, and it wasn’t a look that really belonged there. “If you knew,” he breathed, “how long I’ve waited…Oh, Harry.” His voice was a deep croon.
“I don’t care,” Harry said, and forced himself to fold his wings and put them away, even though it was strangely difficult when Riddle had his out. He remembered, vaguely, that Ron and Hermione often argued with their wings spread, and if one of them spread theirs first, the other always followed. “You’re my worst enemy. The shade of my worst enemy. This changes nothing.”
“Why should it not?” Riddle’s eyes were blazing like the torches. “If you knew how much I wanted someone, needed someone.” His voice dropped. “I knew I was special when I saw that my wings were like a dragon’s and so different from anyone else’s. And I knew that the person I matched with had to be special, too.”
“I would never date you, you wanker.”
Riddle looked taken aback. Then he smiled. His face was already more solid than it had been a minute ago, Harry saw, feeling sick. “It doesn’t have to be dating, not until you’re older. Soulmates bring out the best potential in each other, remember? And I know that we can help each other, Harry.” Again his voice was a croon.
If someone had spoken to Harry like that when he was a kid, and told him he was special and prized, would he have listened to them?
Probably.
But that was the one good thing about being raised by the Dursleys and told you were a freak all your life. You learned to recognize it when someone just wanted to take advantage of you. Dudley had used to be able to fool Harry by pretending to be his friend. Aunt Petunia had sometimes fooled him when he was younger by pretending that she cared about his injuries and she just had to talk to Uncle Vernon and things would get better.
They always, always laughed at him. It never, ever worked.
“Get fucked,” Harry said fiercely, and reached for Ginny’s hand.
Riddle recoiled. His eyes were open wide, his face fresh and wounded. It looked genuine. But lots of things did. Harry bared his teeth and snarled at Riddle like the dragon that his wings insisted he was.
“You’ll change your tune,” Riddle said softly, and then turned and faced the statue of Salazar Slytherin. “Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts four!”
*
Later, Harry was glad that Fawkes’s tears had healed the wound on his arm, so that Madam Pomfrey didn’t have an excuse to examine him. It would have been hard to hide his wings then, and he didn’t trust that Madam Pomfrey would keep the secret. She would probably feel the need to tell just one person, who would tell the others.
After all, last year the way he fought Quirrell for the Philosopher’s Stone hadn’t stayed secret. Why should Harry trust that this would?
Professor Dumbledore talked to him for a long time about the diary and choices. Harry asked about the similarities between him and Riddle, just concentrating on the Parseltongue, and breathed a little easier when Professor Dumbledore told him his theory about Voldemort transferring some of his powers to Harry the night his parents had been killed.
We’re not soulmates. I’m corrupted and twisted, he affected me, but I’m not the same as him.
Harry had choices, the way Professor Dumbledore said. He proved them by using his own dirty sock to make Lucius Malfoy free Dobby. Someone who was a bad person wouldn’t have done that, he told himself. Tom Riddle wouldn’t have done that.
Professor Dumbledore finally told him he could go to the infirmary. Harry did, but mostly to check on Ginny. Mrs. Weasley was still there, and she hugged him fiercely—Harry was glad that school robes were so thick and he’d cast Repairing Charms on his—and told him how much they owed him for saving Ginny, with tears on her cheeks.
Harry also overheard a scrap of conversation that he didn’t think he was supposed to. Mr. Weasley was talking to Madam Pomfrey, and the mediwitch was murmuring, “You know what happens in cases of possession, Arthur.”
“But surely—she’s so young—she hasn’t grown them yet—”
“I’m sorry,” Madam Pomfrey said, in a tone of awful finality. “Her wings will have burned. They’ll never come in now.”
Mr. Weasley bowed his head. Harry did, too, although he didn’t think Mrs. Weasley, who was still hugging him, noticed. He felt sad for Ginny.
But he also felt that maybe having your wings never arrive wasn’t all bad. Not when sometimes you got news like the news Harry had had.
*
At three in the morning the night after the Chamber, Harry stood in the infirmary bathroom and stared at his wings, spreading them out so he could see them. They looked the same as they had the first time he’d looked at them, the same as Riddle’s. Green and shimmering gold, so innocent, colors that other people would probably admire.
Harry quietly folded his wings and tucked them away. He would learn spells to hide them better, and also spells to make them appear transparent, the way that someone’s wings would when their soulmate had died. He wouldn’t be able to hide that he had them forever, but he could bloody well hide what they meant.
Fred’s words from last year drifted through his head.
The person who can help you grow to be the strongest and best person you can be.
Harry smiled a little grimly. Well, Riddle was that, wasn’t he? Or Voldemort, whichever one of them was supposedly Harry’s soulmate. Harry was going to be the best person he could be because of him.
Nothing like his parents’ murderer. Never someone selfish, who just did whatever he wanted because he thought no one should be able to stop him. Never someone who fit into Slytherin, no matter what the Sorting Hat thought.
Harry was going to be the best Gryffindor, the best friend to Ron and Hermione, the best protector of other people, that he could. And in the end, his freakish wings would just spur him on. He couldn’t fly with them, any more than anyone could who didn’t enhance them with magic, but he could use them to drive him higher anyway.
Never like you, Riddle, Harry thought viciously in the direction of someone who couldn’t hear him. It didn’t make it any less important that Harry was saying it. That was also his choice. Never yours.
Harry wove the spell that would hide his wings’ presence on his back to a casual glance or touch, and turned and walked back into the hospital wing. He paused to check on Ginny. She was pale, and still deep in a magical sleep Madam Pomfrey had said would heal her. But she was all right.
So am I, Harry thought, and chose to go back to his own bed, and chose to lay down, and chose to start thinking about how he’d beat his assigned fate.
The End.
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