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Part Two

Lily rises to her feet, stilling the anxious twitching of her fingers as best she can. She asked for a visit with Harry, her son she hasn’t seen since the day he turned seventeen and moved out of their house, but she’s afraid, as he sweeps into the room, that she’s getting a visit with a Dark wizard who barely knows her at all.

“Yes?” Harry folds his arms as he studies her. There’s so little of him left from the boy Lily loved and raised. Eyes the same color, but hair different, clothes different, expression closed-off instead of carefree and laughing.

Even that scar on his forehead. Lily has no idea how he got that.

I should know every scar on his body. I should have been there to hold his hand and feed him healing potions when he got it.

Lily takes a deep breath. They’re in “the Dark Lord’s receiving room,” also known as the receiving room of a manor that seemed to appear from nowhere. It wasn’t outside Hogsmeade at one point, and then it was. The house is huge, dark, this particular room filled with a shifting blood-red light like being drowned in roses.

“I don’t have all day, Lily. What do you want?”

Lily forces down the urge to flee to the fire again. This might be her one chance of getting her son back. She says softly, “I wanted to see you. I wanted to ask you to visit for your father’s birthday.”

Harry blinks. He looks like someone who has forgotten he ever had a mother or father. “Why would I do that, when you despise me and my husband and the House I was sorted into and the choices I made?”

Husband.

If the thorn of one of those invisible dancing roses had gone through her heart, Lily could not feel more anguish.

She swallows down all the words she wants to say. Words haven’t made the difference, except to chill the fire that Harry was born with and make him think he had to choose Riddle—Slytherin, as he calls himself now. “Your father would like to see you. So would I, and Sirius. We’re still your family.”

“You’re the womb that gave birth to me. Nothing more than that.”

Lily staggers. There’s nothing to catch herself on, and she nearly falls.

“You—you don’t mean that, Harry. Not really.”

“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Harry, you’re our son. Sirius’s godson! You’re the person we loved and raised for eleven years! Don’t you see that Riddle just—he baffled you, he bedazzled you, he led you astray, he used the Imperius Curse on you for all I know—”

Lily stops. Harry’s wand is leveled at her, and his eyes are so wide that she thinks she can see redness at the bottom of them. Yes, red, and the image of a coiling, hissing snake that bares its fangs at her.

“Get out.”

Harry follows that up with words Lily can’t make out, but she knows a command when she hears one. She stumbles to the fire and nearly falls through it. Her voice calling out “Potters’ Place!” is so shaky that she thinks she might be whirled away by the Floo and never emerge, traveling between walls and flames forever.

It might be better than this thorn in her heart.

*

“Isn’t she cool?”

“She is,” Tom says, and then hisses something at Adeline in Parseltongue. Adeline hisses back, twining around Harry’s upper arm, and Harry laughs a little. He wishes that he could understand her, the way Tom does, but he doesn’t mind that much when he can sit right here, in the corner of the common room he and Tom have marked as their own, and listen to their hissing.

Adeline is the adder that his parents presented Harry with at Christmas. Harry smiled at them and thanked them, and told himself that this was a big compromise when his parents were so uneasy with snakes and snake imagery.

(And tried not to hear the voice in his own head that whispered they gave him Adeline at his second Christmas after being Sorted into Slytherin, a full year after he asked for a snake).

“Harry?”

Harry blinks and glances up at Tom. “Sorry,” he says, only he’s not very. He wouldn’t have been able to understand what Tom and Adeline were saying anyway. “Did you want to ask me a question?”

“I wanted to ask you how your parents and godfather were treating you.”

“The same as ever, really.”

“That doesn’t sound like an answer.”

Harry leans back on the couch and kicks his feet up to rest on the far arm. Tom prefers the wingback chair that stands next to the couch, and which he’s marked with a snake slashed into the back of it, because he’s a berk like that. “But it is,” he says, shaking his head. “They still don’t know what to do with me, what to think of me.”

“It is pathetic that a simple Hogwarts Sorting convinced them to disregard a wizard of your obvious power.”

Harry rolls his eyes. He thinks Tom is too fixated on power. But he doesn’t feel like arguing. He waves his hand. “I agree with the first part of that. Okay, so it was a surprise to them when I Sorted Slytherin. It was a surprise to me. But it’s still thrown them off their stride so badly, and I can’t figure out why.”

He has to admit that he’s more frustrated with his parents than with Sirius. Sirius grew up with his whole family believing in blood prejudice nonsense and talking nonstop about how Slytherin was the only acceptable House. Sirius shocked them all when he went to Gryffindor, so it makes a kind of sense that he’s finding it hard to deal with a godson who went to the unexpected House, the one his terrible family was in. Harry is a member of the Potter family, and he was supposed to do the opposite of the Black family.

But his parents? Losing a best friend and having bad memories of some students in the House are insufficient motivation, Harry thinks. Especially when Harry didn’t cause either event and certainly wasn’t alive to remember them.

“Harry.”

Harry starts and realizes that Tom is leaning forwards and has his hand on Harry’s knee. Harry flushes. He knows Tom doesn’t like being ignored in the middle of a conversation, even if it isn’t on purpose. “Sorry. I suppose it’s just hard to stop thinking about my parents and Sirius when I just spent a few weeks with them.”

“Do not apologize. I did want to ask you a question.” But then Tom goes silent enough that Harry wonders if this is one of those mysterious things Tom prefers to keep to himself and ask Harry about later. At last, however, he murmurs, “What do you want, Harry?”

“I—to be your friend?” Tom seems to test people, Harry has noticed, as if trying to figure out what it would take to drive them away or make them stick close.

It’s because he manipulates people, of course. Harry realized that in the first term of his first year. But as long as someone treats Harry like he’s valuable, he doesn’t really care if they manipulate him.

“No. I mean, more broadly. What do you want in your career? Where do you see yourself living seven years from now?”

Harry sighs. “You know that the Hat didn’t put me in Slytherin for my ambition, Tom—”

“That does not mean that you cannot want things.”

Harry takes the time to think it through, stroking Adeline as she coils around his arm more tightly and goes to sleep. A few years ago, he would have had a simple answer. He wanted to be an Auror, like his dad. He wanted to help people.

But now?

He’s learned a lot about the Ministry by listening to his yearmates and the older students who sometimes deign to talk to him because he’s Tom’s friend. The Ministry is corrupt. Harry thinks that only Dad’s money and pure blood got him promoted to Head Auror, and now he’s too powerful to just be disregarded.

But Harry? He won’t have the pure blood. He may not have the money if his parents disown him, which he sometimes lies awake at night worrying about.

They have no reason to. But they have no reason to be so strange and silent with him, either.

And…

Well, new thoughts shift in his head. Does Harry really want to be an Auror just because his father is? Does he want it because it’s what he always wanted, for himself, or just because it’s the kind of thing that got him patted on the head and smiled at by his parents?

When they thought I would be in Gryffindor.

Harry breathes out and admits to Tom, who has been watching him since he asked the question, “I don’t know.”

“Well,” Tom says, and leans back in his own chair, straightening his posture. Harry slumps some more. Tom frowns, but the frown is wiped out by his smile when he adds, “We can work on learning that together.”

Harry mirrors his smile.

*

James closes his eyes and leans his face against the doorway. He knows it won’t erase what he saw today. Nothing will.

“James? Honey?”

Lily comes out of her study with her hair in disarray; probably some potion blew up earlier today, and she hasn’t bothered to fix the style. James turns and holds out his arms to her. Lils, dear Lils, knows what he needs, and comes over to hold him silently.

But it doesn’t take much time for her to catch a glimpse of the photographs on the kitchen table. She gasps. James holds her closer, and guides her over without relaxing his embrace, so she can see them more closely.

The first one is of a shop on Knockturn Alley, one that James has led raids on a few times. Borgin and Burke’s. However, it looks nothing like it did the last time James saw it—before today, at least. The front window is shattered, the shards standing out around a large hole with blackened edges.

Some powerful spell caused that, but James noticed one odd thing about the photograph even before he went to the shop to see for himself. The magic that did this came from inside the shop, not outside.

If someone was breaking in to steal some Dark artifact from Borgin, the current going theory, they apparently walked through the front door first.

The second photograph is of Borgin on the floor of the shop. It’s—bad. The blood around him is splayed in a ritual pattern. The man did survive, but he’s in a coma at St. Mungo’s. James isn’t sure that he’ll want to wake up, given how bad the scars are.

He’s not sure why the thief would choose to bleed Borgin in particular for this ritual. Or choose that ritual, for that matter. It’s a protective one, one that entwines itself with the caster’s magic and uses it to defend another person or object. It’s the kind of thing usually using willingly donated blood and usually completed in a quiet, private setting, such as the caster’s home.

The theory in the Auror Department is that Borgin betrayed someone and they liked the symbolism of using an enemy who was once a friend for this ritual. James admits that could be the case. But something else bothers him.

The protective ritual does not demand this much blood.

The third photograph makes Lily say, “What is this, James? Is it a snake that Borgin has in his shop?”

“He doesn’t sell live animals, Lils,” James murmurs, and leans over her shoulder to feather his fingers over the surface of the photograph. “It’s a picture of what was left on the wall of his shop, and inscribed in blood in the middle of the ritual circle.”

“It’s not alive?”

“No. Not at all. Just a symbol.”

“I’ve never seen a drawing this perfect, James. This alive.”

James never has, either, and this picture is the one that worries him second most. Someone went to a lot of trouble to perfect this drawing. It’s an image of a brilliant blue snake with its head coiled back over its body. It has its tail almost in its mouth—not the classic Ouroboros, but close.

The last photograph—

“Oh,” Lily breathes.

The symbol of the snake is hovering over the roof of Borgin’s shop. The magic needed to create such a thing and make it look so alive, let alone make the light so intense a blue, makes James sick with fear at the thought of its power.

He saw the snake in the sky when he got to Borgin’s shop, and that was bad enough, but for some reason, looking at it in the photograph, and being reassured over and over again that it’s as bad as he remembered, is worse.

“James, look.”

“Lils, I spent the afternoon looking. I know what it looks like—”

“It’s not an Ouroboros, James.”

James leans close to the picture, grimacing despite himself at how the snake in the image shifts back and forth. It was doing that in the sky, too, but that was easier to ignore than in a small picture right in front of him.

And—

He can see what Lily means, now. The snake’s tail is still lifted towards its mouth, open and with a pair of fangs in the front, but it isn’t just the tail. The end of the tail, which should be blunt and smooth, is another snake’s head.

Two snakes.

James leans against Lily and shakes. Lily caresses his back, and they stare in silence at the image that could mean anything. It’s widely considered to herald the rising of a new Dark Lord, like Grindelwald, who also used a symbol of some sort to mark his crimes and raids. There’s no reason to assume that this is Riddle, and their Harry.

But in their hearts, both Lily and James know.

*

“Get up. Try again.”

Harry grimaces, forcing himself back to his feet. Third year is busy. He has all the classes he did for the first two years, plus being a reserve Seeker on the Slytherin Quidditch team—Draco got the actual Seeker place, thanks to his daddy’s money—and Arithmancy and Ancient Runes. And then Tom offered him dueling practice, and of course Harry couldn’t say no. Professor Compris, their Defense teacher, isn’t terrible, but she won’t teach them anything except basic hexes and jinxes.

Just about all the free time Harry has is devoted to studying, sleeping, eating, and taking care of Adeline.

Adeline hisses sleepily from the couch that Tom Transfigured from an old, broken desk. He’s the one who found this nook deep in the dungeons where they could come and no one would bother them if they wanted to practice Dark Arts. It has a brazier with a bright fire, some of the books that Tom got out of the Restricted Section, and a hook for Tom’s cloak.

And really hard stone floors, Harry thinks, wincing, as he rubs at his tailbone.

“You want to learn Dark Arts, don’t you?”

Harry glares at Tom, who stands on the far side of the classroom with his arms smugly folded. “Yeah,” he snaps. “But I notice that you’re the one casting all the hexes and curses at me. Never the other way around.”

Tom’s eyes widen. Harry has the sensation that he has really surprised Tom, and that makes him feel a little smug. But not that much, because his bruises still ache. He rubs the one on his right shoulder he got from a fall this morning.

“I didn’t know that you wanted to cast one of those spells,” Tom says at last.

“Oh, come on. What have we been training for during the last—”

“No. I mean.” Tom holds a hand up, looking flustered. “I only mean that you’ve been shielding and dodging and offering me practice with the Dark Arts, but I never thought you wanted to cast them yourself.”

“You’re as short-sighed as my parents.”

Tom hisses, his eyes dilating. Adeline promptly snaps upright, hissing back. Then she drops to the floor and crawls over to Harry, winding herself up around his leg and climbing to his arm. She sways in place there, apparently set to guard Harry, and flickering her tongue at Tom in an agitated manner.

“I do not appreciate being compared to a pair of thoughtless Gryffindors,” Tom says at last, his voice harsh. He stops staring at Adeline and focuses on Harry again.

“Now who’s the one bringing House stereotypes into it?”

Tom closes his eyes and stands there for a long moment as Harry watches him. Then he breathes out and says, “I—apologize. Besides thinking that you didn’t want to cast the spells, I did not like the thought of suffering pain.”

“I’m afraid that you’ll have to get used to it,” Harry says coolly.

“Yes, I will.” Tom steps back and sweeps his wand over the floor in front of him, Vanishing some of the sand and holes that his spells created. “Would you cast the first curse at me, Harry? Anything of your choosing.”

“Not just the ones that you tried to use on me today?”

“No. Anything you want.”

Harry stares at Tom. Tom looks back with wide, solemn eyes, but there’s a twitch to his lips that he might not even be aware of. He isn’t afraid, not the way Harry was when Tom first said they would be casting Dark Arts curses at each other. He doesn’t think Harry can hurt him, even with a bruise from making him fall on his arse.

It makes Harry all the more determined to do something impressive.

He closes his eyes and spends some time breathing softly. Then he lifts his wand, and thinks that he feels Adeline curl tighter around his arm in approval of his choice. Even if he doesn’t manage this, he still wants to shock and impress Tom.

“Imperio!”

He feels his magic unfold from his wand like a series of lightning bolts, aiming straight at Tom. Tom reels back and barely catches himself with a hand on the edge of the Transfigured couch. His mouth is open in a silent gape, his eyes round and staring at Harry.

Harry feels a bolt of satisfaction cut through him like the curse. Take that. Stop underestimating me.

Then Tom throws back his head and laughs.

Harry shivers. The laughter cuts through the air, and it hurts his ears. It replaces the most honest laughter that he thought he heard from Tom in the past. This is what someone with madness in his heart sounds like when laughing.

But it also promises great things. So does the way that Tom stops laughing a minute later and studies Harry with his eyes glinting, his wand hovering in front of him as he stretches his arm out.

“I hoped you would accomplish much, Harry,” Tom says, with a death’s-head grin. “Now I expect it. Come on, darling. Cast it again. Control me.”

Harry doesn’t know how he feels about the name “darling,” how it makes something sharp like the curse cut through him. But he nods, and lifts his wand again.

“Imperio!”

*

Sirius doesn’t plan, exactly. He can’t plan for the Dark Lord’s next raid when he doesn’t know what’s going to happen or when.

But when the shriek of the alarm medallion he’s wearing on his chest wakes him—he’s one of the five Aurors on duty tonight—he slams himself out of bed, and slams his wand into his holster, and slams himself through the Floo.

He’s barely landed in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement when Amelia scrambles up to him, her monocle almost falling off her face. “It’s Zonko’s shop in Hogsmeade!” she gasps. “Go, go, go!”

Sirius has no idea why the Dark Lord would attack a joke shop, but he supposes it doesn’t matter what the target is. Slytherin is mad. He turns on his heel, since Aurors can Apparate from inside the department once there, and leaps to the outskirts of Hogsmeade, with Amelia right behind him.

That damn two-headed blue snake is glowing over the shop. Sirius shoots a spell that he and James developed to make it vanish, and then runs directly towards the shop. He’s sure that his godson is still here.

Sirius is going to make him pay attention and walk away from Slytherin. If he has to capture Harry and keep him in the cellars of Grimmauld Place until he starts listening to reason, then honestly, that’s what Sirius is going to do.

The shop is burning, but there are no cries—then again, it’s not likely there would be, since the proprietors of Zonko’s don’t live in the building and would have gone home with nightfall. Sirius narrows his eyes and casts a Silencing Charm on his shoes. Are Harry and Slytherin hiding silently inside, ready to fire the first spell?

Sirius is going to kill that bastard Slytherin, if he can.

“Sirius.”

Amelia’s call is low and anxious. Sirius turns to face her. She’s standing with her hands clasped around her medallion, which is vibrating. Sirius realizes that his is, too. He was just too concentrated on the shop to realize it.

“What is it?” he asks. “Do you think they divided their forces?”

“No. Sirius—the pattern it’s jangling in—someone’s attacking the department itself.”

Sirius stares at her with his mouth open for a second, then spins around towards Zonko’s shop and swears. When he casts a single Aguamenti charm at the shop, that’s enough to dowse all the fires that are burning. It wasn’t even a cursed fire.

A distraction. They attacked a joke shop as a bloody distraction.

Sirius begins running to the nearest building with a Floo. The wards on the department have gone down only to allow them to Apparate out. They will be back up now, preventing Apparition in.

Damn it. Damn it, Harry! Why can’t you see what Slytherin is?

He arrives back at the department and doesn’t need Amelia, popping through the Floo beside him, to point out what Harry and Riddle came for. The whole bookshelf that was full of old and confiscated Dark books is empty.

Sirius lets his head fall into his hands.

Harry, Harry. Where did we go wrong?

*

“What if I told you what I want?”

Harry studies Tom thoughtfully. Tom hasn’t had much time for Harry in the last month, since he had to throw himself into frantic revising for his OWLS. But his exams are over now—Harry knows he did perfectly—and they’re back relaxing in their corner of the common room, ignoring the sometimes uneasy glances of the other Slytherins in their direction.

“You can do that,” Harry answers, and then he smiles as he watches Adeline drape herself over his arm. “Maybe I can even do something towards making it come true, the way I did with giving you money for that flat you have.”

Tom smiles at him. The smile goes deeper all the time, Harry thinks, less mad but stronger, as if every time it appears, it’s carving splinters of Tom’s bones out. “Are you sure that you want to?”

“I don’t even know what you want, yet.”

Tom nods. “Very well. I want to be immortal.”

Harry stares at him. It takes him a long moment to find his tongue, which is suddenly lying thick and heavy in his mouth. Adeline hisses what seems to be a complaint as Harry’s arm goes rigid. “You do? Why?”

“How can you ask something like that? Can you not see the glory of never dying?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Why would I want to live forever when everyone else I care about would be mortal and die around me? I might not be close to my parents anymore, but I wouldn’t want to watch them die of old age while I just stay here. Or Sirius. Or—” Harry chokes on the word you, because honestly, that might be too vulnerable to admit to Tom.

Tom gives him a brilliant smile, so he probably guessed what Harry was thinking anyway. He leans forwards and plants a hand on Harry’s arm. His skin is fever-hot. Harry turns his hand over to clasp Tom’s, not knowing what to say next.

“I have a plan.”

“To become immortal? I know you do.” Tom wouldn’t have brought up his desire for immortality at all if he didn’t have a plan.

“No. To make sure that we both do.”

Harry stares at him. Tom looks back, and all the weight of his determination is in that gaze, the sort that kept him going through the years he had to live in the Muggle world and gave him the strength to learn Dark Arts and wandless magic.

“I—Tom, why would you want me with you?”

“Have I not made my intentions clear, Harry?”

“I know that you don’t have many friends, and I’m one of them,” Harry whispers. Tom’s hand tightens on his in response. “But that doesn’t mean—it doesn’t mean that you would want me to become immortal with you.”

“I thought you understood better than that, Harry. Friendship, yes, we have that. But we are also teacher and student, and that goes both ways. You are the only one I would consent to learn more than spells or potions or facts from.”

Harry feels his face flush as Tom stares at him. Adeline hisses and turns her head back and forth from him to Tom. Sometimes, Harry wonders how much she understands. He knows that she’s not a magical snake. Mum and Dad got him a common adder, one whose venom is easily defended against by anyone who knows the spell. “So you want to live and learn with me forever?”

“And love you forever,” Tom says, and bends his head down, down, down. Harry’s heart is about ready to pound out of his chest by the time that Tom’s lips brush the back of his knuckles.

It’s mental. No other upper-year student has declared themselves for a third-year student like this. But Tom knows what he wants. Harry absolutely believes that.

And he seems to have decided that he wants Harry.

Harry feels his heart thudding through his ears and his cheeks. Tom watches him with a faint half-smile, and waits.

He wants me to choose him the way he’s chosen me.

And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Tom went unwanted and unclaimed for so long. It’s only the money Harry gave him that permitted him to have a flat of his own. Maybe Tom even thinks that this is a good way to pay off the debt and tie up his weaknesses in a neat little bow. If Harry is his, then Harry can’t be used against him.

Harry understands. He can’t even resent it. He’s sure that Tom is going places. And despite what he’s said about not having Slytherin ambition…

He would like to learn powerful magic. He would like to see people who looked down on him as a half-blood or a Potter—or a Slytherin—learn to respect him and back down when he challenges them.

He would like to be with Tom.

“Yes,” Harry murmurs, and watches the red in Tom’s eyes shine brighter than the fire.