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lomonaaerenTitle: Wandering Star
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Orion/Harry/Abraxas
Content Notes: Time travel, angst, forced marriage, mentions of violence and blood purism
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 3300
Summary: Orion Black and Abraxas Malfoy decide to perform a ritual that will bind Tom Riddle to them without his knowledge, so that they will always be his most important and valued servants. Except something goes wrong, and Harry Potter, a time traveler from the future, arrives in the circle—as the third partner in their new ritual marriage.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have three parts.
Wandering Star
“Are you sure the runes are right, Black?”
“I examined them myself, Malfoy. Three times. You examined them twice. Do you want to look again?”
“Do you know, I think I shall.”
Orion rolled his eyes as he watched Abraxas walk around the room, staring down at the runes on the floor. The runes were made of crushed roses and nightshade. Oriion had examined them, and even his mother, Melania Black, an expert in Runes, had done it. Abraxas wouldn’t find any mistakes, and it was crass of him to suggest he would.
“Yes, all right,” Abraxas said grudgingly, returning to his place. The circle that contained the runes, itself sketched in the ashes of burned nightshade, was laid out on the plain white marble floor of a ritual room in Grimmauld Place. “It looks good.”
“Good?”
“Perfect. It looks perfect.”
Orion nodded in satisfaction. The circle was a simple one, with a single ring and a line of ashes running directly from him to Abraxas across the center, dividing the circle into two halves swarming with the different runes. One half for the summoning; one for the binding.
“Shall we?”
“Yes, we shall.”
Abraxas’s tone was snide and mocking, but Orion ignored it. Abraxas was still the most intelligent of the Knights of Walpurgis, except for Orion and their Lord himself. That meant he was the most tolerable potential partner in the binding ritual that Orion had dug up in the Black library and determined to perform.
Their Lord was drifting further and further away from them. Orion thought now that he would have vanished on the travels he kept talking about before this, but the constraints of Hogwarts and its routines had kept him artificially bound there. Now their seventh May at Hogwarts was almost a year behind them, and Tom would vanish soon.
Orion and Abraxas might live to see him come back, but perhaps not. They might be able to use his power, as they had counted on, to avoid unwanted marriages and pressure from their parents, but perhaps not. They might be able to stay his most valued servants, but he could meet someone else in his travels and drag them up to stand beside him instead.
That was the real reason at the root of the ritual. Orion had grown bored bowing to Tom. He wanted power, and he was willing to let someone else lead the way, but he would stand at their side as an equal.
It annoyed him that the only ritual to make certain of this, whether or not the target wanted it, involved two people, and so he’d had to reach out to Abraxas.
Doubly annoying, to have two equals. But needs must.
“Ready?” Abraxas asked, and his voice was low and eager now.
Orion nodded and faced the circle. When he took a breath and released it, it was colder than it had been, as the air above the ritual circle began to twist and writhe. Orion smiled and closed his eyes.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
Unlike many other rituals, there was no chant to accompany this one. (A good thing, in Orion’s opinion; Abraxas’s Latin accent was atrocious). Instead, Abraxas and Orion both had to concentrate on what they wanted. They had agreed on the wording beforehand, and Abraxas had no reason to think something different. If their thoughts clashed, the ritual simply wouldn’t work.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
The cold air above the circle was thickening. Orion thought he could feel tendrils reaching out to him and scraping down his skin. He concentrated harder and fed the thought again and again through his mind, looping it like a ribbon on the edge of a robe.
He had never learned to sew, but he had certainly seen his mother and sister and cousins do it often enough.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
The smell of burning nightshade filled the room suddenly. Orion gagged, but continued concentrating on the thought. The book had said this might happen.
And then the scent of burning roses.
That was not supposed to happen.
Orion’s eyes snapped open. Abraxas, who didn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong—of course not, his nose wasn’t exquisitely sensitive the way Orion’s was—still stood on the other side of the circle with his eyes shut. Orion stared back and forth, and saw the runes smoking and twisting in the half of the circle that was supposed to do the summoning.
He opened his mouth to call to Abraxas, and then shut it. What if something was going wrong because Orion had lost his concentration on what they were supposed to do? Abraxas would hold it over his head for the rest of their, inevitably joined, lives.
Besides, the summoning half of the circle was doing something odd, not the binding half. Maybe they could bind Tom without bringing him here. The binding was more important, anyway.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
The summoning half of the circle filled with a brilliant, cold white light. Orion staggered back with an oath as it abruptly grew so bright that he couldn’t keep his head turned in that direction. Abraxas gave a ragged gasp at the same time on the other side of the circle.
If it turns out that he had something to do with this and summoned it deliberately—
But the light narrowed down and thinned like a knife blade. Then it vanished. Orion turned his head back to the circle, wondering if this was some unorthodox means of bringing the person they had summoned to them, since Tom might have been behind powerful wards or something similar.
No.
The figure standing in the left half of the circle, staring at them both, was decidedly not Tom.
He had dark hair and pale skin, but that was about the only resemblance. His hair was tousled, so shaggy that Orion felt a shiver of apprehension up his back. Was this man a Muggle? But Orion didn’t see how he could be, not when their ritual would have specifically called someone with magic to join them.
However, the man did wear ragged robes, totally unlike Tom’s neat ones, and he had green eyes that flashed back and forth between Orion and Abraxas for a moment before narrowing in anger.
“What the fuck?” the stranger asked. The words seemed strangely doubled. Orion realized a moment later that Abraxas had spoken them at the same time from across the circle.
He’s so crude.
Orion shook his head. Something about the ritual had gone wrong, obviously. Well, he and Abraxas would remove this stranger from Grimmauld Place, and then they would simply resume the—
Orion’s heart abruptly began to beat with hard horror as he noticed that all the roses and nightshade ashes on the floor had burned up. And there was something that felt like a stretchy rope unwinding from his temple and leading towards the stranger and Abraxas, both.
No. Oh, no.
Somehow, the ritual had gone wrong enough to bind him and Abraxas to each other and to this stranger without Tom being in the equation at all.
And given that the ritual had been supposed to simply enact a need on Tom’s part for Orion and Abraxas, rather than establishing connections between all three, Orion was afraid that the bond had changed and become something else altogether.
He knew it had when Abraxas’s voice snarled to life in his mind. I told you the runes were wrong!
*
“You’re bonded to both of us.”
“That doesn’t matter. You have to let me go.”
Abraxas watched with narrowed eyes as Orion attempted to reason with the stranger who had shown up in the ritual circle and called himself Harry Potter. He had said the name as if it was supposed to mean something to either of them, his eyes darting back and forth between them, and then called Orion Sirius and Abraxas Draco.
It might be natural to mistake Orion for his grandfather, but Abraxas was a little offended that someone might think he looked like a Black.
Or feel like one, given the bond that now connected them.
Blacks were full of drama and arrogance, not controlling those tendencies strictly the way Abraxas and other members of his family did. Surely the stranger ought to be able to feel, from his separate but equally strong connections to their minds, that Abraxas wasn’t like that?
Potter shot Abraxas a sharp glance. Perhaps he had felt the echo of the thought. Abraxas lifted his chin and stepped into the conversation, since Orion wasn’t doing any good.
“You’re bonded to us now. There’s no way to break the bonds. We summoned you from what you claim is another time—”
“And from death.”
Abraxas’s mind tripped over itself. He stared at Potter and tasted no taint of a lie through the bond as he otherwise would have, but it was still—he couldn’t believe this.
“You were dead?” Orion leaned back from Potter. “You’re an Inferius?”
Abraxas gave in to the temptation to roll his eyes, no matter how plebeian that was. Potter would have stunk in that case and barely had free will. Orion ought to have known better. There was no conceivable way for them to be bonded to an Inferius.
Then again, a lot has happened in this ritual that we didn’t intend, Orion snapped down the bond.
Abraxas grimaced. Yes, it had.
“I got hit by a Killing Curse,” said the impossible Potter, who had already claimed that he was a trainee Auror and the reason for the ragged state of his robes was that he’d been in a battle. “We were fighting Death Eaters—” He narrowed his eyes at them, seemingly waiting for a response, but Abraxas had never heard of Death Eaters before. Potter snorted. “You know? Like you? Pathetic followers of Lord Voldemort?”
“We are the Knights of Walpurgis,” Abraxas said, but his voice was faint. As far as he knew, no one had ever known the name of Lord Voldemort outside the Knights.
“Well, he changed your name at some point.” Potter shrugged, every part of the bonds still shining with truth, as much as Abraxas hated the notion. He leaned against the blank marble wall of the ritual room and stared around, clearly judging the accommodations. “I actually killed him, but some of his followers are left and causing trouble. I woke up in the blank white place that I woke up in the last time someone hit me with a Killing Curse—”
At least Orion was the one who choked this time, and didn’t even manage to speak. Abraxas shot him a superior glance.
“You can’t survive the Killing Curse,” Abraxas said.
“This is my third one,” Potter said. A vicious smile curled his lips. “You could say that I have the relevant experience.”
Abraxas stared at him and could think of nothing to say. Orion started forwards from the side of the circle where he was still standing and whispered, “How could you—you can’t survive it even once, never mind—”
“Do you think I’m lying to you?” Potter swept back the hair from his forehead and revealed the most peculiar-looking scar Abraxas had ever seen. It resembled a lightning bolt. “This came from your precious Lord trying to kill me once, when I was a toddler, and failing. Then he tried to kill me again, and I survived. And then a Death Eater tried, probably thinking that he could do it because he wasn’t your pathetic Lord, and here I am again.”
Abraxas would have liked to deny what Potter was saying. But the bond rang and shimmered with the truth. Orion, from the way he stood there and looked like he was about to start convulsing, seemed to sense it, as well.
Abraxas sent words through the bond. Can you hear me?
The stranger’s eyes widened. “Yes, I can.”
You should answer the same way, Orion said.
Potter looked back and forth between them again, as he had done frequently since arriving. Then he swallowed and said, This is the kind of bond that means we’re—what? Unable to be separated?
That’s right, Abraxas said.
Married, Orion said at the same time.
Potter choked on thin air. Orion looked smug about this. Potter shook his head wildly. “That’s impossible. I can’t—you have to send me back to my own time! I can’t stay here!”
“We don’t even know why the ritual went wrong in the first place,” Orion said.
Runes, Abraxas muttered.
Orion’s left eyebrow twitched. Abraxas grinned.
“You were dead,” Abraxas said. “Are you sure that you would return to your own time even if we released you from the bond? Or would you just die and turn to a wisp of air and light?”
Potter hesitated. Then he said, “I could have come back from the Killing Curse.”
“The way you did the second time?”
Potter nodded.
“And did you want to?”
Potter’s eyes closed in a quick blink that didn’t matter. Abraxas could feel his reluctance, like thick pudding, down the bond. The emotional part of their marriage tie was developing slowly, which meant this reluctance had to be strong for Abraxas to feel it already.
“I never would have sought death on my own,” Potter said at last.
“But now that you’re here?”
Potter stared at him, and said nothing. Orion was the one who broke in, “We still don’t know why you came here in the first place, or why our ritual to summon and bind our lord to consider us as his equals failed. How could we even reverse it and send you back, given that?”
“You wanted to bind him? Into marriage? Are you insane? Because he is.”
Abraxas swallowed. Now that someone had spoken the truth aloud, he had to acknowledge it. But he did that inwardly, and said aloud, “Not in marriage. Only to considering us with greater favor than he did others of his Knights. Only to make him think of us as equals.”
“And did you call for Voldemort or Tom Riddle?”
Abraxas started, He glanced at Orion, but Orion waved a hand at him. Abraxas murmured, “Tom Riddle.”
Potter nodded. “If he’s already thinking of himself as Voldemort and particularly if he already split his soul, then Tom Riddle doesn’t exist anymore, except as a name that you know him by. Because I carried a trace of Tom Riddle in me and you wanted someone who treated you as an equal, then the ritual reached through time.”
Abraxas’s head whirled. He had no idea what to respond to first.
*
“He split his soul? How?”
“You carried a trace of him? How?”
Harry stared at the two men in front of him and resisted the urge to shake his head. They would think that he was refusing to answer their questions, and that wasn’t true, even if Harry didn’t want to tell them about Horcruxes. He could still do the same thing and just not use the real name.
He had been standing in the white of King’s Cross and wrestling with his own desire to stay there when he’d felt the tug on his soul. The peace he had anticipated after Voldemort’s death had barely lasted six months. Both of the Lestrange brothers had escaped the Battle of Hogwarts and had immediately started leading other Death Eaters in a resistance against the Ministry.
Harry had pushed back his desire to attend Hogwarts and became a trainee Auror to take care of them, while other Aurors cowered from the Lestrange brothers and the papers called Harry a coward for not confronting Rabastan and Rodolphus right away. Just like before, it was suddenly his responsibility to stop the most feared Dark wizards in Britain.
He’d died, again. He’d had the desire to go on, again.
And why not? It wasn’t like there was a prophecy that only Harry could defeat one of the Lestrange brothers, the way there had been with Voldemort. He’d been strongly tempted to go join his loved ones in death and leave the others to fend for themselves.
Not even Ron and Hermione had provided much temptation to return. They had both gone back to Hogwarts, and Harry rarely saw them nowadays.
He had never rekindled his relationship with Ginny after the Battle. She wanted to forget the war. Harry had to keep fighting it.
And now here he was, snatched out of that whiteness, bound to two men Harry had only heard of vaguely and only by reputation.
Orion Black was a horrible father to Sirius. Or at least a neglectful one. And Abraxas Malfoy was one of the original Death Eaters.
But that was all, really. Harry took a deep breath and spoke while he studied Malfoy and Black. He didn’t know if it mattered that much what they were like if he would be unable to escape from them.
“Voldemort wanted to be immortal, so he split his soul with murders and stored bits of the soul in various objects. He didn’t mean to, but he made me one of those objects the night he tried to kill me when I was one.” He noted with some satisfaction that Malfoy looked as if he might be sick at that, and Black’s mind was in chaos even if he was standing silent and stoic. “I managed to get rid of that piece of his soul when he cast the second Killing Curse at me. The spell you used—”
“Ritual.”
Harry rolled his eyes and his shoulder at the same time. “Whatever it was, it probably picked up on the trace of Riddle lingering in me. Why it pulled me through time now and not earlier, who knows. Why it didn’t pick a Tom Riddle from another world, who knows.” Harry leaned back with his arms folded. “What matters is that you know something more about who I am now, and you have to know that I won’t let you just continue on as Death Eaters.”
“Knights of Walpurgis,” Black muttered, but he didn’t sound like his heart was in it.
Malfoy and Black exchanged intense glances, and Harry realized with a jolt that they had their own bond they were communicating down. He shook his head a little. Of course they did. This bond went three ways, or four if you counted the one that connected all three of them as a separate aspect. They could talk without his hearing it.
It was—odd. Disquieting. But Harry wouldn’t let it be disappointing. He didn’t even know why he thought he might feel that emotion in the first place.
“I might know why,” Malfoy began.
“You’re the only person with a trace of Tom Riddle who would treat us as equals,” Black said, with a decisive nod.
“And that’s what we wanted.”
Harry resisted the urge to tell them they reminded him of the Weasley twins. They wouldn’t know who he meant, anyway.
It hit him, then, that he was in a world where the Weasley twins didn’t exist. Or Ron and Hermione. Or Ginny, who Harry had very much wanted to exist, even if they would never date again.
And Voldemort still existed.
“Potter?”
“Harry? What’s wrong?”
Harry’s legs were shaking and his head darkening. He tried to stop himself from slumping to the floor, but it seemed as though his body didn’t want to listen to him. The shock was finally catching up with him, he thought distantly.
Hands caught him. There was a flare of something like sleeting hail in his mind. Worry, maybe. Harry didn’t know how to tell all the emotions apart yet.
He would have to figure it out.
He was married.
He laughed hysterically, and passed out.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Orion/Harry/Abraxas
Content Notes: Time travel, angst, forced marriage, mentions of violence and blood purism
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 3300
Summary: Orion Black and Abraxas Malfoy decide to perform a ritual that will bind Tom Riddle to them without his knowledge, so that they will always be his most important and valued servants. Except something goes wrong, and Harry Potter, a time traveler from the future, arrives in the circle—as the third partner in their new ritual marriage.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have three parts.
Wandering Star
“Are you sure the runes are right, Black?”
“I examined them myself, Malfoy. Three times. You examined them twice. Do you want to look again?”
“Do you know, I think I shall.”
Orion rolled his eyes as he watched Abraxas walk around the room, staring down at the runes on the floor. The runes were made of crushed roses and nightshade. Oriion had examined them, and even his mother, Melania Black, an expert in Runes, had done it. Abraxas wouldn’t find any mistakes, and it was crass of him to suggest he would.
“Yes, all right,” Abraxas said grudgingly, returning to his place. The circle that contained the runes, itself sketched in the ashes of burned nightshade, was laid out on the plain white marble floor of a ritual room in Grimmauld Place. “It looks good.”
“Good?”
“Perfect. It looks perfect.”
Orion nodded in satisfaction. The circle was a simple one, with a single ring and a line of ashes running directly from him to Abraxas across the center, dividing the circle into two halves swarming with the different runes. One half for the summoning; one for the binding.
“Shall we?”
“Yes, we shall.”
Abraxas’s tone was snide and mocking, but Orion ignored it. Abraxas was still the most intelligent of the Knights of Walpurgis, except for Orion and their Lord himself. That meant he was the most tolerable potential partner in the binding ritual that Orion had dug up in the Black library and determined to perform.
Their Lord was drifting further and further away from them. Orion thought now that he would have vanished on the travels he kept talking about before this, but the constraints of Hogwarts and its routines had kept him artificially bound there. Now their seventh May at Hogwarts was almost a year behind them, and Tom would vanish soon.
Orion and Abraxas might live to see him come back, but perhaps not. They might be able to use his power, as they had counted on, to avoid unwanted marriages and pressure from their parents, but perhaps not. They might be able to stay his most valued servants, but he could meet someone else in his travels and drag them up to stand beside him instead.
That was the real reason at the root of the ritual. Orion had grown bored bowing to Tom. He wanted power, and he was willing to let someone else lead the way, but he would stand at their side as an equal.
It annoyed him that the only ritual to make certain of this, whether or not the target wanted it, involved two people, and so he’d had to reach out to Abraxas.
Doubly annoying, to have two equals. But needs must.
“Ready?” Abraxas asked, and his voice was low and eager now.
Orion nodded and faced the circle. When he took a breath and released it, it was colder than it had been, as the air above the ritual circle began to twist and writhe. Orion smiled and closed his eyes.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
Unlike many other rituals, there was no chant to accompany this one. (A good thing, in Orion’s opinion; Abraxas’s Latin accent was atrocious). Instead, Abraxas and Orion both had to concentrate on what they wanted. They had agreed on the wording beforehand, and Abraxas had no reason to think something different. If their thoughts clashed, the ritual simply wouldn’t work.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
The cold air above the circle was thickening. Orion thought he could feel tendrils reaching out to him and scraping down his skin. He concentrated harder and fed the thought again and again through his mind, looping it like a ribbon on the edge of a robe.
He had never learned to sew, but he had certainly seen his mother and sister and cousins do it often enough.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
The smell of burning nightshade filled the room suddenly. Orion gagged, but continued concentrating on the thought. The book had said this might happen.
And then the scent of burning roses.
That was not supposed to happen.
Orion’s eyes snapped open. Abraxas, who didn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong—of course not, his nose wasn’t exquisitely sensitive the way Orion’s was—still stood on the other side of the circle with his eyes shut. Orion stared back and forth, and saw the runes smoking and twisting in the half of the circle that was supposed to do the summoning.
He opened his mouth to call to Abraxas, and then shut it. What if something was going wrong because Orion had lost his concentration on what they were supposed to do? Abraxas would hold it over his head for the rest of their, inevitably joined, lives.
Besides, the summoning half of the circle was doing something odd, not the binding half. Maybe they could bind Tom without bringing him here. The binding was more important, anyway.
We want Tom Riddle, bound to me and Abraxas, as our equal, in an unending bond.
The summoning half of the circle filled with a brilliant, cold white light. Orion staggered back with an oath as it abruptly grew so bright that he couldn’t keep his head turned in that direction. Abraxas gave a ragged gasp at the same time on the other side of the circle.
If it turns out that he had something to do with this and summoned it deliberately—
But the light narrowed down and thinned like a knife blade. Then it vanished. Orion turned his head back to the circle, wondering if this was some unorthodox means of bringing the person they had summoned to them, since Tom might have been behind powerful wards or something similar.
No.
The figure standing in the left half of the circle, staring at them both, was decidedly not Tom.
He had dark hair and pale skin, but that was about the only resemblance. His hair was tousled, so shaggy that Orion felt a shiver of apprehension up his back. Was this man a Muggle? But Orion didn’t see how he could be, not when their ritual would have specifically called someone with magic to join them.
However, the man did wear ragged robes, totally unlike Tom’s neat ones, and he had green eyes that flashed back and forth between Orion and Abraxas for a moment before narrowing in anger.
“What the fuck?” the stranger asked. The words seemed strangely doubled. Orion realized a moment later that Abraxas had spoken them at the same time from across the circle.
He’s so crude.
Orion shook his head. Something about the ritual had gone wrong, obviously. Well, he and Abraxas would remove this stranger from Grimmauld Place, and then they would simply resume the—
Orion’s heart abruptly began to beat with hard horror as he noticed that all the roses and nightshade ashes on the floor had burned up. And there was something that felt like a stretchy rope unwinding from his temple and leading towards the stranger and Abraxas, both.
No. Oh, no.
Somehow, the ritual had gone wrong enough to bind him and Abraxas to each other and to this stranger without Tom being in the equation at all.
And given that the ritual had been supposed to simply enact a need on Tom’s part for Orion and Abraxas, rather than establishing connections between all three, Orion was afraid that the bond had changed and become something else altogether.
He knew it had when Abraxas’s voice snarled to life in his mind. I told you the runes were wrong!
*
“You’re bonded to both of us.”
“That doesn’t matter. You have to let me go.”
Abraxas watched with narrowed eyes as Orion attempted to reason with the stranger who had shown up in the ritual circle and called himself Harry Potter. He had said the name as if it was supposed to mean something to either of them, his eyes darting back and forth between them, and then called Orion Sirius and Abraxas Draco.
It might be natural to mistake Orion for his grandfather, but Abraxas was a little offended that someone might think he looked like a Black.
Or feel like one, given the bond that now connected them.
Blacks were full of drama and arrogance, not controlling those tendencies strictly the way Abraxas and other members of his family did. Surely the stranger ought to be able to feel, from his separate but equally strong connections to their minds, that Abraxas wasn’t like that?
Potter shot Abraxas a sharp glance. Perhaps he had felt the echo of the thought. Abraxas lifted his chin and stepped into the conversation, since Orion wasn’t doing any good.
“You’re bonded to us now. There’s no way to break the bonds. We summoned you from what you claim is another time—”
“And from death.”
Abraxas’s mind tripped over itself. He stared at Potter and tasted no taint of a lie through the bond as he otherwise would have, but it was still—he couldn’t believe this.
“You were dead?” Orion leaned back from Potter. “You’re an Inferius?”
Abraxas gave in to the temptation to roll his eyes, no matter how plebeian that was. Potter would have stunk in that case and barely had free will. Orion ought to have known better. There was no conceivable way for them to be bonded to an Inferius.
Then again, a lot has happened in this ritual that we didn’t intend, Orion snapped down the bond.
Abraxas grimaced. Yes, it had.
“I got hit by a Killing Curse,” said the impossible Potter, who had already claimed that he was a trainee Auror and the reason for the ragged state of his robes was that he’d been in a battle. “We were fighting Death Eaters—” He narrowed his eyes at them, seemingly waiting for a response, but Abraxas had never heard of Death Eaters before. Potter snorted. “You know? Like you? Pathetic followers of Lord Voldemort?”
“We are the Knights of Walpurgis,” Abraxas said, but his voice was faint. As far as he knew, no one had ever known the name of Lord Voldemort outside the Knights.
“Well, he changed your name at some point.” Potter shrugged, every part of the bonds still shining with truth, as much as Abraxas hated the notion. He leaned against the blank marble wall of the ritual room and stared around, clearly judging the accommodations. “I actually killed him, but some of his followers are left and causing trouble. I woke up in the blank white place that I woke up in the last time someone hit me with a Killing Curse—”
At least Orion was the one who choked this time, and didn’t even manage to speak. Abraxas shot him a superior glance.
“You can’t survive the Killing Curse,” Abraxas said.
“This is my third one,” Potter said. A vicious smile curled his lips. “You could say that I have the relevant experience.”
Abraxas stared at him and could think of nothing to say. Orion started forwards from the side of the circle where he was still standing and whispered, “How could you—you can’t survive it even once, never mind—”
“Do you think I’m lying to you?” Potter swept back the hair from his forehead and revealed the most peculiar-looking scar Abraxas had ever seen. It resembled a lightning bolt. “This came from your precious Lord trying to kill me once, when I was a toddler, and failing. Then he tried to kill me again, and I survived. And then a Death Eater tried, probably thinking that he could do it because he wasn’t your pathetic Lord, and here I am again.”
Abraxas would have liked to deny what Potter was saying. But the bond rang and shimmered with the truth. Orion, from the way he stood there and looked like he was about to start convulsing, seemed to sense it, as well.
Abraxas sent words through the bond. Can you hear me?
The stranger’s eyes widened. “Yes, I can.”
You should answer the same way, Orion said.
Potter looked back and forth between them again, as he had done frequently since arriving. Then he swallowed and said, This is the kind of bond that means we’re—what? Unable to be separated?
That’s right, Abraxas said.
Married, Orion said at the same time.
Potter choked on thin air. Orion looked smug about this. Potter shook his head wildly. “That’s impossible. I can’t—you have to send me back to my own time! I can’t stay here!”
“We don’t even know why the ritual went wrong in the first place,” Orion said.
Runes, Abraxas muttered.
Orion’s left eyebrow twitched. Abraxas grinned.
“You were dead,” Abraxas said. “Are you sure that you would return to your own time even if we released you from the bond? Or would you just die and turn to a wisp of air and light?”
Potter hesitated. Then he said, “I could have come back from the Killing Curse.”
“The way you did the second time?”
Potter nodded.
“And did you want to?”
Potter’s eyes closed in a quick blink that didn’t matter. Abraxas could feel his reluctance, like thick pudding, down the bond. The emotional part of their marriage tie was developing slowly, which meant this reluctance had to be strong for Abraxas to feel it already.
“I never would have sought death on my own,” Potter said at last.
“But now that you’re here?”
Potter stared at him, and said nothing. Orion was the one who broke in, “We still don’t know why you came here in the first place, or why our ritual to summon and bind our lord to consider us as his equals failed. How could we even reverse it and send you back, given that?”
“You wanted to bind him? Into marriage? Are you insane? Because he is.”
Abraxas swallowed. Now that someone had spoken the truth aloud, he had to acknowledge it. But he did that inwardly, and said aloud, “Not in marriage. Only to considering us with greater favor than he did others of his Knights. Only to make him think of us as equals.”
“And did you call for Voldemort or Tom Riddle?”
Abraxas started, He glanced at Orion, but Orion waved a hand at him. Abraxas murmured, “Tom Riddle.”
Potter nodded. “If he’s already thinking of himself as Voldemort and particularly if he already split his soul, then Tom Riddle doesn’t exist anymore, except as a name that you know him by. Because I carried a trace of Tom Riddle in me and you wanted someone who treated you as an equal, then the ritual reached through time.”
Abraxas’s head whirled. He had no idea what to respond to first.
*
“He split his soul? How?”
“You carried a trace of him? How?”
Harry stared at the two men in front of him and resisted the urge to shake his head. They would think that he was refusing to answer their questions, and that wasn’t true, even if Harry didn’t want to tell them about Horcruxes. He could still do the same thing and just not use the real name.
He had been standing in the white of King’s Cross and wrestling with his own desire to stay there when he’d felt the tug on his soul. The peace he had anticipated after Voldemort’s death had barely lasted six months. Both of the Lestrange brothers had escaped the Battle of Hogwarts and had immediately started leading other Death Eaters in a resistance against the Ministry.
Harry had pushed back his desire to attend Hogwarts and became a trainee Auror to take care of them, while other Aurors cowered from the Lestrange brothers and the papers called Harry a coward for not confronting Rabastan and Rodolphus right away. Just like before, it was suddenly his responsibility to stop the most feared Dark wizards in Britain.
He’d died, again. He’d had the desire to go on, again.
And why not? It wasn’t like there was a prophecy that only Harry could defeat one of the Lestrange brothers, the way there had been with Voldemort. He’d been strongly tempted to go join his loved ones in death and leave the others to fend for themselves.
Not even Ron and Hermione had provided much temptation to return. They had both gone back to Hogwarts, and Harry rarely saw them nowadays.
He had never rekindled his relationship with Ginny after the Battle. She wanted to forget the war. Harry had to keep fighting it.
And now here he was, snatched out of that whiteness, bound to two men Harry had only heard of vaguely and only by reputation.
Orion Black was a horrible father to Sirius. Or at least a neglectful one. And Abraxas Malfoy was one of the original Death Eaters.
But that was all, really. Harry took a deep breath and spoke while he studied Malfoy and Black. He didn’t know if it mattered that much what they were like if he would be unable to escape from them.
“Voldemort wanted to be immortal, so he split his soul with murders and stored bits of the soul in various objects. He didn’t mean to, but he made me one of those objects the night he tried to kill me when I was one.” He noted with some satisfaction that Malfoy looked as if he might be sick at that, and Black’s mind was in chaos even if he was standing silent and stoic. “I managed to get rid of that piece of his soul when he cast the second Killing Curse at me. The spell you used—”
“Ritual.”
Harry rolled his eyes and his shoulder at the same time. “Whatever it was, it probably picked up on the trace of Riddle lingering in me. Why it pulled me through time now and not earlier, who knows. Why it didn’t pick a Tom Riddle from another world, who knows.” Harry leaned back with his arms folded. “What matters is that you know something more about who I am now, and you have to know that I won’t let you just continue on as Death Eaters.”
“Knights of Walpurgis,” Black muttered, but he didn’t sound like his heart was in it.
Malfoy and Black exchanged intense glances, and Harry realized with a jolt that they had their own bond they were communicating down. He shook his head a little. Of course they did. This bond went three ways, or four if you counted the one that connected all three of them as a separate aspect. They could talk without his hearing it.
It was—odd. Disquieting. But Harry wouldn’t let it be disappointing. He didn’t even know why he thought he might feel that emotion in the first place.
“I might know why,” Malfoy began.
“You’re the only person with a trace of Tom Riddle who would treat us as equals,” Black said, with a decisive nod.
“And that’s what we wanted.”
Harry resisted the urge to tell them they reminded him of the Weasley twins. They wouldn’t know who he meant, anyway.
It hit him, then, that he was in a world where the Weasley twins didn’t exist. Or Ron and Hermione. Or Ginny, who Harry had very much wanted to exist, even if they would never date again.
And Voldemort still existed.
“Potter?”
“Harry? What’s wrong?”
Harry’s legs were shaking and his head darkening. He tried to stop himself from slumping to the floor, but it seemed as though his body didn’t want to listen to him. The shock was finally catching up with him, he thought distantly.
Hands caught him. There was a flare of something like sleeting hail in his mind. Worry, maybe. Harry didn’t know how to tell all the emotions apart yet.
He would have to figure it out.
He was married.
He laughed hysterically, and passed out.
