![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: Precious Things
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily, OMC/OFC
Content Notes: AU (no Voldemort), soulmate-identifying marks, angst, violence, manipulation, dysfunctional relationship, hot mess, drama, minor character deaths, mindfuck, dubious consent
Wordcount: This part 3400
Rating: R
Summary: Harry Potter was born with a mark that was supposed to identify his soulmate, but none came forwards by the time he was twenty-nine, and so he sacrificed his mark in a ritual to awaken his brother-in-law from a magical coma. Two months later, Tom Riddle, his soulmate, appears. And he’s determined to make Harry pay the price for what he did.
Author’s Notes: This is an extremely dark fic that will update irregularly. Please take a close look at the tags/content notes. This is not a functional or happy romance.
Precious Things
Chapter One—The Past
“You good, Harry?”
Harry waved lazily at Patricia, his twin sister, from where he was stretched out on the balcony that ran around the back of their parents’ house. It gave him a prime view of the Quidditch pitch where Patricia was practicing her latest Chaser moves, as well as the swimming pool underneath her. “I’m fine, Patty.”
“Don’t call me that, Har-Har.”
“That nickname never bothered me as much as yours bothered you. Patty.”
Patricia narrowed her eyes and tossed her hair over her shoulder. She was taller than Harry was, with eyes more hazel than green, and hair that might have had more a sheen of red than his did in direct sunlight. But at the moment, as she leaned forwards on her broom, Harry thought someone would have had a hard time telling their faces apart. “Let me show you why I’m ranked the top Chaser in the league.”
“Go right ahead.”
Harry leaned back and smiled a little as he watched Patricia zoom after the Quaffle that she’d enchanted to bounce around in random patterns from the walls and stones in the garden, and sometimes duck under the water. The longer she chased it and the more successful catches she made, the wilder the patterns would become.
She had always been a better Chaser than Harry had been a Seeker. Or, rather, her talent had lasted longer. Harry had grown too tall and heavy to be a Seeker not long after their twentieth birthday.
Harry watched idly as Patricia caught and released the Quaffle, scratching now and then at the soul-mark on his left arm. Or, really, the burn where the mark used to be before he’d sacrificed it.
You’d think that it wouldn’t itch as much when it doesn’t even exist anymore. But I suppose soul-marks don’t play by the rules.
“Patricia!”
Harry lifted himself on one elbow to watch his brother-in-law, Michael Abbott, hurry across the grass. His smile was brighter than the summer sun, his arms outstretched. Patricia swooped down and into them.
Harry sighed a little. He wished he had his own soulmate, so he could do that.
But the fact that Patricia could do it because of what he’d done was enough for him. The envy faded, and Harry leaned back and took another sip from the glass of cold lemonade beside him, charmed to maintain the perfect temperature.
“I missed you so much.”
“I know, Michael, I know.”
Patricia’s voice was low and earnest, as much as Michael’s. Harry sighed again and shut his eyes. He knew without looking that Patricia’s hands would be darting over Michael, patting at his shoulders, straightening his robes, checking for hidden injuries.
When a crazed fan of hers had cursed Michael into a coma and he never would have woken if not for Harry sacrificing his own soul-mark, then why wouldn’t she feel that way? Patricia had paid a few retired Hit Wizards to accompany her to games and even shopping in Diagon Alley ever since, and Michael went about with one of them if he was out in public.
Harry, an Auror, would have gladly helped them, but he did have to work sometimes.
“Harry? Are you all right?”
Harry cracked one eye and smiled at his mother, who stood behind the glass door that let out onto the balcony. She smiled back at him, a quirk of her lips that had more than a hint of worry to it, while her gaze ran over Harry.
Checking me for injuries, too.
No one had ever suggested that Harry do what he’d done to rescue Michael. Most people hadn’t believed it was possible at all. And after Harry had done it, his mum and dad had been certain something was incredibly wrong, that they must have pushed Harry aside and made him feel like he didn’t matter somehow. Even though they’d never been anything but the best parents to Harry, and raised him in such a way that he’d never once doubted he was loved or been resentful of his sister’s fame as a Quidditch player.
Harry had overheard Mum and Dad having a hushed conversation in the drawing room one night when he’d come to visit them for dinner and decided to Apparate to the front door instead of coming through the Floo.
“Do you think he thought he had to prove himself?”
“Do you think that he believed we would think him lesser because his soulmate hadn’t come forwards? But that’s not his fault.”
Harry had gone into the room and told them that it wasn’t their fault, and that he hadn’t had some kind of mental break, either. He had simply asked a Healer what would help, and learned it would take a sacrifice, one of great value.
Harry was the one best positioned to make that sacrifice. He was the only one in the family who didn’t have his soulmate, and if they hadn’t shown up by the time he was twenty-nine, either they were dead or they had decided that he wasn’t worth having.
He had done it to save Michael’s life and spare Patricia the agony of losing her soulmate. That had been the whole motivation and only reason.
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
Harry tilted a smile at his mother and waited until she nodded and retreated back into the house. Harry sighed and rolled over so that he could see the pitch again. Patricia was on the broom, tossing the Quaffle with a perfect spin of her wrist that sent it through the hoop. Michael cheered for her, hopping up and down, his blond curls tossing back and forth.
Harry supposed that he could have been gentler and actually answered his mother’s question. He knew one reason they were wary of him was because they hadn’t thought he was so—extreme. That he would do something that his mother had compared to a fox gnawing off its leg to escape a trap.
If I was a fox and that was what I had to do to escape, that’s what I would do.
But his family loved him whether or not he answered their questions. Harry rolled on his back to soak up the sun and smiled a little as he listened to his sister continue to score perfectly and Michael laugh in joy.
Something no one would have ever heard again if I hadn’t acted the way I did.
It was reward enough.
*
“Potter?”
Harry glanced up with a snort. He had stepped off the lift into the rarefied heights of the Muggle Retreat offices. These were the smug bastards, blending people from Magical Law Enforcement and the Department of Mysteries, who were assigned to find a more permanent solution for Muggles possibly discovering the magical world than the Memory Charm or the wards on Diagon Alley. “Malfoy. Sorry you have to put up with seeing me today.”
Draco Malfoy’s horrified face promptly snapped into a neutral expression. “It’s not an imposition,” he said smoothly, the worst lie Harry had ever heard him tell. “I merely meant to ask what you were doing here. I didn’t think Unspeakable Riddle had any need of Aurors.”
“It’s an invitation from Unspeakable Riddle that brought me here,” Harry said, and silently reveled in the look of horror that draped itself like wet moss across Malfoy’s face. “Can you tell me where his office is?”
“What would a man like him want with you?”
“I’m to be his bodyguard against monsters from another dimension.”
“Potter.”
“Why are you so easy to rile, Malfoy? Isn’t that something you’re supposed to have grown past now that you’re part of the Ministry’s most exalted offices?”
Malfoy, somewhat to Harry’s disappointment, managed to keep himself from responding to Harry after that. He stepped back, snapped his head in a silent command to Harry to follow, and began stalking down the corridors that were made of unornamented grey stone. Except for the fucking mirrors everywhere, Harry had to notice, all of them heavy silver glass in heavier golden frames.
There was probably a magical reason for them. Harry made a point of sticking out his tongue at his reflection in the first one and then pulling faces for the rest, at least until Malfoy turned around and noticed what he was doing.
“Why are you so childish and disgusting, Potter?”
“Still sore that our date didn’t work out, Draco?”
A tide of crimson flowed down Malfoy’s neck, and he turned forwards again without speaking. Harry chuckled at his back, which became stiffer.
Malfoy had found his soulmate during their seventh year at Hogwarts, but he’d got impatient during their sixth year and decided that dating Harry would make whoever it was jealous and more likely to reveal themselves. Harry could have explained that it was entirely possible the person didn’t know they were Malfoy’s soulmate, but that hadn’t factored into Malfoy’s thinking. He generated such gravity for himself as the center of his own universe that he thought everyone else should swing off-course because of it, too.
They had gone on one date, because Harry had thought he might as well, and it had been a disaster. Malfoy hadn’t once stopped giving Harry advice from the time they met up in the entrance hall, starting with flattening his hair. It had escalated to the point that Harry had stood up in the Three Broomsticks after Malfoy called him childish for enjoying butterbeer and introduced Malfoy to butterbeer more intimately by dumping it over his head.
Malfoy had got no sympathy for that from anyone, including Pansy Parkinson, who thought she was Malfoy’s soulmate, because he shouldn’t have been on a date with Harry in the first place, according to most Slytherins.
Hiding his twitching lips, Harry looked up to see that they were in front of a richly decorated office door with Unspeakable Riddle on the nameplate. Malfoy turned around and sneered at him again.
“I still don’t know why he would want to see you, Potter.”
“I’m dying of a rare disease and he wants to harvest my eyes for Potions ingredients.”
Malfoy stomped off. Harry knocked on the nameplate and waited.
“Enter, Mr. Potter.”
Riddle’s voice was deep and resonant. Harry stepped into the office and looked around, saving his glance at the occupant for last. It actually reminded him a little of Dumbledore’s office in Hogwarts, with silver instruments crowded onto every surface and more mirrors that reflected scenes not in the office.
I should remember to tell him that. He’d hate it. One of the few things Harry knew about Riddle was that he and Dumbledore didn’t get on.
He turned and faced the man, the only Unspeakable to leave the Department and still remain part of it, the only one with a publicly-known identity.
Riddle was leaning forwards over the desk, also in a Dumbledore-like position. His eyes were a burning black, and they locked on Harry with a force that dried up most of the jokes on Harry’s tongue. His dark hair was silver along the temples, in an oddly regular pattern that looked like he’d been wearing a crown there, and he wore heavy blue velvet robes that Harry thought looked itchy.
He swallowed and tried to sound normal, calm, not breathy and not wary as he said, “You called for me, sir?”
“Have a seat, Potter.”
Riddle waved a hand at the chair across from his own desk. Harry settled into it and folded his hands in his lap. Riddle kept staring at him, and yeah, his eyes were piercing in a way that had nothing to do with Dumbledore or Legilimency.
He looked as if he was the one who had set the trap that Harry might have to gnaw his leg off to escape from.
Harry narrowed his eyes, disturbed by his own thoughts, and settled back more firmly into the chair. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yes.” Riddle reached down and moved a few of the parchments from his desk, revealing a photograph. It was still, like a Muggle one. “I was told you might know something about this.” He turned the picture around.
Harry swallowed. The image was of a wrist with an intricate black and gold pattern on it, looking like a map of an unknown country.
He ought to know it. It had occupied his own wrist where the burn scar now was until two months ago.
Harry let his eyes rise and meet Riddle’s. The intensity in them made him wince. “I—it was the mark I used to wear, sir.”
“Used to?”
“I burned it.”
“What a coincidence.” Riddle’s voice descended into a guttural hiss. Harry remembered hearing that he could speak Parseltongue. It had surprised a lot of people when he chose to keep his Muggle name instead of starting to go by Slytherin, as would be expected of someone so obsessed with Slytherin House and snakes. “I would ask you to show me your wrist, but I suspect that I don’t need to.”
“Sir?”
“I suspect it looks like this.”
Harry looked up and shrank away from the burn scar on Riddle’s wrist. Yes, it was the twin of his own. Just as Riddle’s wrist must have borne the twin of Harry’s soul-mark at one time, and it must be his hand in the photograph and not Harry’s.
Harry opened his mouth and found himself with nothing to say. He leaned further back in the chair and locked his own questions in his mind. Why did you never approach me if you knew? Why did you decide that this is the only time you wanted to talk to me? From the intensity of Riddle’s fury, he wouldn’t get answers if he did ask them.
“What did you do?” Riddle whispered.
“My brother-in-law was in a coma. My sister’s soulmate. My twin sister. She was dying day by day. The Healers said that only a profound sacrifice could break the curse. So I made it. I burned the mark.”
Harry heard his voice come out flatter and calmer than he’d suspected it would. But he didn’t care, because the next instant, his own fear of Riddle tore like a cocoon, and he leaned forwards.
“Why do you care now, huh, Riddle? You had twenty-nine fucking years to find me, and you never did! I’ve made my life and built my career. Made my choices. I can’t reverse the sacrifice, and neither can you. We’ve all made our decisions. Why are you angry at me? Not yourself?”
Riddle’s eyes widened. Harry thought he could see flames in them for a moment, but he tore his gaze away. The last thing he wanted was Riddle using Legilimency on him.
And despite what he’d said, he didn’t really want an answer to his questions, either. There was nothing that would satisfy him. They had gone on to lead their separate lives, and it was over with. It was done.
“We can’t be soulmates without the mark,” Harry said, and stood. “Whatever decisions you made, whatever kind of life you want to have without me, you can still have it. Have fun, Riddle.”
He turned towards the door, and then spun to the side. It was instinct that made him do that, far more than consciousness. Riddle’s spell shot past him and impacted with the door, making it rattle in place. Locked, a distant part of Harry noted.
The office, which was large but didn’t feel that way, filled with the rasping sound of both their breathing. Harry kept his eyes locked on Riddle. Riddle had gone back into that soul-deep rage again.
It probably was soul-deep.
But what’s done is done.
“I didn’t find you because I didn’t know about you,” Riddle said at last. “My work is very demanding. I sometimes looked around for my soulmate when I was younger, but I have been highly preoccupied for the last twenty years. I assumed that my soulmate would find me. The right people have always known what my soul-mark looks like.”
“I’m not the right people. I’m an Auror, not one of your conceited Unspeakable types, and a half-blood, and I have Muggleborn friends—”
“None of that would have mattered if you hadn’t burned it!”
Harry let the shout wash over him, then said softly, tauntingly, “But I did. There’s no getting it back. If there was, then it wouldn’t have been the kind of sacrifice that could wake Michael up. And if I’d had even the slightest doubt about what I was doing, I wouldn’t have been able to burn it. What hurts more, Riddle? That you lost your soul-mark, or that I was willing to burn the mark instead of running around looking for you?”
Riddle stared at him and said nothing. Then he turned away and put his wand into a holster down at his side. He rested one hand on his head as if trying to contain some fury rising out of it like heat.
Harry glanced back at the office door. He could break the lock with a great enough effort of magic and will, but that would definitely attract attention, to break out of the office of the Great Tom Riddle—
“You’re going to make it up to me.”
“Excuse me?” Harry snapped, turning around with a flick of his own wand. A skin-tight, translucent shield surrounded him, one that would bounce any spells except the Unforgivables. And Harry was resistant to the Imperius.
Riddle stared at him with opaque eyes, no longer easy to read. “You’re going to make it up to me,” he repeated. “You might have saved your sister’s soulmate, but you deprived me of mine. You didn’t consult me before you burned the mark. You didn’t even try to find another way—”
“If you knew how many days I put in trying to figure out some other way to wake Michael up—”
“Not enough.” Riddle’s magic rippled out from him and made the desk rock for a moment. “Not enough. Nothing would ever be enough.”
“Then why should I waste time trying to make it up to you?”
“A figure of speech.” Riddle made a flickering motion of his fingers as though throwing away a pinch of dust. “You will do so. I will accept the pitiful efforts that you make.”
“And if I don’t?”
Riddle bared his teeth as he leaned forwards. “Then what I will do to your sister’s soulmate will make what the person who cursed him did look pathetic.”
Harry swallowed. Yes, Riddle would never have the empathic bond with Harry that true soulmates did, but he understood Harry well anyway. Harry would hate it if he made so many sacrifices to save Michael and then Michael died or was cursed or suffered more. He would hate to see his sister suffering.
“You’re a bastard.”
“And your soulmate, who has waited more than seventy years for you. Consider that, Harry.”
Harry shuddered at the way his name sounded in Riddle’s voice, and then shook his head violently. Focus. He had to focus.
“How do I know that you’ll accept what I offer you and not try to kill or hurt Michael anyway?”
“If I was to do that, it would defeat the purpose. You would attack me, and you would not hesitate because of his suffering if it had already happened. You might not be able to kill me, but we are equals, and you would potentially maim me.”
Harry nodded slowly. He supposed burning the mark had shown Riddle what he was capable of. “Very well. I—I’ll try somehow. I just—don’t know how.”
“That’s for you to work out.”
“Or you’ll kill my brother-in-law, I know, I know.”
Riddle laughed a little and leaned forwards. “You sacrificed your own soul-mark to save that man, Harry. You should, perhaps, think about the fact that I’m your soulmate and your equal, and think about what I would do to him in return.”
You’re too extreme, Mum’s voice murmured in Harry’s head.
A match for his soulmate, in this case. Harry thought about Michael doing worse than dying and felt sick.
He turned away and hit the locking charm with a blast of focused magic. Behind him, Riddle took a jagged breath.
Harry walked out, not looking back. Not that that would change things, but it made him feel better.
He would take feeling good where he could get it, given the sacrifices still to come.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily, OMC/OFC
Content Notes: AU (no Voldemort), soulmate-identifying marks, angst, violence, manipulation, dysfunctional relationship, hot mess, drama, minor character deaths, mindfuck, dubious consent
Wordcount: This part 3400
Rating: R
Summary: Harry Potter was born with a mark that was supposed to identify his soulmate, but none came forwards by the time he was twenty-nine, and so he sacrificed his mark in a ritual to awaken his brother-in-law from a magical coma. Two months later, Tom Riddle, his soulmate, appears. And he’s determined to make Harry pay the price for what he did.
Author’s Notes: This is an extremely dark fic that will update irregularly. Please take a close look at the tags/content notes. This is not a functional or happy romance.
Precious Things
Chapter One—The Past
“You good, Harry?”
Harry waved lazily at Patricia, his twin sister, from where he was stretched out on the balcony that ran around the back of their parents’ house. It gave him a prime view of the Quidditch pitch where Patricia was practicing her latest Chaser moves, as well as the swimming pool underneath her. “I’m fine, Patty.”
“Don’t call me that, Har-Har.”
“That nickname never bothered me as much as yours bothered you. Patty.”
Patricia narrowed her eyes and tossed her hair over her shoulder. She was taller than Harry was, with eyes more hazel than green, and hair that might have had more a sheen of red than his did in direct sunlight. But at the moment, as she leaned forwards on her broom, Harry thought someone would have had a hard time telling their faces apart. “Let me show you why I’m ranked the top Chaser in the league.”
“Go right ahead.”
Harry leaned back and smiled a little as he watched Patricia zoom after the Quaffle that she’d enchanted to bounce around in random patterns from the walls and stones in the garden, and sometimes duck under the water. The longer she chased it and the more successful catches she made, the wilder the patterns would become.
She had always been a better Chaser than Harry had been a Seeker. Or, rather, her talent had lasted longer. Harry had grown too tall and heavy to be a Seeker not long after their twentieth birthday.
Harry watched idly as Patricia caught and released the Quaffle, scratching now and then at the soul-mark on his left arm. Or, really, the burn where the mark used to be before he’d sacrificed it.
You’d think that it wouldn’t itch as much when it doesn’t even exist anymore. But I suppose soul-marks don’t play by the rules.
“Patricia!”
Harry lifted himself on one elbow to watch his brother-in-law, Michael Abbott, hurry across the grass. His smile was brighter than the summer sun, his arms outstretched. Patricia swooped down and into them.
Harry sighed a little. He wished he had his own soulmate, so he could do that.
But the fact that Patricia could do it because of what he’d done was enough for him. The envy faded, and Harry leaned back and took another sip from the glass of cold lemonade beside him, charmed to maintain the perfect temperature.
“I missed you so much.”
“I know, Michael, I know.”
Patricia’s voice was low and earnest, as much as Michael’s. Harry sighed again and shut his eyes. He knew without looking that Patricia’s hands would be darting over Michael, patting at his shoulders, straightening his robes, checking for hidden injuries.
When a crazed fan of hers had cursed Michael into a coma and he never would have woken if not for Harry sacrificing his own soul-mark, then why wouldn’t she feel that way? Patricia had paid a few retired Hit Wizards to accompany her to games and even shopping in Diagon Alley ever since, and Michael went about with one of them if he was out in public.
Harry, an Auror, would have gladly helped them, but he did have to work sometimes.
“Harry? Are you all right?”
Harry cracked one eye and smiled at his mother, who stood behind the glass door that let out onto the balcony. She smiled back at him, a quirk of her lips that had more than a hint of worry to it, while her gaze ran over Harry.
Checking me for injuries, too.
No one had ever suggested that Harry do what he’d done to rescue Michael. Most people hadn’t believed it was possible at all. And after Harry had done it, his mum and dad had been certain something was incredibly wrong, that they must have pushed Harry aside and made him feel like he didn’t matter somehow. Even though they’d never been anything but the best parents to Harry, and raised him in such a way that he’d never once doubted he was loved or been resentful of his sister’s fame as a Quidditch player.
Harry had overheard Mum and Dad having a hushed conversation in the drawing room one night when he’d come to visit them for dinner and decided to Apparate to the front door instead of coming through the Floo.
“Do you think he thought he had to prove himself?”
“Do you think that he believed we would think him lesser because his soulmate hadn’t come forwards? But that’s not his fault.”
Harry had gone into the room and told them that it wasn’t their fault, and that he hadn’t had some kind of mental break, either. He had simply asked a Healer what would help, and learned it would take a sacrifice, one of great value.
Harry was the one best positioned to make that sacrifice. He was the only one in the family who didn’t have his soulmate, and if they hadn’t shown up by the time he was twenty-nine, either they were dead or they had decided that he wasn’t worth having.
He had done it to save Michael’s life and spare Patricia the agony of losing her soulmate. That had been the whole motivation and only reason.
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
Harry tilted a smile at his mother and waited until she nodded and retreated back into the house. Harry sighed and rolled over so that he could see the pitch again. Patricia was on the broom, tossing the Quaffle with a perfect spin of her wrist that sent it through the hoop. Michael cheered for her, hopping up and down, his blond curls tossing back and forth.
Harry supposed that he could have been gentler and actually answered his mother’s question. He knew one reason they were wary of him was because they hadn’t thought he was so—extreme. That he would do something that his mother had compared to a fox gnawing off its leg to escape a trap.
If I was a fox and that was what I had to do to escape, that’s what I would do.
But his family loved him whether or not he answered their questions. Harry rolled on his back to soak up the sun and smiled a little as he listened to his sister continue to score perfectly and Michael laugh in joy.
Something no one would have ever heard again if I hadn’t acted the way I did.
It was reward enough.
*
“Potter?”
Harry glanced up with a snort. He had stepped off the lift into the rarefied heights of the Muggle Retreat offices. These were the smug bastards, blending people from Magical Law Enforcement and the Department of Mysteries, who were assigned to find a more permanent solution for Muggles possibly discovering the magical world than the Memory Charm or the wards on Diagon Alley. “Malfoy. Sorry you have to put up with seeing me today.”
Draco Malfoy’s horrified face promptly snapped into a neutral expression. “It’s not an imposition,” he said smoothly, the worst lie Harry had ever heard him tell. “I merely meant to ask what you were doing here. I didn’t think Unspeakable Riddle had any need of Aurors.”
“It’s an invitation from Unspeakable Riddle that brought me here,” Harry said, and silently reveled in the look of horror that draped itself like wet moss across Malfoy’s face. “Can you tell me where his office is?”
“What would a man like him want with you?”
“I’m to be his bodyguard against monsters from another dimension.”
“Potter.”
“Why are you so easy to rile, Malfoy? Isn’t that something you’re supposed to have grown past now that you’re part of the Ministry’s most exalted offices?”
Malfoy, somewhat to Harry’s disappointment, managed to keep himself from responding to Harry after that. He stepped back, snapped his head in a silent command to Harry to follow, and began stalking down the corridors that were made of unornamented grey stone. Except for the fucking mirrors everywhere, Harry had to notice, all of them heavy silver glass in heavier golden frames.
There was probably a magical reason for them. Harry made a point of sticking out his tongue at his reflection in the first one and then pulling faces for the rest, at least until Malfoy turned around and noticed what he was doing.
“Why are you so childish and disgusting, Potter?”
“Still sore that our date didn’t work out, Draco?”
A tide of crimson flowed down Malfoy’s neck, and he turned forwards again without speaking. Harry chuckled at his back, which became stiffer.
Malfoy had found his soulmate during their seventh year at Hogwarts, but he’d got impatient during their sixth year and decided that dating Harry would make whoever it was jealous and more likely to reveal themselves. Harry could have explained that it was entirely possible the person didn’t know they were Malfoy’s soulmate, but that hadn’t factored into Malfoy’s thinking. He generated such gravity for himself as the center of his own universe that he thought everyone else should swing off-course because of it, too.
They had gone on one date, because Harry had thought he might as well, and it had been a disaster. Malfoy hadn’t once stopped giving Harry advice from the time they met up in the entrance hall, starting with flattening his hair. It had escalated to the point that Harry had stood up in the Three Broomsticks after Malfoy called him childish for enjoying butterbeer and introduced Malfoy to butterbeer more intimately by dumping it over his head.
Malfoy had got no sympathy for that from anyone, including Pansy Parkinson, who thought she was Malfoy’s soulmate, because he shouldn’t have been on a date with Harry in the first place, according to most Slytherins.
Hiding his twitching lips, Harry looked up to see that they were in front of a richly decorated office door with Unspeakable Riddle on the nameplate. Malfoy turned around and sneered at him again.
“I still don’t know why he would want to see you, Potter.”
“I’m dying of a rare disease and he wants to harvest my eyes for Potions ingredients.”
Malfoy stomped off. Harry knocked on the nameplate and waited.
“Enter, Mr. Potter.”
Riddle’s voice was deep and resonant. Harry stepped into the office and looked around, saving his glance at the occupant for last. It actually reminded him a little of Dumbledore’s office in Hogwarts, with silver instruments crowded onto every surface and more mirrors that reflected scenes not in the office.
I should remember to tell him that. He’d hate it. One of the few things Harry knew about Riddle was that he and Dumbledore didn’t get on.
He turned and faced the man, the only Unspeakable to leave the Department and still remain part of it, the only one with a publicly-known identity.
Riddle was leaning forwards over the desk, also in a Dumbledore-like position. His eyes were a burning black, and they locked on Harry with a force that dried up most of the jokes on Harry’s tongue. His dark hair was silver along the temples, in an oddly regular pattern that looked like he’d been wearing a crown there, and he wore heavy blue velvet robes that Harry thought looked itchy.
He swallowed and tried to sound normal, calm, not breathy and not wary as he said, “You called for me, sir?”
“Have a seat, Potter.”
Riddle waved a hand at the chair across from his own desk. Harry settled into it and folded his hands in his lap. Riddle kept staring at him, and yeah, his eyes were piercing in a way that had nothing to do with Dumbledore or Legilimency.
He looked as if he was the one who had set the trap that Harry might have to gnaw his leg off to escape from.
Harry narrowed his eyes, disturbed by his own thoughts, and settled back more firmly into the chair. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yes.” Riddle reached down and moved a few of the parchments from his desk, revealing a photograph. It was still, like a Muggle one. “I was told you might know something about this.” He turned the picture around.
Harry swallowed. The image was of a wrist with an intricate black and gold pattern on it, looking like a map of an unknown country.
He ought to know it. It had occupied his own wrist where the burn scar now was until two months ago.
Harry let his eyes rise and meet Riddle’s. The intensity in them made him wince. “I—it was the mark I used to wear, sir.”
“Used to?”
“I burned it.”
“What a coincidence.” Riddle’s voice descended into a guttural hiss. Harry remembered hearing that he could speak Parseltongue. It had surprised a lot of people when he chose to keep his Muggle name instead of starting to go by Slytherin, as would be expected of someone so obsessed with Slytherin House and snakes. “I would ask you to show me your wrist, but I suspect that I don’t need to.”
“Sir?”
“I suspect it looks like this.”
Harry looked up and shrank away from the burn scar on Riddle’s wrist. Yes, it was the twin of his own. Just as Riddle’s wrist must have borne the twin of Harry’s soul-mark at one time, and it must be his hand in the photograph and not Harry’s.
Harry opened his mouth and found himself with nothing to say. He leaned further back in the chair and locked his own questions in his mind. Why did you never approach me if you knew? Why did you decide that this is the only time you wanted to talk to me? From the intensity of Riddle’s fury, he wouldn’t get answers if he did ask them.
“What did you do?” Riddle whispered.
“My brother-in-law was in a coma. My sister’s soulmate. My twin sister. She was dying day by day. The Healers said that only a profound sacrifice could break the curse. So I made it. I burned the mark.”
Harry heard his voice come out flatter and calmer than he’d suspected it would. But he didn’t care, because the next instant, his own fear of Riddle tore like a cocoon, and he leaned forwards.
“Why do you care now, huh, Riddle? You had twenty-nine fucking years to find me, and you never did! I’ve made my life and built my career. Made my choices. I can’t reverse the sacrifice, and neither can you. We’ve all made our decisions. Why are you angry at me? Not yourself?”
Riddle’s eyes widened. Harry thought he could see flames in them for a moment, but he tore his gaze away. The last thing he wanted was Riddle using Legilimency on him.
And despite what he’d said, he didn’t really want an answer to his questions, either. There was nothing that would satisfy him. They had gone on to lead their separate lives, and it was over with. It was done.
“We can’t be soulmates without the mark,” Harry said, and stood. “Whatever decisions you made, whatever kind of life you want to have without me, you can still have it. Have fun, Riddle.”
He turned towards the door, and then spun to the side. It was instinct that made him do that, far more than consciousness. Riddle’s spell shot past him and impacted with the door, making it rattle in place. Locked, a distant part of Harry noted.
The office, which was large but didn’t feel that way, filled with the rasping sound of both their breathing. Harry kept his eyes locked on Riddle. Riddle had gone back into that soul-deep rage again.
It probably was soul-deep.
But what’s done is done.
“I didn’t find you because I didn’t know about you,” Riddle said at last. “My work is very demanding. I sometimes looked around for my soulmate when I was younger, but I have been highly preoccupied for the last twenty years. I assumed that my soulmate would find me. The right people have always known what my soul-mark looks like.”
“I’m not the right people. I’m an Auror, not one of your conceited Unspeakable types, and a half-blood, and I have Muggleborn friends—”
“None of that would have mattered if you hadn’t burned it!”
Harry let the shout wash over him, then said softly, tauntingly, “But I did. There’s no getting it back. If there was, then it wouldn’t have been the kind of sacrifice that could wake Michael up. And if I’d had even the slightest doubt about what I was doing, I wouldn’t have been able to burn it. What hurts more, Riddle? That you lost your soul-mark, or that I was willing to burn the mark instead of running around looking for you?”
Riddle stared at him and said nothing. Then he turned away and put his wand into a holster down at his side. He rested one hand on his head as if trying to contain some fury rising out of it like heat.
Harry glanced back at the office door. He could break the lock with a great enough effort of magic and will, but that would definitely attract attention, to break out of the office of the Great Tom Riddle—
“You’re going to make it up to me.”
“Excuse me?” Harry snapped, turning around with a flick of his own wand. A skin-tight, translucent shield surrounded him, one that would bounce any spells except the Unforgivables. And Harry was resistant to the Imperius.
Riddle stared at him with opaque eyes, no longer easy to read. “You’re going to make it up to me,” he repeated. “You might have saved your sister’s soulmate, but you deprived me of mine. You didn’t consult me before you burned the mark. You didn’t even try to find another way—”
“If you knew how many days I put in trying to figure out some other way to wake Michael up—”
“Not enough.” Riddle’s magic rippled out from him and made the desk rock for a moment. “Not enough. Nothing would ever be enough.”
“Then why should I waste time trying to make it up to you?”
“A figure of speech.” Riddle made a flickering motion of his fingers as though throwing away a pinch of dust. “You will do so. I will accept the pitiful efforts that you make.”
“And if I don’t?”
Riddle bared his teeth as he leaned forwards. “Then what I will do to your sister’s soulmate will make what the person who cursed him did look pathetic.”
Harry swallowed. Yes, Riddle would never have the empathic bond with Harry that true soulmates did, but he understood Harry well anyway. Harry would hate it if he made so many sacrifices to save Michael and then Michael died or was cursed or suffered more. He would hate to see his sister suffering.
“You’re a bastard.”
“And your soulmate, who has waited more than seventy years for you. Consider that, Harry.”
Harry shuddered at the way his name sounded in Riddle’s voice, and then shook his head violently. Focus. He had to focus.
“How do I know that you’ll accept what I offer you and not try to kill or hurt Michael anyway?”
“If I was to do that, it would defeat the purpose. You would attack me, and you would not hesitate because of his suffering if it had already happened. You might not be able to kill me, but we are equals, and you would potentially maim me.”
Harry nodded slowly. He supposed burning the mark had shown Riddle what he was capable of. “Very well. I—I’ll try somehow. I just—don’t know how.”
“That’s for you to work out.”
“Or you’ll kill my brother-in-law, I know, I know.”
Riddle laughed a little and leaned forwards. “You sacrificed your own soul-mark to save that man, Harry. You should, perhaps, think about the fact that I’m your soulmate and your equal, and think about what I would do to him in return.”
You’re too extreme, Mum’s voice murmured in Harry’s head.
A match for his soulmate, in this case. Harry thought about Michael doing worse than dying and felt sick.
He turned away and hit the locking charm with a blast of focused magic. Behind him, Riddle took a jagged breath.
Harry walked out, not looking back. Not that that would change things, but it made him feel better.
He would take feeling good where he could get it, given the sacrifices still to come.
