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lomonaaerenTitle: The Stars Too Fondly
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Established relationship, ignores the epilogue, Dark Theo, angst, romance, mentions of torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2300
Summary: Theo has always practiced some Dark magic, but now the call of the Dark Arts has become so strong that he is preparing to leave Harry Potter, his husband and Auror partner, behind. He knows there is no way that Harry, still dedicated to the pursuit of justice and fairness, will want to accompany him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” short fics being posted between the first of December and the winter solstice. The title comes from a quote from the poem “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil,” by Sarah Williams: “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;/I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
The Stars Too Fondly
Theo stared at the note he had written to Harry, and then shook his head. It wasn’t a good note.
But what was he supposed to say? There were no words that would encompass this.
He turned and looked around their bedroom. It was done in deep greys and blues, colors Harry had always said comforted him. The fireplace blazed away on one wall, underneath a mantel crowded with photographs. Harry with Ron and Hermione, the two of them together at their wedding, Theo as a baby held in his mother’s arms…
Theo closed his eyes. This wouldn’t help.
He could try to argue, to say it wasn’t fair. But whether it was fair or not, it was happening.
He turned back to the note and looked at it again.
Harry, I’m sorry. The Dark Arts are calling me on a path you can’t walk. I’m leaving my ring, and signed divorce documents in case you want to use them. I’ll block our marriage bond so you don’t have to feel it anymore. Feel free to tell the other Aurors that I went rogue and you had no idea. It’s true.
Theo brushed his fingers over the parchment, thick and silky and covered with ink. The ink wouldn’t bleed through. It wouldn’t matter how long Harry was gone, staying with Ron and Hermione in hospital when they’d been attacked by remnant Death Eaters.
Theo could have gone with Harry, but he’d begged off, saying that he was afraid Ron and Hermione wouldn’t want to see him right now, given his father’s Death Eater connections. Harry had given him an intense look that said he knew that was bollocks.
“They wouldn’t hold it against you, Theo. They know you.”
Theo had just shaken his head and smiled a little. “Let’s not chance it right now, love, all right?”
Harry had rolled his eyes and gone through the Floo. Theo swallowed now, remembering it. In truth, he would have liked to see Ron and Hermione one last time, debate with Hermione about the exact Arithmantic makeup of the curse that had hit her and exchange barbs about who Harry’s best friend was with Ron.
It was their way. Ron and Hermione had accepted him much more fully than Theo had once thought Harry’s friends would ever be able to.
They still couldn’t hear the call.
It sang endlessly through the night, although it diminished with the rising of the sun. It was the song of Dark magic, a wolf’s howl and the winter wind and the high, piercing music of the Wild Hunt all mixed.
Theo had practiced Dark Arts all his life. After his marriage to Harry, he’d done most of it in secret, in private, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d done it, and found in that magic something that tempted him like the flame did the moth.
He hadn’t thought he’d go so far as to hear the call, the steady summons to another realm where Dark Arts were the only kind of magic and he could run with the Wild Hunt, the Unseelie Sidhe, the Beasts of Winter, other Dark people and beings banished from the human world long ago.
But he had.
And now Theo heard the call even in the daytime. There was no refusing it.
Theo looked back at the note, and sighed. It said almost nothing, but it said all he would be able to say. He loved Harry. He was miserable at the thought of abandoning him.
But better he do it this way, when he was capable of thinking and speaking coherently and planning for the future, instead of walking out the door one night without a word, or dissolving in a beam of sunlight to vanish into the Dark the way his own father had.
Theo turned around, quiet, remorseful, grieving, and stopped.
Harry stood in the doorway of their bedroom, his arms folded and his gaze rooted on Theo.
“Did you think you were going to sneak off and just leave me?” he asked.
Theo drew a shaky breath. He had thought Harry might believe that Theo had some other lover, despite their marriage bond supposedly making such a thing impossible. Some Dark Arts could undermine the bond, and Theo had thought about pretending to use them, because maybe it would be less painful for Harry than the truth.
But no. In the end, they owed each other the truth, always. And their bond was singing with pain right now, going higher and higher, like the sound of someone trailing a finger around the rim of a wineglass.
“Yes,” Theo said, and watched Harry’s eyes flash once. He winced as pain surged down the bond again. “Not because I’m being kind. Because I’m selfish, and I couldn’t stand to watch your face or feel what you’ll feel when you know I chose the Dark Arts over you.”
Harry blinked. Then he shut the door on his part of the marriage bond—Theo winced again—and took a step forwards, eyes locked on him. “Because you’re using the kind of Dark Arts that would sever our bond?” he asked slowly. “Because you intend to become a Death Eater in truth and resurrect Voldemort?”
“What? Of course not.”
“Then why?”
Theo licked his lips. His own father had always warned him not to try and explain the call to anyone else. People who didn’t hear it would think him mad. Or if they believed him, they would try to kill him, or have him arrested and imprisoned in Azkaban. They would think that he’d done the kind of Dark Arts that deserved it.
They would be right.
But Theo was married to Harry, bonded, in a way that his father had never been to Theo’s own mother, Polaris Black. Theo took a long step forwards and reached out to cup Harry’s cheek. Harry stared at him, neither moving nor opening his own part of the bond again.
“I’m hearing a summons to a realm where the worst Dark creatures and magics were sent long ago,” Theo said softly. “Don’t ask me who sent them. I don’t know. The door between our realms is mostly sealed. But now and then, it opens to send a call through, when someone has practiced enough Dark magic that they belong there.”
Harry’s eyes were wide. He said nothing for long seconds. Then he opened his part of the bond again, and Theo nearly fell to his knees from the avalanche of Harry’s own love and curiosity and—
Relief.
Theo sighed when he felt that, because it told him that Harry still hadn’t understood what this summons meant. He staggered back to his feet and reached out to clench his hands on his husband’s shoulders. Harry smiled at him, eyes glowing like full moons, and spoke before Theo could say anything.
“I suppose I never showed you how much I really love you.”
“What?”
“I thought you were abandoning me. Leaving me.”
“Harry…” Theo swallowed. “That’s what I am doing.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t want to come with me,” Theo said. It felt as though he were trying to swim upriver against a current. Getting the words out wasn’t a problem. Finding the ones that would persuade Harry was. “You’d leave your friends. I don’t—I haven’t met anyone who came back from that realm. I don’t think there’s a door. We couldn’t just visit. You don’t like Dark magic. You don’t—”
“Theo.”
Maybe it was stupid, but Theo fell silent at the sound of Harry’s voice. He always would, he thought. There was a power to it, a sonorous command that he felt echoing at the bottom of his bones.
“I love you,” Harry said softly. “Much more than I loathe Dark magic. I’ve used that, when I had to. You know about my casting the Cruciatus and the Imperius during the war. You’ve been there when I used the Flaying Fire to subdue Macnair.”
Theo hesitated again. Yes, he had been, and he had immediately told Harry that he would tell Gawain Robards, the Head Auror, that Theo had been the one who had used that spell. It was a lie no one would question. Theo’s fellow Aurors walked warily around him, given his father’s reputation and his own casual use of Dark and wandless magic.
“The Flaying Fire is an Azkaban sentence,” he said at last.
“Yes, and it would have been for you if they weren’t frightened of you and you weren’t the Boy-Who-Lived’s husband,” Harry said, with a roll of his eyes that made Theo smile in spite of himself. “But what makes you think they would have put me away any more than they put you?”
“It’s—Harry, I wanted to spare you from that.”
“You didn’t spare me from casting it.”
Theo rubbed his hand over his face in exasperation. These weren’t the kinds of emotions he had expected to feel when he was speaking to Harry for the last time.
Are you so sure that it’s the last time?
It had to be, though. Theo acknowledged Harry’s point about the Dark spells he had used, minor ones or major ones sometimes, but it wasn’t the same thing as having been immersed in Dark Arts since he was a child.
“Harry…”
“Do you not want me to come with you?”
“There is nothing I can imagine wanting more on this earth,” Theo said hoarsely, and saw Harry close his eyes from the strength of the emotion Theo was pouring down their bond. “But where I’m going isn’t on this earth. It’s not for you. You’re so pure, Harry. I wouldn’t have corrupted you for anything.”
“I’m not pure.”
“Compared to—”
“No, not even compared to you, Theo.” Harry leaned forwards, and the wordless power that let him command more seasoned Aurors in the field without any official title fell over him. “I was made a Horcrux when I was fifteen months old. I grew up in a household with no magic, but just as full of hatred for me personally as yours was full of Dark Arts. I killed a man when I was eleven. I killed a basilisk and a piece of someone else’s soul when I was twelve. I was used in a resurrection ritual at fourteen. I used the Unforgivables during the war, and I’ve used spells that are only different in name since. I’m in love with you, Theo. I married all of you. The Dark Arts and the protectiveness and the man who holds me when I have nightmares. The man who trusts me with his own nightmares. No, we’re not going to be parted.”
Theo stared at the husband he had loved, but who he apparently hadn’t known. He moved forwards with one hand extended, and Harry gripped his shoulders in return and leaned up to kiss him.
Love like nothing Theo had ever imagined moved down their bond, burned through their kiss, shone in Harry’s magic as it became like a black corona around him for a moment. Theo clung to Harry, and shivered.
If he had seen that corona before, he might not have hesitated to invite Harry along to the darkest realm he knew of.
But it was partially his own fault, to have seen and heard about the spells Harry had cast and known so much of his past, and dismissed the idea that Harry might ever choose Theo above the friends and the career he loved.
“I do love them,” Harry whispered, apparently sensing Theo’s thoughts the way he sometimes did when their bond was burning especially strongly. “I just love you more.”
Theo gasped and drew him closer. “How did I get so lucky?”
“Just by being yourself,” Harry said, and leaned on him as they held each other.
*
They slipped outside into the darkness that was alive with the shrieking notes of the call. From the look on Harry’s face, he heard it, too. He squeezed Theo’s hand once, and then they both looked up as the night sky split apart above them.
It was the Wild Hunt that dived through, moonshadow horses with flying manes of cloud and eyes of pure hunger, bearing riders carved of blood and steel. The hunters laughed, and Theo and Harry laughed back.
The Hunt whirled above them for a moment, no threat to those who were invited, and then streamed towards what seemed to be a mountain of pure shadow. Theo followed, his fingers intertwined with Harry’s. For a moment, he thought of Ron and Hermione and how they would react to finding the note Harry had left.
Harry leaned his head on Theo’s shoulder, and he stopped thinking about it.
The shadow was lifting up in front of them, revealing a deeper darkness underneath it, but one that was spangled with stars. Theo walked towards it, feeling his throat close for a moment. His mother had been from a branch of the Black family that had migrated to the Continent generations ago, but she had retained her fondness for Astronomy.
One of Theo’s few memories of Polaris Black Nott was of being held in her arms as she taught him to name the constellations.
It occurred to him, for the first time, that she had disappeared when he was so young because she had been so immersed in Dark magic, and that he might see her again.
But it would have not been enough to cut through his sorrow, if he had had to leave Harry behind.
He glanced down. Harry smiled up at him, and as they heard the sound of singing like breaking bones, they stepped into the Darkest realm, and the stars and the Hunt streamed above them.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Established relationship, ignores the epilogue, Dark Theo, angst, romance, mentions of torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2300
Summary: Theo has always practiced some Dark magic, but now the call of the Dark Arts has become so strong that he is preparing to leave Harry Potter, his husband and Auror partner, behind. He knows there is no way that Harry, still dedicated to the pursuit of justice and fairness, will want to accompany him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” short fics being posted between the first of December and the winter solstice. The title comes from a quote from the poem “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil,” by Sarah Williams: “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;/I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
The Stars Too Fondly
Theo stared at the note he had written to Harry, and then shook his head. It wasn’t a good note.
But what was he supposed to say? There were no words that would encompass this.
He turned and looked around their bedroom. It was done in deep greys and blues, colors Harry had always said comforted him. The fireplace blazed away on one wall, underneath a mantel crowded with photographs. Harry with Ron and Hermione, the two of them together at their wedding, Theo as a baby held in his mother’s arms…
Theo closed his eyes. This wouldn’t help.
He could try to argue, to say it wasn’t fair. But whether it was fair or not, it was happening.
He turned back to the note and looked at it again.
Harry, I’m sorry. The Dark Arts are calling me on a path you can’t walk. I’m leaving my ring, and signed divorce documents in case you want to use them. I’ll block our marriage bond so you don’t have to feel it anymore. Feel free to tell the other Aurors that I went rogue and you had no idea. It’s true.
Theo brushed his fingers over the parchment, thick and silky and covered with ink. The ink wouldn’t bleed through. It wouldn’t matter how long Harry was gone, staying with Ron and Hermione in hospital when they’d been attacked by remnant Death Eaters.
Theo could have gone with Harry, but he’d begged off, saying that he was afraid Ron and Hermione wouldn’t want to see him right now, given his father’s Death Eater connections. Harry had given him an intense look that said he knew that was bollocks.
“They wouldn’t hold it against you, Theo. They know you.”
Theo had just shaken his head and smiled a little. “Let’s not chance it right now, love, all right?”
Harry had rolled his eyes and gone through the Floo. Theo swallowed now, remembering it. In truth, he would have liked to see Ron and Hermione one last time, debate with Hermione about the exact Arithmantic makeup of the curse that had hit her and exchange barbs about who Harry’s best friend was with Ron.
It was their way. Ron and Hermione had accepted him much more fully than Theo had once thought Harry’s friends would ever be able to.
They still couldn’t hear the call.
It sang endlessly through the night, although it diminished with the rising of the sun. It was the song of Dark magic, a wolf’s howl and the winter wind and the high, piercing music of the Wild Hunt all mixed.
Theo had practiced Dark Arts all his life. After his marriage to Harry, he’d done most of it in secret, in private, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d done it, and found in that magic something that tempted him like the flame did the moth.
He hadn’t thought he’d go so far as to hear the call, the steady summons to another realm where Dark Arts were the only kind of magic and he could run with the Wild Hunt, the Unseelie Sidhe, the Beasts of Winter, other Dark people and beings banished from the human world long ago.
But he had.
And now Theo heard the call even in the daytime. There was no refusing it.
Theo looked back at the note, and sighed. It said almost nothing, but it said all he would be able to say. He loved Harry. He was miserable at the thought of abandoning him.
But better he do it this way, when he was capable of thinking and speaking coherently and planning for the future, instead of walking out the door one night without a word, or dissolving in a beam of sunlight to vanish into the Dark the way his own father had.
Theo turned around, quiet, remorseful, grieving, and stopped.
Harry stood in the doorway of their bedroom, his arms folded and his gaze rooted on Theo.
“Did you think you were going to sneak off and just leave me?” he asked.
Theo drew a shaky breath. He had thought Harry might believe that Theo had some other lover, despite their marriage bond supposedly making such a thing impossible. Some Dark Arts could undermine the bond, and Theo had thought about pretending to use them, because maybe it would be less painful for Harry than the truth.
But no. In the end, they owed each other the truth, always. And their bond was singing with pain right now, going higher and higher, like the sound of someone trailing a finger around the rim of a wineglass.
“Yes,” Theo said, and watched Harry’s eyes flash once. He winced as pain surged down the bond again. “Not because I’m being kind. Because I’m selfish, and I couldn’t stand to watch your face or feel what you’ll feel when you know I chose the Dark Arts over you.”
Harry blinked. Then he shut the door on his part of the marriage bond—Theo winced again—and took a step forwards, eyes locked on him. “Because you’re using the kind of Dark Arts that would sever our bond?” he asked slowly. “Because you intend to become a Death Eater in truth and resurrect Voldemort?”
“What? Of course not.”
“Then why?”
Theo licked his lips. His own father had always warned him not to try and explain the call to anyone else. People who didn’t hear it would think him mad. Or if they believed him, they would try to kill him, or have him arrested and imprisoned in Azkaban. They would think that he’d done the kind of Dark Arts that deserved it.
They would be right.
But Theo was married to Harry, bonded, in a way that his father had never been to Theo’s own mother, Polaris Black. Theo took a long step forwards and reached out to cup Harry’s cheek. Harry stared at him, neither moving nor opening his own part of the bond again.
“I’m hearing a summons to a realm where the worst Dark creatures and magics were sent long ago,” Theo said softly. “Don’t ask me who sent them. I don’t know. The door between our realms is mostly sealed. But now and then, it opens to send a call through, when someone has practiced enough Dark magic that they belong there.”
Harry’s eyes were wide. He said nothing for long seconds. Then he opened his part of the bond again, and Theo nearly fell to his knees from the avalanche of Harry’s own love and curiosity and—
Relief.
Theo sighed when he felt that, because it told him that Harry still hadn’t understood what this summons meant. He staggered back to his feet and reached out to clench his hands on his husband’s shoulders. Harry smiled at him, eyes glowing like full moons, and spoke before Theo could say anything.
“I suppose I never showed you how much I really love you.”
“What?”
“I thought you were abandoning me. Leaving me.”
“Harry…” Theo swallowed. “That’s what I am doing.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t want to come with me,” Theo said. It felt as though he were trying to swim upriver against a current. Getting the words out wasn’t a problem. Finding the ones that would persuade Harry was. “You’d leave your friends. I don’t—I haven’t met anyone who came back from that realm. I don’t think there’s a door. We couldn’t just visit. You don’t like Dark magic. You don’t—”
“Theo.”
Maybe it was stupid, but Theo fell silent at the sound of Harry’s voice. He always would, he thought. There was a power to it, a sonorous command that he felt echoing at the bottom of his bones.
“I love you,” Harry said softly. “Much more than I loathe Dark magic. I’ve used that, when I had to. You know about my casting the Cruciatus and the Imperius during the war. You’ve been there when I used the Flaying Fire to subdue Macnair.”
Theo hesitated again. Yes, he had been, and he had immediately told Harry that he would tell Gawain Robards, the Head Auror, that Theo had been the one who had used that spell. It was a lie no one would question. Theo’s fellow Aurors walked warily around him, given his father’s reputation and his own casual use of Dark and wandless magic.
“The Flaying Fire is an Azkaban sentence,” he said at last.
“Yes, and it would have been for you if they weren’t frightened of you and you weren’t the Boy-Who-Lived’s husband,” Harry said, with a roll of his eyes that made Theo smile in spite of himself. “But what makes you think they would have put me away any more than they put you?”
“It’s—Harry, I wanted to spare you from that.”
“You didn’t spare me from casting it.”
Theo rubbed his hand over his face in exasperation. These weren’t the kinds of emotions he had expected to feel when he was speaking to Harry for the last time.
Are you so sure that it’s the last time?
It had to be, though. Theo acknowledged Harry’s point about the Dark spells he had used, minor ones or major ones sometimes, but it wasn’t the same thing as having been immersed in Dark Arts since he was a child.
“Harry…”
“Do you not want me to come with you?”
“There is nothing I can imagine wanting more on this earth,” Theo said hoarsely, and saw Harry close his eyes from the strength of the emotion Theo was pouring down their bond. “But where I’m going isn’t on this earth. It’s not for you. You’re so pure, Harry. I wouldn’t have corrupted you for anything.”
“I’m not pure.”
“Compared to—”
“No, not even compared to you, Theo.” Harry leaned forwards, and the wordless power that let him command more seasoned Aurors in the field without any official title fell over him. “I was made a Horcrux when I was fifteen months old. I grew up in a household with no magic, but just as full of hatred for me personally as yours was full of Dark Arts. I killed a man when I was eleven. I killed a basilisk and a piece of someone else’s soul when I was twelve. I was used in a resurrection ritual at fourteen. I used the Unforgivables during the war, and I’ve used spells that are only different in name since. I’m in love with you, Theo. I married all of you. The Dark Arts and the protectiveness and the man who holds me when I have nightmares. The man who trusts me with his own nightmares. No, we’re not going to be parted.”
Theo stared at the husband he had loved, but who he apparently hadn’t known. He moved forwards with one hand extended, and Harry gripped his shoulders in return and leaned up to kiss him.
Love like nothing Theo had ever imagined moved down their bond, burned through their kiss, shone in Harry’s magic as it became like a black corona around him for a moment. Theo clung to Harry, and shivered.
If he had seen that corona before, he might not have hesitated to invite Harry along to the darkest realm he knew of.
But it was partially his own fault, to have seen and heard about the spells Harry had cast and known so much of his past, and dismissed the idea that Harry might ever choose Theo above the friends and the career he loved.
“I do love them,” Harry whispered, apparently sensing Theo’s thoughts the way he sometimes did when their bond was burning especially strongly. “I just love you more.”
Theo gasped and drew him closer. “How did I get so lucky?”
“Just by being yourself,” Harry said, and leaned on him as they held each other.
*
They slipped outside into the darkness that was alive with the shrieking notes of the call. From the look on Harry’s face, he heard it, too. He squeezed Theo’s hand once, and then they both looked up as the night sky split apart above them.
It was the Wild Hunt that dived through, moonshadow horses with flying manes of cloud and eyes of pure hunger, bearing riders carved of blood and steel. The hunters laughed, and Theo and Harry laughed back.
The Hunt whirled above them for a moment, no threat to those who were invited, and then streamed towards what seemed to be a mountain of pure shadow. Theo followed, his fingers intertwined with Harry’s. For a moment, he thought of Ron and Hermione and how they would react to finding the note Harry had left.
Harry leaned his head on Theo’s shoulder, and he stopped thinking about it.
The shadow was lifting up in front of them, revealing a deeper darkness underneath it, but one that was spangled with stars. Theo walked towards it, feeling his throat close for a moment. His mother had been from a branch of the Black family that had migrated to the Continent generations ago, but she had retained her fondness for Astronomy.
One of Theo’s few memories of Polaris Black Nott was of being held in her arms as she taught him to name the constellations.
It occurred to him, for the first time, that she had disappeared when he was so young because she had been so immersed in Dark magic, and that he might see her again.
But it would have not been enough to cut through his sorrow, if he had had to leave Harry behind.
He glanced down. Harry smiled up at him, and as they heard the sound of singing like breaking bones, they stepped into the Darkest realm, and the stars and the Hunt streamed above them.
The End.
