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lomonaaerenTitle: His Darkest Dread
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Tom Riddle/Harry, mentions of James/Lily
Content Notes: AU, angst, soulmate-identifying marks, drama, brief discussion of suicide
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3700
Summary: Ron and Hermione were the first ones to discover that Harry was gone. But Albus was the one who knew where he had gone, and who soon received confirmation that his darkest fears were true: Harry Potter had united with his soulmate, Minister Tom Riddle.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s an AU of my fic His Darkest Devotion, and immediately follows the one-shot “His Most Arden Obsession.” Reading those first will give you the best way to understand this story.
His Darkest Dread
“Harry? Mate?”
Ron frowned as he looked at Harry’s wide-open bed curtains, the empty foot of his bed where his trunk was missing, the equally empty corner against the wall where his broom usually leaned. He stepped back and caught Neville’s eye as Neville came out of the bathroom. “Have you seen Harry?”
“No. He didn’t go down to breakfast early?”
“I don’t know why he would have taken his trunk and his broom if he did that.”
Neville turned with a frown of his own. “Yeah, now that you mention it, it’s weird. I didn’t hear anything last night.”
“Me, neither,” Ron said, and glanced over as Dean’s curtains stirred and he leaned out of the bed. “What about you, Dean? Hear where Harry went?”
“Thought I heard the window open and shut sometime during the night.” Dean rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Might have been my imagination, though,” he added through a huge second yawn, before he rolled over and tugged a pillow atop his head.
Ron swallowed, feeling a little cold. Harry could have flown out the window on his broom, and there was no telling where he might have gone.
Had he fled to join his parents? Ron thought Dumbledore had convinced Harry to stay in school, while the Headmaster did what he could to get pardons for the Potters. Harry had also mentioned something about the letters from his mum and dad saying his education was important.
He wouldn’t have—
Harry had been depressed since the start of the term. Ron took a deep breath and told himself that Harry wouldn’t have leaped from the window, not and taken his broom and trunk with him. It was all right. They wouldn’t find his best friend’s broken body at the foot of Gryffindor Tower.
But he did turn and start running down the stairs to the common room. Hermione and Professor Dumbledore needed to know more about this, right away.
*
“Where do you think he went, sir?”
Albus held back his despair. There was no reason to spill it like water in front of these children, who should be allowed to be children for a while longer. “I am not sure, but I will look into it. There may be some merit in your idea that Mr. Potter fled to find his parents, Mr. Weasley.”
“He should have known we would go with him!”
Albus gave Miss Granger a smile. She was a good friend for Harry, clear and focused on the righteous path, and Muggleborn, so she could remind Harry every day of the costs of succumbing to the soul-bond. “I am sure he did, Miss Granger. Rationally. But he was probably overcome with emotion.”
“I thought he might have leaped from the window,” Mr. Weasley blurted, and then bit his lip.
“Fortunately, that is not the case.” It was not the end that Albus wanted for Harry, himself, even if it would have been easier for the Order in some ways. “I assure you we have searched the grounds thoroughly.”
Mr. Weasley sagged, and it only took a few more minutes to calm them down enough to leave his office. Albus sat back in his chair and poured himself a glass of water with a hand that trembled.
Fawkes chirped inquiringly from his perch.
“I am afraid that he did. That Harry went to him.”
Fawkes gave a long trill that sounded joyful. Albus shook his head. Well, he could not expect phoenixes to always understand human situations or emotions.
“I will have to investigate,” he said. “Quietly. Discreetly.”
*
“Are you ready for your journey back to Hogwarts, Harry?”
Harry lifted his head and smiled. The soul-bond that connected him to Tom had flooded with confidence and joy the minute he asked the question. And although Harry was nervous about seeing Dumbledore and the disappointment he would probably show after telling Harry again and again to stay away from his soulmate, with Tom beside him, he could do anything.
“Yeah.”
It had been a quiet fortnight, at least on the outside. Tom had put in a few hours every day for the most urgent Ministry paperwork and meetings, but he had spent the rest of the time working with Harry through his OWL subjects and the first steps that would let him become an Animagus.
Now, Harry felt as though his head was buzzing with knowledge, as though his bones were beginning to shift beneath his skin into the legless shape of a boomslang.
He was the center of most of Tom’s thoughts, of his burning gaze, of the bond that had formed between them and sometimes linked them abruptly to each other’s memories.
He understood Tom in a way that he hadn’t ever understood his parents or godfather or the Order’s goals.
“We’ll Apparate to Hogsmeade, and walk up from there,” Tom said, reaching out to take Harry’s wrist. The blue flames sprang up between them with a small hiss.
Harry leaned towards Tom and sighed as Tom’s free arm immediately encircled his waist. His head relaxed and cleared. He could breathe, and even the thought of Dumbledore’s disappointed expression had no power over him.
“You are more than ready,” Tom whispered to him in Parseltongue.
Harry nodded, and they turned and walked out of the room. Tom’s guard of Aurors scrambled into place behind them. Harry could feel a few unhappy glares fixed on his back. The Aurors didn’t seem to know how to adjust to the presence of the Minister’s soulmate, who wasn’t even allowed to use magic legally outside school.
Not that Harry thought for one second he would be arrested if he did. And he had practiced some spells for the past week in Tom’s private, warded office at the Ministry as well as his house.
But he understood the principle of the thing, the same way that he understood the principles the guided the decisions Dumbledore and his parents and Sirius had made.
He had just chosen different ones.
*
“Headmaster? Minister Riddle is here to see you.”
Albus frowned. Almost always, Tom sent word ahead when he wanted to visit. They discussed matters pertaining to the school like wolves circling each other, and Albus did not feel prepared at the moment. “Guide him to the office, please, Minerva.”
His Deputy Headmistress nodded and closed the door. Albus turned in his chair so that he was looking at Fawkes, who ruffled all his feathers at once, flapped a little, and then closed his wings and stood on one foot.
“What do you think he wants, Fawkes?”
Fawkes didn’t deign to answer.
Albus shook his head and turned back to face the door, hoping the meeting wouldn’t take long. He had to coordinate the search for Harry, and he was hoping to meet up with James and Lily that afternoon and take some blood to track Harry with. It didn’t work as well as blood from the actual person someone wanted to track, but it would do.
The door opened. Tom walked in with Harry at his side.
Albus’s world spun sideways. He felt as though he had taken an ordinary step and ended up falling down a cliff, with stones bouncing around him, striking him, drawing blood to the surface of his skin.
Leading to his death.
He forced himself to stand and his mouth to move, especially after a concerned croon from Fawkes. He couldn’t just sit there and gape at them. “Harry, my boy! We’ve been so worried. Tom, thank you for bringing him back to school.”
“My soulmate hasn’t yet determined if he wants to return to Hogwarts on a permanent basis.”
Yes, a stone had hit him, Albus thought, and the world was darker than it had been two minutes ago.
Tom was watching him with a faint smile lifting one corner of his mouth. Harry was looking at him with wide eyes, and his own mouth trembled a little.
That was where Albus had to focus, he managed to think, clinging to rationality the way he would to the edge of that cliff. Appealing to Tom would be useless. He had to focus on Harry and appeal to Harry’s sense of rationality, and justice, and a higher purpose than the mere pleasure of life.
“Harry,” he whispered. “Oh, my dear boy. How could you?”
*
Pain came through the bond Tom shared with Harry, although there was also, as always, the implacable resistance that had carried Harry through the last fortnight. He was overjoyed to have found Tom as his soulmate, and terrified, and yet he would rise above it all to keep going.
But why should he have to?
Tom stepped in front of Harry to shield him from Albus’s gaze. He met that gaze instead and asked, “Why did you ask him to give up his soulmate, Headmaster? If you truly believe me to be a Dark Lord, as Harry has told me, why not duel me yourself? Why is it up to other people to fight me?”
Albus’s face went white.
Yes, he told me, Tom wanted to say. How you kept him isolated, convinced his parents something was wrong with him, made him try and destroy his soul-mark more than once.
“You have done very well in managing to hide your evil, Tom,” Albus said, and his gaze was steady in a way that told Tom he probably wouldn’t be able to lure the man into a duel. A pity. “But someday, it will emerge. And have you considered what it will do to your defenseless soulmate?”
“Why call him defenseless, when he has me?”
“You have no heart, Tom. You cannot love. Perhaps I kept Harry from you for reasons you consider abhorrent, but there is also this: you will never be able to return his feelings. Why should he be doomed to a loveless existence?”
Tom stared at Albus in silence for a moment. Albus stayed silent, as well, apparently waiting for some reaction to his declaration.
It didn’t seem he expected Tom to start laughing.
The laughter poured out of Tom, and he actually bent over, his hands on his knees, wheezing a little from the force of his mirth. It came out in whoops near the end, which Tom wasn’t proud of. But he managed to straighten up and shake his head, and Albus was staring at him with his mouth open.
So worth it.
“You are such a fool, Albus,” Tom said softly. “Why would I have waited so long for my soulmate if I didn’t love him? Why would I still be seeking him among those with phoenix soul-marks and serpentine Animagus forms?”
“You have had other lovers! How long did you favor them?”
“Most of those were alliances of mutual convenience.” Tom turned around so that he could meet Harry’s eyes. “But my soulmate is much more than that. And he is everything I have ever wanted. Everything that was worth waiting for.”
Harry’s smile bloomed across his face. Tom held out his hand, and Harry crossed the office without hesitation to clasp it, something Tom hadn’t been sure would happen.
“We’ll take our leave now, Albus,” Tom said. “You deserved to know that Harry wasn’t dead, but that was as the Headmaster of his school, and someone who can pass the word on to his professors and friends. You don’t deserve anything as the leader of the organization who kept him imprisoned.”
“You are making a mistake, Tom.”
“I do not think so.” Harry’s hand in his said it was not.
“You should know that the Order of the Phoenix does not tolerate traitors.”
Tom felt his smile draining away. He turned to face Albus, and the man actually took a step backwards, one hand coming to rest on his desk. So he had the sense to be afraid of what was in Tom’s face at the moment, then.
“Harm my soulmate, and I will destroy you and your Order more thoroughly than you can imagine,” Tom said softly. It was an effort to prevent the words from coming out in Parseltongue.
“We do not fear death in the pursuit of protecting Muggleborns and Muggles.”
“You think that you would die?” Tom laughed, and the shadows slid down the walls as he let his magic go, let it swell and fill the room, and press Dumbledore’s hand against the desk with the shadow of a nail through it. “That is a touching faith in my mercy, for all that you say I lack it.”
Albus stared at him in what seemed to be true horror. Tom half-nodded. Yes. Albus did not truly believe, in his heart of hearts, that Tom was a Dark Lord, or he wouldn’t have been surprised by this confrontation. That might mean he retained some sanity, and was reachable on this matter.
More years of keeping Harry under his control and Tom without his soulmate? Perhaps not. Those were years that would have hardened Albus’s surety of Tom’s evil still further.
Would have driven Tom further towards evil, perhaps, because to be without this bond was already the worst thing he could think of.
Albus seemed to have given up on trying to appeal to Tom. He swung to face Harry. “You know the ideals your parents and godfather live by,” he whispered. “Will you forsake what you were born with, Harry, for the obsession—not the devotion—of the man they are fighting?”
Tom wanted to speak, but he held his tongue between his teeth. He would defend Harry from all physical and magical and financial threats. But Harry had to stand on his own when it came to verbal ones. He would suffer far worse from Tom’s enemies.
Besides. Tom wanted to hear what Harry had to say about leaving the Order’s suffocating care to find his soulmate.
*
Harry stared at Professor Dumbledore and felt a great weariness washing through him. It felt like what he had experienced when he’d discovered he had a boomslang Animagus form. Just another “gift” he would never be able to do anything with, just another thing he had to hide and deny.
But now—
Now he was beyond that.
Walking back into Hogwarts had felt like walking into a prison, but now Harry understood that he was free to leave again. That the soul-bond thrumming between him and Tom was full of the exact kind of devotion the Headmaster was denying existed.
That what his family and the Order had asked him to do was wrong.
“I heard my parents talking once about my soul-mark,” Harry said quietly. “They said it would have been better that I not be born, instead of born to bear Tom’s name.”
Dumbledore caught his breath. Then he said, “I am sure they did not mean it.”
“They meant it enough to say it,” Harry said. “They told me when I was young that I could never show anyone my soul-mark, and that giving in to the temptation to find my soulmate would mean I turned as evil as he was. I’m the only person I know who was denied my living soulmate, Headmaster. Death would have been one thing, and if I’d chosen to reject him, that would have been one thing—”
Agony that almost made Harry breathless surged down their bond. Just the thought of that rejection gave Tom so much pain that Harry had to pause in speaking and turn towards him, clasping his hands.
“Do not say it,” Tom hissed. “Not even in jest. Not even to make a point.”
Harry nodded. He couldn’t speak Parseltongue back, even though he understood it as Tom’s soulmate, but he said softly, “I won’t.”
“I promise that you will never want for anything. That I will never do anything that would cause you to reject me.”
Harry smiled at him and turned back to Dumbledore, in time to hear him say, “I rejected my soulmate when he became a Dark Lord, as you well know, Harry.”
It was a tale that his parents had told him all the time, hoping to inspire him to follow Dumbledore’s example. Harry nodded. “And yet, sir, you didn’t duel him until after years of war, when he had destroyed countless people’s lives. Why is that, unless you felt some lingering affection for him?”
“We are not here to discuss Gellert—”
“No, we’re discussing Tom,” Harry said. “And I need to know. Where is your evidence that he is a Dark Lord? I accepted it without question when I was younger, but I want to know now.”
“He is playing the long game. You know that, Harry. You know that he has brought plans before the Wizengamot that call for stricter control of Muggles’ minds, sponsored laws that would make it possible for purebloods to seize Muggleborns from their families, inveighed against the free gathering of Muggleborns as part of the Order—”
“That sounds like your usual corrupt politician to me, sir.” Harry had to smile at the absolute indignation that flowed from Tom. “And from what I understand, the ‘free gathering’ was attacking people in the middle of Diagon Alley.”
“Violence is often necessary to defend freedom, Harry.”
“So this is all about what he could do, not what he’s done?”
“What have I told you about what happened to the children who burned off your Dark Lord’s soul-mark, Harry?”
“Why were they children and he wasn’t?”
Dumbledore shook his head, his eyes gaining the misty shimmer of tears for a moment. “He slaughtered them. And their families. No matter how tragic the destruction of a soul-mark, it is not worth that.”
“If it had been proven that I did that, I would be in prison right now,” Tom said calmly.
Harry sighed. “So this is about crimes that are decades old. Sir, I haven’t seen any evidence that Tom is the Dark Lord the Order’s painted him to be. And I think I would have felt it, better than anyone else.”
Dumbledore’s eyes widened. “You have completed the emotional bond?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dumbledore said nothing for long moments, his eyes focused on the wall as if he were seeing something far distant. Then he sighed. “I would not have wished this for you, Harry. This—essential slavery to a man who is far your superior in age, in power, and in Darkness.”
Tom started to move forwards. Harry grabbed his wrist, flinching a little. The bond between them was so heated that Harry half-expected Tom’s skin to be hot and burning, too.
“I want to kill him,” Tom hissed.
“I know,” Harry said, almost the only response he could give in English that wouldn’t alert Dumbledore that something was wrong, and then turned to face the Headmaster again. “He’s been chosen for me, sir, and me for him. That’s what you always said about your soul-mark, wasn’t it? About my parents’? Why should I be the only one different, the only one who has to hide?”
“You will give Tom such power that he could destroy the world.”
“The world as you know it, perhaps, Albus.”
Harry sighed. He had hoped for some sort of answers or closure from his confrontation with Dumbledore, but it was clear that he wouldn’t get any. “All right, sir. If that’s the way you feel.”
“Then you will come home? Return to Hogwarts?”
“What is there for me at home, with Mum and Dad gone? And I don’t really feel like returning to Hogwarts now.”
“Harry, my boy—”
Harry turned to Tom. “It was never really about me,” he said. “It was about his fear of you. He would have done the same thing if someone else was your soulmate.”
Tom cupped Harry’s chin gently. “I cannot imagine having another soulmate than you.”
Harry smiled at him, and glanced at Dumbledore when he made an inarticulate noise of protest. “Come up with something to tell Ron and Hermione, sir. If you like. We’ll be announcing our soulmate bond soon, and I can’t imagine that they’ll think it all that understandable that you wanted me to hide my mark forever.”
“Harry, they are your friends.”
“Who I could never be entirely honest with, thanks to the Order,” Harry said, but shook his head when Dumbledore opened his mouth again. “No, I’m not going to get drawn into this argument. Let’s go, Tom.”
Tom lingered behind to meet Dumbledore’s eyes. Harry rolled his own and walked out the office door ahead of Tom. This part really wasn’t about him, and he would rather remove himself from the situation than be part of their pissing contest.
*
“I have won, Albus. I have won everything.”
“If you were the slightest bit humane, Tom, you would let that dear, sweet boy go. If I were in your situation—”
“I’m not you, Albus, to reject my soulmate and then hide away from dealing with him for decades at a time.”
The stricken look on Albus’s face wasn’t the best thing Tom had ever seen, but it was in the top ten. He inclined his head, smiling, and went to rejoin the best thing in his life, who waited patiently for him on the stairs below.
Harry smiled up at him when they reached the entrance to Hogwarts, with people whispering and staring after them, and said, “I don’t think I want to come back to school this term, at least not until some of the excitement over our announcement dies down. Maybe next term.”
Tom nodded. When Albus has been removed as Headmaster, and is no threat to you. “Of course, Harry. We can make our decisions one day at a time.”
Their bond, still a wonder to him, sang in the mental space between them, and Tom took Harry’s hand again to walk off the grounds.
*
Ron knocked urgently at Professor Dumbledore’s office door. He had seen Harry, briefly, walking with the Minister for Magic of all people, but they had been gone before Ron could catch up.
“Sir?” he asked, finally bursting into the office. “Sir? What’s going on? I saw Harry, and then—”
The professor lifted his head, and Ron’s breath choked in his throat. There were tears on Dumbledore’s cheeks.
“Alas,” Dumbledore whispered. “I fear that young Harry is lost to all of us.”
Ron stared at him, and felt the beginning of a long, slow desolation stretch in front of him.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Tom Riddle/Harry, mentions of James/Lily
Content Notes: AU, angst, soulmate-identifying marks, drama, brief discussion of suicide
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3700
Summary: Ron and Hermione were the first ones to discover that Harry was gone. But Albus was the one who knew where he had gone, and who soon received confirmation that his darkest fears were true: Harry Potter had united with his soulmate, Minister Tom Riddle.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s an AU of my fic His Darkest Devotion, and immediately follows the one-shot “His Most Arden Obsession.” Reading those first will give you the best way to understand this story.
His Darkest Dread
“Harry? Mate?”
Ron frowned as he looked at Harry’s wide-open bed curtains, the empty foot of his bed where his trunk was missing, the equally empty corner against the wall where his broom usually leaned. He stepped back and caught Neville’s eye as Neville came out of the bathroom. “Have you seen Harry?”
“No. He didn’t go down to breakfast early?”
“I don’t know why he would have taken his trunk and his broom if he did that.”
Neville turned with a frown of his own. “Yeah, now that you mention it, it’s weird. I didn’t hear anything last night.”
“Me, neither,” Ron said, and glanced over as Dean’s curtains stirred and he leaned out of the bed. “What about you, Dean? Hear where Harry went?”
“Thought I heard the window open and shut sometime during the night.” Dean rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Might have been my imagination, though,” he added through a huge second yawn, before he rolled over and tugged a pillow atop his head.
Ron swallowed, feeling a little cold. Harry could have flown out the window on his broom, and there was no telling where he might have gone.
Had he fled to join his parents? Ron thought Dumbledore had convinced Harry to stay in school, while the Headmaster did what he could to get pardons for the Potters. Harry had also mentioned something about the letters from his mum and dad saying his education was important.
He wouldn’t have—
Harry had been depressed since the start of the term. Ron took a deep breath and told himself that Harry wouldn’t have leaped from the window, not and taken his broom and trunk with him. It was all right. They wouldn’t find his best friend’s broken body at the foot of Gryffindor Tower.
But he did turn and start running down the stairs to the common room. Hermione and Professor Dumbledore needed to know more about this, right away.
*
“Where do you think he went, sir?”
Albus held back his despair. There was no reason to spill it like water in front of these children, who should be allowed to be children for a while longer. “I am not sure, but I will look into it. There may be some merit in your idea that Mr. Potter fled to find his parents, Mr. Weasley.”
“He should have known we would go with him!”
Albus gave Miss Granger a smile. She was a good friend for Harry, clear and focused on the righteous path, and Muggleborn, so she could remind Harry every day of the costs of succumbing to the soul-bond. “I am sure he did, Miss Granger. Rationally. But he was probably overcome with emotion.”
“I thought he might have leaped from the window,” Mr. Weasley blurted, and then bit his lip.
“Fortunately, that is not the case.” It was not the end that Albus wanted for Harry, himself, even if it would have been easier for the Order in some ways. “I assure you we have searched the grounds thoroughly.”
Mr. Weasley sagged, and it only took a few more minutes to calm them down enough to leave his office. Albus sat back in his chair and poured himself a glass of water with a hand that trembled.
Fawkes chirped inquiringly from his perch.
“I am afraid that he did. That Harry went to him.”
Fawkes gave a long trill that sounded joyful. Albus shook his head. Well, he could not expect phoenixes to always understand human situations or emotions.
“I will have to investigate,” he said. “Quietly. Discreetly.”
*
“Are you ready for your journey back to Hogwarts, Harry?”
Harry lifted his head and smiled. The soul-bond that connected him to Tom had flooded with confidence and joy the minute he asked the question. And although Harry was nervous about seeing Dumbledore and the disappointment he would probably show after telling Harry again and again to stay away from his soulmate, with Tom beside him, he could do anything.
“Yeah.”
It had been a quiet fortnight, at least on the outside. Tom had put in a few hours every day for the most urgent Ministry paperwork and meetings, but he had spent the rest of the time working with Harry through his OWL subjects and the first steps that would let him become an Animagus.
Now, Harry felt as though his head was buzzing with knowledge, as though his bones were beginning to shift beneath his skin into the legless shape of a boomslang.
He was the center of most of Tom’s thoughts, of his burning gaze, of the bond that had formed between them and sometimes linked them abruptly to each other’s memories.
He understood Tom in a way that he hadn’t ever understood his parents or godfather or the Order’s goals.
“We’ll Apparate to Hogsmeade, and walk up from there,” Tom said, reaching out to take Harry’s wrist. The blue flames sprang up between them with a small hiss.
Harry leaned towards Tom and sighed as Tom’s free arm immediately encircled his waist. His head relaxed and cleared. He could breathe, and even the thought of Dumbledore’s disappointed expression had no power over him.
“You are more than ready,” Tom whispered to him in Parseltongue.
Harry nodded, and they turned and walked out of the room. Tom’s guard of Aurors scrambled into place behind them. Harry could feel a few unhappy glares fixed on his back. The Aurors didn’t seem to know how to adjust to the presence of the Minister’s soulmate, who wasn’t even allowed to use magic legally outside school.
Not that Harry thought for one second he would be arrested if he did. And he had practiced some spells for the past week in Tom’s private, warded office at the Ministry as well as his house.
But he understood the principle of the thing, the same way that he understood the principles the guided the decisions Dumbledore and his parents and Sirius had made.
He had just chosen different ones.
*
“Headmaster? Minister Riddle is here to see you.”
Albus frowned. Almost always, Tom sent word ahead when he wanted to visit. They discussed matters pertaining to the school like wolves circling each other, and Albus did not feel prepared at the moment. “Guide him to the office, please, Minerva.”
His Deputy Headmistress nodded and closed the door. Albus turned in his chair so that he was looking at Fawkes, who ruffled all his feathers at once, flapped a little, and then closed his wings and stood on one foot.
“What do you think he wants, Fawkes?”
Fawkes didn’t deign to answer.
Albus shook his head and turned back to face the door, hoping the meeting wouldn’t take long. He had to coordinate the search for Harry, and he was hoping to meet up with James and Lily that afternoon and take some blood to track Harry with. It didn’t work as well as blood from the actual person someone wanted to track, but it would do.
The door opened. Tom walked in with Harry at his side.
Albus’s world spun sideways. He felt as though he had taken an ordinary step and ended up falling down a cliff, with stones bouncing around him, striking him, drawing blood to the surface of his skin.
Leading to his death.
He forced himself to stand and his mouth to move, especially after a concerned croon from Fawkes. He couldn’t just sit there and gape at them. “Harry, my boy! We’ve been so worried. Tom, thank you for bringing him back to school.”
“My soulmate hasn’t yet determined if he wants to return to Hogwarts on a permanent basis.”
Yes, a stone had hit him, Albus thought, and the world was darker than it had been two minutes ago.
Tom was watching him with a faint smile lifting one corner of his mouth. Harry was looking at him with wide eyes, and his own mouth trembled a little.
That was where Albus had to focus, he managed to think, clinging to rationality the way he would to the edge of that cliff. Appealing to Tom would be useless. He had to focus on Harry and appeal to Harry’s sense of rationality, and justice, and a higher purpose than the mere pleasure of life.
“Harry,” he whispered. “Oh, my dear boy. How could you?”
*
Pain came through the bond Tom shared with Harry, although there was also, as always, the implacable resistance that had carried Harry through the last fortnight. He was overjoyed to have found Tom as his soulmate, and terrified, and yet he would rise above it all to keep going.
But why should he have to?
Tom stepped in front of Harry to shield him from Albus’s gaze. He met that gaze instead and asked, “Why did you ask him to give up his soulmate, Headmaster? If you truly believe me to be a Dark Lord, as Harry has told me, why not duel me yourself? Why is it up to other people to fight me?”
Albus’s face went white.
Yes, he told me, Tom wanted to say. How you kept him isolated, convinced his parents something was wrong with him, made him try and destroy his soul-mark more than once.
“You have done very well in managing to hide your evil, Tom,” Albus said, and his gaze was steady in a way that told Tom he probably wouldn’t be able to lure the man into a duel. A pity. “But someday, it will emerge. And have you considered what it will do to your defenseless soulmate?”
“Why call him defenseless, when he has me?”
“You have no heart, Tom. You cannot love. Perhaps I kept Harry from you for reasons you consider abhorrent, but there is also this: you will never be able to return his feelings. Why should he be doomed to a loveless existence?”
Tom stared at Albus in silence for a moment. Albus stayed silent, as well, apparently waiting for some reaction to his declaration.
It didn’t seem he expected Tom to start laughing.
The laughter poured out of Tom, and he actually bent over, his hands on his knees, wheezing a little from the force of his mirth. It came out in whoops near the end, which Tom wasn’t proud of. But he managed to straighten up and shake his head, and Albus was staring at him with his mouth open.
So worth it.
“You are such a fool, Albus,” Tom said softly. “Why would I have waited so long for my soulmate if I didn’t love him? Why would I still be seeking him among those with phoenix soul-marks and serpentine Animagus forms?”
“You have had other lovers! How long did you favor them?”
“Most of those were alliances of mutual convenience.” Tom turned around so that he could meet Harry’s eyes. “But my soulmate is much more than that. And he is everything I have ever wanted. Everything that was worth waiting for.”
Harry’s smile bloomed across his face. Tom held out his hand, and Harry crossed the office without hesitation to clasp it, something Tom hadn’t been sure would happen.
“We’ll take our leave now, Albus,” Tom said. “You deserved to know that Harry wasn’t dead, but that was as the Headmaster of his school, and someone who can pass the word on to his professors and friends. You don’t deserve anything as the leader of the organization who kept him imprisoned.”
“You are making a mistake, Tom.”
“I do not think so.” Harry’s hand in his said it was not.
“You should know that the Order of the Phoenix does not tolerate traitors.”
Tom felt his smile draining away. He turned to face Albus, and the man actually took a step backwards, one hand coming to rest on his desk. So he had the sense to be afraid of what was in Tom’s face at the moment, then.
“Harm my soulmate, and I will destroy you and your Order more thoroughly than you can imagine,” Tom said softly. It was an effort to prevent the words from coming out in Parseltongue.
“We do not fear death in the pursuit of protecting Muggleborns and Muggles.”
“You think that you would die?” Tom laughed, and the shadows slid down the walls as he let his magic go, let it swell and fill the room, and press Dumbledore’s hand against the desk with the shadow of a nail through it. “That is a touching faith in my mercy, for all that you say I lack it.”
Albus stared at him in what seemed to be true horror. Tom half-nodded. Yes. Albus did not truly believe, in his heart of hearts, that Tom was a Dark Lord, or he wouldn’t have been surprised by this confrontation. That might mean he retained some sanity, and was reachable on this matter.
More years of keeping Harry under his control and Tom without his soulmate? Perhaps not. Those were years that would have hardened Albus’s surety of Tom’s evil still further.
Would have driven Tom further towards evil, perhaps, because to be without this bond was already the worst thing he could think of.
Albus seemed to have given up on trying to appeal to Tom. He swung to face Harry. “You know the ideals your parents and godfather live by,” he whispered. “Will you forsake what you were born with, Harry, for the obsession—not the devotion—of the man they are fighting?”
Tom wanted to speak, but he held his tongue between his teeth. He would defend Harry from all physical and magical and financial threats. But Harry had to stand on his own when it came to verbal ones. He would suffer far worse from Tom’s enemies.
Besides. Tom wanted to hear what Harry had to say about leaving the Order’s suffocating care to find his soulmate.
*
Harry stared at Professor Dumbledore and felt a great weariness washing through him. It felt like what he had experienced when he’d discovered he had a boomslang Animagus form. Just another “gift” he would never be able to do anything with, just another thing he had to hide and deny.
But now—
Now he was beyond that.
Walking back into Hogwarts had felt like walking into a prison, but now Harry understood that he was free to leave again. That the soul-bond thrumming between him and Tom was full of the exact kind of devotion the Headmaster was denying existed.
That what his family and the Order had asked him to do was wrong.
“I heard my parents talking once about my soul-mark,” Harry said quietly. “They said it would have been better that I not be born, instead of born to bear Tom’s name.”
Dumbledore caught his breath. Then he said, “I am sure they did not mean it.”
“They meant it enough to say it,” Harry said. “They told me when I was young that I could never show anyone my soul-mark, and that giving in to the temptation to find my soulmate would mean I turned as evil as he was. I’m the only person I know who was denied my living soulmate, Headmaster. Death would have been one thing, and if I’d chosen to reject him, that would have been one thing—”
Agony that almost made Harry breathless surged down their bond. Just the thought of that rejection gave Tom so much pain that Harry had to pause in speaking and turn towards him, clasping his hands.
“Do not say it,” Tom hissed. “Not even in jest. Not even to make a point.”
Harry nodded. He couldn’t speak Parseltongue back, even though he understood it as Tom’s soulmate, but he said softly, “I won’t.”
“I promise that you will never want for anything. That I will never do anything that would cause you to reject me.”
Harry smiled at him and turned back to Dumbledore, in time to hear him say, “I rejected my soulmate when he became a Dark Lord, as you well know, Harry.”
It was a tale that his parents had told him all the time, hoping to inspire him to follow Dumbledore’s example. Harry nodded. “And yet, sir, you didn’t duel him until after years of war, when he had destroyed countless people’s lives. Why is that, unless you felt some lingering affection for him?”
“We are not here to discuss Gellert—”
“No, we’re discussing Tom,” Harry said. “And I need to know. Where is your evidence that he is a Dark Lord? I accepted it without question when I was younger, but I want to know now.”
“He is playing the long game. You know that, Harry. You know that he has brought plans before the Wizengamot that call for stricter control of Muggles’ minds, sponsored laws that would make it possible for purebloods to seize Muggleborns from their families, inveighed against the free gathering of Muggleborns as part of the Order—”
“That sounds like your usual corrupt politician to me, sir.” Harry had to smile at the absolute indignation that flowed from Tom. “And from what I understand, the ‘free gathering’ was attacking people in the middle of Diagon Alley.”
“Violence is often necessary to defend freedom, Harry.”
“So this is all about what he could do, not what he’s done?”
“What have I told you about what happened to the children who burned off your Dark Lord’s soul-mark, Harry?”
“Why were they children and he wasn’t?”
Dumbledore shook his head, his eyes gaining the misty shimmer of tears for a moment. “He slaughtered them. And their families. No matter how tragic the destruction of a soul-mark, it is not worth that.”
“If it had been proven that I did that, I would be in prison right now,” Tom said calmly.
Harry sighed. “So this is about crimes that are decades old. Sir, I haven’t seen any evidence that Tom is the Dark Lord the Order’s painted him to be. And I think I would have felt it, better than anyone else.”
Dumbledore’s eyes widened. “You have completed the emotional bond?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dumbledore said nothing for long moments, his eyes focused on the wall as if he were seeing something far distant. Then he sighed. “I would not have wished this for you, Harry. This—essential slavery to a man who is far your superior in age, in power, and in Darkness.”
Tom started to move forwards. Harry grabbed his wrist, flinching a little. The bond between them was so heated that Harry half-expected Tom’s skin to be hot and burning, too.
“I want to kill him,” Tom hissed.
“I know,” Harry said, almost the only response he could give in English that wouldn’t alert Dumbledore that something was wrong, and then turned to face the Headmaster again. “He’s been chosen for me, sir, and me for him. That’s what you always said about your soul-mark, wasn’t it? About my parents’? Why should I be the only one different, the only one who has to hide?”
“You will give Tom such power that he could destroy the world.”
“The world as you know it, perhaps, Albus.”
Harry sighed. He had hoped for some sort of answers or closure from his confrontation with Dumbledore, but it was clear that he wouldn’t get any. “All right, sir. If that’s the way you feel.”
“Then you will come home? Return to Hogwarts?”
“What is there for me at home, with Mum and Dad gone? And I don’t really feel like returning to Hogwarts now.”
“Harry, my boy—”
Harry turned to Tom. “It was never really about me,” he said. “It was about his fear of you. He would have done the same thing if someone else was your soulmate.”
Tom cupped Harry’s chin gently. “I cannot imagine having another soulmate than you.”
Harry smiled at him, and glanced at Dumbledore when he made an inarticulate noise of protest. “Come up with something to tell Ron and Hermione, sir. If you like. We’ll be announcing our soulmate bond soon, and I can’t imagine that they’ll think it all that understandable that you wanted me to hide my mark forever.”
“Harry, they are your friends.”
“Who I could never be entirely honest with, thanks to the Order,” Harry said, but shook his head when Dumbledore opened his mouth again. “No, I’m not going to get drawn into this argument. Let’s go, Tom.”
Tom lingered behind to meet Dumbledore’s eyes. Harry rolled his own and walked out the office door ahead of Tom. This part really wasn’t about him, and he would rather remove himself from the situation than be part of their pissing contest.
*
“I have won, Albus. I have won everything.”
“If you were the slightest bit humane, Tom, you would let that dear, sweet boy go. If I were in your situation—”
“I’m not you, Albus, to reject my soulmate and then hide away from dealing with him for decades at a time.”
The stricken look on Albus’s face wasn’t the best thing Tom had ever seen, but it was in the top ten. He inclined his head, smiling, and went to rejoin the best thing in his life, who waited patiently for him on the stairs below.
Harry smiled up at him when they reached the entrance to Hogwarts, with people whispering and staring after them, and said, “I don’t think I want to come back to school this term, at least not until some of the excitement over our announcement dies down. Maybe next term.”
Tom nodded. When Albus has been removed as Headmaster, and is no threat to you. “Of course, Harry. We can make our decisions one day at a time.”
Their bond, still a wonder to him, sang in the mental space between them, and Tom took Harry’s hand again to walk off the grounds.
*
Ron knocked urgently at Professor Dumbledore’s office door. He had seen Harry, briefly, walking with the Minister for Magic of all people, but they had been gone before Ron could catch up.
“Sir?” he asked, finally bursting into the office. “Sir? What’s going on? I saw Harry, and then—”
The professor lifted his head, and Ron’s breath choked in his throat. There were tears on Dumbledore’s cheeks.
“Alas,” Dumbledore whispered. “I fear that young Harry is lost to all of us.”
Ron stared at him, and felt the beginning of a long, slow desolation stretch in front of him.
The End.
