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lomonaaerenTitle: Glacier Souls
Pairing: Harry/Theo, mentions of James/Lily
Content Notes: Past time travel, mental age difference, angst, past character death
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry used his accidental time travel to save the world, and he succeeded while he was still a child in his new timeline. But he never realized that retaining his adult memories and command of magic would distance him from other people so dramatically. Drifting through life, detached from almost everyone else, he runs into Theodore Nott, who thinks they have something in common.
Author’s Notes: This one-shot is part of my “More Harry/Theo in the World Project” series.
Glacier Souls
“It’s the way he would have wanted to go.”
Remus’s voice was clogged with tears. Harry put an arm around his shoulders. “Yeah,” he said, even though he didn’t think Sirius had ever expressed the desire to die by leaping over the edge of the Black townhouse while drunk on some concoction he had invented himself.
Unless Remus just meant that Sirius would have wanted to be playing a prank in his final moments. That was more likely.
And a better death than the Veil.
Harry crushed those memories to death expertly and glanced around. His parents stood on one side of the grave, James’s face still pale with shock. Lily was leaning against him, holding him up.
Sirius was in the coffin at the bottom of the grave, a plain Muggle thing he had chosen himself, years ago. He had said he didn’t want to be burned or buried in a mausoleum in the manner of his Black ancestors, and his friends had honored his choice.
He did get his wish.
Harry knew that some people would fault him for not shedding tears, but his family had accepted a long time ago that that was just the way he was. He had a “calm head in a crisis,” as his mum would have said.
None of them would ever know that Harry had traveled back in time, landed in his baby’s body, and promptly made sure that he’d revealed Wormtail’s Dark Mark the next time the man came over. That he’d been able to wield a wand and cast the Imperius Curse on the right people when he was five. That he’d destroyed Voldemort’s Horcruxes and vanquished the man’s wraith forever, after Voldemort had been disembodied in a duel with Dumbledore, due to the help of those people.
None of them could ever know.
Harry had thought he would be happier living in this new world. And he was, in a way. But whenever he glanced at someone he’d known, he could see the other life they’d lived, playing over their faces like a Muggle film. He reminded himself all the time that he couldn’t judge people in this reality by the actions different versions of them had taken in another world, and scolded himself into being compassionate, thoughtful, forgiving.
It detached him from them continually. So did glancing at people he’d known were dead or seen die in his former life, and seeing the skull beneath their skins. And a few times, like with Sirius now, the skull had come out.
“Harry?”
Harry shook himself back to the present. He could be maudlin later. For now, Remus needed him, probably so that he could tell stories about Sirius and have someone nod and be sympathetic. “Yeah, Remus?”
“Do you remember the time…”
And Harry nodded and smiled, and watched as his mum Levitated dirt over the coffin. James still couldn’t do it, still caught up the never-ending pain of Sirius’s death. Harry was kind of lucky that his mum was so handy in a crisis, too. He could just say that he took after her.
*
“Potter?”
Harry turned around with a blink. The voice was one he didn’t know, and after two lives spent in a fairly small British wizarding world, there were few that fell into that category.
He struggled to recall the slender man standing before him for a moment. The man was his age—his physical age—and had brown hair and crystal-blue eyes that Harry felt sure he should have noticed.
Then again, he hadn’t really let himself notice. He wasn’t a child, no matter what his body looked like, and it would have been immoral to start a relationship with a child at Hogwarts. And in the eight years since he’d finished his seventh year, he’d never really—felt as though he could take a lover he would always have to keep secrets from.
“Nott.”
“So you do remember me. I’m flattered.”
Harry didn’t say that the realization had popped up suddenly in his mind, and he wasn’t sure whether it came from this world or his former one. He didn’t think that he had ever spoken directly to Nott in either place. The sum total of his knowledge was that Nott had been a Slytherin and the son of a Death Eater.
And his father hadn’t been one of the people Harry had manipulated with the Imperius Curse. That was literally all he knew.
Was Nott a blood purist? Was he just looking for some kind of favor? Their interaction might be brief, but Harry felt his interest spark anyway. This was something new, someone new.
There was a hunger in him that pulsed like a second heartbeat.
“Can I speak to you outside?” Nott said, tilting his head towards the entrance of the cottage where Harry had always lived with his parents in this life.
“Yes, of course.”
It seemed more likely that it was going to be the short favor than sustained interaction, Harry thought as he followed Nott. But one never knew. He hadn’t expected Nott to show up at the meal that followed Sirius’s funeral, and he didn’t think Nott had been invited.
This was new, too, someone essentially crashing a funeral, and Harry had a small smile on his lips.
Nott turned to face him under the shadow of the huge oak that shaded the cottage. His eyes looked more than ever like faceted crystal.
“This will be a strange question. But I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else, and I would appreciate your honesty.”
Harry blinked, his heart picking up the pace, and then nodded. “You can trust me. I’ll be honest in return.”
“Do you feel detached from the world, as if you’re seeing everyone from behind a layer of ice?”
Harry swallowed. “How—how could you tell?”
“So you do.”
“Yes. I promised you—yes.”
Harry was trembling. Nott’s gaze went to his hands, and Harry stopped himself from folding them or tucking them in his pockets. He had promised honesty. And Nott looked enthralled.
“So you’re like me,” Nott whispered. “I’ve seen people like that all my life. I never felt connected to anyone, never felt as though their concerns could touch me. I floated above it all and found them mildly amusing, sometimes annoying. Sometimes their plans concerned me if those plans could have harmed me or my reputation. But I never cared.”
“That’s not exactly the same as I am,” Harry said, a shadow of regret moving across his mind. “I do care about them.”
“But deeply?”
Harry hesitated.
“I knew it.”
No one had ever said they knew him, not like that. Not in his former life, not in this one. In his former life, they’d been blinded by what he was, and in this one, they just assumed that they knew him already, and that was “calm” and “good in a crisis.”
They didn’t say the words at all, but even if they had, they wouldn’t have spoken them like Nott did now, his eyes a winter sun.
“What caused it, then?” Harry asked, and he saw no skull beneath Nott’s skin. “What do you think makes you different from everyone else?”
“Will you tell me what made you that way?”
“Yes.”
Harry was an excellent liar, and if it turned out that he couldn’t trust Nott with honesty, he would trust him with an Obliviate, or a vow. But at the moment, his pulse pounding cold in his temples, he meant it.
Nott met his eyes, and some unseen ice melted from his shoulders. “All right. For me, it was my mother’s passing.”
Harry searched his memory, but he had paid so little attention to Nott that he hadn’t known about this. “She died when you were young?”
“You could say that.”
Harry almost said something about honesty, but then he looked at Nott, really looked. What he saw was—
The prancing pride of a young stag, honestly, what Harry sometimes saw in a more muted form in his father. The pride of someone who wanted people to pay attention to him, and admire, and inquire, and ask.
Harry could do that. He smiled at Nott, and asked, “What do you mean that your mother didn’t die when you were younger?”
“I don’t think I said that, either.”
Like a stag looking back over his shoulder this time, lifting one hoof and scraping it down. Wanting to be chased.
Flirting.
Harry felt his smile deepen, his interest pulse like a heartbeat. Honestly, he had reached the point where he thought he could take a lover, where the gap wasn’t so deep or wide. He hadn’t been interested because the people he loved, the people he surrounded himself with, were the ones he knew so well from his previous life, or was just getting to know.
But he could be very interested in Nott.
“What did you mean?”
Nott looked Harry in the eye, and his smile faded, but the impression of a smile hiding in his eyes deepened as he answered. “My mother was a necromancer who was obsessed with finding a spirit who was a reflection of herself—her own ideas and priorities. She always felt she was getting ideas from outside herself, that they weren’t really hers. A spirit influencing her would explain that. And necromancers are vulnerable to possession.”
“And she got herself possessed?”
“Yes, when I was three. The spirit controlled her body for three more years before the conflict between its personality and my mother’s became too much, and her body simply crumbled. I was in the room when it happened.”
Harry couldn’t breathe. His own detachment from people had taken years and been the result of dedicating his soul so completely to one project, the defeat of Voldemort, that he had lost the chance to kindle some of his relationships. But Nott was the opposite, a huge blow that had quenched the fire in him all at once.
“Then…”
“It left me unsure who to trust. When I was old enough to understand the truth and my father told me, I had to look back and reevaluate everything my mother said to me from the time I was three to the time I was six. Did she mean it? Was it the spirit saying it? And if the spirit was enough like her to possess her, maybe it did express the thoughts she would have had? I don’t know.”
“And you applied that to everyone.”
“I had to. How could I know that someone else was being sincere if I didn’t detect it when it was my mother, one of the people I should know best? Of course, I know now that I alienated others, doing that. But I find it difficult to care.”
“Why?”
“I like the person that I am.”
Nott’s eyes were brilliant with something like triumph, and Harry found himself nodding. Yes, perhaps Harry had been mistaken and he shouldn’t have detached himself so thoroughly from everyone when he was young. But it was done. And…
He wouldn’t have given it up. Not really. He wouldn’t have left Voldemort undefeated and other people in danger just so that he could be a little warmer.
“Your turn. What caused it for you?”
“It’s the kind of secret that I would have to demand a vow from you or Obliviate you to have you keep,” Harry said. “Do you truly want to know?”
Nott’s head came up. Harry tensed, ready for the man to back away from him.
“Yes,” Nott said, and he sounded half-delirious. “If you knew—if you knew how long I’ve looked for someone like me, and to know that you exist…”
Yes, he sounded delirious.
Harry had a thin smile on his face as he got out his wand. It felt natural, unlike the fuller ones that he usually gave his friends and family. “Then swear on my wand that you won’t tell anyone, in any way, what I’m about to tell you.”
Nott’s head twisted like a snake’s even as he reached out to lay his hand on the holly wand that had come back to Harry in this lifetime. “Usually, it would be my own wand, for an oath like this.”
“I’ve researched it, and this kind is stronger.”
“How did you learn that?”
“Weren’t you listening, Nott? Research.”
There was a timeless moment when they were both staring at each other, and then Nott laughed aloud. His hand closed around Harry’s wand, and Harry shuddered. It felt as though Nott had reached into his chest to stroke his liver or another organ, the connection was suddenly that close and that intimate.
“I, Theodore Lucien Nott, do so swear on Harry Potter’s wand to never tell anyone what he now tells me, via speech, writing, Legilimency, or any other kind of method I can think of.”
The moment stretched between them like syrup, and Nott was the one who took his hand back and disrupted it first. He had the same kind of thin smile on his face that Harry could feel on his own. He clasped his hands behind his back, tilted his head, and asked, “Well?”
Harry still raised a Privacy Charm around them before he began.
He told Nott what had happened as simply as possible. The big details of his first life as the Boy-Who-Lived and the way that he’d had to fight Voldemort. He used the name, and Nott’s eyes widened, but he didn’t flinch. Harry talked about the prophecy, how his parents had been killed, the way people had deified him. How he’d died.
That was the only time Nott interrupted during what Harry had to admit was a pretty wild story. “You actually died? You went into—this realm you described?”
“Yes, I really died as far as I know.”
Nott looked at him for so long in silence that Harry thought he had changed his mind and would retreat, maybe assuming that Harry was mental. But instead, he shook his head and murmured, “Well, it fits with the idea that you know so much about how wand-oaths should be made.”
Harry again smiled, and continued talking.
How he’d watched the same people rise to power again in the Ministry, after the brief flare of hope and promise in the wake of the war. How Lucius Malfoy’s claim to have been under Imperius had been accepted a second time, and the Unspeakables had spent more time trying to “persuade” Harry to submit to them so they could study his scar than doing anything productive. How they’d succeeded, finally, in kidnapping him.
“And you…”
“I was in the middle of a huge stone room, with white lines all over the floor. They glowed, but I don’t know whether they did that because of the magic or because they were made of light.”
“That’s plausible, that they could be made of pure light. What shape did they form?”
“A pentagram.”
Nott was nodding. “I’ve read that it’s perfectly possible to form a powerful ritual circle out of that shape. Well, when I say circle—”
“I know what you mean.”
“And what did you do, when you found yourself in that position?”
Harry held Nott’s eyes for a long moment. He looked nothing but breathless. Hungry.
“I didn’t know what they were doing to me,” Harry said simply. “But I knew what I wanted to do.”
It still filled his nightmares, sometimes, that heavy, thick feeling of certainty, that there was no coming back from this. He would never see his friends and family again. He had to make a decision, and he had to use the magic of the pentagram that was piling up inside him, outside him, to fulfill an unknown purpose.
He had reached towards that power, wrapped it around himself, and felt a cool voice speak into the depths of his mind. Even now, he couldn’t say what language the voice had spoken, English or Latin or Parseltongue or something else that—it didn’t matter. Not when the voice was saying the kinds of things this one said.
This is your choice. This is your chance. Travel in time or die.
Harry had reached out and grasped something that felt like a handful of the white mist in the imagined King’s Cross station where he had gone when he’d died. He drawn it towards himself, and it had dripped stars, and he had flung his body and his mind into it and asked to go back to his body, to be born again.
He had used that choice and that chance. Their world was at peace now, and Hermione had grown up fearless and Ron with only the mild unhappiness of his place in the family and Ginny without ever being possessed. Harry could say that he’d made his choice, and that he wouldn’t turn and go back to his world if he could. He had protected his friends and family the only way he knew how.
But.
But he hadn’t willingly put himself in the position to make that choice.
He tried to explain it to Nott, fumbling with the words, sure that he wasn’t conveying the moment of certainty and blinding light the way it had happened to him. But Nott listened, still, and then reached out one hand and rested it on Harry’s chest. Harry started and stopped talking, staring at him.
“You knew them,” Nott whispered. “Most of them, if not your parents. You grew up knowing what could have happened, what they did in another lifetime. And of course it would be difficult to feel yourself connected to them. How could you even be sure it was to them, and not to the ghosts of another world?”
Harry had never put it so succinctly in his own head before. He nodded. “Yeah, exactly.”
“But you could tell the truth to me, because I wasn’t in your first lifetime. From the sounds of it, we never interacted.”
Harry shook his head. “I’m sorry for it, now,” he blurted, which wasn’t at all what he had planned to say, but was startlingly easy to say to Nott as they stood in the cool summer twilight now, under a blossoming tree. “I don’t know him. I didn’t know him. Maybe his mother died when he was young, too. Maybe I could have helped him. I don’t know. I regret it.”
“I don’t.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if you had known him, you would have impressions of the way that you should approach me. And I would not have preferred that.”
Nott stepped closer, and his hand was heavier than ever on Harry’s chest, his fingers moving slowly back and forth like snakes in search of warmth. Harry swallowed.
“Because you don’t know, I’m new. I’m me. You have no impressions in your head to hold you back.” Nott’s eyes glittered again, glowing with something deeper than fascination, darker than triumph. “And because of that, you’re going to be mine.”
Harry felt as though he was falling and has no idea where his broom was. His heart made his throat feel thick. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“You’re awfully confident.”
“The way you breathe tells me you’re mine. The way you stand. The way you look at me.”
Harry’s head reeled again. He had never had someone approach him like this before, even the fans in his first life who were convinced that they knew him so well. And it should be terrifying, but it was exhilarating.
Besides, Harry still had the advantage of knowledge and power. He was absolutely confident of his ability to put Nott under the Imperius and escape anything he tried to do, if it came to that.
Seeing the way that Nott shone, Harry couldn’t imagine it coming to that. But not knowing was a large part of the thrill.
He reached up and curled a hand behind Nott’s neck. Nott only responded with a little lift of the right corner of his mouth.
“You mean I would be your friend.”
Nott laughed at him. “You’re playing coy.”
“I haven’t dated anyone in this life, either a man or a woman. I couldn’t even say for certain which one I like.”
“You want to be with me.”
And he did, yes. Harry would have accepted it if Nott had said that he only wanted a friend and confidant, but it would have been easier to sever the bond. If he had a lover who knew his secret—
He couldn’t walk away. He couldn’t imagine walking away.
“Yes,” Harry said, his voice hardly louder than the murmur of the leaves above them. “I do.”
Nott gave him a smile more fleeting than all the others, a flash of light in a pond glimpsed from a speeding broom, and bent to kiss him.
Harry kissed eagerly back, hands rising to Nott’s shoulders, threading through his hair. He couldn’t remember wanting to touch someone like this, bleeding through their skin, brand himself on Nott’s soul. He had kissed Cho, he’d dated Ginny, he’d died to protect his friends, but this was different. Already different. Already new.
This was already so different from anything that Harry had risked his life to do. He was shaking with the force of it, with the heaviness of Nott’s hands on his shoulders and his tongue in Harry’s mouth and—
He was alive.
The glacier in his soul sparkled with the sun.
The End.
Pairing: Harry/Theo, mentions of James/Lily
Content Notes: Past time travel, mental age difference, angst, past character death
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry used his accidental time travel to save the world, and he succeeded while he was still a child in his new timeline. But he never realized that retaining his adult memories and command of magic would distance him from other people so dramatically. Drifting through life, detached from almost everyone else, he runs into Theodore Nott, who thinks they have something in common.
Author’s Notes: This one-shot is part of my “More Harry/Theo in the World Project” series.
Glacier Souls
“It’s the way he would have wanted to go.”
Remus’s voice was clogged with tears. Harry put an arm around his shoulders. “Yeah,” he said, even though he didn’t think Sirius had ever expressed the desire to die by leaping over the edge of the Black townhouse while drunk on some concoction he had invented himself.
Unless Remus just meant that Sirius would have wanted to be playing a prank in his final moments. That was more likely.
And a better death than the Veil.
Harry crushed those memories to death expertly and glanced around. His parents stood on one side of the grave, James’s face still pale with shock. Lily was leaning against him, holding him up.
Sirius was in the coffin at the bottom of the grave, a plain Muggle thing he had chosen himself, years ago. He had said he didn’t want to be burned or buried in a mausoleum in the manner of his Black ancestors, and his friends had honored his choice.
He did get his wish.
Harry knew that some people would fault him for not shedding tears, but his family had accepted a long time ago that that was just the way he was. He had a “calm head in a crisis,” as his mum would have said.
None of them would ever know that Harry had traveled back in time, landed in his baby’s body, and promptly made sure that he’d revealed Wormtail’s Dark Mark the next time the man came over. That he’d been able to wield a wand and cast the Imperius Curse on the right people when he was five. That he’d destroyed Voldemort’s Horcruxes and vanquished the man’s wraith forever, after Voldemort had been disembodied in a duel with Dumbledore, due to the help of those people.
None of them could ever know.
Harry had thought he would be happier living in this new world. And he was, in a way. But whenever he glanced at someone he’d known, he could see the other life they’d lived, playing over their faces like a Muggle film. He reminded himself all the time that he couldn’t judge people in this reality by the actions different versions of them had taken in another world, and scolded himself into being compassionate, thoughtful, forgiving.
It detached him from them continually. So did glancing at people he’d known were dead or seen die in his former life, and seeing the skull beneath their skins. And a few times, like with Sirius now, the skull had come out.
“Harry?”
Harry shook himself back to the present. He could be maudlin later. For now, Remus needed him, probably so that he could tell stories about Sirius and have someone nod and be sympathetic. “Yeah, Remus?”
“Do you remember the time…”
And Harry nodded and smiled, and watched as his mum Levitated dirt over the coffin. James still couldn’t do it, still caught up the never-ending pain of Sirius’s death. Harry was kind of lucky that his mum was so handy in a crisis, too. He could just say that he took after her.
*
“Potter?”
Harry turned around with a blink. The voice was one he didn’t know, and after two lives spent in a fairly small British wizarding world, there were few that fell into that category.
He struggled to recall the slender man standing before him for a moment. The man was his age—his physical age—and had brown hair and crystal-blue eyes that Harry felt sure he should have noticed.
Then again, he hadn’t really let himself notice. He wasn’t a child, no matter what his body looked like, and it would have been immoral to start a relationship with a child at Hogwarts. And in the eight years since he’d finished his seventh year, he’d never really—felt as though he could take a lover he would always have to keep secrets from.
“Nott.”
“So you do remember me. I’m flattered.”
Harry didn’t say that the realization had popped up suddenly in his mind, and he wasn’t sure whether it came from this world or his former one. He didn’t think that he had ever spoken directly to Nott in either place. The sum total of his knowledge was that Nott had been a Slytherin and the son of a Death Eater.
And his father hadn’t been one of the people Harry had manipulated with the Imperius Curse. That was literally all he knew.
Was Nott a blood purist? Was he just looking for some kind of favor? Their interaction might be brief, but Harry felt his interest spark anyway. This was something new, someone new.
There was a hunger in him that pulsed like a second heartbeat.
“Can I speak to you outside?” Nott said, tilting his head towards the entrance of the cottage where Harry had always lived with his parents in this life.
“Yes, of course.”
It seemed more likely that it was going to be the short favor than sustained interaction, Harry thought as he followed Nott. But one never knew. He hadn’t expected Nott to show up at the meal that followed Sirius’s funeral, and he didn’t think Nott had been invited.
This was new, too, someone essentially crashing a funeral, and Harry had a small smile on his lips.
Nott turned to face him under the shadow of the huge oak that shaded the cottage. His eyes looked more than ever like faceted crystal.
“This will be a strange question. But I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else, and I would appreciate your honesty.”
Harry blinked, his heart picking up the pace, and then nodded. “You can trust me. I’ll be honest in return.”
“Do you feel detached from the world, as if you’re seeing everyone from behind a layer of ice?”
Harry swallowed. “How—how could you tell?”
“So you do.”
“Yes. I promised you—yes.”
Harry was trembling. Nott’s gaze went to his hands, and Harry stopped himself from folding them or tucking them in his pockets. He had promised honesty. And Nott looked enthralled.
“So you’re like me,” Nott whispered. “I’ve seen people like that all my life. I never felt connected to anyone, never felt as though their concerns could touch me. I floated above it all and found them mildly amusing, sometimes annoying. Sometimes their plans concerned me if those plans could have harmed me or my reputation. But I never cared.”
“That’s not exactly the same as I am,” Harry said, a shadow of regret moving across his mind. “I do care about them.”
“But deeply?”
Harry hesitated.
“I knew it.”
No one had ever said they knew him, not like that. Not in his former life, not in this one. In his former life, they’d been blinded by what he was, and in this one, they just assumed that they knew him already, and that was “calm” and “good in a crisis.”
They didn’t say the words at all, but even if they had, they wouldn’t have spoken them like Nott did now, his eyes a winter sun.
“What caused it, then?” Harry asked, and he saw no skull beneath Nott’s skin. “What do you think makes you different from everyone else?”
“Will you tell me what made you that way?”
“Yes.”
Harry was an excellent liar, and if it turned out that he couldn’t trust Nott with honesty, he would trust him with an Obliviate, or a vow. But at the moment, his pulse pounding cold in his temples, he meant it.
Nott met his eyes, and some unseen ice melted from his shoulders. “All right. For me, it was my mother’s passing.”
Harry searched his memory, but he had paid so little attention to Nott that he hadn’t known about this. “She died when you were young?”
“You could say that.”
Harry almost said something about honesty, but then he looked at Nott, really looked. What he saw was—
The prancing pride of a young stag, honestly, what Harry sometimes saw in a more muted form in his father. The pride of someone who wanted people to pay attention to him, and admire, and inquire, and ask.
Harry could do that. He smiled at Nott, and asked, “What do you mean that your mother didn’t die when you were younger?”
“I don’t think I said that, either.”
Like a stag looking back over his shoulder this time, lifting one hoof and scraping it down. Wanting to be chased.
Flirting.
Harry felt his smile deepen, his interest pulse like a heartbeat. Honestly, he had reached the point where he thought he could take a lover, where the gap wasn’t so deep or wide. He hadn’t been interested because the people he loved, the people he surrounded himself with, were the ones he knew so well from his previous life, or was just getting to know.
But he could be very interested in Nott.
“What did you mean?”
Nott looked Harry in the eye, and his smile faded, but the impression of a smile hiding in his eyes deepened as he answered. “My mother was a necromancer who was obsessed with finding a spirit who was a reflection of herself—her own ideas and priorities. She always felt she was getting ideas from outside herself, that they weren’t really hers. A spirit influencing her would explain that. And necromancers are vulnerable to possession.”
“And she got herself possessed?”
“Yes, when I was three. The spirit controlled her body for three more years before the conflict between its personality and my mother’s became too much, and her body simply crumbled. I was in the room when it happened.”
Harry couldn’t breathe. His own detachment from people had taken years and been the result of dedicating his soul so completely to one project, the defeat of Voldemort, that he had lost the chance to kindle some of his relationships. But Nott was the opposite, a huge blow that had quenched the fire in him all at once.
“Then…”
“It left me unsure who to trust. When I was old enough to understand the truth and my father told me, I had to look back and reevaluate everything my mother said to me from the time I was three to the time I was six. Did she mean it? Was it the spirit saying it? And if the spirit was enough like her to possess her, maybe it did express the thoughts she would have had? I don’t know.”
“And you applied that to everyone.”
“I had to. How could I know that someone else was being sincere if I didn’t detect it when it was my mother, one of the people I should know best? Of course, I know now that I alienated others, doing that. But I find it difficult to care.”
“Why?”
“I like the person that I am.”
Nott’s eyes were brilliant with something like triumph, and Harry found himself nodding. Yes, perhaps Harry had been mistaken and he shouldn’t have detached himself so thoroughly from everyone when he was young. But it was done. And…
He wouldn’t have given it up. Not really. He wouldn’t have left Voldemort undefeated and other people in danger just so that he could be a little warmer.
“Your turn. What caused it for you?”
“It’s the kind of secret that I would have to demand a vow from you or Obliviate you to have you keep,” Harry said. “Do you truly want to know?”
Nott’s head came up. Harry tensed, ready for the man to back away from him.
“Yes,” Nott said, and he sounded half-delirious. “If you knew—if you knew how long I’ve looked for someone like me, and to know that you exist…”
Yes, he sounded delirious.
Harry had a thin smile on his face as he got out his wand. It felt natural, unlike the fuller ones that he usually gave his friends and family. “Then swear on my wand that you won’t tell anyone, in any way, what I’m about to tell you.”
Nott’s head twisted like a snake’s even as he reached out to lay his hand on the holly wand that had come back to Harry in this lifetime. “Usually, it would be my own wand, for an oath like this.”
“I’ve researched it, and this kind is stronger.”
“How did you learn that?”
“Weren’t you listening, Nott? Research.”
There was a timeless moment when they were both staring at each other, and then Nott laughed aloud. His hand closed around Harry’s wand, and Harry shuddered. It felt as though Nott had reached into his chest to stroke his liver or another organ, the connection was suddenly that close and that intimate.
“I, Theodore Lucien Nott, do so swear on Harry Potter’s wand to never tell anyone what he now tells me, via speech, writing, Legilimency, or any other kind of method I can think of.”
The moment stretched between them like syrup, and Nott was the one who took his hand back and disrupted it first. He had the same kind of thin smile on his face that Harry could feel on his own. He clasped his hands behind his back, tilted his head, and asked, “Well?”
Harry still raised a Privacy Charm around them before he began.
He told Nott what had happened as simply as possible. The big details of his first life as the Boy-Who-Lived and the way that he’d had to fight Voldemort. He used the name, and Nott’s eyes widened, but he didn’t flinch. Harry talked about the prophecy, how his parents had been killed, the way people had deified him. How he’d died.
That was the only time Nott interrupted during what Harry had to admit was a pretty wild story. “You actually died? You went into—this realm you described?”
“Yes, I really died as far as I know.”
Nott looked at him for so long in silence that Harry thought he had changed his mind and would retreat, maybe assuming that Harry was mental. But instead, he shook his head and murmured, “Well, it fits with the idea that you know so much about how wand-oaths should be made.”
Harry again smiled, and continued talking.
How he’d watched the same people rise to power again in the Ministry, after the brief flare of hope and promise in the wake of the war. How Lucius Malfoy’s claim to have been under Imperius had been accepted a second time, and the Unspeakables had spent more time trying to “persuade” Harry to submit to them so they could study his scar than doing anything productive. How they’d succeeded, finally, in kidnapping him.
“And you…”
“I was in the middle of a huge stone room, with white lines all over the floor. They glowed, but I don’t know whether they did that because of the magic or because they were made of light.”
“That’s plausible, that they could be made of pure light. What shape did they form?”
“A pentagram.”
Nott was nodding. “I’ve read that it’s perfectly possible to form a powerful ritual circle out of that shape. Well, when I say circle—”
“I know what you mean.”
“And what did you do, when you found yourself in that position?”
Harry held Nott’s eyes for a long moment. He looked nothing but breathless. Hungry.
“I didn’t know what they were doing to me,” Harry said simply. “But I knew what I wanted to do.”
It still filled his nightmares, sometimes, that heavy, thick feeling of certainty, that there was no coming back from this. He would never see his friends and family again. He had to make a decision, and he had to use the magic of the pentagram that was piling up inside him, outside him, to fulfill an unknown purpose.
He had reached towards that power, wrapped it around himself, and felt a cool voice speak into the depths of his mind. Even now, he couldn’t say what language the voice had spoken, English or Latin or Parseltongue or something else that—it didn’t matter. Not when the voice was saying the kinds of things this one said.
This is your choice. This is your chance. Travel in time or die.
Harry had reached out and grasped something that felt like a handful of the white mist in the imagined King’s Cross station where he had gone when he’d died. He drawn it towards himself, and it had dripped stars, and he had flung his body and his mind into it and asked to go back to his body, to be born again.
He had used that choice and that chance. Their world was at peace now, and Hermione had grown up fearless and Ron with only the mild unhappiness of his place in the family and Ginny without ever being possessed. Harry could say that he’d made his choice, and that he wouldn’t turn and go back to his world if he could. He had protected his friends and family the only way he knew how.
But.
But he hadn’t willingly put himself in the position to make that choice.
He tried to explain it to Nott, fumbling with the words, sure that he wasn’t conveying the moment of certainty and blinding light the way it had happened to him. But Nott listened, still, and then reached out one hand and rested it on Harry’s chest. Harry started and stopped talking, staring at him.
“You knew them,” Nott whispered. “Most of them, if not your parents. You grew up knowing what could have happened, what they did in another lifetime. And of course it would be difficult to feel yourself connected to them. How could you even be sure it was to them, and not to the ghosts of another world?”
Harry had never put it so succinctly in his own head before. He nodded. “Yeah, exactly.”
“But you could tell the truth to me, because I wasn’t in your first lifetime. From the sounds of it, we never interacted.”
Harry shook his head. “I’m sorry for it, now,” he blurted, which wasn’t at all what he had planned to say, but was startlingly easy to say to Nott as they stood in the cool summer twilight now, under a blossoming tree. “I don’t know him. I didn’t know him. Maybe his mother died when he was young, too. Maybe I could have helped him. I don’t know. I regret it.”
“I don’t.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if you had known him, you would have impressions of the way that you should approach me. And I would not have preferred that.”
Nott stepped closer, and his hand was heavier than ever on Harry’s chest, his fingers moving slowly back and forth like snakes in search of warmth. Harry swallowed.
“Because you don’t know, I’m new. I’m me. You have no impressions in your head to hold you back.” Nott’s eyes glittered again, glowing with something deeper than fascination, darker than triumph. “And because of that, you’re going to be mine.”
Harry felt as though he was falling and has no idea where his broom was. His heart made his throat feel thick. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“You’re awfully confident.”
“The way you breathe tells me you’re mine. The way you stand. The way you look at me.”
Harry’s head reeled again. He had never had someone approach him like this before, even the fans in his first life who were convinced that they knew him so well. And it should be terrifying, but it was exhilarating.
Besides, Harry still had the advantage of knowledge and power. He was absolutely confident of his ability to put Nott under the Imperius and escape anything he tried to do, if it came to that.
Seeing the way that Nott shone, Harry couldn’t imagine it coming to that. But not knowing was a large part of the thrill.
He reached up and curled a hand behind Nott’s neck. Nott only responded with a little lift of the right corner of his mouth.
“You mean I would be your friend.”
Nott laughed at him. “You’re playing coy.”
“I haven’t dated anyone in this life, either a man or a woman. I couldn’t even say for certain which one I like.”
“You want to be with me.”
And he did, yes. Harry would have accepted it if Nott had said that he only wanted a friend and confidant, but it would have been easier to sever the bond. If he had a lover who knew his secret—
He couldn’t walk away. He couldn’t imagine walking away.
“Yes,” Harry said, his voice hardly louder than the murmur of the leaves above them. “I do.”
Nott gave him a smile more fleeting than all the others, a flash of light in a pond glimpsed from a speeding broom, and bent to kiss him.
Harry kissed eagerly back, hands rising to Nott’s shoulders, threading through his hair. He couldn’t remember wanting to touch someone like this, bleeding through their skin, brand himself on Nott’s soul. He had kissed Cho, he’d dated Ginny, he’d died to protect his friends, but this was different. Already different. Already new.
This was already so different from anything that Harry had risked his life to do. He was shaking with the force of it, with the heaviness of Nott’s hands on his shoulders and his tongue in Harry’s mouth and—
He was alive.
The glacier in his soul sparkled with the sun.
The End.
