lomonaaeren

“You couldn’t have chosen a more perfect home if you’d tried.”

Harry smiled at Theo. It meant something that he was speaking English now, and had done so more often in the past few days. “Isn’t it magnificent? Come on, let’s look at the inside as well.”

The key the goblins had given him had already dissipated the wards. Now it unlocked the door, and Harry stepped in with Theo crowding close to his back. When they got into the entrance hall, though, Theo halted with a wordless sound of awe.

Harry looked around, and smiled.

The front of the house had a huge room soaring up to the ceiling, which was covered with a replica of the enchantment in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. Right now, it showed fluffy, darting clouds, and a sky on the dark blue edge of evening.

On the far side of the room was a staircase going up to a balcony running around two walls. There were doors visible there, ones that Harry knew led to bedrooms, a library, a room that could be connected to the Floo, bathrooms, and several empty, stripped spaces that could be made into a Potions lab plus a study or another library or whatever they needed.

The color scheme, other than the ceiling, was deep greys and blues. Harry thought that was a little somber, and he’d like to change it up. But the house was great otherwise. Spacious. And they’d already seen the half-wild, tangled grounds where a basilisk could hunt.

“This is brilliant.”

Harry reached back and clasped Theo’s hand. “Isn’t it? Let’s go choose the bedrooms we want.”

“I want three.”

“Do you mean a suite, like the one that you had at home? I don’t think this house has any.”

“No. I mean that I want one for you, one for me, and one that we can share together.”

Harry closed his eyes and took a deep breath. That might be a further leap into the future than he’d planned on.

Then again, it might also be perfect.

*

“According to my father, I’ve been kidnapped.”

Harry blinked and looked up. Theo’s voice was flat, his eyes locked on the front page of the Prophet gripped in his shaking hands. Harry had given up reading the paper a few days after their escape because of how persistently they kept insisting that he was mental and had been lying to everyone for years.

Now, though, he stood up and eased around the table, since he thought trying to take the paper away from Theo would be a mistake.

The front page did indeed contain a moving photograph of Alexander Nott—the first time Harry had ever seen his face clearly, cold and seamed with old scars—and an article about how Theo had been “kidnapped out of the Notts’ ancestral home.” The article also said something about the theft of a priceless magical treasure, which made Harry chuckle a little. He supposed you could call Sacred that.

If you were a bastard.

“Of course he would say that,” Harry muttered. “He can’t possibly be letting anyone think that he had something to do with your disappearance. Although you would think sane people would decide that’s a good possibility, after what he did to your mother.”

Theo took a long, slow breath, then another one. He looked up at Harry with the same sort-of hypnotic eyes that Harry had seen for the first time on the lakeshore last year. “This will make it hard to go back to Hogwarts.”

“Not with the story I plan to spread.”

“What story is that?”

Theo was still gripping the paper with fingers so pale that seeing them clenched like that made Harry ache a little. He bent down and kissed Theo. Theo’s mouth opened beneath his, as always, and Harry ran his fingers slowly down and into Theo’s hair.

When Theo had relaxed enough to listen, Harry whispered, “A story about there being only Death Eaters in that graveyard.”

“What?”

“We don’t know how to fight Voldemort yet. We don’t know how to destroy these Horcruxes he has, or how powerful they are. I was one, the diary was one, but there are at least four more. And the shard in me never fought one except when sharing my memories of the fight in the Chamber..” Harry took a deep breath. “And we can’t fight him if we make the war too open, too early. The homunculus has probably already received Howlers because of the Prophet’s smear campaign. I’m going to recant my story and say that it wasn’t Voldemort in the graveyard, but it was Death Eaters trying to resurrect their master. Your father’s name is going to feature prominently.”

“Will that work? My father was acquitted.”

“I think it will. It’ll give people something to talk about besides my supposed mental state, and it’ll give the Ministry a more palatable story, to them, to work with. And I’ll get Rita Skeeter to write the article.”

Theo swallowed. Then he said, “You shouldn’t have to lie.”

“I shouldn’t have had to go back to the Dursleys, either, the way Dumbledore thought he was sending me. You shouldn’t have had to suffer under that blood curse. Sacred shouldn’t have had to be captive. But we suffered that and we survived. This will work. Too many people will want to believe it.”

“It will give the Dark Lord cover, of a kind.”

Harry tilted his head in a slow nod. “But he’s taking that anyway. He’s not launching any big attacks or raids so far. We won’t get anyone to believe me right now, so we do what we can to defeat him in slowness and silence.”

“And collect the Horcruxes.”

“Yes.” Harry knew he would have to go more deeply into the memories he’d got from the shard so that he could be sure he understood the traps that protected the Horcruxes and how to get them out. But he would have to do research anyway, since the shard had never studied how to destroy itself.

He needed time. Time to think of new plans, to absorb the cascade of memories inside himself and that he had been a Horcrux and now—

Was no longer one.

What am I now? I will have to decide.

“Harry?”

Harry gave Theo a reassuring smile and bowed his head to kiss Theo’s knuckles. “I promise, we’ll make it so that we can live. And in the meantime…”

“Yes?”

“I need to send an owl to Ron and Hermione.”

*

Harry honestly hadn’t been sure if Ron and Hermione would accept his owl, or how they would respond to being asked to come to an unknown Floo address without any of the adults. He was waiting by the fireplace that he and Theo had had the goblins connect to the Floo, and Theo stood around the corner with his wand drawn. If someone else came out of the fireplace or if Ron and Hermione showed signs of having only come because Dumbledore or someone else had asked them to, then he would Stun them and Memory Charm them.

But at the appointed time, two in the afternoon, the Floo lit, and Ron and Hermione came out, alone. They stared at Harry with wide, shining eyes. Although in Hermione’s case, they were shiny because of tears.

“Harry?” she whispered. “But—we just left you in—” She seemed to choke, unable to speak the name of wherever they came from. “What is going on?”

“Is that really you, mate?” Ron asked tightly, his fists clenched.

“Yes, it is. I know you told me in the chess game we played in first year that you play chess by making some sacrifices.” Harry took a deep breath. “And I’m willing to do whatever else I need to do to preserve my identity.”

“But then who is that in—where we were? Someone under Polyjuice?”

“No. A homunculus I made with snake’s venom and a potion.”

Hermione and Ron stared at him. Harry wondered for a second if the word was unfamiliar. He thought he had talked about Voldemort using a homunculus to come back from the dead, but maybe they hadn’t absorbed that—

Then Hermione reached a trembling hand towards him. “Oh, but Harry, that’s Dark Arts,” she whispered. “Why would you have done that? Why?”

“What even is a homun-cule thingy?”

Harry smiled a little at Ron’s words, but his gaze was on Hermione. “Because there was no way that I was going back to the Dursleys’ after the year I had. After seeing Cedric die. I wasn’t going to be isolated again.”

“The blood protections at the Dursleys’ would have kept you safe, though. That’s what Dumbledore said.”

“Did they keep my copy safe from Dementors?”

Ron and Hermione exchanged a helpless glance. Harry nodded a little. “I don’t think you’re at fault for that, or for believing that the homunculus was a copy of me,” he added. “There’s no reason that you would be. But you can see the blood protections really didn’t do much at all.”

“I just—I can’t believe that something like that would have lasted this long,” Hermione whispered.

Harry shrugged. It was time to reveal another part of the truth, but also move onto the next subject. “I used Parseltongue and snake venom to make it. There’s a lot about Parseltongue that I never understood as being valuable before now.”

“But who told you about that?” Hermione’s eyes were wide. “How could someone, if you and Voldemort are the only Parselmouths left?”

“There is another one, now.”

Harry held in a sigh as Theo stepped around the corner of the fireplace with his wand raised. They hadn’t discussed how he was going to reveal himself, but Harry decided that he had done it in the most dramatic way possible.

Then again, there wasn’t really a possibility in this situation that wasn’t dramatic.

“Who are you?” Ron asked, apparently so stunned by Theo’s presence that he didn’t recognize him.

“Nott?” Hermione said.

“Theodore Nott, yes.” Theo draped himself down Harry’s back and wrapped his arms around Harry’s neck. Harry rolled his eyes. “Given the gift of Parseltongue by Harry feeding me a basilisk heart. We fled to a sanctuary to help a friend of mine, and when that became dangerous, we bought this house. We’ll move our friend here soon, too.”

Ron and Hermione just gaped at him, then at Harry, and didn’t have anything to say.

Harry cleared his throat. “Maybe we could go and sit down and have this conversation?”

*

“I still don’t understand why you trusted Nott.”

“He already explained about the blood curse and why it had to be a basilisk heart, Weasley.”

Harry held up his hand before either Ron or Theo could go further, and they both shut up. However, Theo was tense and trembling where he leaned against Harry on the couch. Harry had an arm around his waist, partially to reassure him and partially because it would be ugly if Theo went for his wand, and he could feel that.

Hermione had remained mostly silent throughout the story of what Harry had done to help Theo and how they had survived the summer, although Theo had insisted beforehand that they not tell Harry’s friends they’d been at Thunderhaven. The tale of a basilisk kept captive by a relative of Theo’s, however, had to come out, and Harry was pretty sure Hermione could figure out that it was Theo’s father who had enslaved Sacred. So far, she didn’t seem inclined to complain much about it.

Ron was the one who just didn’t understand.

“You should have told us about this, mate!”

“When?”

“When—” Ron flushed, probably remembering that he would have been ignoring Harry during the time when Theo had first approached Harry for help. He cleared his throat. “You could have found someone else to cure his blood curse.”

“No, I really couldn’t. It had to be me, and I’ve already explained why it had to be a basilisk heart.”

“But it doesn’t—you could have told us!”

“Would you have kept it to yourself? Or would you have run off and told your mum or Dumbledore or something?”

Ron looked at a loss for words. Harry sighed and softened a little. He didn’t hate Ron. He had been the one to make the decision to keep Theo a secret. Theo had never pressured him to do so. And so now he just spoke honestly.

“I felt at the time that I couldn’t trust anyone else to listen to me or help Theo. Maybe that was wrong, but it was the way I felt. And now it’s done. It’s not like I can go back in time and cast the blood curse on Theo again.”

He thought the way he phrased it was what made Ron move past it. He clenched his fists, breathed in and out for a second, and then nodded. “Fine. But you still haven’t really explained why you sent a homunculus to the Dursleys’.”

“I wasn’t going back there.”

“He wasn’t going back there.”

Ron and Hermione looked back and forth between him and Theo. Their speaking at the same time hadn’t been planned. Harry simply leaned harder on Theo and stared at his friends, and Hermione was the one who swallowed and nodded slowly.

“I suppose that was an ill-considered decision on Dumbledore’s part.”

Theo curled his lip, but said nothing. Harry slid his hand slowly up and down his boyfriend’s arm and said, “Yes. It was.”

“And were you ever going to tell us the truth about the homunculus?”

“I just thought it would stay in the Dursleys’ house all summer and no one would notice. After all, I wouldn’t be able to use magic during the summer most of the time, so why would it matter?”

“You weren’t planning to tell us.”

“No. I already explained why when I told you about Theo’s blood curse. I thought you would go and tell someone, and I would have been forced back to Privet Drive.”

Hermione sucked in a long breath and held it. Then she asked, “Harry, you’ve told us a little—how exactly do they treat you?”

“They’ve called me a freak every day I’ve spent with them since I could remember. My bedroom was a cupboard until I was eleven. They let my cousin chase me and beat me up, and they told me that my parents were drunks who died in a car accident. My aunt and uncle both knew about magic, but they never bothered to tell me. They told me I couldn’t have food on a regular basis.”

With each word, Hermione’s eyes grew wider and wider. Then she closed her eyes and nodded. “I see,” she said. “I’ll—I’m so sorry that you had to endure that, Harry.”

Despite Theo’s clear disapproval, Harry got up from the couch and went to hug her. “It’s all right, Hermione. It’s not your fault. And I never told you all the details until now.”

“I still should have done something.” Hermione hugged him hard, then sat up and dashed the tears from her eyes. “Now that I know the truth, I will do something. I’ll tell Dumbledore that you can go back there. I’ll get my parents to adopt you if I have to.”

Harry smiled. Those were the loyal friends he knew. Ron hugged him next, telling him that he never would have agreed with Dumbledore that Harry should go back if he’d known.

Harry forgave him, too, and clapped Ron on the back, and went to sit back down with Theo.

Theo wrapped his arm around Harry’s waist, again, and barely spoke for the rest of Ron and Hermione’s visit. Harry knew why. Theo would be thinking that Harry hadn’t told them about the Horcrux, or about Sacred, and he would be happy and proud, knowing that he was the only one privy to those secrets.

Before they left, Hermione did hesitate by the fireplace and say, “I think you should tell Sirius and Dumbledore the truth, Harry. I don’t think they would force you to come to—to where we’re staying.”

“That place is under the Fidelius, isn’t it?” Theo asked, his first words for more than half an hour.

Hermione started and glanced at him. “Yes. How did you know?”

“That’s how the Fidelius works, making it impossible for you to say the name of the place.”

Hermione nodded. “Yes. It’s—I can’t explain it to you, and I don’t know if they would let you go there, but they could come here.”

Theo’s snarl next to Harry said how little he liked that idea, but Harry gently touched his arm. “They could,” he said.

There were wards on the house, old and deep, that would keep someone from kidnapping him, especially since Harry was the one who had bought the house. He would make sure to have them fully engaged before Sirius and Dumbledore arrived.

“What’s going to happen to the homunculus?” Ron blurted.

“I’ll leave it in place until after you’ve told people what happened. I think they would just get more upset if they saw it collapse on itself.”

“Uh, yeah, mate?”

Harry smiled and hugged his friends one more time before they went back through the Floo. Then he turned and met Theo’s gaze.

“Are you going to tell them about the Horcrux? Or that you’re stepping back from confronting the Dark Lord directly for a while?”

“The first one, no. Not right away. I don’t know when. And the latter only when they’ve had time to get used to the idea.”

Theo’s smile was radiant, and he leaned down for a kiss. Harry lifted his hands and wound his fingers into Theo’s hair, sighing a little into his mouth.

He was beyond glad that he still had Ron and Hermione’s friendship. He didn’t intend to give it up, and he didn’t intend to give Theo up, either.

Somehow, he would find a way to balance his wants, his needs, his desires. He would have what he needed.

*

“Harry.”

Sirius’s voice was cracked, broken, shaken. Harry sighed and embraced his godfather. He felt as if he didn’t even know how much he had missed Sirius until now, until he got the chance to hold him.

But Theo was still hovering behind him, and Dumbledore still stood between Sirius and the fireplace, looking at Harry with no expression at all.

“When Ron and Hermione came back and said that we hadn’t had the real you all summer,” Sirius said, and then didn’t finish the sentence, just stepping back and giving Harry’s shoulders a little shake. “I knew that you’d been quiet, but I thought it was because of the Diggory boy dying and him coming back.”

“That was part of it,” Harry said, and then turned to face Dumbledore, looking him directly in the face. “And then I learned that I was going to be sent back to the home of my abusive relatives after what I’d gone through.”

Dumbledore’s lips tightened in the moment before he stared at the floor with a long sigh. “There truly was no safer place, my boy. I regret it, but there was not.”

“The Dementors would seem to disagree,” Theo drawled.

Dumbledore examined Theo then, the same way he’d been looking at Harry. “Young Mr. Nott. I confess, your friendship with Harry is—unexpected.”

“Given that you were ignoring him the majority of the year even when he was participating in a deadly Tournament, I’m not surprised you never noticed.”

Harry stepped back and wrapped an arm around Theo’s waist to quiet him down. Dumbledore’s eyes blew wide, and he took a deep, pained breath. Harry wasn’t entirely sure why, and he didn’t know if he wanted to know.

He had to make peace with Dumbledore somehow, had to tell Sirius the truth.

“I wasn’t going to be locked in the Muggle world where I couldn’t know anything or do anything,” he said, his gaze on Dumbledore. “I’d already helped Theo become a Parselmouth to get rid of a blood curse. He offered me his home.”

“His father claims he’s been kidnapped.”

“My father is the one who cast the blood curse on me in the first place,” Theo said, and didn’t bother to hide the sibilance under his words. “It would have killed me by the time I was seventeen.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes and seemed to hold his breath. At least he didn’t look like he disbelieved them, Harry thought. “My boy, I am sorry.”

“Harry cured the curse. Of course I would offer to help him escape Muggles who abused him.”

Dumbledore didn’t say anything to contradict it, just watched them. Harry nodded and turned to face Sirius.

Sirius looked half-mad with guilt. He reached out and grabbed Harry’s free hand so hard he left little scratches in the flesh on the back of his knuckles. “I’m so sorry,” he babbled. “I should have known—I should have done something, Harry, I’m so sorry—”

“I know,” Harry said. “I don’t blame you. Everyone around here was acting for what they thought was the best. I really do believe you, sir,” he added, turning to Dumbledore, “that you thought the blood protections on the Dursleys’ house would keep me safe. But they didn’t. And I’m not going to tolerate being shuffled back there and forgotten.”

Dumbledore waited another moment or two, as though listening to a voice that wasn’t Harry’s speaking softly into his ear. Then he sighed and inclined his head. “You are right, Harry. You have enemies in the Ministry, and one of them must have sent the Dementors. I am sorry, my boy, that I have driven you to these desperate measures.’

Theo hissed next to him. Harry knew that Theo didn’t think the apology was enough—or maybe he thought it wasn’t for the right thing. But Harry ignored that. He had more important things to do.

“You should know that I’m going to tell the Ministry I was wrong about seeing Voldemort rise that night in the graveyard.”

Sirius flinched and yelped. Dumbledore just raised his eyebrows. “Why is that?”

“Because I want to protect Theo by casting the blame on his father instead. Obviously coming back to Hogwarts will challenge the story that Theo was kidnapped anyway, but we should make sure his father can’t just say it was a mistake or he was worried.”

“Just Mr. Nott?”

“Other Death Eaters, too. I’m going to say the names of the Death Eaters that were there.”

“Fudge might not believe you. He is already saying that you are simply reciting names from newspaper articles you have seen in the past.”

Harry smiled thinly. “This is where we can take advantage of the fact that I grew up in the Muggle world and wouldn’t have seen those newspaper articles as they came out. And I’d like it, sir, if you can vouch for me by saying I was too busy studying for the Tournament to look through old newspapers.”

Dumbledore watched him again. Then he said softly, “I presume there is a reason behind this unprecedented move?”

“Yes, sir. Voldemort is keeping a low profile, or he would have done something to announce himself by now. And there was information I learned in Theo’s father’s house about his goals that—I need to use it. I need to take time to figure out a new strategy for fighting him.”

There was another moment when Harry really wasn’t sure what Dumbledore was going to do next. Then he gave a nod that was glacial in its slowness. “I trust you’ll tell me what that is.”

“If can work together? Yes, sir.”

“It would help,” Dumbledore said, his fingers tapping on his robes, “now that I know you do intend to continue the fight against Tom and have not been persuaded or coerced into abandoning it, if you would also share the secret of constructing homunculi like the one you created to represent you. Such things could be invaluable in the war effort.”

“Yes, sir. I’d be happy to.”

“Then let us—bargain, Harry.”

Harry settled down to it, touching Theo’s shoulder or leaning against him when he felt like his boyfriend needed reassurance. He didn’t know if he could trust Dumbledore with everything, and he would definitely reserve some of the truth about Horcruxes.

But they both wanted Voldemort defeated, and that outweighed everything else. Harry didn’t need to trust Dumbledore completely to work with him.

*

“Are you sure that I must simply wind about you?”

“As sure I can be.”

Sacred swayed back and forth in front of him for a moment. Harry bit his lip and resisted the urge to tell her to hurry. The longer he spent in proximity to Thunderhaven, the more danger he was in.

He hadn’t wanted Theo to come with him, because he’d thought it likely that Mr. Nott would have spells up that would warn him of his son’s approach. But the danger wasn’t much less for Harry.

“It is good hunting here. Is it good hunting around your house?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? Have you hunted prey that would interest me?”

Harry had to laugh. “I haven’t, but I haven’t really had time. And you know that you can’t stay here.”

“I know. But I wish I had had time to get vengeance on my captor before I left.”

Luckily, Sacred didn’t hesitate any longer, slipping forwards so that her head was hovering above Harry’s. Harry took a slow breath of the kind that was becoming familiar to him, and then reached out and put his hands on her scales.

The Horcrux had shared the memory of Apparating with several large beings before, including the corpse of a giant once. It still made Harry a little unhappy to vanish with Sacred, she was so large, but—

Not as large as a giant. Not as large as the basilisk in the Chamber.

They vanished, and for long moments, the soul-deadening black cold of Apparition sucked at Harry’s soul. He came out of it staggering, and Sacred also hissed in surprise and dropped several coils back, apparently striving to keep her balance. But then she was rearing and turning her head to face Theo, who had come running to meet them despite promising to stay back from the Apparition point.

“Sacred!”

Harry stepped back with a smile as he watched Theo run up to Sacred. Just as he had Ron and Hermione, Theo had Sacred. They had been all in all to each other from the time Theo was nine until he was fourteen.

He would never give her up.

But then, Harry would never ask him to.

He leaned his elbow on the wall of the house as he watched them chatter together in Parseltongue. Theo apparently had hunted one of the animals that had come with the woods around the house, and was telling Sacred about it. Harry breathed in deep, flooding his lungs with the clean air that the wards created.

Nothing was perfect. He would still have to hunt down the Horcruxes and find out how to kill them. He would have to put up with the fallout of telling people that only Death Eaters had been in the graveyard. He would have to work out a way, somehow, to tell Ron and Hermione (and maybe Sirius, and maybe Dumbledore) about the Horcruxes.

But for right now, watching his boyfriend speak to the giant basilisk in the tongue that all three of them shared, it didn’t matter.

His heart was at peace.

The End.