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lomonaaerenTitle: The Drapery of a Dragon
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, dimension travel, angst, soulmate-identifying marks, creature!fic (Tom is a dragon), happy fluff
Rating: : PG-13
Wordcount: 4000
Summary: After Harry died in his original dimension, Death began to send him to others to clean up the problems posed in those worlds by Voldemort’s existence. This world isn’t the first where Harry has woken up with Voldemort’s soul-mark on him. But it might be the first where Voldemort is still more Tom Riddle—and where both of them have a chance at happiness.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Sisu-Hullu requested a story with Tom and Harry being bonded mates. This is a fluff-based story with only mild angst.
The Drapery of a Dragon
Harry lifted his eyebrows as he looked over his shoulder at the mark on his back in the conjured mirror. This was—quite something. He hadn’t even known soulmate marks could be this large.
An enormous dragon stretched its wings across his back, slender serpentine head resting on the nape of Harry’s neck, body rising from flames that arched along the base of his spine. The right side of the dragon’s body was a glowing red-gold, with shapes of flame and curls of wind carved on it. The left side was black, withered, dead, with scales so dark that Harry winced to look at them and a skeletal wing and legs. The only color in that part of its body other than black was the sickly green light that edged the scales.
Harry wondered for a moment what it meant. That Voldemort was dead and living at the same time? That Harry was alive but also Master of Death? That Voldemort was as destructive as a dragon?
Then Harry shook his head and shrugged his cloak over the mark. He stood in the Forbidden Forest a short distance from Hogwarts. The play of light through leaves and the soft birdsong around him said it was late spring.
Not that it mattered, much. The soul-mark’s size aside, Harry had been in worlds like this before. He had found Voldemort before, and destroyed him, or imprisoned him, or turned him onto a different path. In some of those worlds, he had also worn the monster’s mark.
Harry had never been with him as a soulmate would in any capacity. His task was always different, and Voldemort never wanted a soulmate.
It would be no different this time.
*
Harry wandered the edge of the Hogwarts grounds to see what time he was dealing with. He didn’t worry about someone spotting him and raising a fuss. Death ensured that Harry looked exactly the way he should like to anyone who spotted him, either someone they knew or someone uninteresting but not out of place.
Being the Master of Death had to have some upsides.
He noticed immediately that Hagrid’s hut wasn’t there and there was a fairly large depression in the grass where something impressive had landed. Harry nodded. He was here in the time period when Riddle was still a student, then. The depression had come from a massive prank played by the Gryffindor Quidditch team a few years before that, and was only gradually healing over.
A little unusual to be here when the monster was a student, but not that much different from normal.
Harry jogged into the entrance hall and looked around, ruthlessly suppressing the surge of unhappy memories. Empty corridors except for a few students trailing through. All right. It was between classes.
He started towards the dungeons. Maybe Riddle would be in Potions class or wandering there. If nothing else, it would provide a chance for Harry to ask Slughorn about him.
Pounding feet sounded from up on one of the staircases. Harry turned and looked up, fighting the temptation to fall into a defensive crouch.
Riddle was bounding towards him.
Harry blinked. All right. It was also unusual to see Riddle running so fast. Most of the time, he seemed to think that was beneath him. But it made him easier for Harry to find, so why not?
Riddle saw Harry and started to hurry even more. Harry waited, wondering as he did who Riddle would see him as.
Riddle screeched to a stop in front of Harry, panting. He was tall enough that he looked to be in seventh year. “Who are you?” he demanded without a pause.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
Riddle jerked his head up and down. He was panting too hard to speak for a long moment, but he finally managed to say, after visibly forcing himself to control his breath, “My soulmate.”
Harry stared at him. Riddle had always corrupted his soul too much to ever feel that connection, no matter how early in the timeline Harry had arrived. Harry cleared his throat. “Ah—that’s strange.”
“Why? I can feel the bond.”
Harry couldn’t, but he just blinked and said, “Well, you haven’t seen my mark. You might be mistaken about that. Sometimes, people long to feel the bond so much that—”
“I am not mistaken,” Riddle interrupted him, harsh and impatient in a way that was at least familiar. “The moment you stepped onto the grounds, I could feel the dragon awakening within me. I know what you are.”
“Dragon?”
“Your mark is a dragon, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but that hardly means—”
Harry stopped, because Riddle was changing.
Riddle’s hands were growing heavy claws, which shone as though they were made of steel. He turned his head, and Harry saw his eyes had turned that bright, burning crimson that meant he was more fully becoming Voldemort. Harry seized his magic, ready to force it forwards, but Riddle opened his mouth, and Harry saw the scales along his lengthening jaws, his forked tongue flickering between fangs, and the curls of flame dancing along his tongue.
Harry stared.
Riddle lowered his hands and shifted his face back into a human one. His eyes shone. “You see?” he asked, with a voice in which a snarl lingered. “I am a dragon in all ways that matter, although I cannot shift my body fully yet. That will come with time and age. And you are my soulmate.”
“I still don’t see—”
“A dragon’s soulmate is also his mate.”
Harry blinked. He had heard of mating in the context of Veela and some other people who had creature blood, but this was—beyond what he had expected.
“I don’t think I can be that for you,” he said quietly.
“Why not?”
“Because I—I’ve had soulmates before who’ve rejected me.” That would sound as truth even to a Legilimens like Riddle, because it was. “And even though this mark is new, for me, it doesn’t erase the scars of the past.”
Riddle half-smiled. It was the scariest smile Harry had ever seen him give, in any form. He reached out and rested a hand on Harry’s shoulder that burned hotter than mere skin should be able to. “Don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you everything you could possibly want or need,” Riddle whispered, lowering his voice. “Everything you’ve been missing. That’s the way dragons are. That’s the way mates are.”
Harry wondered if he should be panicking. He wasn’t, just taken off-guard. He opened his mouth, not sure how he would respond.
Then a voice rang down the corridor that made it unnecessary.
“Tom, my boy!”
Dumbledore strode into view. Harry managed a small smile. He hadn’t seen the man in five worlds, and he wondered how he would react here and now. In the past, it had been everything from suspicion to helping once he learned about Harry’s mission.
(He didn’t learn, always).
“Hello, Professor.” Riddle didn’t pay any attention to Dumbledore, even the wary, coiled sort that he always had when Harry had been in the same room with both of them. He kept staring straight at Harry. “I just met my soulmate.”
“Now, then, was that an excuse to go running out of Transfiguration in such a way that you toppled over Miss Linden’s stack of books?”
Dumbledore’s voice was jovial, but his eyes traveled back and forth between Harry and Riddle in rapid flicks. Harry could understand why. A Riddle who wanted his soulmate could be cause for some concern.
Hell, he was for Harry, and Harry didn’t really know this version of Tom Riddle.
“Please convey my apologies to Miss Linden,” Riddle said, and stuck out his arm, elbow crooked, for Harry to take. Harry took it, feeling as if he were in a dream.
“You can do that yourself, Tom, since you will be coming back to class with me.”
“I’m sorry, Professor, but I do deserve some time to talk with my soulmate.”
Dumbledore peered at Riddle again, then at Harry. Harry tried to convey his own helpless bewilderment.
Inexplicably, Dumbledore smiled then. “Well. Perhaps I was hasty in thinking that you should be in trouble. Enjoy your walk with your soulmate, Tom.” And he turned and walked back up the stairs towards what had to be the Transfiguration classroom.
“I—didn’t he sound like he was going to order you to return to class?”
“He did sound like that.” Riddle’s eyes, a muted red now, glittered with amusement. “But he’s always talked about the power of soulmates while staring pointedly at me. I suspect he’s too relieved I’ve found mine to worry about it right now.” He made a sweeping, expansive gesture of his hand at the doors out of the school. “Shall we?”
Still feeling like he was in a dream, Harry nodded, and accepted Riddle’s escort out onto the grounds again.
*
“Why did your soulmates reject you?”
They’d got all the way out to the lake before Riddle asked that question, but Harry supposed its arrival had been inevitable.
“They were complete in themselves, most of them.” Harry chose the simplest answer. “They didn’t want a soulmate to make them weak, to extend them beyond themselves. And a few of the rest also—didn’t share my principles, to the point that I had to destroy them to make my escape.”
Riddle glanced at him, still, arrested. Harry looked back, and didn’t try to hide the shifting waves of the ocean of worlds that filled his eyes.
“You are not from here,” Riddle said. There was an echo of the dragon’s snarl in his voice.
“No.” Harry prepared himself in case Riddle struck.
“You—where do you come from?”
“A world much like this one. You were a different person there, and we weren’t soulmates; there were no such things as soul-marks in that world. But you killed my parents and waged war under the name of Lord Voldemort. If you hadn’t made me into a living Horcrux, I wouldn’t have survived your Killing Curse, and I wouldn’t have become the Master of Death.”
Riddle stared at him in profound silence. Harry waited. He hadn’t told any version of Riddle the truth about himself in several worlds. Now, with his magic gathering around him, it wouldn’t matter if Riddle did get violent about it. Harry would just erase his memory.
“And here you are,” Riddle whispered.
“Here I am.”
“You chose to come here.”
“In the sense that I didn’t resist. Death is the one who chooses the worlds. I can refuse to stay, but I don’t know ahead of time which one I’ll end up in.”
“You are a servant of Death?”
“I’ve only been close to it a few times. If you think I should have resisted and conquered it, then—I can only tell you that you don’t know what it’s like.”
“No,” Riddle said, an odd expression on his face. “And thanks to you, I will never know.”
“I have destroyed so many other versions of you, I’ve lost track of them all. I could destroy you, too.”
The words fell into the silence that seemed to spread around them like a pool of freezing water, and dissipated. Harry took a deep breath. He was sure that Riddle would turn on him now, and Harry would destroy him, and then awaken in another world, maybe with another mark on his back.
Riddle shook his head, his face remarkably calm. “You have no idea how long I have waited for you.”
“For your soulmate.”
“Which you are.”
“Yes, but—not in the way you were expecting.”
Riddle laughed. Harry blinked and listened to him, watched him, standing against the light and the sky as he tossed his head back and laughed in the most sincere way that Harry had ever heard from him.
Any version.
“Nothing has been the way that I expected from the day I woke up with a dragon in my soul,” Riddle said. “To know that I would become immortal not in the ways I had imagined, but because I am a dragon and will not die in the ways that ordinary humans do? Yes, that was a shock. And to know that I would accept my mate as well as my soulmate? That was beyond a shock. But you are here now.”
“I—but it doesn’t bother you that I’m not from this world originally?”
“Why would it?”
“I killed other versions of you. You could say I’m not the mate or soulmate you were waiting for.”
Riddle studied him with his eyes a bright, pulsing red. Then he said simply, “May I see your mark?”
Harry nodded slowly. Maybe once Riddle saw how large and strange the mark was, he would be put off.
Not that Harry really wanted him to be put off, he admitted to himself, as he turned around and dropped the robe off his back. Riddle’s gasp was like a dying swan’s. He reached out—Harry knew that even before the fire-warm fingers made contact with the middle of his spine—and Harry shuddered and tipped his head back.
“You are magnificent.”
No version of Riddle had ever said anything like that to him, ever. It hadn’t mattered whether he was Tom Riddle or Voldemort, if he was a student or older. He had sometimes screamed defiance in Harry’s face, but that wasn’t—that wasn’t—
Harry conjured a mirror with a simple twitch of the Elder Wand, and then cast another spell that would allow him to see directly behind him. He saw his mark, the way that Riddle’s fingers were running over the red-gold scales on the right of the dragon’s body and the wondering expression on his face.
He saw Riddle blink, saw him come to some decision. But Harry still didn’t know what it would be, until Riddle bent forwards and kissed the middle of his back, exactly at the join of the living and the dead pieces of the dragon’s body.
There was a surge of magic so deep and primal that Harry’s knees gave out beneath him. He sank and felt Riddle catch him before he could hit the ground. Riddle’s lips brushed the middle of his back again, and he gave a light hiss, wondering, deep. Harry could understand the words buried in it, although it was no dialect of Parseltongue he had ever heard.
“Look at you, darling.”
Harry let his head fall back again, and looked at himself in the mirror.
He was still half-folded over Riddle’s arm, and Riddle’s face loomed over Harry’s shoulder. His eyes shone with a kind of fire that made Harry want to turn around and kiss him and kiss him—
He compromised, since he didn’t know if Riddle wanted him to do that. He reached out and let his hand rest on the nape of Riddle’s neck.
Riddle went still, his head tilting in a serpentine gesture. Then he hissed, “Would you like to see mine?”
“I didn’t know yours was there,” Harry murmured, and heard Riddle’s breath catch at the sound of the Parseltongue. “But yes, I think I would very much like to see it.”
What mark would represent his soul, in this reality? He’d never seen any of the marks that other Riddles or Voldemorts had carried.
Riddle swung around, although only after he’d set Harry back on his feet. He watched Harry over his shoulder as he swept his wand back and forth above the nape of his neck, turning his robe transparent.
Harry felt as though all the breath had been knocked out of him.
The image was of a griffin rearing into the air from a forested cliff. Underneath its clawed front feet lay a glowing sapphire. The griffin’s beak was open, and it was obviously screaming at something beyond the boundaries of the mark. A shining green lightning bolt seamed the griffin’s flank.
Protective. Strong. And a nod to his former House that Harry never would have thought about.
“Will you tell me what it means?” Riddle whispered.
Harry traced his fingers down the mark, and absently watched Riddle shiver before he answered. “I was a Gryffindor, and the scar on my forehead represented the sliver of your soul that I carried from your Killing Curse, which I survived.” He felt Riddle’s jolt through his fingers, but he didn’t move his eyes from the griffin picture or take his fingers from it, either. “I was a hero and a protector because I had to be. I have to admit I don’t know what the sapphire represents, though.”
“Blue is often the color of the sky.”
“Well, yes.”
“One of the first things I learned in my class on soul-marks in my first year is that blue is therefore the color of the soul. Marks that show the importance of the mates’ souls to one another often involve the color blue.”
Harry felt his fingers come to a halt. Riddle made an unsatisfied sound and wriggled back against his hand like a cat waiting to be petted. Harry did it, but his thoughts were a little dazed. “You think that this mark shows I’m protecting your soul?”
“What else can it be? I did consider different means of immortality before I realized that I was a dragon, among them Horcruxes, but I could not bear to damage the soul my soulmate might someday share. I assume you would have rejected me if I had made one.”
“Rather.”
“Such a tone in your voice, darling.”
“My scar carried a Horcrux. I thought I said that. I had to die to be rid of it.”
Riddle turned and stared at him. “You didn’t say the word Horcrux,” he whispered. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s what it was.” Harry glanced away, feeling as though someone had flung up a net and snared his soul as it soared overhead. Now he felt foolish for allowing it to fly. “I—I should have known this wouldn’t work. You’ve been the monster that defined my life in so many worlds. How could you be something different in this one?”
“Darling.”
Riddle bowed his head as he clasped Harry’s hands and turned them palm upwards. Harry stared at him. He could feel the pull of the soul-mark, he thought now. And the thought of being cherished by someone as immortal as he was, gathered and held by a dragon’s strength—
It was tempting. But maybe that was exactly why Death had sent him to this world, so Harry could prove that he wasn’t tempted by situations like this.
“I would treasure you always,” Riddle whispered. He bent and let his lips brush against the centers of Harry’s palms, and Harry gasped as tingles of pleasure flooded down his spine. “I have waited for you fewer years than you have been hunting versions of me, I’m sure, but still. I would never forsake you. I would never turn away from you. I would never fear you. And I think that is something you have had to worry about, haven’t you?”
Harry swallowed. The way he’d interacted with Riddle or Voldemort in other worlds hadn’t always been perfect. He had sometimes revealed his power to other people, either accidentally or because he’d thought that was the best way to convince them to help with Riddle.
It had never gone well.
“I will be there,” Riddle said, his breath a warm puff of air in the middle of Harry’s hands. “I will never swerve, never decide that there is anything more important than you are. Because of the mark on your back, I know you will honor the dragon in me.” He looked up, and his eyes were no longer plain red but the red-gold color of the flames on Harry’s mark. “I will honor the griffin in you.”
“This seems—sudden for someone you didn’t know existed two hours ago.”
“If you knew…”
Harry stared at Riddle’s half-averted face. There was a thread of longing in his voice that Harry thought might be the answer to this—riddle. But he asked anyway. “If I knew?”
Riddle raised his head all the way, and his expression was so naked with longing that Harry shifted in discomfort despite himself. Of course he knew Riddle, probably better than anyone else could claim to, including Riddle himself. But this was something new.
Longing of his own moved through him suddenly. Newness was rare enough, in a life like his.
“If you knew how alone I have been, how much I have longed for my soulmate,” Riddle whispered. “Hearing that the mark on my neck meant something and was more than an odd birthmark or a hallucination was the saving of me. I could go back to the Muggle world every summer knowing that someday I wouldn’t be alone, that someone was waiting for me. You meant everything to me long before I knew you.”
He shook his head, an odd smile darting across his face. “And then the dragon awoke in my third year, and I learned that my soulmate would also be my mate. I would say this to no one else, but—dragons hoard treasure. I’ve had people ask me what I would choose to hoard first, when my heritage manifested all the way.” His fingers shook a little as he reached up and towards Harry. “I never answered them, but I always knew.”
Harry felt as though he stood there with worlds reeling around him. He could turn and run away, he thought. He could reject the future Riddle was offering him, a world where he would stay and live with his soulmate instead of trying to destroy him.
But why would I do that?
Of course he had wanted a soulmate. Of course he had been eager and excited in the first world where a mark had appeared on his skin and he had learned what it had meant. But he had given up the hope forever with the first Voldemort that had rejected him.
Perhaps he should have been more hopeful than that.
He said softly, “Yes.”
“What?” Riddle’s breath had ceased, and he was staring at Harry with wide brown eyes, no tinge of red or gold in them now.
Harry ran his fingers through Riddle’s hair, the first time he had ever touched it. Riddle shuddered and half-closed his eyes like a reptile basking in the sun, turning his head to the side and up towards Harry’s touch.
His hair was soft.
This wasn’t Harry’s world. Riddle wasn’t Harry’s Voldemort. He was new. Harry was absolutely certain that none of the versions of the Dark Lord he had ever confronted before had had draconic heritage.
He would be a fool to reject them.
And he might be strange to almost every inhabitant of the worlds he had appeared in, but he wasn’t a fool.
“Yes, I’ll be your soulmate. Your mate. I’ll stay with you.”
Riddle looked at him in perfect silence, and then he lunged forwards and grabbed Harry’s shoulders. His hands were warm as the fire beneath his skin, but Harry wasn’t frightened. It took a lot more to frighten him than it had when he’d been a teenager.
“Yes,” Riddle whispered. “Yes.” And he kissed Harry so strongly that Harry’s head spun and his mouth opened before he quite knew what he was doing.
Harry couldn’t even describe the kiss. It was like a dive into deepest space, and falling off a broom with a dragon holding him, and the very mortal sweetness and heat of Riddle’s mouth. He clutched, he held, he was held.
When Riddle pulled back and stroked his way down Harry’s shoulders again, he said, “I will never betray you. I will always be here. I will never leave you.”
“I won’t leave you, either,” Harry whispered. “I’ll never betray you. You’ll never be alone.”
In the fierce light of Riddle’s eyes, Harry could see all the bridges that had brought him here burning. He could imagine the horrified reactions of people he had known, and even of himself, only a few hours ago.
But those things were on fire. And from their ashes, the future would spring.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, dimension travel, angst, soulmate-identifying marks, creature!fic (Tom is a dragon), happy fluff
Rating: : PG-13
Wordcount: 4000
Summary: After Harry died in his original dimension, Death began to send him to others to clean up the problems posed in those worlds by Voldemort’s existence. This world isn’t the first where Harry has woken up with Voldemort’s soul-mark on him. But it might be the first where Voldemort is still more Tom Riddle—and where both of them have a chance at happiness.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Sisu-Hullu requested a story with Tom and Harry being bonded mates. This is a fluff-based story with only mild angst.
The Drapery of a Dragon
Harry lifted his eyebrows as he looked over his shoulder at the mark on his back in the conjured mirror. This was—quite something. He hadn’t even known soulmate marks could be this large.
An enormous dragon stretched its wings across his back, slender serpentine head resting on the nape of Harry’s neck, body rising from flames that arched along the base of his spine. The right side of the dragon’s body was a glowing red-gold, with shapes of flame and curls of wind carved on it. The left side was black, withered, dead, with scales so dark that Harry winced to look at them and a skeletal wing and legs. The only color in that part of its body other than black was the sickly green light that edged the scales.
Harry wondered for a moment what it meant. That Voldemort was dead and living at the same time? That Harry was alive but also Master of Death? That Voldemort was as destructive as a dragon?
Then Harry shook his head and shrugged his cloak over the mark. He stood in the Forbidden Forest a short distance from Hogwarts. The play of light through leaves and the soft birdsong around him said it was late spring.
Not that it mattered, much. The soul-mark’s size aside, Harry had been in worlds like this before. He had found Voldemort before, and destroyed him, or imprisoned him, or turned him onto a different path. In some of those worlds, he had also worn the monster’s mark.
Harry had never been with him as a soulmate would in any capacity. His task was always different, and Voldemort never wanted a soulmate.
It would be no different this time.
*
Harry wandered the edge of the Hogwarts grounds to see what time he was dealing with. He didn’t worry about someone spotting him and raising a fuss. Death ensured that Harry looked exactly the way he should like to anyone who spotted him, either someone they knew or someone uninteresting but not out of place.
Being the Master of Death had to have some upsides.
He noticed immediately that Hagrid’s hut wasn’t there and there was a fairly large depression in the grass where something impressive had landed. Harry nodded. He was here in the time period when Riddle was still a student, then. The depression had come from a massive prank played by the Gryffindor Quidditch team a few years before that, and was only gradually healing over.
A little unusual to be here when the monster was a student, but not that much different from normal.
Harry jogged into the entrance hall and looked around, ruthlessly suppressing the surge of unhappy memories. Empty corridors except for a few students trailing through. All right. It was between classes.
He started towards the dungeons. Maybe Riddle would be in Potions class or wandering there. If nothing else, it would provide a chance for Harry to ask Slughorn about him.
Pounding feet sounded from up on one of the staircases. Harry turned and looked up, fighting the temptation to fall into a defensive crouch.
Riddle was bounding towards him.
Harry blinked. All right. It was also unusual to see Riddle running so fast. Most of the time, he seemed to think that was beneath him. But it made him easier for Harry to find, so why not?
Riddle saw Harry and started to hurry even more. Harry waited, wondering as he did who Riddle would see him as.
Riddle screeched to a stop in front of Harry, panting. He was tall enough that he looked to be in seventh year. “Who are you?” he demanded without a pause.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
Riddle jerked his head up and down. He was panting too hard to speak for a long moment, but he finally managed to say, after visibly forcing himself to control his breath, “My soulmate.”
Harry stared at him. Riddle had always corrupted his soul too much to ever feel that connection, no matter how early in the timeline Harry had arrived. Harry cleared his throat. “Ah—that’s strange.”
“Why? I can feel the bond.”
Harry couldn’t, but he just blinked and said, “Well, you haven’t seen my mark. You might be mistaken about that. Sometimes, people long to feel the bond so much that—”
“I am not mistaken,” Riddle interrupted him, harsh and impatient in a way that was at least familiar. “The moment you stepped onto the grounds, I could feel the dragon awakening within me. I know what you are.”
“Dragon?”
“Your mark is a dragon, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but that hardly means—”
Harry stopped, because Riddle was changing.
Riddle’s hands were growing heavy claws, which shone as though they were made of steel. He turned his head, and Harry saw his eyes had turned that bright, burning crimson that meant he was more fully becoming Voldemort. Harry seized his magic, ready to force it forwards, but Riddle opened his mouth, and Harry saw the scales along his lengthening jaws, his forked tongue flickering between fangs, and the curls of flame dancing along his tongue.
Harry stared.
Riddle lowered his hands and shifted his face back into a human one. His eyes shone. “You see?” he asked, with a voice in which a snarl lingered. “I am a dragon in all ways that matter, although I cannot shift my body fully yet. That will come with time and age. And you are my soulmate.”
“I still don’t see—”
“A dragon’s soulmate is also his mate.”
Harry blinked. He had heard of mating in the context of Veela and some other people who had creature blood, but this was—beyond what he had expected.
“I don’t think I can be that for you,” he said quietly.
“Why not?”
“Because I—I’ve had soulmates before who’ve rejected me.” That would sound as truth even to a Legilimens like Riddle, because it was. “And even though this mark is new, for me, it doesn’t erase the scars of the past.”
Riddle half-smiled. It was the scariest smile Harry had ever seen him give, in any form. He reached out and rested a hand on Harry’s shoulder that burned hotter than mere skin should be able to. “Don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you everything you could possibly want or need,” Riddle whispered, lowering his voice. “Everything you’ve been missing. That’s the way dragons are. That’s the way mates are.”
Harry wondered if he should be panicking. He wasn’t, just taken off-guard. He opened his mouth, not sure how he would respond.
Then a voice rang down the corridor that made it unnecessary.
“Tom, my boy!”
Dumbledore strode into view. Harry managed a small smile. He hadn’t seen the man in five worlds, and he wondered how he would react here and now. In the past, it had been everything from suspicion to helping once he learned about Harry’s mission.
(He didn’t learn, always).
“Hello, Professor.” Riddle didn’t pay any attention to Dumbledore, even the wary, coiled sort that he always had when Harry had been in the same room with both of them. He kept staring straight at Harry. “I just met my soulmate.”
“Now, then, was that an excuse to go running out of Transfiguration in such a way that you toppled over Miss Linden’s stack of books?”
Dumbledore’s voice was jovial, but his eyes traveled back and forth between Harry and Riddle in rapid flicks. Harry could understand why. A Riddle who wanted his soulmate could be cause for some concern.
Hell, he was for Harry, and Harry didn’t really know this version of Tom Riddle.
“Please convey my apologies to Miss Linden,” Riddle said, and stuck out his arm, elbow crooked, for Harry to take. Harry took it, feeling as if he were in a dream.
“You can do that yourself, Tom, since you will be coming back to class with me.”
“I’m sorry, Professor, but I do deserve some time to talk with my soulmate.”
Dumbledore peered at Riddle again, then at Harry. Harry tried to convey his own helpless bewilderment.
Inexplicably, Dumbledore smiled then. “Well. Perhaps I was hasty in thinking that you should be in trouble. Enjoy your walk with your soulmate, Tom.” And he turned and walked back up the stairs towards what had to be the Transfiguration classroom.
“I—didn’t he sound like he was going to order you to return to class?”
“He did sound like that.” Riddle’s eyes, a muted red now, glittered with amusement. “But he’s always talked about the power of soulmates while staring pointedly at me. I suspect he’s too relieved I’ve found mine to worry about it right now.” He made a sweeping, expansive gesture of his hand at the doors out of the school. “Shall we?”
Still feeling like he was in a dream, Harry nodded, and accepted Riddle’s escort out onto the grounds again.
*
“Why did your soulmates reject you?”
They’d got all the way out to the lake before Riddle asked that question, but Harry supposed its arrival had been inevitable.
“They were complete in themselves, most of them.” Harry chose the simplest answer. “They didn’t want a soulmate to make them weak, to extend them beyond themselves. And a few of the rest also—didn’t share my principles, to the point that I had to destroy them to make my escape.”
Riddle glanced at him, still, arrested. Harry looked back, and didn’t try to hide the shifting waves of the ocean of worlds that filled his eyes.
“You are not from here,” Riddle said. There was an echo of the dragon’s snarl in his voice.
“No.” Harry prepared himself in case Riddle struck.
“You—where do you come from?”
“A world much like this one. You were a different person there, and we weren’t soulmates; there were no such things as soul-marks in that world. But you killed my parents and waged war under the name of Lord Voldemort. If you hadn’t made me into a living Horcrux, I wouldn’t have survived your Killing Curse, and I wouldn’t have become the Master of Death.”
Riddle stared at him in profound silence. Harry waited. He hadn’t told any version of Riddle the truth about himself in several worlds. Now, with his magic gathering around him, it wouldn’t matter if Riddle did get violent about it. Harry would just erase his memory.
“And here you are,” Riddle whispered.
“Here I am.”
“You chose to come here.”
“In the sense that I didn’t resist. Death is the one who chooses the worlds. I can refuse to stay, but I don’t know ahead of time which one I’ll end up in.”
“You are a servant of Death?”
“I’ve only been close to it a few times. If you think I should have resisted and conquered it, then—I can only tell you that you don’t know what it’s like.”
“No,” Riddle said, an odd expression on his face. “And thanks to you, I will never know.”
“I have destroyed so many other versions of you, I’ve lost track of them all. I could destroy you, too.”
The words fell into the silence that seemed to spread around them like a pool of freezing water, and dissipated. Harry took a deep breath. He was sure that Riddle would turn on him now, and Harry would destroy him, and then awaken in another world, maybe with another mark on his back.
Riddle shook his head, his face remarkably calm. “You have no idea how long I have waited for you.”
“For your soulmate.”
“Which you are.”
“Yes, but—not in the way you were expecting.”
Riddle laughed. Harry blinked and listened to him, watched him, standing against the light and the sky as he tossed his head back and laughed in the most sincere way that Harry had ever heard from him.
Any version.
“Nothing has been the way that I expected from the day I woke up with a dragon in my soul,” Riddle said. “To know that I would become immortal not in the ways I had imagined, but because I am a dragon and will not die in the ways that ordinary humans do? Yes, that was a shock. And to know that I would accept my mate as well as my soulmate? That was beyond a shock. But you are here now.”
“I—but it doesn’t bother you that I’m not from this world originally?”
“Why would it?”
“I killed other versions of you. You could say I’m not the mate or soulmate you were waiting for.”
Riddle studied him with his eyes a bright, pulsing red. Then he said simply, “May I see your mark?”
Harry nodded slowly. Maybe once Riddle saw how large and strange the mark was, he would be put off.
Not that Harry really wanted him to be put off, he admitted to himself, as he turned around and dropped the robe off his back. Riddle’s gasp was like a dying swan’s. He reached out—Harry knew that even before the fire-warm fingers made contact with the middle of his spine—and Harry shuddered and tipped his head back.
“You are magnificent.”
No version of Riddle had ever said anything like that to him, ever. It hadn’t mattered whether he was Tom Riddle or Voldemort, if he was a student or older. He had sometimes screamed defiance in Harry’s face, but that wasn’t—that wasn’t—
Harry conjured a mirror with a simple twitch of the Elder Wand, and then cast another spell that would allow him to see directly behind him. He saw his mark, the way that Riddle’s fingers were running over the red-gold scales on the right of the dragon’s body and the wondering expression on his face.
He saw Riddle blink, saw him come to some decision. But Harry still didn’t know what it would be, until Riddle bent forwards and kissed the middle of his back, exactly at the join of the living and the dead pieces of the dragon’s body.
There was a surge of magic so deep and primal that Harry’s knees gave out beneath him. He sank and felt Riddle catch him before he could hit the ground. Riddle’s lips brushed the middle of his back again, and he gave a light hiss, wondering, deep. Harry could understand the words buried in it, although it was no dialect of Parseltongue he had ever heard.
“Look at you, darling.”
Harry let his head fall back again, and looked at himself in the mirror.
He was still half-folded over Riddle’s arm, and Riddle’s face loomed over Harry’s shoulder. His eyes shone with a kind of fire that made Harry want to turn around and kiss him and kiss him—
He compromised, since he didn’t know if Riddle wanted him to do that. He reached out and let his hand rest on the nape of Riddle’s neck.
Riddle went still, his head tilting in a serpentine gesture. Then he hissed, “Would you like to see mine?”
“I didn’t know yours was there,” Harry murmured, and heard Riddle’s breath catch at the sound of the Parseltongue. “But yes, I think I would very much like to see it.”
What mark would represent his soul, in this reality? He’d never seen any of the marks that other Riddles or Voldemorts had carried.
Riddle swung around, although only after he’d set Harry back on his feet. He watched Harry over his shoulder as he swept his wand back and forth above the nape of his neck, turning his robe transparent.
Harry felt as though all the breath had been knocked out of him.
The image was of a griffin rearing into the air from a forested cliff. Underneath its clawed front feet lay a glowing sapphire. The griffin’s beak was open, and it was obviously screaming at something beyond the boundaries of the mark. A shining green lightning bolt seamed the griffin’s flank.
Protective. Strong. And a nod to his former House that Harry never would have thought about.
“Will you tell me what it means?” Riddle whispered.
Harry traced his fingers down the mark, and absently watched Riddle shiver before he answered. “I was a Gryffindor, and the scar on my forehead represented the sliver of your soul that I carried from your Killing Curse, which I survived.” He felt Riddle’s jolt through his fingers, but he didn’t move his eyes from the griffin picture or take his fingers from it, either. “I was a hero and a protector because I had to be. I have to admit I don’t know what the sapphire represents, though.”
“Blue is often the color of the sky.”
“Well, yes.”
“One of the first things I learned in my class on soul-marks in my first year is that blue is therefore the color of the soul. Marks that show the importance of the mates’ souls to one another often involve the color blue.”
Harry felt his fingers come to a halt. Riddle made an unsatisfied sound and wriggled back against his hand like a cat waiting to be petted. Harry did it, but his thoughts were a little dazed. “You think that this mark shows I’m protecting your soul?”
“What else can it be? I did consider different means of immortality before I realized that I was a dragon, among them Horcruxes, but I could not bear to damage the soul my soulmate might someday share. I assume you would have rejected me if I had made one.”
“Rather.”
“Such a tone in your voice, darling.”
“My scar carried a Horcrux. I thought I said that. I had to die to be rid of it.”
Riddle turned and stared at him. “You didn’t say the word Horcrux,” he whispered. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s what it was.” Harry glanced away, feeling as though someone had flung up a net and snared his soul as it soared overhead. Now he felt foolish for allowing it to fly. “I—I should have known this wouldn’t work. You’ve been the monster that defined my life in so many worlds. How could you be something different in this one?”
“Darling.”
Riddle bowed his head as he clasped Harry’s hands and turned them palm upwards. Harry stared at him. He could feel the pull of the soul-mark, he thought now. And the thought of being cherished by someone as immortal as he was, gathered and held by a dragon’s strength—
It was tempting. But maybe that was exactly why Death had sent him to this world, so Harry could prove that he wasn’t tempted by situations like this.
“I would treasure you always,” Riddle whispered. He bent and let his lips brush against the centers of Harry’s palms, and Harry gasped as tingles of pleasure flooded down his spine. “I have waited for you fewer years than you have been hunting versions of me, I’m sure, but still. I would never forsake you. I would never turn away from you. I would never fear you. And I think that is something you have had to worry about, haven’t you?”
Harry swallowed. The way he’d interacted with Riddle or Voldemort in other worlds hadn’t always been perfect. He had sometimes revealed his power to other people, either accidentally or because he’d thought that was the best way to convince them to help with Riddle.
It had never gone well.
“I will be there,” Riddle said, his breath a warm puff of air in the middle of Harry’s hands. “I will never swerve, never decide that there is anything more important than you are. Because of the mark on your back, I know you will honor the dragon in me.” He looked up, and his eyes were no longer plain red but the red-gold color of the flames on Harry’s mark. “I will honor the griffin in you.”
“This seems—sudden for someone you didn’t know existed two hours ago.”
“If you knew…”
Harry stared at Riddle’s half-averted face. There was a thread of longing in his voice that Harry thought might be the answer to this—riddle. But he asked anyway. “If I knew?”
Riddle raised his head all the way, and his expression was so naked with longing that Harry shifted in discomfort despite himself. Of course he knew Riddle, probably better than anyone else could claim to, including Riddle himself. But this was something new.
Longing of his own moved through him suddenly. Newness was rare enough, in a life like his.
“If you knew how alone I have been, how much I have longed for my soulmate,” Riddle whispered. “Hearing that the mark on my neck meant something and was more than an odd birthmark or a hallucination was the saving of me. I could go back to the Muggle world every summer knowing that someday I wouldn’t be alone, that someone was waiting for me. You meant everything to me long before I knew you.”
He shook his head, an odd smile darting across his face. “And then the dragon awoke in my third year, and I learned that my soulmate would also be my mate. I would say this to no one else, but—dragons hoard treasure. I’ve had people ask me what I would choose to hoard first, when my heritage manifested all the way.” His fingers shook a little as he reached up and towards Harry. “I never answered them, but I always knew.”
Harry felt as though he stood there with worlds reeling around him. He could turn and run away, he thought. He could reject the future Riddle was offering him, a world where he would stay and live with his soulmate instead of trying to destroy him.
But why would I do that?
Of course he had wanted a soulmate. Of course he had been eager and excited in the first world where a mark had appeared on his skin and he had learned what it had meant. But he had given up the hope forever with the first Voldemort that had rejected him.
Perhaps he should have been more hopeful than that.
He said softly, “Yes.”
“What?” Riddle’s breath had ceased, and he was staring at Harry with wide brown eyes, no tinge of red or gold in them now.
Harry ran his fingers through Riddle’s hair, the first time he had ever touched it. Riddle shuddered and half-closed his eyes like a reptile basking in the sun, turning his head to the side and up towards Harry’s touch.
His hair was soft.
This wasn’t Harry’s world. Riddle wasn’t Harry’s Voldemort. He was new. Harry was absolutely certain that none of the versions of the Dark Lord he had ever confronted before had had draconic heritage.
He would be a fool to reject them.
And he might be strange to almost every inhabitant of the worlds he had appeared in, but he wasn’t a fool.
“Yes, I’ll be your soulmate. Your mate. I’ll stay with you.”
Riddle looked at him in perfect silence, and then he lunged forwards and grabbed Harry’s shoulders. His hands were warm as the fire beneath his skin, but Harry wasn’t frightened. It took a lot more to frighten him than it had when he’d been a teenager.
“Yes,” Riddle whispered. “Yes.” And he kissed Harry so strongly that Harry’s head spun and his mouth opened before he quite knew what he was doing.
Harry couldn’t even describe the kiss. It was like a dive into deepest space, and falling off a broom with a dragon holding him, and the very mortal sweetness and heat of Riddle’s mouth. He clutched, he held, he was held.
When Riddle pulled back and stroked his way down Harry’s shoulders again, he said, “I will never betray you. I will always be here. I will never leave you.”
“I won’t leave you, either,” Harry whispered. “I’ll never betray you. You’ll never be alone.”
In the fierce light of Riddle’s eyes, Harry could see all the bridges that had brought him here burning. He could imagine the horrified reactions of people he had known, and even of himself, only a few hours ago.
But those things were on fire. And from their ashes, the future would spring.
The End.
