lomonaaeren

Chapter Six.

Chapter One.

Title: Jonquils and Lightning (7/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, a few one-sided het pairings and canon het pairings
Content Notes: Angst, blood, dubious consent, dimension travel, OC’s
Rating: R
Summary: Harry Potter found peace after the war in another world where a large number of Potters live. He makes his living as an animal healer in Godric’s Hollow, surrounded by family and away from all wars. But his peace shatters with the arrival of a Tom Riddle from another dimension, who seeks a Potter who can be his foretold weapon in his own war.
Author’s Notes: At the moment, I can’t say how long this story will be.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seven—Immunity to Seduction

“What are you doing here, Gaunt?”

“I thought I’d see how you spend your mornings.”

Harry lengthened his stride towards the stables without answering. Gaunt walked beside him, not attempting to touch him now. Harry was grateful. The abnormal reactions his own body had towards Gaunt disgusted him. They were almost certainly magical, but Harry didn’t care. He was master of his own magic. It shouldn’t be reacting like this.

“Why are you content?”

“I’m not.”

“I didn’t mean right in this moment, Harry. In general, why are you content tending to animals and living in an obscure village in a world that doesn’t have many chances for you to shine? What could you have come from that would offer this as a good contrast?”

Harry stopped outside the stable. He wasn’t about to bring the agitation he was feeling into Princess’s stall. He stared at Gaunt. “You’re strange.”

“I am a stranger, yes,” Gaunt corrected, still staring intently at him. “That does not mean I wish to stay one.”

Harry shook his head. “No, I mean, you’re strange to want to know everything about my background within days of meeting me.”

“You know part of the reason for that—”

“And I am never going to return to your dimension with you in order to fight a war.” Harry let his voice rise and enough magic come out that the ground trembled under their feet. Gaunt’s eyes widened, but only to reveal lust in the back of them. Harry pulled the magic back into him like fishline on a reel. “I fought my war.”

“Will you tell me about it, Harry?”

Harry eyed Gaunt. He was saner than Riddle, that much was true. And as reluctant as Harry was to either call up old memories or give Gaunt a reason to be more fascinated still with him, at least this might clarify to the sane bastard that he would never convince Harry to join him.

“Fine,” Harry said. “But I’m going to feed Princess first.” He turned away and hoped that Gaunt liked being ignored for a horse.

*

At last.

Tom smiled a little as he watched from the doorway of the stables—Harry had forbidden him to come any closer—while Harry fed and watered the mare in the stall, examined her for some reasons Tom couldn’t determine and did the same for the foal, and then draped a halter across the mare’s neck to lead her outside. At last he would know why Harry had come here when he didn’t fit into his surroundings, when he shone like a polished diamond no matter how hard he tried to hide that polish.

He stepped out of the way as Harry led the mare past him. Harry regarded him with narrow eyes. Tom resisted the urge to touch him. It hadn’t worked last night, and it wasn’t pleasant enough for him anymore just to watch Harry writhe. He wanted both of them joined in one purpose, one goal.

He followed Harry to the pasture where Harry turned the mare and her foal loose. Then he cast some more spells that Tom assumed were diagnostic ones. He didn’t actually know, and of course didn’t care. He draped himself on the fence and stared until Harry glanced at him and hissed softly.

Tom replied in Parseltongue. “You promised me a story.”

“Yeah, I did,” Harry said, refusing the intimacy of the language, which was a minor disappointment. He led them to a bench built on the opposite side of the field and watched the foal jump and butt and snap at his mother for a moment. Tom waited beside him. Harry finally turned to him.

“I was a propaganda figure in my first world.”

Tom raised his eyebrows. “That’s not how I thought this story would begin.”

“It’s the best place.” Harry stared past Tom’s shoulder for a second, then focused on his eyes again. “Look. You had a counterpart in that world, the Voldemort I told you about, but he was much older than either of us. He heard a prophecy that said I would be the one to kill me. So he came to kill me, when I was a baby.”

“An infant?”

“Well, a toddler. I was fifteen months old.”

Tom clasped his hands together to stop the shiver of disgust from moving throughout his body. “Then he deserved whatever happened to him.”

Harry stared at him for a second, but rushed ahead with the story instead of asking. “He killed my parents first. He kept asking my mother to stand aside—I found out a lot later that someone asked him to spare her—but she wouldn’t, so he killed her. But that meant that she could use sacrificial magic to keep me safe, and she did. The Killing Curse bounced off me and returned and hit him. It destroyed his body and made him have to flee as a bodiless wraith.”

“He deserved it.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because doing something like that on the basis of a prophecy is stupid in the first place. He should have been skilled enough in Divination to know that. And in the second place, he was trying to hurt you.”

Harry shook his head instantly. “That’s not the point, Gaunt. It would have been bad for him to try to hurt any toddler, to kill their parents. It being about me undermines your point.”

“Why?”

“Because you should care about other people because they exist! Not because of who they are.”

Tom laughed softly. “You contradict your own moral code if that’s true, Harry. Because you despise me, and you care for your family because they’re your family.” At least he understood why, now. Growing up without parents, and, it sounded like, without siblings, would make Harry long for them fiercely. And once he learned that his mother had sacrificed herself for him, of course he would love her all the more.

I would have loved my mother for that.

“What happened after that? Who raised you?”

“My mother’s Muggle sister.”

Harry was staring at him, waiting for something. Tom stared back, not understanding how a simple declaration like that could prompt waiting. He finally shook his head and asked, “Is there something specifically I’m supposed to say?”

“My mother was Muggleborn.”

“I believe I have told you that I do not despise Muggleborns, Harry.”

Tom couldn’t help the caress in his voice on the last word. Harry jerked back, his hands clenched, and said in a clipped tone, “They didn’t tell me anything about the wizarding world because it made them uncomfortable. I only knew after I got my Hogwarts letter when I was eleven. Then I found out I was famous, because people thought I was the one who defeated Voldemort somehow, not my mum. They called me the Boy-Who-Lived.” The loathing in his voice made Tom unsurprised when a bright wheel of fire leaped into existence over Harry’s shoulder and spun, the emotions releasing themselves through magic.

“It’s a stupid name, yes.” Tom decided to test something and reached out to touch Harry’s fingers with the tips of his own.

He’d been right. A soft warmth burned between them instead of orgasmic pleasure. Harry still jerked back in a way that told Tom how little he was used to that sort of touch, his eyes wide.

“What…?”

“It depends on my intention in touching you, I think,” Tom said softly, memorizing the play of expressions on Harry’s face. He might see some like them when he convinced Harry to yield. “If I want to seduce you, then it inspires lust. If it’s sympathy, then nothing but gentleness.”

Harry jerked his eyes away and went rushing on. “Your older self kept trying to kill me in various ways. I prevented him from resurrecting himself a few times as a teenager, and then he finally managed it with a ritual that used my blood. After that, I had to fight him, but most of the wizarding world refused to believe that he was back and called me crazy and attention-seeking. Then one of his servants killed my godfather, and a trap he left behind killed my—well, my world’s version of Dumbledore.”

“How did the Minister get involved in that mess?”

“What? Gaunt, in my world Dumbledore wasn’t the Minister. They offered him the job, I think, but he refused it. He was the Headmaster of Hogwarts.”

Tom blinked. Then he said, “But still, how did he get involved?”

“He was the one who collected the memories of your younger self and showed me how to defeat you.”

“Not me.”

Harry glared at him, but finally nodded. “Fine, not you. He was the only one that Voldemort was afraid of. He was stronger than him, and he refused to give in and fear him like other people. He even led a group called the Order of the Phoenix against him in the first war.”

“The second starting after he managed to resurrect himself, I suppose,” Tom murmured, but the comment was automatic. “I suppose some things are universal.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Minister’s secret Aurors in my world are called the Order of the Phoenix.”

“Oh. Um. Anyway. After that trap killed Dumbledore, then my friends and I fought back against Voldemort by destroying the means that he’d used to anchor himself to the world. And we managed to destroy most of them in time. There were only a few left by the time I faced him, and with help, I tricked him into thinking he’d killed me. Then I dueled him and triumphed over him.”

“And the war was over.” Tom was clever enough to know that Harry had left out most of the story there, and clever enough to know that asking for it right now wouldn’t help. “What happened after that?”

Harry sighed. “They decided that saving them once wasn’t enough. And they wanted me to be an Auror and their savior and hero and never do anything wrong. I didn’t have any privacy. They criticized me constantly via the papers for any slight mistake I made, which in reality was anything that contradicted their image of me. The people who dated me couldn’t get any peace, either. And fans tried to steal my possessions and touch me without permission and get me to donate to their favorite charities and blame me for not acting sooner against Voldemort, all at once.”

“Your magic?”

“What about it?”

“In my world, at least, magic of the kind you have would be enough to shut some people up permanently.”

Harry snarled, and the wheels of sparks popped into existence over both shoulders this time, so bright that Tom winced back from them before he thought better. “And you believe that I should kill people for things like that, Gaunt? That is yet another reason that I will never follow you to your world.” He stood up and stalked towards the pasture. “I’ve had enough of fighting and fame and being singled out and being told that I’m special and could shut people up if I wanted. All of it.”

Tom blinked at Harry’s back, and watched as he cast a few more diagnostic spells on the horses and then strode over to another barn. Tom didn’t follow. It wouldn’t gain him anything right now.

Tom leaned back thoughtfully. This was a more complex case than he’d thought. So Harry didn’t want to be special because he’d experienced too much of it, while Tom had hardly had a taste and wanted more. And he might not want to fight Minister Dumbledore in Tom’s world because he had fond memories of the meddling Headmaster from his first one.

I have to show him something he can do that isn’t getting showered with more fame or using his magic to hurt people.

Thinking around the edges of Harry’s story, Tom began to smile. He thought he knew exactly what to offer him.

*

“Thank you, Harry.”

Harry grinned at Marie, Zachary’s wife, as she stepped back and curtsied to him. She was kind of his aunt, since she’d married the son who’d been born to his grandparents in this world instead of James Potter. But she wasn’t much older than he was, and she had dark red hair that suggested she was related to Prewetts or Weasleys somewhere. She hadn’t wanted to talk about her family, though, so Harry hadn’t pried.

“No, thank you. I don’t know where I’ll ever use dancing lessons, but it was a little embarrassing to be so bad at it.”

“And it’s nice to know that I’m still a good teacher.” Marie smiled. “I’m thinking of applying to Hogwarts as a professor when the children are old enough. They used to offer dancing as a class. They should offer it again.”

Harry just let his grin widen. “I’m sure that you’ll be able to convince them.” His aunt, or his cousin’s wife, or however he was supposed to think of her, was a force of nature. Marie seemed to find infinite time in the day to do everything she wanted to do, whether that was practicing dancing, taking care of her children, gardening, or writing a book that was going to be on the history of wizarding dance.

“Uncle Harry!”

Harry managed to turn around and fall into a crouch in time to pick up the armful of six-year-old who had hurled herself at him. Ally Potter—who already had a hatred for his full name, “Alcyone,” that would have done Ginny’s hatred for Ginevra credit—bounced on her toes and beamed at him. She had untamable black hair that she said she liked better since she’d met Harry. So that was at least one piece of good Harry had done Ally.

Merlin knows that she won’t let anyone else do anything for her. “Yes?”

“We’re going to watch Julian turn the garden red! Come with me!”

Marie waved calmly to him as her daughter almost ran Harry’s feet off under him. Harry let her take him to the garden behind Zachary and Marie’s house, a snug little cottage that reminded Harry of the Burrow more than anything else in Godric’s Hollow did. He saw Ally’s older brother standing in the middle of the garden, his eyes closed and his scowl fierce.

Harry didn’t speak. His nephew—cousin—whatever—was trying so hard to master his accidental magic, which had persisted in him longer than it usually did in children with happy childhoods. He kept telling Harry that someday soon, he would manage to make things float or turn different colors because he wanted them to, without the burning desire to escape or fetch a toy that some children had to have.

Harry sat down next to Ally and watched Julian continue to concentrate. Marie had gone into the house, he thought, probably to look after baby Clara.

Julian suddenly let out a loud, long breath and released his magic. It poured past Harry in a glittering cloud that he turned to watch. It landed on several of the blue roses that Marie prided herself on and—

Turned them maroon.

Julian opened his eyes, and his scowl got worse. “It was supposed to be red!”

“It’s still closer than I would have managed at that age.”

Julian turned his scowl on Harry. He had a habit of thinking everyone who praised him was trying to patronize him. “But you told me that you managed to Apparate when you were Ally’s age!”

“Yes, but I didn’t know what Apparition was or what it was called.” Harry only shrugged when Julian stared at him. “I told you that the first time I told you the story, too.”

Julian still didn’t look convinced. “But you did some things deliberately, right? You told me that you managed to open a cupboard and get your trunk out just by willing it when you didn’t have your wand.”

“It’s still nothing like this. It only happened under pressure. If you come up with ways to master wandless magic when it’s always deliberate and at your will, you’ll be ahead of me.”

“Okay,” Julian said slowly.

“I want to do it, too!” Ally jumped up and tugged on Harry’s sleeve. “Julian said you gave him lessons! Give me lessons!”

Harry smiled. “I just told him to concentrate and meditate. That’s all.”

“I can concentrate!”

“No, you can’t. You’re six,” Julian said, with all a nine-year-old’s superiority.

“Can too!”

“Can not!”

“Uncle Harry Apparated when he was six!”

“You’re not Uncle Harry!”

“I could be just as strong!”

Harry leaned back and smiled at his little cousins. This was exactly the kind of arguing that he could imagine driving Tom—whether he was Gaunt or Riddle—mental, and which he enjoyed. Families weren’t always right or nice, but they were important.

And Harry could never give this up to fling himself headlong into war again. Or give up healing animals. Or give up spending nights lying on his back in the grass and watching stars, which for the first time in his life, he had the leisure to do.

I’m fixed here. Immovable. You’ll need to find yourself someone better than me, Gaunt.