[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Twelve and One, Harry/Tom Riddle, R, 6/7
Part Five.
Part One.
Title: Twelve and One (6/7)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily and Merope/Tom Riddle Sr.
Content Notes: Angst, past minor character death, violence, fairy tale AU
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4000
Summary: AU. King James Potter has twelve daughters, each more beautiful than the last, and all under a devastating curse. He also has one son, who serves as his father’s steward. Harry has begun to wonder if his sisters will ever be free from the curse, until Prince Thomas Slytherin comes seeking a consort. (Very) loosely based on the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Author’s Notes: This is one of “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year. It will have seven parts.
Part Six
“Mother?” Harry stared at the dark-haired woman on the slope of the hill. Of course she was an elf, and of course she was Unseelie. The sharply pointed ears and the face that looked as if it had been pointed, too, and the dark green hair that rustled and clacked like scales confirmed it. She had eyes the color of the hills of the underworld, Tom’s eyes.
But it made no sense to Harry that she would be standing here. What investment would Queen Merope of the House of Slytherin have in their quest to break the curse?
Unless her investment isn’t in that, Harry thought as he watched the way she watched Tom. Unless it’s that she wants him to choose the right consort, the one that she would have encouraged…
But even then, Harry would have expected her to appear at the end of the quest. Why here? The princesses weren’t even all free yet, and Tom might find a respectable bride in one of the four youngest.
“Yes,” said the woman, breaking into Harry’s thoughts. “A queen. And mother of a prince who will learn how to be a king.” She took a step forwards, her hair shimmering like glass for a moment, the way her dress did. “And you have still not learned the lessons I set you to learn. Have you, Tom?’
“I’m not a child anymore, Mother.” Tom’s voice was a croak, nothing like the confident tone Harry was so used to hearing from him, but he had straightened his shoulders and was staring at Queen Merope with a defiant tilt of his chin. “I’m not someone you can punish simply because I think differently from you.”
“Oh, my son,” Queen Merope said, her smile widening a little. Her teeth shone with what seemed to be reflected light from the hills. “That is not the reason I came to punish you.” She took another step nearer.
Tom seemed entirely unnerved, and certainly not ready to defy his mother. Harry moved between them. “Why, then?” he asked, playing for time while his eyes scanned the horizon for some sign of the next part of the quest approaching. Even that would be a welcome distraction right now. But the horizon was still only hill piled on hill, each exactly like the others. “Why are you here?”
“To teach the lessons.” Queen Merope hadn’t removed her eyes from Tom. “You need not interfere, Prince Harry of the House of Potter.” She spat the human name as if it burned her mouth. “You have come this far, and I’m certain that you’re capable of overcoming the remaining challenges on your own, aren’t you? It’s not as though Tom has really helped you.”
“Tom has been a great help,” Harry said fiercely. He had the impression that he had been meant to move aside with each step the queen took, but he remained in place. “I never would have healed the tree and the falcon if not for him.”
“And the fires? Who came up with the idea to pass through the flames? That was your idea. And your courage.”
“Tom still walked through them. I know that he wouldn’t have if he was alone, but that didn’t matter. He reached down inside himself and found the courage!”
Queen Merope flicked her fingers. Harry gasped. It felt as though a heavy iron plate had suddenly smacked him across the face.
“You have no right to interfere in the way I discipline my son,” the queen said, indifferently, and faced Tom. “Come here, son. You know what price has to be paid when you have displeased me.”
Tom moved forwards, his jaw down and a blank light in his eyes. Harry grabbed hold of his arm and dragged him to a standstill.
“You would interfere in this?” The queen turned to face Harry. Her eyes had acquired a glassy tint themselves, as if she was imagining some of the things that she could do to Tom. “This is a royal family affair, and an Unseelie affair. Neither of which you are.”
“I’m a prince, and I can tell you that-”
Harry had been about to say something about the way that his parents had disciplined their children, but the queen shook her head. “You do not get to claim one name and position when Tom is courting you, and then deny them now,” she whispered. “You know you are a servant. You have made yourself a good one. But the servant obeys the queen and prince. You know that.”
Harry shivered. Yes, he knew that. How could he have forgotten? He was a steward, and he obeyed his father’s orders-
His father’s orders. But his father wasn’t here, was he? And there was something amiss, Harry was certain of that, whatever the interactions between the queen and her son might be like in private.
Tom didn’t stand there like a blithering idiot while other people discussed his fate. That was more wrong to Harry than the thought of playing himself up as a prince now.
He shook his head and took a long step forwards. “I’m a prince even if I don’t always claim the title,” he said. His voice was hoarse, which made Harry wonder if he had stood a longer time there under the queen’s enchantment than he knew. “And I know that you wouldn’t treat the son who’s the heir to your throne this way.”
“I also have a daughter, Princess Amratha. Tom may have told you of her. She is more beautiful, more elven. She will certainly make a better ruler for the kingdom than someone who associates with people like you.”
Harry clenched his hands, refusing to back down, and said, “He told me about her. He never said that he thought she was better than him. Just more elven.”
“That equates to better, you stupid boy.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Harry said, and managed to smile as he thought about the wayTom would react to those words if he was acting like himself. “Tom would never think that someone was better than he was.”
The queen stared at him in silence. Harry stared back, not daring to take his eyes from her, although he wanted badly to glance at Tom and see if he was waking up at all. This was a dangerous opponent.
Or punishment? Had the queen died in the time Tom had been away from home and the underworld had brought her spirit forth to punish him?
Harry frowned. No, the more he thought about it, the less he thought it would be that way. Everything he had heard about the elven underworld said it didn’t work like the human underworld, which punished and tormented the souls of the pitiful dead who wandered there. Instead, the elven underworld acted more like a labyrinth constructed out of the souls of those who ventured there.
A labyrinth made of souls…
That was an important thought, but before he could pursue it much further, Queen Merope turned towards him, and her face blazed with beauty.
It was beauty that Harry had only seen before in the middle of sunsets and other works of art made of shadows and dark but brilliant colors. There was a tapestry in Lord Black’s house that looked sort of like her face right now, and depicted the Unseelie elves dancing in the middle of a dark forest around a blood-stained altar. Queen Merope’s eyes suddenly had a glossy sheen, as though they reflected everything around them, and Harry could see how small and unworthy he was in that reflection.
“You need to understand,” the queen whispered, stepping forwards and reaching out a hand. It didn’t touch Harry’s cheek, but Harry knew why. Even renewed by Hyacinth’s phoenix fire, his skin was too dirty for an elf to touch. “I granted you a few kind words and a chance to defend yourself because that is the sort of person I am. But you should have been happy claiming the place you chose, a dirty servant. That is all humans and half-elves are to the rest of us. Servants. Those who rule because we indulge them. Are you aware of the ultimate goal of Faerie, prince?”
The name was gently, dreadfully mocking. Harry struggled to clear his throat. It was hard. It was clogged with the consciousness of his own unworthiness. “I-I think that Faerie is going to take over the human realms. When the majority of the population in each kingdom are of elven blood or under the sway of elves, then Faerie will grow and absorb the human kingdoms into itself.”
It was something he had only dared to voice on long winter nights before this, sitting by himself in his quarters. There were portraits and mirrors he could talk to, all of them enchanted against betraying the blood of the House of the Potter. They had been horrified, but the idea had seemed abstract to Harry. First, he was half an elf himself; second, he had a deep-down contempt for those who grew so enchanted by glamour that they pined themselves to death, the way the old steward had done after Queen Lily had died.
The way his father was doing.
“Yes, exactly,” Queen Merope said, and smiled at him. The smile made Harry want to kneel, but somehow he stayed on his feet. She frowned slightly and glanced over his shoulder at Tom, who was still separated from her by the imposition of Harry’s body. “And that’s a strategy that was decided on in Faerie long ago, when we saw how fast humans bore children and how hungry they were for land. We could not fight them with armies. We chose to fight them with beauty.”
Queen Merope leaned closer and shook her head a little. “And you, foolish half-elf, have all the dirty blood and weak mind that I would expect from a human. Nothing you saw here in the underworld has been real.” She paused and then gave a tinkling sigh like glass breaking cut with silver bells. “Or perhaps I should say that nothing you saw here has been as an elf would see it.”
“I know that,” Harry said. “I’ve accepted it.”
“But have you accepted the consequences? That it means you cannot be with my son?” Queen Merope nodded to Tom, who had a frown on his face, but still didn’t seem to have woken up completely. “Because he sees things the way an elf would? Because he is more elven than you will ever be?” She paused, then added with utter contempt, “Or would you still say that you have a claim on him?”
“It’s not that I have a claim,” Harry began.
Queen Merope laughed, and once again, it was so sweet that Harry found himself wincing before he thought about it. “But you would still act as though you do.” She shook her head. “Tom will learn better, and I will discipline him, and then we will return to the world. He will take one of your sisters as wife. Probably one of the older ones. I doubt he would care for the younger.”
“And what about me?”
Queen Merope smiled at him, a slow tilt of her hair making it clatter as it slid down her neck. It sounded like the warning of a rattlesnake before it struck, Harry thought. “I am sure that a fine young half-elf like you can find his own way out, yes? Because you think yourself good enough to make a claim on my son.”
“Tom wouldn’t want you to leave me here like this.”
“What Tom wants no longer matters.” Queen Merope turned and ran a hand down Tom’s face, and his expression shifted into one of absurd calm. Tom would never be so unaware under normal circumstances, Harry thought, and that increased his sense of wrongness about the entire situation. “I will take care of him after the discipline, and he will find how much better his life goes when he listens to me.”
“Were you the one who burned his father to death?”
Queen Merope stopped and stared at him. Harry didn’t know where the question had come from, but he had thought, and Tom feared fire in a way that spoke of seeing his father’s death, and he had mentioned that his mother had received news from Faerie about Queen Lily’s pregnancies, and he had forbidden Harry from speaking about her…
“Perhaps you are more clever than you look,” said Queen Merope, with a slight bow of her head. “But not clever enough to claim my son.”
“I want to see him safely back in the human world,” Harry said quietly. “With the curse on my sisters being broken.”
“Then you want him for that. Not for himself.”
“You have no idea what the relationship between us is.”
Queen Merope raked Harry with a glance that ran up and down his body like claws .”I have a good idea, and no need to sully my mind with the details.”
Harry felt the blush creeping up his face and wished something could stop it. He knew he looked like a human when he blushed, and from the slight smile on Queen Merope’s face, she knew that and was counting on it.
She started to turn away, reaching out to drag Tom by his arm. “Entertaining conversation aside, you have no claim on myself or my son. I wish you luck in finding your way out of the underworld, Prince Harry.”
“Tom wouldn’t want you to leave me here.”
“As I said, he no longer has the luxury of an opinion.”
Harry braced his feet and shook his head once, sharply. It was something he had resorted to when some elven visitors from his mother’s part of Faerie had come to his father’s court, and they had laid enchantments on the other servants simply by the way they moved and looked and spoke. Harry wanted to challenge his own cowardice and go after Queen Merope. She had no right to turn Tom into the sort of passive toy he would hate being, or expose his secrets and weaknesses to Harry.
He did nothing but shake his own head, but Queen Merope gasped and staggered. Her hand reached out and groped at the air in front of her as though she had lost track of an iron bar she was following. Then she dropped Tom’s arm and spun to face Harry.
Her face was a mask of rage, and all the Unseelie beauty had fled. Harry stared back and thought that was strange. His mother had been beautiful even in her anger, and it made sense that an Unseelie elf would be the same, although perhaps with considerably more bloody-mindedness.
“You dare?” she spat. “You leave me with no choice but to use the final weapon!”
Harry sprang back, trying to remember human spells that would save him and Tom in this instance while he expected her to draw a blade-
And instead, she began to dance.
Harry hastily tried to close his eyes. He had heard all the stories-which were more like “history” in the case of elves-of Faerie dancing that enchained mortals. He was enough like a human that he assumed he would need rescuing if he watched long enough, and Tom was no longer capable of protecting him.
But when he looked again at Queen Merope, she was spinning with her arms up and her hair flying behind her. She was graceful, but she didn’t compel him to watch her; she did nothing but move back and forth rhythmically. Harry blinked. Once again, she seemed to be doing this in a strange way.
In fact, her dancing looked familiar, even though it shouldn’t have. Harry had seen elves dance, but they were Seelie dances. Why would an Unseelie elf do something like that?’
Queen Merope finished a turn and faced him again. Her eyes stared at him, burning indigo, but also glossy in a way that made Harry wonder if she wasn’t enchanted herself.
Glossy, or-
Reflective.
Iris’s gift is mirrors!
Harry dashed straight at Queen Merope. Her eyes opened and she lifted her hands as if she was going to score his face with physical claws this time, but Harry forced himself to ignore that. He grabbed her wrists and held them out from her body, so she couldn’t hurt him that way, and leaned forwards to see his reflection in her eyes.
Dirty. Grubby. Human. The way he had always looked, the way he had presented himself to Tom.
Harry took a deep breath and said the words that rolled thickly up his throat, like stones.
“I am a prince, and I do have elven qualities.”
Queen Merope shrieked, and the shriek started somewhere in the depths of the mirror that was her eyes and rose up long and hard and fast. Harry continued to hold her wrists, ignoring her as she writhed in his arms and adopted other forms, including that of his mother for a moment, and Iris. Then came Jade’s form, and Harry smiled coldly.
“And Jade’s gift is the dance,” he told the figure, and it broke apart, shattered, like flying fragments of mirrors, only to reform into the darkly shining figure he had glimpsed once before.
“And Krystal’s gift is beauty,” Harry said. “But I concede that I hold my own beauty, or someone like Tom would never have slept with me no matter how tempted he might have been.”
The face writhed this time, drowning in water like the pool that Krystal sometimes admired her face in, and a final face rose, one that was-
Harry nearly shivered, nearly let the figure go. This was himself the way he had sometimes imagined he might be, with his hair a dark, deep red that was a variant of his mother’s blood-fire color, and verdant green eyes like the hills of Faerie, and a smile that could beguile anyone who saw it, and a sword by his side that had been forged in the wounds of dragons. This particular face could lead a nation.
The idealized version of himself smiled back at him and murmured in a sweet voice on the edge of hearing, “Wouldn’t your Tom want you if you looked like this?”
Harry reached back to memory and reality-or at least his memory and his reality. Maybe it was all different, in different versions of the elven underworld. But he could only pursue what he knew to be real.
“He wanted me even though I didn’t.” Harry narrowed his eyes a moment later, remembering how the figure that had looked like Queen Merope had tried to bewitch him at first, and added, “And Lobelia’s gift is words.”
The figure melted completely, a runnel of quicksilver that slumped out of his hands onto the grass. Harry gasped as he watched half the indigo hills around them wink out of sight, but then he nodded. Of course. They had been reflections of each other.
Rather as Queen Merope had been a reflection of Tom’s deepest fears, or his susceptibility to enchantment.
Harry watched as the ground shivered, and out of it grew two flowers. One was an iris that raced towards the dim air of the underworld as if towards the sun, a piece of jade carved to look like a dancing maiden caught in its petals. The other was a lobelia. On one petal was a tiny crystal pool of water.
Harry supposed that was all the acknowledgment that he was going to get that his sisters were now free. He swallowed, his heart still pounding. That had been the hardest challenge, especially since the reflection had been free to use words, beauty, and dance as a means to enchant him.
“Harry?”
Harry turned slowly to face Tom.
Tom was staring at him with his usual expression back again, although Harry thought he had never seen him look so startled. He blinked and said, “For a moment, you were-it was as if I was looking through a pane of glass.”
Harry smiled sadly. Tom must have seen him through the mirror of the curse’s glamour. Yes, it had made Harry look like the kind of prince who could be a consort to a future king, and someone who might stand up to the real Queen Merope, not the shadow of her they had met here.
But that was a dream, and it was as ended as the curse was now.
“My sisters are free,” he said quietly, nodding to the flowers. “And so are you, now. Do you think we can find our way back to the gate that leads out from the underworld?”
“I-think we can.” Tom stared at him for a second longer, and then his eyes dipped to the level of Harry’s collarbone and his expression became fierce. “You’re hurt.”
Harry looked down in surprise. A long, shallow scratch ran along the side of his neck, and began to hurt when his eyes landed on it, as if it had waiting for him to notice it. Harry shrugged. He supposed one of the false Merope’s nails must have scratched him after all, or perhaps one of the flying fragments of the mirror it had become had. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s a wound you got defending me, when I was helpless.” Tom’s voice was soft and his eyes concerned in a way Harry hadn’t known they could get. “Let me.” He reached down and took something fluffy out of a pocket. Harry blinked, watching him. Tom was holding a handkerchief made of what looked like silk as silver as shadows.
He stepped forwards and knotted it gently around Harry’s neck, fussing with the folds until he had them the way he wanted them. Then he stepped back with a faint smile. “What do you think?”
Harry looked down, wondering what there could be to “think” about a handkerchief, but had to smile when he saw that the green letters that spilled out P. T. H. S. were right over his pulsepoint. Prince Thomas of the House of Slytherin. Harry traced them with a finger for a minute, and then looked up. “I like it.”
Tom’s gaze clung to his for a second before moving away. He seemed shier and more awkward than he ever had, but Harry thought he understood. How did you face the man who’d had to rescue you despite you being more elven than him, let alone the man you’d slept with?
And now the quest that had included that sex was done.
Harry swallowed and reached for the pack that Tom had dropped when the enchantment began to work on him. “Have you thought about which of my sisters you want to take as your consort?” he asked softly. He understood now how difficult Tom’s choice must be. He would want someone not only intelligent and with magic and who could be his equal, but someone who could help him withstand Queen Merope’s overwhelming presence-assuming she was anything like the reflection that the curse had woven for Tom.
“Yes, I have. There is only one consort I desire.”
Harry thought of asking for the name, but he was too afraid he would flinch when Tom told him. He contented himself with a long, slow breath, and turning in the direction of the gate. “Let’s get out of here.”
He’d only taken one step when Tom grabbed his elbow and steered him onto a different path, shaking his head in what sounded like exasperation. “Really, Harry. You can see through a truth of the most difficult test of the curse, but you can’t see the path blazing across the grass?”
Harry relaxed. The chiding, arrogant Tom was back.
And although it wouldn’t be easy to give him up to-who? Harry thought it was probably Amaranth or Beryl-Harry would cherish the small amount of time he had remaining with him.
Part Seven.
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