Chapter Twenty-Six of 'Lightning and War'- Drained
Chapter Twenty-Five.
Title: Lightning and War (26/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, a few het and slash background pairings mentioned
Content Notes: Established relationship, angst, violence, dimension travel
Rating: R
Summary: Harry and Tom are pursuing Harry’s cousin Jonquil Potter into Tom’s dangerous, paranoia-ridden world. In addition to finding Jonquil, they need to deal with Dumbledore, Tom’s associates, and dangerous fluctuations in Harry’s magic. Sequel to Jonquils and Lightning.
Author’s Notes: This story involves a lot of background that won’t make much sense without having read the prequel. At the moment, I don’t know how long this story will be or if it will be the last in the series.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Six-Drained
“The others want to know if Tom will be able to lead us.”
Harry nodded quietly to Shara. “Of course he will. Although we both faced Dumbledore, and Dumbledore cursed him, he lived. And we’ll make sure that the old man pays for the curse.” He settled back behind the breakfast table and started eating again, ignoring the way that Shara stared at him and ignored the bacon and eggs. He’d already invited her to eat, and she had decided not to.
“But what did the curse do?” Shara was staring at the red weals on his face, too, Harry saw.
He wasn’t about to admit that Tom’s Parseltongue was gone or that the wild magic had failed them, not when the people who followed them would probably lose their confidence and never get it back after hearing that. He shrugged a little and munched on a particularly toothsome piece of bacon. “He got hurt. But he recovered after a bit of rest.”
As far as Harry was concerned, that was even the truth. Tom had slept in his arms and then opened his eyes with less of an obsessed look, and he had asked Harry to speak Parseltongue to him and then listened intently to it and shaken his head. At least he wasn’t the silent, hollow shell he had been right after Dumbledore’s curse.
“Did he curse you, too?”
Harry snorted. “No. These came from magic, but something else.”
Shara nibbled her lip for a second, and then nodded. She walked over and sat on the chair across from him. “I’m just-starting to be afraid that we’ll lose this war, Mr. Potter.”
“Why is that?” Tom’s voice asked coldly from behind her. “Are the other Knights of Walpurgis starting to doubt their lord?”
Shara whirled around and dropped into a full kneeling position that Harry had never seen her take before. He shuddered a little and continued eating his eggs. He was grateful that the Knights treated him with less deference than Tom, if that was how they were going to show their bloody deference.
“No,” Shara breathed out, and it at least sounded sincere to Harry, although one of Tom’s eyebrows rose as he paced in a slow circle around Shara. “Never, my lord. But-you have to know that word of our defeat in the Black library has spread, and then the Malfoys removed you from their house, and then you were cursed by Dumbledore. None of us were even certain that you had survived that.”
“Ah. Then it is about appearances.” Tom sat down in the chair next to Harry and stole a piece of bacon from his hand. Harry reached out and touched his arm briefly. Tom nodded and continued eating the bacon as if it tasted better because it was stolen. “I can make an appearance that ought to satisfy them.”
“Pardon me, my lord, who? The Knights, or Dumbledore, or the Order of the Phoenix, or the wider public?” At least Shara’s brain hadn’t stopped working just because she was cowering on the floor, Harry thought.
“Everyone,” Tom said, with the kind of bite to his voice that Harry knew well. He held back a sigh as Tom turned towards him.
“Harry.”
“Yes, Thomas?” Tom narrowed his eyes but ignored the alteration of his name, only bending his head a little.
“I know you can do things with the power of the diadem that you haven’t yet, and that you can do magic with Parseltongue that you haven’t explored.” Tom reached out and slid his hand gently up Harry’s arm, towards his shoulder. Harry found himself shivering relentlessly, and from the way Tom smiled, he enjoyed that. “Shall we?”
Harry nodded slowly. Yes, he could understand why Tom was doing it this way. The diadem was an impressive Potter legacy, and by having Harry wield it and Parseltongue, no one had to know about their failure with the wild magic. Or that Tom would only be able to stand by smiling and not understand as Harry spoke in the language of serpents.
“Yes,” he said, and put his hand on Tom’s arm.
*
Tom studied the Knights in front of him with a cool eye. Abraxas was there, and Shara, and Lestrange, and Avery, and several others who made him feel a slushy sort of relief. But not as many as there should have been.
“Have the others abandoned us because they think me weak, or because they fear Dumbledore?” he asked, as he paced back and forth in front of them. They were kneeling on the grass of the grounds behind the Potter house, although not too near the cursed grove of trees that had tried to kill Tom and Harry. Tom was thinking about chopping down those trees.
“Um.” Abraxas fidgeted in place when Tom stared at him. “Neither, my lord.”
“Then what is it?”
“Most of the rest have parents who are keeping them home, or have taken them out of the country,” Shara explained. She didn’t flinch when Tom frowned at her, although that should have been news that came to him first. “You might have to call on some of your older followers, my lord.”
Tom nodded slowly. That made too much sense, and it was one of the perils with appealing to the younger generation. Although the age of majority in the wizarding world was seventeen, many pure-blood families had rules that said they retained some control over their children until they were twenty-one or older.
Well, not all his followers were pure-blood, and he had some members of the Wizengamot who owed him favors or were otherwise closer than others. Tom held up his hand and closed his eyes. He heard the Knights in front of him shifting around excitedly and he concealed his smile. He didn’t do this kind of magic often because it was so draining, but they considered it a privilege to see it.
He wondered briefly if Harry, standing off to the side in quiet, would like to see it, too, and then the rising tide of the magic swept him away.
Tom had never marked his followers the way that Dumbledore had branded his Phoenix minions. He considered it too much an identifying mark, one that Dumbledore had only got away with because of his enormous power as Minister. As someone leading a rebellion, he needed a way to connect them to him that wasn’t so obvious to outsiders.
Instead, he had settled an oath that would work itself into the body and the magic of the person who had made it. It could lie dormant for years until Tom called on it. He had heard that Dumbledore could brand even the unwilling with his phoenix and control them that way; the magic of the mark would gradually compel them to serve him in truth. In contrast, the oath Tom had had his Knights take could only be spoken by the willing.
But Tom wouldn’t have wanted disloyal Knights anyway, and now his consciousness ascended into the air over Britain, born on the thermals of his followers’ magic.
His mind reached for names and found them. Lawrence Evers, a Muggleborn. Reginald Ellemere, a half-blood who had taken the name of his Muggle mother when his pure-blood father disowned him. Sally Marchbanks, just appointed to the Wizengamot this year.
Down and across and into their dreams his summons spread, and he dimly felt his Knights who were in front of him shuddering, caught up in the summons just as the others were. People who had been asleep stood up and began moving, as awake as if they had all drunk perfect Pepper-Up Potions. Those who had been studying found their minds cleared of mist and their thoughts focused on him. One injured Knight in St. Mungo’s, who had held back an Order wizard who had been taking aim at a shopkeeper suspected of practicing Dark Ars, floated into the air as her injuries healed and the magic Apparated her to Tom.
Tom opened his eyes and found himself drifting in the midst of intense swirls of blue and violet magic. He blinked and sighed with an open mouth, and looked at the more than fifty Knights now kneeling in front of him, including some of those who would have been restricted by their parents. Tom smiled slightly. It was nice to know that their devotion to him ran deeper than it did to their families.
He turned to Harry, and did see that his mouth was open and his eyes shining. Tom smiled at him before he faced his Knights.
*
Harry didn’t listen much to Tom’s voice as he began a speech about how his Knights were the best fighters in the world and they were going to help him against Dumbledore and win. He was too overcome with the tugging sensation that had pulled at him when Tom began to summon his people.
The violet color of the magic said it was an oath, but Harry hadn’t taken an oath to Tom-
No, wait, of course I did. When we bonded.
Harry blinked, and blinked, and blinked again. He walked slowly towards Tom. Tom didn’t turn to face him, still continuing the speech, but held out one hand. Harry clasped it and leaned against his shoulder in silence as Tom finished to a few enthusiastic nods.
“-And there are some people who would be content to let Dumbledore dictate their futures for them, but not one of them is here! We are here, and we are the ones who are going to provide the shield for the wizarding world that the Order of the Phoenix will break upon. Are you with me?”
The oldest woman there, who Harry thought he had perhaps seen among the Wizengamot when they were making the declaration of war on Dumbledore, smiled and lifted her wand. It shone silvery at the tip with a charm Harry didn’t know, the same color as her hair. “We will break them.”
“We will break them!” yelled Shara, her own face bright with wonder and delight and her own wand brilliant.
“We will!” voices roared up and down the lines of Knights, and Harry felt Tom’s hand tighten on his arm.
“We will break them!” he cried, and if his voice sounded a little distorted in the silence that had descended after that great roar, no one, from the looks on their faces, was going to criticize their lord’s husband.
“Ready?” Tom turned to face Harry, and Harry realized with a jolt that Tom was going to rely solely upon him. In fact, Tom was smiling a little as if he thought this was a lovely surprise for Harry, instead of a massive burden. “Shall we create the shield that the Order of the Phoenix will break upon, Harry?”
“You could have warned me,” Harry squeezed out of the side of his mouth. Tom shrugged with one shoulder.
“I didn’t think I needed to.”
And perhaps he didn’t need to, Harry conceded a second later. There were powers that the diadem abruptly filled his mind with, powers that had lain untapped in the damn thing for years. And if any Potter was going to harness them, it would be him. The diadem didn’t fully count Tom as a Potter.
Harry extended his empty left hand and his wand in front of him, aware that the Knights watched him in breathless silence. He cast without words, the intention joining with the magic that was rising like a fountain from the diadem.
From his hands, yellow light streamed, the color of some of the candles Harry remembered Hermione burning when she was studying ancient books. The shade eddied and danced for a second, and then formed a gleaming, round shield in front of Harry himself, so bright that he squinted. The shield spread out, thickening and extending up and down, covering the Knights in front of them and Tom to his side.
When the diadem gave a little pulse that indicated it was the right time, Harry released his hold on the shield. It bobbled for a second, the light it was made of sinking beneath the ground. Harry shook his head and adjusted it, flickering his fingers before he thought about it. The shield steadied again, and shone in the middle of the night like a lamp seen from afar in a window.
“How study is the shield?” whispered the oldest Knight, the one Harry thought might be a member of the Wizengamot.
Harry grinned. “Why doesn’t one of you go outside it and cast at it?”
It was no surprise, really, that it was Shara who volunteered, scrambling to her feet with her hair streaming behind her. She stepped outside the shield and spun around, her wand lifting. Harry winced as she called a powerful red Thunderous Curse and directed it straight at the shield.
In this case, however, the thunder that rolled through the night was the only effect. When it died, the shield hovered without cracks. Shara reached out and tapped her hand on the shield, gasping in surprise when her fingers went through.
“So the shield is only impervious to spells?” asked Abraxas.
“It’s impervious to what I want it to be impervious to,” Harry said, suddenly sure that it was true, although he hadn’t known that until he spoke. He supposed the diadem was feeding him some knowledge that he didn’t hear as a separate voice from his own thoughts. He concentrated, and the shield grew wider, dimmer, and softer. He turned to Tom. “Try to punch me through it.”
Tom struck without hesitation, and Harry snorted a little even as his hand bounced off the shield. He eyed Tom. Could have looked a little less enthusiastic than you did then, he tried to say, without speaking aloud.
Tom gave him a brilliant smile and leaned back. “And you think that you can make it impervious to anything Dumbledore’s forces might try?”
Harry nodded. “And-well, it would take me time to construct this.” He could feel the slight ebb of his magic inside him. He needed to rest before he did something this large again. “But I think we need to kill Dumbledore.”
Tom’s eyes widened a little, but Shara was the one who spoke. “Of course we hope to do that,” she said. “But we were just thinking in terms of forcing him out of power because he’s so strong. It would probably be easier to make him flee than kill him. Why would you want to do that?”
“Because,” Harry said, not taking his eyes from Tom’s, “he’s cast curses on this land and people. And if you kill the caster, then the curse often breaks if it’s one that doesn’t have a simple counter.”
Tom’s breath caught, and he nodded once, thoughtfully. “Yes, there’s something to what Harry says,” he murmured.
Harry clenched his hand around Tom’s for a second, and then turned back to answer more questions from the Knights about what the shield could do and how they would bring it with them to the battlefield. Tom would join in in a second, of course, but Harry thought he should let him have this moment first.
*
I should have thought of that myself.
Tom hadn’t thought enough about the implications of the curse that had removed his Parseltongue because he had been too busy thinking he could use the wild magic to take care of it, and then trying to come to terms with the fact that it might not have a counter. But Harry had pierced to the center of the situation as he so often did.
Curses sometimes died with their caster, and that was, as Harry had pointed out, more likely if the spell was complex and old, and-although Harry hadn’t mentioned this-Dark.
Tom would like to repay the old hypocrite’s use of a Dark curse, the kind he denounced, by destroying him.
And Harry was willing to do that for him, with him, even if he had valued another version of Dumbledore in his first world.
Tom freed his hand from Harry’s, but only so that he could slide it behind his husband’s back. Harry leaned against his arm, and his voice grew softer and stronger as he answered the questions flowing from the Knights. Tom settled himself, centered and grounded again. He wasn’t weak. Not if he could provide that kind of strength to Harry.
His eyes lingered for a moment on the pulsing jewel in the diadem. Whether or not all the strength and ideas Harry was having came from that, Tom didn’t know, but unlike the wild magic in the trees on the Potter grounds, he was confident that this was a power that wouldn’t betray them.
Dumbledore, though…
Tom smiled. He was looking forward to that betrayal when it happened, yes indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
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