Chapter Thirty of 'Lightning and War'- Battle's Dawn
Chapter Twenty-Nine.
Title: Lightning and War (30/35)
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 Thirty-Battle’s Dawn
Harry took a long step forwards, his eyes on the fence in front of him. It was made of what looked like frozen, pearly magic, forced to remain in the shape of delicately-arched points and gates ornamented with swirling curlicues of mist. One of the gates, right in front of him, stood swung back against the fence, leaving him a path inside the circle the fence made.
And coming through the gate right opposite him was Dumbledore’s emissary.
You can do this, Harry reminded himself, and strode in.
The emissary was a woman Harry didn’t know, with long, thick blonde hair braided back so that it trailed in a cable down her shoulder and the Order of the Phoenix brand on her cheek. She came to a stop and nodded briskly to Harry. “You are one of the Knights of Walpurgis?”
“In a way. My name’s Harry Potter. I’m Tom Potter’s husband.”
The woman paused, as though wrong-footed. Maybe they didn’t expect me or Tom to come ourselves, because Albus wouldn’t come in person, Harry thought, and spread his magic out around him so that he would be alerted the minute someone moved. He wouldn’t put it past the Order to try an assassination attempt right now.
“I was told to negotiate with the Knights of Walpurgis.”
Harry hid a silent sigh. He really hated the lack of independence that Dumbledore’s followers had. Right now, it meant this woman obviously had no idea how to deal with an unexpected complication. “I am one of the leaders of the Knights of Walpurgis.”
After a long, silent moment, when the woman seemed to be consulting whatever orders Dumbledore had implanted in her head, she nodded as if that was acceptable. “Very well. Then you should know that we will offer peace terms for the Knights if the Potters are surrendered to us.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you do not understand the peace terms we offer. We will not persecute the Knights in any way-”
“And the answer is still no.” Harry had to smile at the expression of perplexity that once again grew on the woman’s face. He was so glad that he had joined Tom’s side instead of the Order in this world, for many reasons, but right now the reason was that the subservience of the Order members would have frustrated him. The Knights were bad enough when they acted even a fraction like this. “We will fight.”
“You will lose.”
“That might be,” Harry said quietly. “But you aren’t worried about losing at all, are you?”
“Our leader is the Minister for Magic,” the woman answered simply, and then turned around and walked back through the gate. Harry hastily stepped back himself and then Apparated to the Potter house. Peace terms for the emissaries held only as long as that peculiar fence existed.
Tom stepped up to him the minute Harry walked through the door, his eyes calm and intent. “What happened?”
“They offered leniency for the Knights if you and I would surrender to them. Except that she said ‘the Potters’ and acted as though one of them wasn’t standing right in front of her.” Harry shook his head and let Tom’s arm encircle his shoulder. “It was creepy. She didn’t act like she knew I was really the leader, either. She’d been supposedly ordered to negotiate the terms with one of the Knights.”
“That’s a sign that Dumbledore’s tightened his hold on them, then.” Tom was doing the same thing at the moment, squeezing Harry until Harry had to draw in a gasping breath, but Harry didn’t think it would be diplomatic to mention it. “Their brands mean that he can do various things like see through their eyes, and usually that’s all he does. But now he’ll be drawing in all their magic as well.”
“He can do that?”
“Yes.” Tom glanced at him, his face carefully blank. “There’s a reason that no one has ever successfully fought him before, Harry, totally discounting his popularity as Minister.”
Harry nodded and closed his eyes. There had been a certain suspicion building in his mind since Dorea had told them about the spell Dumbledore had probably cast on his wand. And that meant he needed to talk to her.
*
“I could have come here alone,” Harry hissed over his shoulder at Tom as he knocked on the door of the room they had given Dorea.
“In the sense of physical capability, yes,” Tom said, and smiled at Harry as the door opened and took away his power to snap back.
“Harry? What is it?” Dorea looked pale and drawn, but then, she had looked like that pretty often since she had come to “warn” Harry about the spell Dumbledore had taken from the Black library. Tom still wasn’t sure that her motivation was as pure as that, but that didn’t matter next to his ability to keep her under control.
“I think you should go back to the portal and return to your world,” Harry said.
“Why?” Dorea pushed her hair back from her face, and only seemed to see Tom then. Her mouth tightened before she decided to pretend he didn’t exist. “Do you think that Dumbledore will attempt to sabotage it?”
“No.” Harry took a deep breath of the kind that Tom knew he took often to settle his stomach. “But Tom told me today that Dumbledore can drain his followers’ magic through their brands. In order to fight him, I might need to collapse the portal that leads to your world and take back the magic I was using to stabilize it.”
Tom stared at the back of Harry’s head. He hadn’t mentioned that was his plan, or what he needed to talk to Dorea about, and there was a surge of both dark joy and irritation in Tom’s mind as he considered it.
“But that would mean that you could never access the portal that leads back to your first world again!” Dorea was reaching out a hand to Harry as if she was actually concerned about him, her eyes wide.
Harry took a deep, difficult breath. Before he could speak, Tom cut in. “And it means that the promise you made to me becomes useless.”
Harry glanced over his shoulder and murmured, “If I need that magic to fight him, then I doubt I could flee in any case.”
Tom considered that and decided that he could see the sense in it. Meanwhile, Harry turned back to Dorea, leaning his forearm on her doorframe and making his voice gentle. “I think I might be able to find another way back to my first world when I want to visit my friends, Aunt Dorea. I did it once when it wasn’t supposed to be possible, and I know that the kind of oracles who opened the portal from my first world exist here, because Tom relied on one to find his way to me.”
Tom was silent, because this part of the discussion didn’t really have to involve him. But he did think, if only to himself, that Harry wasn’t ever going to visit another world unaccompanied.
“I-” Dorea blinked back tears. “You’re really never going to return and visit us again.”
“I don’t think so,” Harry said gently. “We’ll see if I’m able to keep the portal open. Maybe in a few months or years. But I only lived with you for six months, and even though I loved it, I don’t really belong in your world.”
Dorea nodded after a second, and leaned forwards to kiss his cheek. Tom tensed, but Harry didn’t seem upset himself, and it wasn’t as though Tom really feared Harry’s sort-of great-aunt was competition for his affections. He relaxed again.
“Do you belong here?” Dorea asked then, and Tom thought about murdering her.
“Of course I do.” Harry just sounded surprised, not upset, which was the reason Dorea still had an intact head. He stepped back, pressing more firmly into Tom’s side and under his arm. “With my husband.”
Tom shot Dorea a smug smile, but annoyingly, Dorea wasn’t looking at him. She only sighed and nodded. “Be safe, Harry. I wish you a successful battle. I’ll leave this morning and make sure that I’m back through the portal by noon.”
“Thanks, Great-Aunt Dorea.” Harry squeezed her hand one more time, and then turned and walked down the corridor. Tom walked with him, not looking back at Dorea because she was probably packing and wouldn’t notice him again.
“How likely is it that you think you’ll need to call on the magic you put into the portal to fight Dumbledore?” Tom asked when they were back in their own bedroom with the door shut behind them.
Harry sighed, and his weariness settled heavily on him. Tom felt another surge of smugness that he was the one who got to see this when the other Knights and Harry’s sort-of-family didn’t, but he quelled it. “I have no idea. But the idea occurred to me when you said that he can draw on the magic of the Order members. I don’t want to leave anything to chance.”
“Why? When this wasn’t even originally your war?”
Harry gave him an incredulous glance. “Can you ask? Because it’s your war. Because Dumbledore would kill me anyway if I tried to run. Because his death is necessary to get your Parseltongue back. Because the thought of him using that spell on anyone, and controlling this world the way he controls the Order, makes me sick.” He laid his hand flat on Tom’s chest and searched Tom’s eyes for a second. “Because I thought I belonged here.”
“Of course you do,” Tom said. It was as much as he could do to get the words out, so great was the thickness in his throat. “Of course you do.” And he leaned in and gave Harry as deep a kiss as they had time for.
Harry might have been smiling, as he curled his fingers into Tom’s hair, but it wasn’t as though Tom had some kind of objection to that.
*
Harry wasn’t entirely surprised when he found himself sitting in a misty blue replica of the fence where he had met the Order’s emissary, but he was annoyed. He stood up and said, “This is a dream, isn’t it? And you’re the spirit of the diadem, again?”
It appeared to him in a different way than it had last time. It looked enough like Dorea that Harry started. It pointed a white staff at him and said in a deep, echoing voice that didn’t, thankfully, sound like Dorea’s, “I can feel your enemy drawing on the magic that links him to his followers through their brands.”
“Gathering up their power.”
“Yes.”
Harry nodded. Well, he had known that he probably wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep, no matter how quickly he and Tom tried to snatch it. “Do you have any advice for me on how to deal with this, or just the warning?”
There was silence for long enough that Harry started to worry this was a projection Dumbledore had sent into his head, or something, and not the diadem at all. But then the diadem said, “You will have to collapse the portal into your second world and take back the magic you used to build it unless you are very, very lucky.”
“And move quickly?”
“That, too,” the spirit of the diadem agreed, and then dissolved in front of him, and Harry found himself blinking his eyes open into darkness.
He turned his head and found that Tom was already awake, but lying motionless beside him, staring at Harry as if for guidance. Harry managed to shift his lips into something resembling a smile. “The diadem told me that Dumbledore has started harvesting magic from the Order of the Phoenix.”
Tom blinked. “Anything more useful than that, such as where he is right now?”
Harry lifted a hand and touched the diadem, even though he felt silly about doing so, and surprisingly, the response pulsed through him right away. “Yes, Dumbledore himself is at the Ministry, although I don’t know if all the Order members are with him or if he’s pulling their magic from other places.”
“It doesn’t matter much except for how many people we’ll have to fight through to get to him,” Tom said dismissively, and stood up to begin reaching for his robes.
“Um, I think that matters a lot-”
“But Dumbledore himself is the problem,” Tom said, and fixed Harry with a sharp glance. “Dumbledore is the target, because of the spell on his wand and the magic he’ll use and because we want to reverse the curse that he has me under.”
Harry sighed and nodded. “Fine. I assume that you’ll want most of the Knights to come with us?”
“Yes,” Tom said quietly. “Not Abraxas, even though I know he’ll want to. He’s still recovering from the duel. But we can do this with half of them, I think. The ones who are in the house. Shara should lead them, and I’ll tell her a little about what to expect.”
So she won’t interfere during your potentially suicidal charge at Dumbledore, was how Harry interpreted that. He nodded, and then the reality of it seemed to sweep on him and he found his heartbeat rippling through his chest and his mouth growing dry.
“Tom?”
Tom turned to face him, somehow managing to look poised in the middle of tugging his robes over his shoulders.
“I love you.”
Tom paused for a moment, then leaned forwards without taking a step and kissed Harry firmly on the mouth. “I love you, too,” he said quietly. “And we are going to defeat him. Especially if we arrive at the Ministry before he manages to achieve draining all the magic from his followers.”
Harry took the hint and turned to reach for his own robes. But he was content that Tom understood the message he’d given him, and why he’d wanted to give it.
And the implied one, the good-bye that Harry had wanted to speak. Just in case.
*
“He wants us to come to him.”
It was a conclusion Tom had reached from the moment they’d Flooed into the Ministry without challenge, but he’d wanted to hear Harry speak it aloud, too. It made the silence in the corridors, the darkness around them, the dust drifting in lazy patterns in the air that Tom had already pointed his wand at because it could be part of a trap, all the more real.
“He probably assumes that he’ll win,” Tom murmured as he stabbed the button on the lift in front of them. The lift obediently arrived and clanged open. Tom ignored his shiver as he stepped in, Harry following him with Shara and three of the other Knights. The rest would need to take different lifts. “He has no idea that we know something about his advantages.”
Harry nodded. The look on his face was remote, his features shadowed by the soft light beaming out of the blue jewel on the diadem. Tom wished he didn’t think that he had to take all the burden of dealing with Dumbledore onto his own shoulders. Even if he was the one who would probably have to destroy Dumbledore’s wand and call his magic back from the portal, Tom and the Knights were still here. They could still fight.
The lift took them to the logical place, the Wizengamot’s courtroom. The diadem’s spirit hadn’t actually told them that Dumbledore would be there, but it was a large room, with space for whatever Order members he’d brought with him, and a comfortable place of power. And a symbolic one. It was probably the court of confrontation that Tom would have chosen himself, come to that.
Harry stepped out into the corridor, and a cold wind blew past them, flattening their robes. Shara and the other Knights bounded forwards in a flash, drawing their wands.
Tom drew his breath in to order them to shield, and then found that he couldn’t release it. The overwhelming, overbearing weight of Dumbledore’s magic settled on his shoulders and forced him lower and lower, to kneel on the floor. He shuddered, his head bowing without his consent.
His thoughts ached in him. This was the exact kind of symbolic surrender that Dumbledore would enforce on them, too. It was the kind of thing that Tom might have done to his enemies if he’d had the power.
He checked out of the corners of his eyes and saw that Shara and the other Knights who had taken the lead were kneeling as well. The lifts that were bringing the rest of his people still brought them, but they didn’t get more than a step beyond the lift shafts before they had to drop as well.
But Harry was still on his feet.
Tom stared at him. Had Dumbledore managed to fine-tune the magic so that it wouldn’t affect Harry? That spoke of a level of power and control that worried Tom more than anything else their enemy had done so far.
But Harry shook his head at Tom with a smile and lifted his hands. The jewel on the diadem was blazing. The blue light cut a path through the darkness in front of them, without in any way affecting the pressure that held Tom down.
“Is he leaving you on your feet on purpose?” Tom whispered, gasping in breath and barely able to speak.
“No,” Harry said quietly. “He just can’t touch me because I’ve called in the magic that supported the portal.”
And then Harry lifted his hands higher, and the air in the corridor became incandescent, and Tom believed they might have a chance after all.
Chapter Thirty-One.