Chapter Twenty-Eight of 'His Darkest Devotion'- Clarity
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
Chapter One.
Title: His Darkest Devotion (28/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, background James/Lily, Molly/Arthur, Ron/Hermione, possibly others
Content Notes: Extreme AU, soulmate-identifying marks, angst, violence, torture, gore, minor character deaths
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Harry Potter has been hiding in plain sight all his life, since he carries the soul-mark of Minister Tom Riddle on his arm-and a fulfilled soul-bond will double both partners’ power. His parents and godfather are fugitives, members of the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry is a junior Ministry official feeding the Order what information he can. No one, least of all him, expects Harry to come to the sudden notice of Minister Riddle, or be drawn into a dangerous game of deception.
Author’s Notes: This is a long fic and an extreme AU, as you can see from the summary. The different facets of the AU will be revealed slowly, so roll with the differences at first; in time, all should be revealed.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Eight-Clarity
“Come in, Mr. Potter. Please have a seat.”
Harry nodded and sat down in the chair in front of the Mind-Healer’s desk. He’d thought the man’s office might look less-well, like an office. The Mind-Healer that Sirius had complained about seeing had large glass balls and soft cushions scattered all over the place, and colorful decorations on the walls, and tanks full of water that bubbled and glowed. Sirius had said it was at least easy to distract himself.
This just looked like a nicer office from Hogwarts, although different because it didn’t have the piles of parchment everywhere that were essays waiting to be marked. The desk was a curve of some kind of pale wood, birch or yew maybe. The only decoration was a painting of autumn leaves that shifted slowly back and forth.
Mind-Healer Gerald Laufrey was a tall, dark-skinned man with his long brown hair caught back in a tail. Harry hadn’t seen that many people in his life wear the style. It seemed to be considered “Muggle” by a lot of pure-bloods. He had dark green eyes that Harry avoided, looking down at his hands clasped on his knees.
“I know you were reluctant to meet with me,” Mind-Healer Laufrey said quietly. “Can I ask why?”
Harry took in a deep breath and looked up, this time studying the man for some trace of resentment. But there didn’t seem to be any. He just sat there and studied Harry back and seemed comfortable as the silence stretched.
“My godfather went to a Mind-Healer who essentially berated him into accepting her conclusions,” Harry said quietly. “I didn’t want to have the same experience, and I assumed I probably would.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been on the wrong side of the war-I mean, a war that Albus Dumbledore thought was going to happen. I assume that most of wizarding Britain would think of me as a terrorist. I wasn’t looking forward to hearing about it.”
Laufrey smiled for the first time. “That would make anyone reluctant to visit someone, I think. One thing you should know that is that I’m not here to berate you. And actually, what Minister Riddle told me when he set the appointment up is that he thought you had been abused by many people in your life, and would need help recovering from that abuse.”
“So he spun you this sad story about me not wanting to be a terrorist, and that was all it took to get your attention?” Harry shot a bolt of cold displeasure down his bond with Tom. Smugness came back, and then warmth that lapped around him like a hot bath. Harry shook his head and focused on Laufrey. “I’d hope you were more perceptive than that.”
Laufrey raised his eyebrows a little. “One thing you’ll soon find, Mr. Potter, is that I can’t be irritated as easily as some of the people you might have dealt with in the past. And Minister Riddle told me that he was going to ask you to come into this with your mind open, and your eyes, the same.”
Harry sighed and stared at his hands. “I just-I don’t want you to tell me a lot of shit about how my parents treated me.”
“At the moment, I have no idea what your parents did other than a very shadowy outline Minister Riddle sent me,” Laufrey said placidly. “And I have to make allowances for the fact that of course the Minister would hate anyone trying to keep his soulmate away from him, no matter what justifications they had. I have in fact already sent him an owl telling him that in that case, he should hate you, too.”
Harry jerked his head up. Laufrey held his gaze for a long moment before he winked. “I am loyal to my patients first, Mr. Potter,” he said gently. “And there are many techniques that I can use to show you a healthier path to a clearer mind without following Minister Riddle’s specifications exactly.”
“But you do want me to accept the soul-bond.”
“From where I sit, Mr. Potter, you’ve already done that,” Laufrey said. “What I want you to do is look back at your life that led up to the soul-bond and make peace with it. It’s highly unusual. A challenging case.”
“And that’s the perspective you’ll approach it from.”
Laufrey chuckled. “You are a prickly one. I’m surprised that your soul-mark wasn’t a hedgehog.”
Harry eyed him, but Laufrey didn’t appear to be laughing at him. He smiled at Harry and tilted his head a little to the side. “Will you permit me to explain to you a little more about what I can help you with?”
Open mind, open mind, Harry chanted to himself. Sirius’s awful experiences couldn’t be all there was to Mind-Healers. And he could feel Tom lying like a cat with one eye open in the back of his bond.
“Fine.”
It wasn’t the most gracious giving of permission, but Laufrey nodded and began to speak. “Conversation is a primary tool of the Mind-Healer, but I also work with memories, and with crystals that store the sense of soul-bonds. Some of my patients have permitted me to infuse those crystals with a sensation that is like having a successful soul-bond. Some of them did so at the end of my work with them. Others already had sound bonds and came to me for other reasons, but agreed to do this to benefit future patients I might have. If our sessions go well, it might be that I’ll ask this of you, as well.”
“All right,” Harry said slowly, his mind whirling. Could a crystal like that help Ron and Hermione? It wouldn’t be the same thing as having their bond back, but if they could hold one and be surrounded by the feeling, maybe it could lessen the numbness and withdrawal that Hermione had described to him.
“I think memories will be the first tool that we act with. Minister Riddle told me that he had experienced one of yours. When you were six or seven years old, I believe, and questioned your mother about whether your soul-mark made you an evil person.”
Harry grimaced, but nodded. It was a far more neutral description of the memory than he would have expected Tom to give, so there was that.
“And you also tried at least once to commit suicide.”
Harry tensed his shoulders. That was not a bloody neutral description, Tom. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to-get away from all of it. I wouldn’t ever be able to have a soul-bond, and I hadn’t found any method to remove my mark or make it so that I would survive if my soulmate got killed. It was-” Harry shook his head. “I didn’t get very far.”
“But you tried, and that is significant.” Laufrey regarded Harry for a few moments, then said, “I am interested in looking at one of your memories of trying to remove the mark. Could I see it?”
“Why that one?” Harry blinked. He had been sure that Laufrey would want to investigate one of the memories Tom had told him about.
“It sounds as though it would be in between the two emotional extremes of the others,” Laufrey said quietly. “In some ways, I need to establish a-I am reluctant to use the word normal, but a sort of baseline for what your thoughts about your soul-bond are. This memory might be a good way to do it.”
“All right,” Harry said. He looked around for a Pensieve, but didn’t see one.
“I don’t actually use a Pensieve, but a method of my own.” Laufrey lifted his wand and, moving slowly as if he didn’t want to startle Harry, cast so that the air between them shimmered. Harry blinked as a golden shape appeared and warped into a door. “This method, once the memory is placed behind it, will actually allow us to enter it, and it will-I am reluctant to say have us relive the memory, but it will duplicate the emotional content in a way that a Pensieve memory will not.”
“I don’t want to go through that again.” Harry shook his head when he heard how small his voice was, and sat up angrily. Damn it, I will not look weak. The last thing we need is some of Tom’s enemies trying to take advantage of that. “I-would prefer if we used a Pensieve.”
“The emotions are ones that I will feel, Mr. Potter,” said Laufrey. “You will be separated from them, viewing it more like a Pensieve memory, yourself. You may feel some faint echoes, and of course the memory itself may recall to you some of what you went through. But I will be the one with the full experience.”
Harry stared at him. “Why would you ever do something like that?”
“Because,” Laufrey said simply, “I want to help people.”
Harry drummed his fingers on his arm for a second. It wasn’t as though the impulse was foreign to him, but he had always thought of helping people as keeping secrets, or entering politics, or the kind of actions that the Order of the Phoenix took. Willingly taking on someone else’s emotional pain was-new.
But then again, he had always had enough of his own, and he had never wanted to be a Healer.
“All right,” he said. “How do you extract the memory?”
“In this case, the door does function like a Pensieve. And I would prefer that you do it yourself, so that you can choose exactly where it will begin and end, and obviate the chance of me seeing anything that you do not wish me to.”
Harry nodded slowly, and tried to ignore the feeling that he was unused to being given that much control over his destiny. Even if it was true, that didn’t mean he needed to start sniveling in front of the Mind-Healer.
He moved over and stood next to the golden door, or whatever it was, while focusing as hard as he could on one of the memories he had of trying to remove the mark. Only the removal itself, not the research process, although that bubbled up into the forefront of his mind as well. When he was sure he had the memory isolated, he stuck his wand to his temple and carefully pulled free the shining strands of silver.
Laufrey nodded encouragingly when Harry looked over at him. “Yes, simply stir your wand behind the door.”
Here goes nothing, Harry thought, half-convinced that the memory would simply splash on the floor, or whatever it would do without a Pensieve. He waved his wand behind the door-
And the silvery blob detached and floated quietly into place, hovering behind the door with the air of a politely waiting server.
As Harry watched, blinking, the area inside the memory began to spin and coalesce, so that he could no longer see the floor or the walls. When it settled, Harry was looking at what he would have described as a tent made out of pale canvas. It flapped and resisted the air as if a breeze was blowing.
“And we’re both going in there?” Harry murmured.
Laufrey nodded, sparing him a smile, when before Harry didn’t think he’d taken his eyes from the process of memory extraction. “Yes. We must go both together, and enter through the door, or it doesn’t work the way it should.”
“All right,” Harry breathed. His stomach was trembling like a drum, and he reached out and put his hand on the door’s knob, which was clear crystal, to stop himself from backing away.
Laufrey was a solid presence at his back, and Harry reminded himself, again, that he wouldn’t feel the emotions if this worked. He took a breath and stepped through.
*
Harry opened his eyes and nodded. So far, this was working like Laufrey had predicted. They were in the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts, the ritual room that Harry had called up several times for his attempts to be rid of his soul-mark, but there was no crushing burden of grief and desperation the way Harry knew he had carried that evening.
He glanced once at Laufrey and saw the man breathing rapidly, a hand over his throat. Harry winced a little and turned back to the memory again.
His fourteen-year-old self was sitting in front of a ritual circle drawn in his own blood, which he had collected a little bit at a time over a month, because trying to do it all at once would have resulted in him collapsing of blood loss. There were symbols sketched on the stone floor inside it, also in his blood. Most were runes, but there were also symbols that resembled the wand movements used for Transfigurations and Finite spells. Harry would have been satisfied either to get rid of his mark altogether or to change it into a harmless blob.
Harry paced slowly over to the side so that he could see his younger self’s face; they’d landed facing his back. The teenage Harry was bent over the thick book in front of him, lips moving as he read.
Harry could still remember the most important phrase to him out of that book. You have to mean it; you have to reject the concept of a soulmate completely to get rid of or change his mark.
Well, Harry had. At the time, he’d envisioned no possible reason that the ritual could fail, which only made it all the more devastating that it hadn’t succeeded.
Now, of course, he knew perfectly well why it had failed. He hadn’t been able to reject the concept of a soulmate, no matter how much he had wanted to. He had clung to the fantasy of someone who would complement him and love him.
Except it wasn’t a fantasy, was it?
Harry shook his head and backed away a little so that he could see the intent look on his younger self’s face, and the motions that his hands were making, as he shook out salt and powdered silver shavings over the blood circle.
“Where-where did you get the silver, Mr. Potter?”
Laufrey’s voice was strangled. Harry took another step back, this time to be near the Mind-Healer in case he needed help, but he got a shivering, head-twitching look for his trouble, so he turned back to himself.
“Raided the Potions master’s storage cupboards,” he murmured. Now the younger Harry had closed his eyes and begun to move his lips in the soundless chant that was necessary to remove the soul-mark. Harry didn’t feel the overwhelming intensity of the desperation he would have in the moment, since Laufrey was getting all of it, but he did feel his chest ache for the poor boy who had no idea he would be loved one day.
“Do-did you know what this ritual did?”
“Of course I did,” Harry said simply, glancing over at Laufrey. He was waving his wand and casting several charms that would, if Harry recognized them correctly, calm down a pounding heart. “I had to research it extensively and sneak into the Restricted Section to get the book, after all.”
Even half-incapacitated as he was, the Mind-Healer still narrowed his eyes. “We should speak about your suicidal impulses as well, Mr. Potter.”
“That was only once-”
“This qualifies.”
Harry would have argued the point, but just then, the ritual circle lit up with the radiant silver lightning that Harry remembered from the ritual. He sighed. It looked beautiful from the outside, although of course he hadn’t noticed that at the time. He had simply been devastated that the ritual had failed.
Rising and falling shapes like the Northern Lights, but all in silver, traced the edges of the ritual circle. The younger Harry, opening his eyes, reached the climax of his chant and thrust his marked right wrist into the circle.
A second later, he was screaming, and this was not soundless. It echoed from every corner of the room, and Laufrey bowed his head and shivered.
The younger version of himself screamed, and screamed, and kept his hand in the fire. Harry’s eyes and heart ached as he watched, but he had to admit that, mostly, his eyes were dry. He had already seen and suffered through this, after all, no matter how new it was to Laufrey.
Finally, the past Harry took his hand out of the fire. He stared down at the blistered, burnt skin, and waited until his magic healed a few of the blisters so that he could see if the mark was gone.
It was still there.
The younger Harry bowed his head and wept.
Harry turned his face away. The memory dissolved around them in the meanwhile, and although he had thought they would have to go back through the door, he wasn’t entirely surprised to lift his head and realize they were back in Laufrey’s office without ever passing through it.
“Have a seat, please, Mr. Potter.”
Laufrey’s voice sounded scraped raw. Harry sat down across from him and looked at him carefully. Laufrey nodded as if Harry had asked a question. “That shows me very effectively some of the problems that you dealt with for having the Minister’s soul-mark. Thank you for sharing it with me.”
“Even though those problems were self-inflicted?”
“Then you came up with all the ideas you had about your soul-mark on your own?”
Harry winced. Shit, walked right into that one. “No, sir. I mean-”
“I’d prefer it if you referred to me as Gerald, Mr. Potter. Having a barrier of formality between us is not going to help your healing.”
“Then why are you calling me by my last name?”
Laufrey paused for a second, then smiled. “Good point. All right, I’ll call you Harry if you call me Gerald.”
Harry nodded. This was working out better than he had thought it would so far, although he knew he would probably resent some of the things that Laufrey came up with. “All right. I didn’t come up with all the ideas on my own, but I was the one who decided to do that ritual. My parents never even suggested that I try something like that to remove my soul-mark, or kill myself. That was my idea.”
“Mmmm.” Gerald scribbled something down on the parchment in front of him and looked hard at Harry. “And what did your parents say?”
“That I could never be with my soulmate. That he was someone who was evil and preparing to wage a secret war on Muggles and Muggleborns.” Harry felt his shoulders tensing and tried to shake it out. Fuck, even after all this time, mentioning Dumbledore’s ideas still made him feel like bolting in a random direction. “I had to resist him, or he would have ended up with doubled power.”
Gerald paused in the middle of scribbling something else down. “Doubled? Not quadrupled?”
“They didn’t think To-Minister Riddle was capable of love. So they thought I would fall in love with him, because he was so manipulative and charming, but not the other way around.”
“You can call him whatever you want in front of me, Harry. And I’ll do whatever you need to do to feel comfortable. Calling him by his last name was instinctive, but I can change that if you want.”
Harry paused and shot a question down his bond with Tom. The answer that came back was a simple outpouring of warmth, like a beam of sunlight through water. Harry opened his eyes and smiled. “He says that the first name is fine.”
Gerald nodded to him, expression serious, and wrote down a new note. “What did you think, when your parents told you that?”
“It wasn’t just my parents. It was my godfather and the Headmaster.”
“How well did you know the Headmaster before you started at Hogwarts?”
“Probably better than most Hogwarts students do.” Harry breathed for a second to try and get the bitterness out of his voice. “I met him for the first time when I was too young to remember. My parents contacted him when they read the soul-mark on my wrist.”
“Your parents became members of the Order of the Phoenix while they were still schoolchildren, then?”
Harry nodded. “A lot of people did. My godfather and several of the Weasleys, too. I think it was the time when Dumbledore could most easily influence them. But the Order had members who were Dumbledore’s age, so I suppose it was probably his reputation as the one who rejected his soul-bond with a Dark Lord that influenced those people.”
“No doubt he saw himself in you. No doubt he assumed that you would have the strength to reject a Dark Lord as well? Or someone that the Headmaster saw as a Dark Lord.”
Harry hesitated. “That’s the thing. It never seemed that he did think that way. He assumed that if I came to Tom’s notice at all, I would inevitably fall in love with him and betray the Order.”
Something like shame woke up in the center of his chest. Hadn’t Dumbledore been right in a way? He’d come into contact with Tom, he’d given up his anonymity and his loyalty to the Order for the comfort of a soulmate-
This time, the warmth that came down the bond was more like dragonfire. Harry turned his head to bask in it, eyes closed, and then started when he opened them and saw Gerald watching him with a small smile. “Sorry.”
“And you still feel partially as though you betrayed a loyalty expected of you, for all that no one should have had the right to expect it of you.” Gerald clasped his hands in front of him on his desk and studied Harry thoughtfully.
Harry averted his eyes and nodded. He knew intellectually that it was all nonsense, but part of him wondered if he had just proved everything that Dumbledore thought right instead of wrong.
“Do you remember what particular result you were hoping for from that ritual?” Gerald asked.
Harry blinked and looked at him, surprised that he’d asked. “That the mark would be gone.”
“Yes, but the primary emotion that I felt when we went through that memory wasn’t hope,” Gerald said. “It was self-loathing. Did you hate yourself that much for something you couldn’t help being born with?”
Harry closed his eyes. He hadn’t thought he was evil, not exactly. He’d known that he hadn’t had any choice about the soul-mark, and that was something his parents and Sirius and even Dumbledore had emphasized repeatedly.
But he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how much easier it would be if he didn’t have it. If it was just gone. And his thoughts had revolved continually around the tale of the attack on Tom’s soul-mark, how the people who had attacked him had managed to burn the phoenix away completely. What if-what if he could do that?
It had at least seemed like a solution.
“It would have made my life so much better if it had disappeared,” he whispered. “And that’s not something I can talk to Tom about, because he was so faithful. He kept waiting, and hoping, and thinking-”
“You don’t need to fear what Tom would say about it,” Gerald said softly. “That’s one of the reasons he sent you to me, you know. Because he knew that there would be things it would be difficult for you to speak to him about.”
Harry swallowed and nodded. He knew that. He accepted it. But the thought still seared his mind that Tom had never given up, that the man he had been trained to hate had still been waiting and searching for him.
That overlapped with the guilt that he felt for not doing as his parents had wanted, but didn’t replace it. The two emotions together twined around his heart, and Harry winced at the thought of what he must be projecting down the bond to Tom.
Gerald waited patiently until Harry opened his eyes and focused on him again. Then he asked, his voice so soft that Harry could barely hear him, “If you had the choice, would you give up the soul-mark now?”
“No.”
Gerald nodded, and a smile broke across his face. “Then that’s one decision made. You know that you can’t go back into the past and change something this important. That means that you’ve got to accept it and move forwards.”
“But that’s exactly what I don’t know how to do,” Harry snapped.
“I know. And we’re going to work on it.” Gerald turned the parchment around that he’d been writing on. “These are the notes that I’ve made about the memory you shared with me and the emotions I felt during it. We’ll talk about them together. Reason them out. Locate their origin. Determine how much danger you’re in of actually repeating them.”
Harry shot him a wary look. “Why?”
“That way, you won’t have to worry about experiencing them again in the future.”
Harry nodded slowly. Yes, he had a bond he would die to defend, but that he’d also been ready to hurt himself and die to reject at one point. He could see why Gerald thought it was important to talk about.
“And I hope,” Gerald went on, “that by the time we’re done talking about them, you can have a weapon against any such emotions that you might feel in the future.”
Harry finally gave in to something he’d been wanting to do for a few minutes, and smiled.
*
“What you are going to do is foolish, Albus.”
Albus ignored Gellert as he laid the patterns of colored sand out in front of him on the floor of the cave. The red one had to loop around the blue one, and the purple one had to be on the outside. And the black one, of course, had to form a huge circle around all the others.
“This is madness.”
Gellert’s voice was rasping and distressed enough now that Albus turned to look at him. He sighed and shook his head. “Why would you say such a thing? The madness was the belief that you set out to promote, that Muggleborns were inferior to other wizards.”
“Even I,” Gellert said, and began to cough. Albus waited it out. He would have to wait on Gellert more and more often, now, but it was a price he was willing to pay to defeat another Dark Lord.
“Even I,” Gellert finally finished, “was never mad enough to interfere with soul magic and soul-marks. What do you think is going to happen? You were the one who made the decision to reject our bond in the first place!”
“And that means,” Albus said quietly, “that I can take it back.”
Gellert stared at him, then yanked up his arm. The mark on his right forearm, that twirled around and around in patterns Albus could still see behind his eyes every time he closed them, was thorns and flames, and all was black-edged. “There is no reviving a dead mark!”
“There is,” Albus said, and scattered another few grains of black sand into the outer circle, “in the magic that I have found.”
He knew what was coming even before Gellert launched the unfocused blast of wandless power at him. He had enough protections on the cave to compensate for the finished magical bond they didn’t have, after all. He deflected it with a sweep of his wand, and went back to carefully lying out the patterns.
“Albus. You don’t have to do this. There’s no sign that Riddle is a Dark Lord, or, if he is, then maybe having his soulmate will temper him.”
Albus sat back with a long, slow sigh. “But I can’t take the chance, Gellert,” he said quietly. “There were visions from the phoenixes that I never told you about. As long as Tom and his soulmate stayed apart, there was a chance that the world would be saved. That was the strongest possibility out of the visions I saw. But all the ones that showed them joining together showed the detailed prophecy coming true.”
“Detailed prophecy.”
“The one that predicts the rise of a Dark Lord.” Albus stood up and faced his recalcitrant soulmate across the circles of sand. “Do you know how many visions I saw of Tom and Harry saving the world, or creating a better one, after the forging of their bond?”
Blinking, Gellert shook his head.
“One,” Albus said. “One out of ninety-nine.”
Gellert looked down at his dead soul-mark again. “That doesn’t mean that you’re the one chosen to try and save the world, Albus. You could let someone else, like other people in the Order of the Phoenix, do it for you. Or you could do it via some other method.”
“The Order has been disbanded. And now that Tom and Harry are joined, Tom will have doubled powers very soon, if he does not already. Harry by himself was strong enough to save Tom from an assassination attempt coordinated by multiple soulmated pairs in the Order and among my allies.” Albus realized that his breath was rushing faster and faster. He tried to calm down. The more hysterical he sounded, the less cooperation he could expect from Gellert. “I’m not powerful enough to oppose them unless I have it, too.”
“You can’t have them.” Gellert laughed, a vicious edge to the sound. “I don’t love you. You don’t love me.”
“I have a solution to that problem.”
Gellert’s eyes seemed to widen to the point that he’d lost all the pupil in them as he stared at the flask of potion shimmering like mother-of-pearl next to Albus. It had been there all along, of course, because it had to be inside the circles of sand. Albus had simply removed the illusion covering it. “Albus,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “No.”
“I don’t need you to drink it.”
Gellert’s eyes jerked to him, but Albus had cast the first spell, the one that made the circles of sand lift and revive, swirling around him. It enclosed him in a shining, prismatic shell that grew brighter and brighter as his magic was added to it, and then the sheen of the potion. Albus spoke the second spell, and the sand traveled outwards to dance around Gellert.
“Albus! Albus, you’re mad!”
Albus ignored him and cast the third spell. The air filled with the roaring, whistling noise of a sandstorm on the move. Albus turned and faced into the heart of the storm, taking up the flask of the potion as he did so.
The next part was tricky. Albus gazed into the heart of the sand until he was ready to attempt it.
At one and the same moment, he cast the spell to create an Inferius on his own black-edged soul-mark and dosed himself with the Amortentia.
The power soared through him, at the same time as obsessed sparked in his veins and life erupted from the soul-mark on his arm and reached out to find the corresponding one on Gellert’s.
Albus locked eyes with Gellert, who was staring at him in shock for some reason.
Why? Albus loved him. He knew it like he knew the names of all the stars. And he crossed the boundary of the sand that joined them instead of separated them and clasped Gellert in his arms, and smiled, and kissed his hand, since Gellert was lifting an arm to shield his face.
Their soul-marks flickered, and turned grey, and Albus laughed in soft exhilaration as he shared his love with Gellert and Gellert shared his horror with him.
The world was, at last, on the path that it should be.
Chapter Twenty-Nine.