Chapter Eight of 'Jonquils and LIghtning'- Angelfire
Chapter Seven.
Chapter One.
Title: Jonquils and Lightning (8/?)
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 Eight-Angelfire
“Tom, would you mind if I dueled you?”
Tom couldn’t have been more startled if someone had thrown a cabbage at his head. He set aside his cup of tea, the only thing left of his breakfast, and blinked at Jonquil Potter. “Why would you want to?”
“Harry’s been giving me some practice with spells that he’s willing to teach me, but he won’t teach me all that much.” Jonquil was leaning forwards a little, her eyes focused on him. “I don’t have a good measure of my power when I keep facing someone who doesn’t want to hurt me.”
“You think I want to hurt you? What would that do to the gracious hospitality your family’s offered me?”
“I think that you won’t care as much as Harry does, and I’ll tell you right now, I have more strength than you might think. And I want to be sure that I can actually face an opponent if I become a professional dueling teacher someday. That was a career that Harry suggested to me. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it makes sense.”
Tom disregarded the rest of the babble. Harry cared enough to try and tell his cousin, who had so many ambitions and so little ability to choose, what she should do in the future. Jealousy hit him like heartburn. If Harry would only give him a tenth of that attention…
“Tom? Would you be willing to duel me?”
Tom smiled and stood, Vanishing the rest of the tea from his cup with a wave of his wand. The Potters mostly didn’t have house-elves but did the dishes and the like themselves. “Of course. Do you want to come out now and I’ll measure your power level? I need to see what kinds of spells you can counter first.”
Jonquil’s eyes glowed. “Then I’ll be right there, as soon as I put on a less delicate pair of robes.”
When Harry feels the magic, he’ll come look. And if I can’t have his positive attention, the antagonistic sort will do.
*
Harry’s head whipped away from the pregnant cow he was kneeling next to when he felt magic blaze into life at the edge of the village.
Dorea was the one on the side of the cow, hands smoothing over her sides. She caught his eye and nodded. “Go attend to whatever you need to, Harry.”
Harry didn’t bother nodding back before he began to run. His skin was burning as if he was the one the spell had been cast on. A powerful Dark fire spell; he recognized that one from when an ex-Death Eater had attacked him in his second flat back in his first world. The spell had burned everything he owned at the time to ashes, except the Invisibility Cloak and the album with his pictures in it, which Harry had protected with multiple, layered defenses. The Death Eater had been terribly surprised when Harry stomped out of the flames and melted her nose.
He ran down paths and through fields, the sensation of power leading him better than any of his normal five senses could have. He was in time to see Jonquil dive to the ground beneath a streaking comet of flame that slammed against the sides of a nearly transparent bubble and dissipated.
Opposite her stood Gaunt, shaking his head with a faint smile. “How are you going to be a dueling instructor if you can’t do something like this?” he asked, and cast another spell, wordlessly. Harry recognized the wand motions for Fiendfyre.
He leaped forwards, and his magic opened around him like steel-edged wings, cutting straight through the sides of the bubble. Gaunt swung around to face him. The Fiendfyre that had become to come into existence on the end of his wand was already fighting his control, struggling to get out and burn.
Harry reached out and cupped the Fiendfyre in his hands. He blew on it, and the beginnings of chimeras and basilisks disappeared like a candle flame.
Gaunt was staring at him with wide eyes. Harry listened until he could hear Jonquil’s rapid breathing and said, “Why don’t you go home, Jonquil? You won’t find the bubble blocking your path of retreat anymore.”
“He didn’t hurt me.”
“I’ll handle him.”
Jonquil didn’t bother speaking again. Harry did a spot more of listening, until he could make out her footsteps disappearing in the right direction, and then he took a long, sliding, stalking step towards Gaunt, his fingers still cupped the way they’d been when he vanquished the Fiendfyre.
“She asked me to duel her.”
Harry didn’t bother to respond. He breathed across his fingers again, meeting Gaunt’s eyes all the while, and white flame spring up from his hands, turning his skin almost transparent as it highlighted the bones. Harry spread his arms then, and the white glow spread along his arms, his shoulders, his spine, twisting up into the images of phoenixes, winged horses, unicorns.
“What the hell is that?” Gaunt’s voice shook.
“Angelfire. The opposite of Fiendfyre.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“There is when I invented the spell.” Harry snapped his fingers, and the flame reformed itself into images of vast white wings, bending forwards around him and spreading out their elongated feathers to completely encircle Gaunt. “And do you know what it does? Creates, Gaunt. Heals. Purifies. And on someone like you, forces you to disclose the darkest secrets you carry and your true nature.”
“Harry…”
Harry punched his hand forwards. Power rode along with it, the Angelfire becoming a thin white spear, and then it pierced Gaunt’s body and sent him reeling back. Harry held him there, panting, his eyes wide.
In a few seconds, darkness began to leak from his body. Harry deliberately ignored the black blood of a Horcrux it reminded him of, and watched as it whirled up into pictures of the past.
Let’s see what sort of a man you really are, Tom Gaunt.
*
Tom found himself looking out through his own eyes, but at the same time detached in a way, the vision of his memory overlapping with a vision as if he was floating in the air and looking at himself from above.
He was playing in the dirt outside the shack where his mother and uncle lived. He had a bone spur in his hand and was turning it back and forth while a glittering black serpent watched him intently.
“You play with that toy often,” the black snake said.
“Why would I not? It is the only legacy of my grandfather left to me.”
Tom pushed hard with his magic, remembering now what would happen next and trying to force Harry back and out of his head. He had no right to see this, no right to pry where he was unwanted.
But nothing happened, except the memory proceeding the way he knew it had.
“I can show you where other toys lie. It would be less boring than playing with that one all the time,” the serpent said, wreathing back on itself.
“Then I will come with you,” said the young figment of his imagination, and jumped to his feet, and followed the serpent down a slope and into a tangled thicket that he had to push through. He ignored the scratches on his hands. He’d already received worse than that by the time he was this age.
Tom pushed again. Nothing changed. He was still hovering above his body and walking down that path following the snake at the same time. He thought he could feel a pulse of magic just behind him that must be Harry’s presence. It didn’t move, either.
The snake finally led him into a small clearing between tall trees that the young Tom would never have found without help, and bobbed its head at him in the way that all those snakes who spent much time around the Gaunts learned to communicate. “This is the source of your toy. This is the source of many other toys.”
The young Tom Riddle already knew how to read, but he still had to squint at the words roughly incised on the gravestone to force them to make sense. “Marvolo Gaunt,” he finally read. “That’s the name of Mother’s father. What is this?”
“The place where toys come from.”
Some emotion, finally, from that impulse of light and magic behind him that Tom thought was Harry. There was horror, and pity. Tom yanked and shoved again, but the only thing that changed was his younger self’s eyes lighting up.
“Mother said that magic could be made from bones. It’s the reason that she gave me that one. But I never knew it was Grandfather’s actual bone.” Tom faced the gravestone again. “Are there others here? Do you think I could make powerful magic with them?”
The snake slithered into the undergrowth. There was only so much time a snake would spend on anything other than food, and it was bored now.
Luckily, the memory dissolved and whirled away before Tom, or Harry, was forced to watch himself delve into the beginnings of his necromancy, but it opened on another near as humiliating. Tom was bent over in a Hogwarts corridor, coughing so hard that he thought blood would come out of his mouth at any second. Over him stood two sixth-year Slytherins, their faces bored more than anything in the dancing shadows of the torchlight.
“Remember your place, half-blood. You’re not to speak to another pure-blood the way you did tonight. Understand?”
How Tom wanted to grab his wand and lunge at them-or at Harry, for forcing him to relive something he had put behind him as much as possible. But he couldn’t, not with that curse to his stomach, so he only nodded and watched through narrow, hate-filled eyes as they turned away. Barbaras Crabbe and Marcellus Flint. He would remember them. They were the first two he took revenge on when he began to rise in Slytherin’s power hierarchy.
But that didn’t change the fact that they had once made him clutch his stomach and tremble in front of them. Nothing would ever make up for that.
The memories swirled and turned again, and Tom found himself standing in the middle of the field where he had gone to commit his first murder. It should have been easy. He stood and stared at his bound victim, his father, in silence for so long that his hand began to shake around his uplifted wand.
All he had to do was cast the Killing Curse, which he had already used to great effect on rats and all sorts of creatures in the Forbidden Forest where he had practiced it. And then the man who had shamed his mother and bestowed a Muggle name on him would be dead.
The locket lay next to him, cold, gleaming, waiting.
But Tom could not cast the spell. He thought of his mother’s eyes when she spoke of her love, even if it had only been genuine on her side, and created by love potions on the Muggle’s. It should have been easy. But it was not.
In the end, Tom turned away, sick with himself, and cast a curse that would give his father horrific nightmares every night instead. Then he unbound the ropes and plunged onto the path that led up to the hill overlooking Little Hangleton, taking Tom Riddle home without caring about the trees that his head struck on the way, or the branches that whipped past him and scored his face and hands.
He went back only to collect the locket, and place it back where Uncle Morfin would look for it, as he always did every morning. Morfin was obsessive about the locket and the ring, the only treasures of the House of Gaunt that remained.
That memory burned Tom up, and he went back to pushing. It seemed to him that he almost removed the floating presence of Harry from the back of his head, that in another moment he would succeed-
And then the world tore around him, and spilled him into the most hated memory of all.
Tom stood in front of the great Albus Dumbledore, the Minister of Magic, the most powerful wizard in the world, and held his breath. He hoped that Dumbledore would recognize the sincere intentions behind Tom’s plea, even if Tom also planned to lead a revolution for this pathetic world soon enough. Dumbledore, like Tom, was a half-blood. Like Tom, he had immense amounts of power. Like him, he had been a prodigy at Hogwarts, and praised for his academic performance, but then had dropped out of sight for some years before he achieved the pinnacle of power.
They had so much in common. Dumbledore could advance Tom’s career so much if he only chose to.
But instead, the Minister gave him a vague smile and turned to greet Abraxas Malfoy, a pure-blooded classmate of Tom’s who couldn’t muster a tenth of his magic or his good marks or his drive. Abraxas was actually embarrassed and tried to say, “Minister, this is Tom Gaunt. You may not know him, but I think he’s going to change the world someday.”
“Mmm?” The Minister glanced at Tom again. “Perhaps so, but changes aren’t always for the better.”
Tom ignored the feeling that everyone in the ballroom was looking at him, and said simply, “You did it, sir.”
“Yes, but I have wisdom to temper the wish. You are, what, eighteen?”
“Nineteen, sir.” Tom didn’t say it between clenched teeth only because he was forcing himself not to do so, as hard as he could.
“Nineteen doesn’t know what it wants. Nineteen might get its hands on strong magic or important artifacts-” Dumbledore looked at him in a way that made it clear he could see through the dampening charms that Tom was using on his own power and aura “-and then make the worst possible decisions because of them. Come back when you have wisdom, boy.”
He left. After embarrassing Tom in front of several of his most important pure-blood friends, he simply left.
Tom shivered as cold wrapped around him. For a second, he thought he would collapse, but instead, he found himself simply soaring out of the darkness of memories. He was back in the field that he had dueled Jonquil in, on his knees-of course-with the Angelfire Curse retracting back into Harry’s hands.
Harry was staring at him, motionless.
Tom said nothing. There was nothing he could say that was less damning than the memories that Harry had seen, had absorbed, and understood now. Now he understood that Tom was weaker than he pretended, and incapable of gaining the attention of the powerful, and had started dabbling in Dark magic that Harry would disdain from a young age. He did glare at him, but words were beyond him.
*
He tried to make a Horcrux, but he didn’t succeed.
No wonder he wants to use pure-bloods. He didn’t forgive them in his world. Or their usefulness as tools for his cause hasn’t outweighed what they did to him.
Harry’s thoughts moved as slowly as tar. He swallowed back the first several things that came to mind. He had used Angelfire before, on some of the former Death Eaters in his world, but their secrets had all been things that had made him despise them. Here, he just felt sorry for Tom.
And some of that sorrow came from what he had just done, rather than anything Tom had.
I’m calling him Tom again. But that wasn’t important next to the thought-the only thought-of how he could make up for this. Harry raised his head. Tom tensed, still glaring at him. Almost anything he could say would smack of pity and be a mistake right now.
Instead, Harry said quietly, “There are things I didn’t tell you about my first world, partially because I didn’t want to give you ideas. But I’ll tell you now. I owe you for how painful that was. Would you like to watch with me while I use the Angelfire on myself?”
Tom tensed further, but didn’t move. Finally, he said, “How can that work? I would have to use the spell to be present during your memories, and I don’t know it.”
And he can hardly cast it right now, with the magical exhaustion I inflicted on him. Harry repressed the wince that would only drive Tom further away. He cocked his head. “There’s a variant to the charm I can cast that will bring you with me. But only if you want to.”
“Yes,” Tom said, and his voice was savage. “I want to see your soul bleeding, Harry Potter.”
Harry nodded, once again not allowing himself to flinch. “Okay.” As he drew his wand and made the first motions that would summon the Angelfire, he realized one good thing about this.
If nothing else, he had made Tom stop wanting him.
Chapter Nine.
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