Chapter Twenty-Two of 'His Darkest Devotion'- Bonds
Chapter Twenty-One.
Chapter One.
Title: His Darkest Devotion (22/?)
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-Two-Bonds
Hermione looked up as the door of their room opened and Harry walked in. She was pleased to note that no Aurors came with him this time, either-well, she was pleased until Riddle stepped in behind him and shut the door firmly with a halfway pleasant smile on his face.
That, of course, meant he would be a complete berk, Hermione knew.
“We wanted to speak to you,” Riddle began.
Harry sent him an annoyed look, and Riddle shut his mouth and stepped away with his hands folded behind his back. Hermione blinked. It looked almost as if Harry had made Riddle do something he didn’t want to do, like shut up during the conversation, but Hermione already knew that couldn’t be right. No one made the Minister do anything he didn’t want to do, and Professor Dumbledore had explained many times to her and Ron that they couldn’t encourage Harry to bond with Riddle in the hopes that he could control him, because not even a soulmate bond was powerful enough to overcome the darkness Riddle had steeped himself in.
“Yes, we did,” Harry said. “Your trial is next week. I wanted to tell you that I’ve done my best to make sure that you get a fair trial.”
Hermione shook her head. “We’re prepared to compromise, Harry.”
Harry paused. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said a second later in a neutral tone. “But how? I’m very aware that your oaths to Dumbledore and the Order prevent you from telling any of their secrets.”
“Ron and I are prepared to swear that we’ll use legal methods to fight Riddle from now on.” Ron nodded firmly at Hermione’s side, and she tried to ignore the crawling unnaturalness that was not knowing how he felt through their emotional bond. “We won’t betray the Order, but we won’t rejoin them.” She thought there probably wouldn’t be anything to rejoin, anyway. Professor Dumbledore was on the run now, and most of the Order’s more powerful members had been with them at the ritual that was meant to subdue Harry. “You don’t have to worry about us staging a raid on the Department of Mysteries again.”
Harry stared at her. Hermione swallowed as she felt a swift prickling move down her neck. This shouldn’t be as hard as it seemed. Why was Harry just staring instead of thanking them?
Riddle hissed something. Harry shook his head. “No, they really don’t understand.”
Hermione bit her lip. Against everything else Harry had been keeping from them, that he could understand Parseltongue was such a small secret, but it still stung.
“What don’t we understand?” Ron demanded. “We know that if you put us on trial, you could have a revolt on your hands.”
Riddle abruptly turned away and walked to the far side of the room. Hermione blinked. His shoulders were shaking as if he were biting back cries of rage. She turned to Harry to explain it, and found him staring at his hands.
“Harry?”
Harry started and looked up at them, shaking his head a little. “Honestly, you two. What you don’t understand is that you have no power in this situation.”
“Yes, we do! We have the secrets and we could-”
“Secrets that you either can’t or won’t betray. Dumbledore has been removed as Headmaster of Hogwarts.” Hermione felt as though a meteorite had hit her in the stomach, but Harry kept going, with no time for her to absorb that information. “And the public isn’t going to come to your aid because they hate you.”
“That’s just Riddle’s manipulation of public opinion, mate.” Ron tapped his fingers on his knee. “Once you explain that we’re your best friends and some about the Order’s reasons, then we’ll be hailed as heroes.”
“I told you before, you waited too long to make the Order’s position clear because you just assumed everybody would already know what you were about.” Harry’s voice was low and intense. “They hate you now. If you were smart, you wouldn’t have gone with Dumbledore’s nonsense about a secret war that’s so hard to prove, anyway. You would have looked up Tom’s voting record and drawn attention to that. You would have pointed out how hypocritical it is of him to be a half-blood and yet favor pure-bloods. But now it’s too late, and he has a grip on the public’s throat.”
“That’s true,” Riddle said over his shoulder. He sounded pleasant again.
“But we could still stage a raid on the Department of Mysteries,” Hermione said. She tried to speak more slowly this time, despite the clawing bewilderment that had taken her over. Harry was just staring at her with hard eyes, and how could he? Why was it taking so long to convince him?
“You’ll be in prison,” Harry said. “Or, if you don’t go to Azkaban, bound by loyalty oaths of the kind that render you unable to do that.”
“We’re going to be free, though.”
Harry leaned forwards. “What made you think that?”
He seemed to be waiting for something in particular, but Hermione had no idea what was going on and what he expected her to say, so she kept silent. Ron was the one who said, “Because you’re going to get us out. Aren’t you?”
Hermione swallowed through a choked throat. She realized that she didn’t know for sure if that was true. And Harry was staring at them with a strange mixture of mockery and pity.
“Of course not. I want you to survive, if you can, but there’s no way that I can let you go back to what you were. Didn’t you understand that after our last conversation?”
“But we’re your friends-”
“Who could have killed me.”
The room was silent and cold. Hermione glanced towards Riddle and then shivered. The cold magic was coming from him, she was certain. Harry never would have done something like that to them because they were friends.
Or had been. “A friend wouldn’t accuse us of that,” she whispered.
Riddle gave another long, sliding hiss of Parseltongue. Harry glanced at him but didn’t respond aloud, answering her instead. “A friend also wouldn’t curse someone in the back or bind his free will so he had no choice but to consent to an unequal duel.”
Hermione licked the inside of her mouth, hating the way it tasted like fear. “We did what we had to do.”
“And that’s part of the reason that you need to go through the trial,” Harry said, his voice soft. Hermione couldn’t be sure what he was feeling, but she thought it might be disbelief. “Because after all this, you’re still loyal to him.”
“No, Harry! I understand what we did wrong. And I’m loyal to you, too. I want to help-you.” Hermione darted a quick glance at Riddle, who was just standing there with his arms crossed. He said nothing, but Hermione didn’t dare meet his eyes for long.
“You haven’t repented, Hermione. You think that you deserve to go free and maybe swear one oath, and that’s it? How would you react to me telling you I should be able to do that if I’d cursed Ron in the back and he’d nearly died?”
“I would hate you.”
“Well?”
“We won’t get a fair trial under this biased system, Harry, and you know that. That means the only just thing you can do is let us go, so that we can join the public life of the wizarding world again.” And persuade them to our way of thinking, she thought, but didn’t say. Harry had to know that. Riddle must, although at the moment he was standing there like a wall and doing nothing.
“I have Truth Crystals. The trial is going to be as fair as it can be. You’ll have to tell the truth about your actions and your motivations, and the people who would be biased against you are going to have to admit their biases.”
Hermione stared at him, appalled. She had been under the Truth Crystals’ spells a few times when she was giving reports to Professor Dumbledore, and that had been uncomfortable enough when she knew the Professor would never misuse the facts she gave him. He just wanted to make sure their reports were complete.
Now, though…
“Are you still insane?” she whispered. “How did you know where Professor Dumbledore hid them? Why did you give them to Riddle?”
“You don’t need to worry about how he found them,” Riddle interrupted, voice smooth and so serpentine that Hermione shuddered and drew away from him. Ron wrapped himself close, but for once, the proximity of her soulmate didn’t help. “I’ve had enough of this. I promised Harry that he could have a certain amount of time to talk you around, but that time has passed.”
“You’re going to be disgusting about controlling him, just like Professor Dumbledore said,” Ron snapped.
Riddle shrugged. “It seems to me that you are not upset with the idea of someone controlling Harry, only upset that it’s not someone who’s on your side.” He went on before Hermione could do more than gasp in anger. “Now, perhaps you will listen to me and the simple facts that Harry was dancing around. Your trial takes place next week. You’ll be in front of the Wizengamot and a few witnesses who survived your attack. The Truth Crystals will be in place, as Harry said, to ensure that everyone in the room is free of unconscious bias. You can expect-”
“Harry! Why are you standing back and just letting him do this to us?” Hermione asked, noting that Harry was leaning against the wall with his arms folded and his face shut down. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him look that cold, which made no sense. Had Riddle cast some spell that gave him control of Harry? It made as much sense as anything else she could think of.
*
Harry caught Tom’s eye, and nodded jerkily. Yes, he remembered their bargain. He had said that Tom could talk after a while if Ron and Hermione weren’t listening to him, and he’d said that he’d step back and stay silent.
And honestly, he didn’t think anything good would happen if he answered Hermione’s question. She was refusing to grasp the obvious, that there wasn’t a miraculous way out of this because they were “on the side of the Light.” And he hadn’t realized, until he said it, how much it hurt that his friends had cursed him the way they had.
Hermione asked another question that Harry ignored. He paced over to the side of the room and stood staring up at the motionless Muggle landscape paintings on the walls. He wondered why Tom had chosen them, but decided that he would ask later, if he ever did at all. The answer probably didn’t matter much.
Tom continued, his tone bland, but the bond around Harry ringing with satisfied fury. “You can expect to be asked questions about the Order of the Phoenix, but of course you will be unable to answer some of them.” He paused, then turned around. “Harry, I didn’t ask how the Truth Crystals worked with vows. Would they be able to force someone to answer even though that person is under an Unbreakable Vow?”
Harry shook his head without turning to Tom. “The Founders, or whoever really created them, didn’t want people to suffer and die under them. They just wanted the truth. They’ll stand there and look foolish until you ask them another question.”
“Looking foolish is an option,” Tom said, and continued to Hermione and Ron. “Your sentence will be Azkaban or death, depending on what you-”
“Fuck you, Riddle!”
Harry spun around. Even he hadn’t thought Ron would go this far. But Ron was on his feet, charging straight at Tom, his hands reaching for his throat.
Harry shouted and tried to Apparate across the room, but he already knew the wards were in place, and-
And then Ron collided with a shield in front of Tom that Harry hadn’t been aware of, and bounced back so far he almost slammed into the couch where Hermione was sitting again. Hermione stood up, pale and horrified, and gathered Ron close, dropping her head so that her hair shaded his face and she was whispering to him.
“Don’t try something like that again,” Tom said softly. He kept his hands folded behind his back. He hadn’t drawn his wand, which meant he’d had the shield hovering around him before they came into the room, Harry realized. He had suspected Ron might try a physical attack.
Harry swallowed, a difficult sound. Tom nodded at him and continued, “Depending on how the trial goes.”
“We’ll never accept this kind of justice,” Hermione said, looking up. Harry had thought she might be weeping, from the strained quality in her voice, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were remarkably dry and focused. “You’re in charge of an illegitimate government. You have no right to do this to us.”
Tom laughed, short and sharp. “As if the one you would have replaced it with would have been any more legitimate? From what Harry’s said, it makes it seem as if you had no plan once I was defeated but letting whoever wanted to take over the Wizengamot. It could have been someone even more openly hostile to Muggleborns and someone who would make things worse for the people you claim you want to protect.”
“But you would be gone.”
Harry closed his eyes. That simple faith was probably the truth, and probably what Hermione and Ron would say, too, under the Truth Crystals.
Hermione continued, although her voice was wavering. Harry supposed it was the expression on Tom’s face. “And besides, what happens in the Wizengamot doesn’t matter so much. It’s people’s day-to-day lives that we need to deal with. Once you’re gone, those will get better.”
“Why?”
A long silence. Harry had to look, despite his conviction that just keeping his eyes shut would be easier for him, and saw Hermione worrying her lip with her teeth as she stared at him.
But Hermione finally took a deep breath and said, “Because there won’t be someone so charismatic and magically-powerful warping people’s minds. Whatever the Wizengamot does after this, they won’t do it with you in charge, and they won’t be as effective.”
“That comes the closest of anything you’ve said to a coherent argument,” Tom murmured, voice precise. “But you can’t actually know that, and you forget that it might take years for another Minister to be elected.” He gave a half-bow. “I look forward to seeing what the Truth Crystals bring out at your trial, Granger, Weasley.”
He turned around and held out his hand, and Harry came to him. Hermione said something desperate behind him that he deliberately didn’t let himself hear.
“Disappointed?” Tom asked when the door closed behind them.
Harry nodded and stepped closer to him. Tom looked at him with his eyebrows raised. Harry reached up and hooked a hand around the back of his neck, ignoring the way the Aurors watched them.
“You’ve been patient with my desire to speak to them, and I thank you,” Harry said quietly. “I don’t think they’ll be convinced until they hear us speak in the presence of the Truth Crystals, but you can’t help that.”
“All right,” Tom said, his eyebrows raised a little as though he was trying to figure out what Harry was talking about.
“I’d like to spend the night in bed with you. May I?”
Every part of Tom seemed to freeze, including the emotional bond and the magic they shared. He reached up and gently slid the back of his knuckles down Harry’s face. Harry smiled a little, but kept looking steadily at his face. Tom leaned towards him and gently kissed the shell of his ear.
“Yes,” he said. “You may join me.”
Harry nodded and stepped back before the Aurors could get too curious. He turned around to find Amelia Bones striding towards them. She had a crisp frown on her face, and she was carrying what looked like a handkerchief in her fingertips, her whole hand seeming to flinch back from it.
“Is something wrong, Madam Bones?” Tom asked, and canted his body a little to the side, as if he wanted to shield Harry from whatever she was holding.
“I want to know what it means that this was found near my home, Minister Riddle,” Madam Bones said, her voice painfully neutral. “I feel that I’ve been a-a trustworthy ally to you, and so why you would leave a piece of cloth with your magical signature and the beginnings of blood magic on it where my niece could have come across it puzzles me.”
Harry was moving before he thought about it. He yanked on the magic swarming around Tom, and heard Tom shout as Harry dissipated the shield that had sheltered him from Ron. Harry didn’t care, though, couldn’t care. He snapped the magic up and out, and the handkerchief in Madam Bones’s hand burst into flames.
“Mr. Potter!” Madam Bones stared at him in outrage. “Are you trying to protect your lover from the natural consequences of his actions? I am appalled-”
“There’s no such thing as a handkerchief that could be used in blood magic and which also has the magical signature of a specific person it,” Harry said. His voice was harsh and buzzing, and all around them, the Aurors were moving chaotically, not sure who to attack and who to protect. It didn’t matter. Harry’s eyes stayed on Madam Bones. “The blood magic would obliterate the traces of a magical signature if it was that far advanced, and if the signature was still detectable, you wouldn’t be able to tell it was meant to be used in a blood magic ritual. Which means that isn’t what you were carrying.”
“Mr. Potter, I must insist-”
Tom Stunned her. Madam Bones staggered rather than going down right away, which told Harry a frightening amount about her magical strength, and then another Stunner slammed into her. Tom still conjured a cushion along the floor before she could hit the ground.
That left the Aurors to gape at them in horror. Tom turned to them, and whatever they saw in his face at least redirected their gazes to the floor and the walls. Harry stood there, breathing and staring at Madam Bones.
“You’re to search her office,” Tom said softly. “Find out who she’s been in contact with in the past ten hours. No, twenty.” He glanced at Harry, and Harry nodded. He didn’t know for sure what sort of mind control had been used on Madam Bones, but twenty hours was a good timeframe for tracing back things like the Imperius Curse, so it ought to work for this. “Full permission granted for owl tracers and ward readers.”
“I mean-sir, won’t someone say it’s an invasion of privacy when they find out we did-”
“The Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement has been compromised,” Tom said, and the tile in the floor immediately next to his feet crackled as it turned to ice and then broke. “I assure you that I will bear the brunt of whatever political consequences might come out of this.”
“Yes, sir,” breathed the Auror who had objected, and then several of them took off up the corridor.
Harry glanced at Tom, who was staring at Madam Bones. “Do you think she’s going to be all right?”
“Yes,” Tom said. Harry wondered if he was only imagining the uncertainty in his tone, but when Tom turned to him, he understood. From the stubborn set of Tom’s chin, he would not let it be any other way. “We’ll make sure that whoever did this is properly punished for hurting Amelia, Harry.”
“I think we both know who did it.”
Harry thought he had kept his voice low enough, but from the sharp slash Tom’s had made in the air, perhaps not. Harry nodded and stepped back, and watched as Tom turned to converse with the Aurors who had remained around them.
He supposed there was no reason, even now, to think that the Aurors’ ranks were free of traitors.
*
“Why would he do something like that to Amelia Bones?”
Harry put down his cup of tea and faced Lily with a little sigh. Lily stared at him. She knew that he had got no taller in the last few weeks, but it seemed as if he had. Certainly he was more clear-eyed and had lost every trace of shyly ducking his head the way he used to when he had to carry the secret about his soulmate around.
“Dumbledore had to know that she was one of the very few people who could get close enough to Tom and me unsuspected,” Harry said, his fingers toying with the outside of the cup. He kept turning his head a little to the side, and Lily was sure, if she asked him, that he would say it was just a coincidence. She didn’t think so. Harry was sensing Riddle’s presence even though he wasn’t here right now, pointing his face in the right direction. “Especially after Whipwood being caught and interrogated. Tom wouldn’t trust an Auror right now.”
“He trusts them around him.”
“They’ve made personal vows of loyalty. But Tom doesn’t trust them enough to just let them approach without putting his guard up.”
Lily looked down at her own teacup and frowned fiercely. Harry made a noise that was sort of like a groan and sort of like a chuckle. “Say what you’re thinking, Mum. I mean, I know you will anyway.”
Lily looked up. “I think that we’ve abandoned one tyrant to support another.”
Harry gave her an odd look. “I didn’t think you supported at him at all.”
“I mean-we’re here.”
“Yeah, but he hasn’t required you to go to Azkaban. He pardoned you. That’s not the same as recruiting you.” Harry shrugged, apparently unconcerned with the way Lily was staring at him. “I always assumed that that was the reason you were mostly staying out of the way and looking at furniture and your accounts and things like that.”
Lily swallowed. Then she swallowed again. “You’re not upset about that?”
Harry leaned back and stared up at the ceiling for a second. “Mum, most of the people in the wizarding world don’t support him. Or Dumbledore either, admittedly, and the number of people who do that is going to go down now that Dumbledore’s a fugitive.” Lily nodded, because she had assumed the same thing herself. “But there’s mostly a lot of complacency. People didn’t care enough about Tom’s voting record to look it up.” Harry’s eyes narrowed and hardened. “Not even Hermione did that. She just accepted Dumbledore’s words about Tom being evil on faith. No one wants to do enough bloody research. They want to believe in the romantic version of his life Tom puts out there, or they want to believe Dumbledore is a shining force for good. It drives me bloody insane,” he muttered.
“Romantic?”
“Oh, come on, Mum. You know. That he got his soul-mark burned off when he was a kid but it didn’t stop him, he still believes in love. And here love is coming along and showing that he has a real soulmate and all his patient waiting for him wasn’t in vain.” Harry rolled his eyes. “I mean, he’s a showman. A con man.”
“But you support him anyway.”
“We’ve been over this,” Harry said quietly, a force of strength like a fire behind his words. “No, I don’t support what he’s done so far. I support him changing, and he’s starting to talk to me about what that would look like. But I spent twenty-four bloody years denying him and rejecting him because I was told that was what I had to do. It didn’t change anything. For once, I’m working with him.”
Lily hesitated. “And if your father and I never come to his side?”
Harry stirred his tea with magic and watched as it moved in the cup. “I can’t pretend it won’t hurt. But you’re your own people, and you have your own beliefs. It has to be hard to overcome those and just pretend everything is fine.” He hesitated. “And Dumbledore had some good ideas. It was his methods I questioned.”
“Are those the ideas that you’re trying to introduce to Riddle?”
Harry nodded. “I mean, not the one where I think it was a good idea to hide from him for twenty-four years. But others.” He smiled.
“Can you-can you forgive us for that?” Lily blurted, and had to close her eyes when she saw how Harry’s expression changed. “Riddle came-he said that we’d betrayed you-”
“Tom,” Harry sighed, and Lily had to hold back a gasp at how much it sounded like the way she sometimes said James’s name. “He does things he knows I don’t want him to in the name of being protective.”
“So you don’t feel comfortable with him?”
“Yes, Mum, that’s exactly it. Because Dad never want too far when you were still friends with Severus Snape.”
Lily sighed. “I didn’t-fully accept that we were soulmates then.”
“And I never accepted Tom ever.” Harry folded his arms and gazed at her evenly, although with a pulse beating in his throat that Lily knew meant he would argue with her to the death if he had to. “I know what it’s like, Mum. I know there’s going to be a lot that we have to go through, and work through, and work on. The thing is, I don’t see that that’s a reason to give Tom up.”
Lily reached out and caught her son’s hand, squeezing once. “As long as you can accept that we’re probably going to be of the opposite political persuasion.”
“And as long as you can accept that if you act against him, I really don’t think I could convince Tom to pardon you this time,” Harry said quietly.
Lily nodded. Honestly, there was a coil of tension in her belly that had relaxed at the words. The kind of activities that Albus had directed the Order of the Phoenix to do no longer appealed to her. Informing people about Riddle and his laws and votes, writing letters, talking to Muggleborns and Muggles who were affected by the restrictions, and getting rid of the Dementors in Azkaban all sounded much more interesting.
“I hoped Hermione would come to the same conclusion,” Harry said then. He stared into his teacup as if there was something important hidden at the bottom of it. “But she still thinks that it’s unfair that she’s going to be tried at all, and that there are going to be Truth Crystals at the trial.”
“Truth Crystals? Where did you get them?”
“I created them.”
Lily opened her mouth and then closed it. “I think Albus must be kicking himself,” she said at last.
Harry stared at her curiously. “For what? I don’t think he realizes that I spent enough time around the Truth Crystals to figure out how they work. I don’t think anyone knows that.”
Lily shook her head. “Not that. I mean that he must have wished he had encouraged you to use your magic.”
“On his behalf, then. And then Tom wouldn’t have got away with so much, and Ron and Hermione would have known better and could have figured out the right way to take me down. Yes, I see.”
Lily’s heart hurt at the casual way he spoke about the essential end of his friendship with Ron and Hermione. She stood up and came around the table. Harry stood, too, his brow furrowing for a second, and then gasped as Lily enveloped him in her arms and hugged him close.
“I love you,” Lily whispered. “I love you so much. And I want you to know that nothing is as important to me as you coming home safe, except your happiness. I’m so sorry that the way we raised you made you so unhappy. I’m sorry, baby.”
Harry leaned against her and kissed her gently on the cheek. “This is why I don’t agree with what Tom did, Mum. I mean, the way he confronted you. There’s no way that we can go back and change the past. And you genuinely did have good intentions.”
“That wasn’t enough to save Ron and Hermione with you. Or Dumbledore.”
“They’re not my parents,” Harry said, so dryly that Lily laughed in spite of herself. “And Ron and Hermione…lied to me, too. And Dumbledore probably went too far the minute he refused to listen to Tom’s claim that he’d had his soul-mark burned off. He made his choices, and he finally did something stupid in public. He’ll be hunted down now, and frankly, that’s enough for me.”
“You’re too forgiving, maybe,” Lily said. She felt tears prickle against the sides of her eyes, but blinked them away. “I’m sure Riddle would say so.”
“Tom should be glad that I’m this forgiving. It’s not like I would have accepted that arsehole as my soulmate otherwise.”
And Lily laughed again, and something even deeper in her eased with those words.
*
“Coming, dear one?”
Harry smiled into the mirror of Tom’s bathroom. Then his smile faded, and he took a deep breath, and removed his shirt. He’d already decided what he wanted, and the desire spread through him more strongly than his fear.
His fingers still trembled as he laid his shirt aside, though.
“In a minute,” he called back.
“You don’t need to brush your teeth. I promise that I won’t turn away no matter what your breath smells like.”
The sincerity Harry could feel through their bond, and the banked heat of Tom’s own desire, reassured Harry more than anything else could have done. He nodded firmly at the mirror and raked his fingers through his hair. Then he reached down and hooked his fingers into his trousers and pants, tugging them down in one smooth motion.
He straightened up and stared at himself in Tom’s full-length mirror, then gave his head an impatient shake. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what he looked like. And from the desire smoldering in their bond, he knew Tom would like the way he looked.
At least.
He hoped Tom would like the way he looked. The only feature people had tended to praise on him was his eyes. And even that had been limited praise, because Harry had made it clear from the time he started attending Hogwarts that he planned to wait for his soulmate.
That turned out to be true, didn’t it? Just in another way that had nothing to do with someone coming close enough to see your soul-mark when you were naked.
For some reason, that made Harry’s shoulders straighten, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then he turned and walked out of the bathroom.
*
Tom had expected some sort of surprise with the fluid way that Harry’s emotions kept changing in the bond and the vague answers he gave when Tom asked if he was ready to come out yet, but he had never expected this.
Harry stepping into view naked was a sight that Tom hadn’t realized he wanted.
His desire was suddenly so present that moving and catching his breath was a chore. Tom swallowed and stalked a slow step forwards. Harry stood watching him come, his eyes tracing over Tom’s face for a second before falling to his erection.
Tom was glad, now, that he still wore his robes, and that they had done enough before this for Harry not to be shocked by the sight of Tom’s cock pressing against the cloth. He would enjoy undressing for Harry, but he didn’t want to deal with a virgin terrified to the point of running.
Harry smiled a little then. “I never intended to run,” he said. “We’ve both had enough of that.”
“Picking up my thoughts, my dear?” Tom was surprised the words didn’t come out in Parseltongue, his voice deepening and sliding as he stopped in front of Harry and reached out a hand to trail his long fingers over a thick, ropy scar on Harry’s chest. Harry breathed in, and Tom watched, entranced, as the skin rose and fell beneath his touch, humming with life. “What is this scar from?”
Harry had to tilt his head sharply to the side to see where Tom’s hand was resting, which Tom found far more enchanting than he should have. “Oh. Someone conjured a panther during a duel with another student in Gryffindor and then bloody lost control of it.”
Tom stared at him. “A panther. It does not look like a bite.”
“No, it used its claws.”
“Who was this student?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Look, he had to serve detention for four months straight with Professor McGonagall. I think he was punished enough.” He leaned forwards and kissed Tom without touching him with his hands, and Tom’s interests changed abruptly.
And Tom let the name of the unknown student go, more than content to gather Harry in his arms and lean forwards, their tongues touching each other’s, their lips brushing, their hands gathering each to one another.
Tonight would be the night they bonded fully, the night Tom had once assumed he would never live to see even if he became immortal.
And here it was.
This is worth more than immortality.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
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