Chapter Text
For once, Harry didn’t dream of the mysterious corridor. He slept with the two gold athames clutched to his chest, and barely dreamed at all. When he awoke, late into the morning, it was with a carried-over sense of anticipation from the dream, but anticipating what, he couldn’t tell.
Certainly not anticipating the Talk Sirius had promised, which was followed-through upon after a late breakfast: for that, all of yesterday’s dread proved justified. Harry spent the first half of the discussion - held in a room upstairs, behind several layers of wards - staring with vague horror at the moving illustrations in an ancient book Sirius had hauled down from the attic: bodies, all sorts of bodies, engaged in sex acts ranging from kissing on the lips to kissing… somewhere else, and everything in between.
“This book’s got a lot of reference material,” his godfather informed him solemnly. “You can look through the parts that interest you on your own. Keep this in your room so it doesn’t get confiscated by certain busybodies,” by which he surely meant Mrs. Weasley, who had reportedly screeched as loud as Walburga’s portrait the one time she caught Ron with a skin mag in his room, back at the Burrow. Harry accepted the heavy tome with an equally grave expression, uncertain if he would be interested in any of it, but not willing to say as much to Sirius, because eugh.
Honestly, though, aside from the explanation of how human bodies’ reproductive systems worked - Harry would have been content never to learn about spells that turned his skin transparent and let him see his own insides - the biology half of the Talk wasn’t the worst part.
It was the second half, when Sirius set down a second book twice as thick as the sex book, that proceeded to be the most horrific and awkward.
“Sex is one thing,” his godfather dismissed, “but courtship is quite another.”
“Sirius,” Harry protested, “I’m never going to need to know this-”
“Wrong!” Sirius cried, a little hysterical. “You should have known this yesterday! Before that boy you said isn’t your boyfriend spent four thousand galleons to gift you an athame and then had the gall to reveal he’s a fucking Gaunt when he paid for it!”
Harry paused. “A ‘gaunt’? Is that a magical creature or-?”
Sirius laughed, but it was a pained sound. “No, Harry. The Gaunts were - are - a very traditional pureblood family, one that essentially died out two generations ago. They were even more inbred than the Black family,” which they both understood was a fairly high bar, “and they were - infamous, really,” a grimace, “for producing some of the Darkest wizards on the Continent. It was even rumored during the war that You-Know-Who was one of them, on account of he could speak to snakes: all Gaunts that ever showed up in public were Parselmouths.”
Harry paused to take in this information. “So you’re saying Tom might be related to Voldemort,” he managed to wonder with a straight face.
“Honestly, I don’t care if he is or not,” Sirius huffed. “He’s his own person, Merlin knows half the reason I went to Azkaban was that people judged me for my parents-” His hand squeezed the Firewhiskey bottle hard enough to whiten his knuckles. “But no. What matters is that even if your bloke isn’t a Gaunt by name - probably a branch family, or something - he has their family seal, and he knows the traditions. Follows the traditions. House Gaunt is one of six remaining houses where gifting that athame has a meaning, you follow?”
“Er, not exactly?” Harry was still wrapping his head around the whole ‘Sirius not caring if he dated a Dark wizard’ thing. Would it matter if ‘Tom’ was closely related to Voldemort? Was his godfather going to tell on him to Dumbledore-
“He proposed, Harry,” Sirius hissed. “And you accepted it!”
The words caught up with him. Proposed. It rang loud in his ears like a church bell.
Harry swallowed. “He… proposed to me? To get married?” Distantly, he was aware that his face was going red. “He can’t, erm, pretend he didn’t? Or make it clear it was just a present?”
Sirius was eyeing him strangely, but Harry was too distracted by this new idea. He didn’t want to - to marry Voldemort. No. That would be stupid. Tom Riddle, though…
A warmth coiled in Harry’s stomach, the remembered taste of bottled blood washing over his tongue. The voice in his ear last night, before Sirius had interrupted. Voldemort’s invitation to dinner.
(“This hunger of yours is one that I would feed.”)
…He could stand to be married to Tom Riddle.
“Dear Merlin, he’s fallen for him,” Sirius despaired, face in his hands.
Harry spent the early afternoon in a distracted haze. Sirius had given up trying to teach him about courtship rules for the day - with the ominous promise of more lessons tomorrow - and let him go back upstairs with one instruction for the time being. If you get any letters, gifts, anything from him, his godfather had emphasized, bring them to me before you open them. Got it?
Harry had promised him that easily enough. Then, he’d gone back to bed for an afternoon nap, and proceeded to dream - vividly.
He was in a dark stone dungeon, standing before a dozen shadowed bodies, hanging in chains. Their faces were concealed by bolts of fabric, but they still breathed, alive… at least until a gleaming knife in Harry’s hand sliced through their bellies, their wrists, their necks, one by one. They didn’t make a sound - but the blood was loud where it poured onto the stones below, rushing like a fountain, and warm when he reached out to cup some in his hand-
Harry woke up with a gasp, jostling the sheathed athames on the bed, and found that he had come in his pants.
He returned from the bathroom some minutes later, dressed in clean clothes again, to a raven on the windowsill with an envelope in its beak: a perfectly innocuous bit of correspondence from ‘Tom Riddle’, except for the faint brown smudge at the corner of the envelope, which he promptly unsealed and opened.
Harry barely skimmed over the words - since our last meeting and expression of my regard and another day this week? - in his haste to bring the parchment to his nose for a deep sniff, because the ink that had been used to write this letter had a very familiar scent, right out of his dream. If he breathed deeply enough, it was almost like the blood was fresh.
Belatedly, he remembered his promise to Sirius. Oops. Well, this was just a letter, right?
No one had to know.
He hid the letter away in the drawer of his nightstand, and went downstairs to join the rest of the Order for dinner.