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“I thought about it sometimes,” he said. “There was one night I actually packed my trunk and grabbed my broom and almost flew out the window of Gryffindor Tower, to come to you.”
Tom pictured what that might have been like, and hissed again. “What stopped you?”
“I imagined the looks on my parents’ faces if I did,” Harry mumbled. “They’d just been exiled, and I—I was a mess. I thought of myself as an orphan. I thought I would never see them again. I just wanted someone who could care for me because of who I was, and not who they thought I was.”
-His Darkest Devotion, Chapter 24.
Harry didn’t let himself think of what he was doing as he slung another book into his trunk, one that he’d taken from the Hogwarts Library that was about soulmates and tales of how not everyone who was born with a clear mark was happy with their soulmate. He thought for a second about whether the wards would sense him fleeing with it and sound an alarm.
It wouldn’t matter. Not with how fast his Firebolt could go.
Harry clapped his hands around his ears and stood there like that for a moment. He was trying to drown out the voices of his parents, his friends.
The parents who had got themselves exiled with their actions against Harry’s soulmate. The friends who had no idea Harry knew exactly who his soulmate was and had hidden the man’s name with a Muggle tattoo of a phoenix.
No one knew exactly who Harry was. Everyone would have different advice for him if they did.
But Harry knew exactly what Mum and Dad would say. Stay out of it. Stay away from him. You know that he’s beyond arrogant or Dark, he’s evil. He would kill all Muggleborns if he could.
His parents were the good ones. Harry knew that. He thought about it all the time. He knew he was the bad one, thinking about going to a soulmate like that, when falling in love with the man could double his power and give him even more ability to act against Muggles and Muggleborns.
But he was alone.
His parents were fugitives, on the run. They could never come back as long as Riddle was in power. Harry would be going home to an empty house this summer. And Sirius had been exiled since the summer before Harry’s first year, gone beyond reach except for a few scattered, hurried meetings here and there.
Maybe—
Harry knew with one part of his mind that he was thinking something in desperation, something that wasn’t true, something that he ought to reject and turn his back on so that he could go on being a good person. But he knew with the other part of his mind that it was think like this or explode. Melt. Tell someone else the secret, which he couldn’t do, for fear of what they would do then.
He had overheard his own parents speaking once. Had heard his dad say that it would have been better, easier, if Harry had never been born.
If his dad could say that, what would Harry’s friends say? Especially when they knew that Harry had known about the soul-mark and never told them? And especially when he knew Ron and Hermione, at least, were being recruited by Professor Dumbledore to join the Order of the Phoenix like Mum and Dad and Sirius?
Maybe I can make Riddle not as bad. Maybe I can influence him and at least get pardons for my family. Maybe I can turn him away from the path he’s walking by telling him that he’ll never hang onto me if he walks it.
Desperate thoughts. Delusional, dream thoughts. But Harry couldn’t stop having them.
And now, now, his trunk was packed, and he grasped the Firebolt, and tossed it out the window of Gryffindor Tower nearest his bed. It hovered in the air, obedient to his will. Harry leaped out to meet it, slinging his leg over it.
He flew towards London, and left the future where he was a good person behind him.
*
“A fifteen-year-old? And you detained him?”
“He’s Harry Potter, Minister.”
Tom felt his nostrils flare. Yes, that put a different complexion on things. The boy’s parents had just been exiled, and the boy might have come to him with threats or even information if he had decided that the price of being the son of exiles was too high. Tom slowed his pace and smoothed out his expression, making sure it was welcoming as he opened the door of the small room where his Aurors had put Potter.
The boy was slumped over the table with his head in his arms, so Tom’s welcoming smile was wasted. But he jerked his head up a moment later, blinking wildly and gasping so hard that Tom could see almost straight down his throat.
He looked so young, Tom thought. Huge bags beneath vivid green eyes. Wild black hair tangled around his head. And one hand cradling his right wrist, as though someone had wounded him there.
“Welcome, Mr. Potter,” Tom said softly, taking the seat across from him. “I know you know that I’m Minister Tom Riddle. And I was told that you came specifically to see me, so I don’t imagine that we need that kind of introduction about what you’re doing here.”
Potter’s eyes were fixed on him in what looked like wonder. Surprised to see that I don’t look like the Devil, perhaps? Tom wondered, and permitted himself a smaller smile.
“I…” Potter said. Then he swallowed and clutched his wrist for a second as if it would fall to pieces if he let go of it.
Tom started to ask if an Auror had injured it, or perhaps Potter himself—they had told him that Potter had landed at the Ministry on a broom—but Potter let go of his arm abruptly and turned the wrist so Tom could see it.
Scrawled across Potter’s wrist in delicate black writing that he must have cast a spell to highlight, buried as it was amid inked broken shackles there, was Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Tom choked. For a moment, the room tilted, and he had to brace his hands flat on the table. He snapped his gaze up to Potter, who was watching him with hope and fear and wonder and anger and confusion in his face.
Of course it might have been a trap. Everyone in the magical world knew how fervently Minister Riddle had sought his soulmate. But there was a way to make certain it wasn’t. Tom reached forwards and curled his fingers delicately around Potter’s wrist, turning his hand so that his bare skin touched the name.
Soft, curling blue flames sprang up around Potter’s wrist, and Tom’s breath went out of him in a sigh so complete that he had to sit down again. Potter closed his eyes at the same time and bowed his head, trembling.
My soulmate. Tom had waited over sixty years for this moment.
He wished he had his own mark that Potter could touch and see the flames curling up from, but other Hogwarts students had burned it off his chest when he was almost Potter’s age. Tom turned, nonetheless, and hooked his free hand under the chain of the onyx-and-diamond phoenix he wore around his neck, charmed to hang at the exact height his soul-mark had once occupied. He undid the clasp with that one hand—he couldn’t bear himself to let go of Potter, Harry, for a moment—and held the ornament out.
Harry didn’t hesitate, closing his own free hand around the chain with a look of relief that couldn’t have been much greater if he had been touching the black-and-white phoenix that had once occupied Tom’s skin. He bowed his head and held it, the chain pooling in his palm, his body shaking with shivers.
“How long have you known?” Tom whispered, the silence between them broken by nothing more than the small, uneasy shiftings of his Auror escort. At least they knew better than to speak.
Harry’s eyes flicked open, the loveliest and deepest green. “I was born with it.”
A second later, he gasped as Tom’s hand closed harshly down. Tom released him with a wordless murmur of apology, stroking his fingers over Harry’s skin. “Your parents told you to hide it?”
“Yeah. They think you’re a Dark Lord bent on committing genocide. They were worried about what would happen if your powers doubled.”
“Doubled only? Not quadrupled?”
“They don’t think you’re capable of love.”
And thus would never love his soulmate back, which was necessary for a four-times-powerful bond. Tom nodded slowly. They thought him capable of seducing his soulmate into falling in love with him, but nothing more.
They knew, and they kept him from me. Would I ever have found him, without this? Would he simply have gone on keeping the secret like a good little boy?
Tom was trembling with shock, not at what had actually happened but at the imagination of what might have happened if Harry hadn’t managed to overcome his training, his upbringing, and flee to his soulmate. He bowed his head so that he could kiss Harry’s soul-mark without taking his eyes from Harry’s face. Harry started to tremble, too.
“Sir?”
Tom managed to pull himself back, slowly. There were people here who might grasp what it meant that Tom had found his soulmate at last, but they wouldn’t necessarily know what to do next, which orders he wanted issued.
“Call off the hunt for James and Lily Potter,” Tom said. His mind was already filled with ideas about not alienating his soulmate’s parents further. He couldn’t pardon them without some more maneuvering, but for Harry, he would direct the resources of the Aurors elsewhere. “Go through the belongings of theirs that were removed from the Potters’ home. Bring them to me.” He would see if there was anything Harry wanted which had been taken.
“Yes, sir.”
The Aurors had the sense not to question him. As two of them left and the others stepped forwards uncertainly, Tom got up and came around the table. Harry leaned back and stared up at him with contentment and exhaustion wrapped like ropes around his face.
“I’m so tired,” Harry whispered.
Tom hit him with a gentle Sleeping Charm, one that simply encouraged the mind to shut down the way it naturally would. Harry slumped over the table. Tom gathered him up himself, using a Lightening Charm. Harry wasn’t particularly tall or bulky for a teenager, but still far heavier than a child.
“Sir?”
The Aurors looked caught between scandalized and awed. Tom half-sneered at them. He could feel the bond growing between him and Harry already, so thick with emotion that he might wake Harry from his sleep if he felt too strongly, and Harry’s fatigue shivered through him. He knew how much Harry needed to rest. “Cancel my meetings for the rest of the day. Send two fresh Hit Wizards to accompany me home. Find the best wardmaster who’s immediately available and send him or her to my house in three hours.”
“Sir,” the nearest Auror said, eyes on the floor, and stepped back so that Tom could get through with Harry. Tom breathed in the scent of sweat rising from Harry’s hair and stood for a moment in the doorway. He would give the Hit Wizards time to catch up to him.
And he would revel in the fact that despite the people who had tried to keep them away, he had found his Harry. At last. At last.
*
Harry stirred and rolled out of a sleep more restful than any he could remember in months. He blinked his eyes open and stared up at Riddle in awe.
Then he winced as a painful snakebite seemed to burrow under his skin. Tom. Not Riddle.
Even referring to his soulmate by his last name was painful, when that patently wasn’t what his soulmate wanted to be called.
“Harry? Are you all right?”
Harry nodded and sat up. He was braced against a fall of incredibly soft pillows, he saw, all in shades of blue and grey, and leaning against the headboard of a bed larger than two of the ones at Hogwarts. Tom was sitting in a chair next to the bed, and shifting to face him, staring at him with rapidly growing concern.
“Yes, fine,” Harry whispered, then winced and cleared his throat. It was so dry. Tom promptly picked up a silver tumbler filled with water and floating ice cubes from the table nearby. Harry seized and drank it, his throat working.
Tom’s eyes were on his throat. Harry knew it as if the gaze radiated fire that stroked his skin. He shuddered with pleasure and—what was the opposite of blankness, the kind of blankness he’d experienced for years and years because he’d never believed he would have a true soulmate bond? Fulfillment?
Yes, that, Harry thought, as he handed the glass back to Tom.
“But you winced.”
“I thought of you as Riddle. I knew immediately that you didn’t want me to, and the bond stung me a little for thinking of you by your last name.” Harry cleared his throat while he watched Tom’s eyes darken. “I didn’t know it was—I don’t know if I’m sensing your thoughts exactly, or your emotions, or a mixture of the two. But I knew that it would hurt you if I called you by your last name, so I felt a bit of that pain, and that’s why I flinched.”
Tom’s eyes had gone very wide. He watched Harry carefully, as if he expected him to be lying. Harry could do nothing but lean a little closer and try to keep an open expression on his face.
He knew real soulmates could sense each other’s thoughts, and there was no doubt that Tom was his real soulmate, not when those blue flames had sprung up when he’d touched Harry. Maybe it just took a little while for the bond to open to that extent when it was new.
“That is—closer than I ever expected to come,” Tom said at last. His voice was a soft, raw tone on the edge of a hiss. He half-stood, then ended up turning to sit on the bed beside Harry. “I did not anticipate that.”
Harry leaned towards him and felt Tom’s arm come around his shoulders. The warmth soaked through him the way nothing ever had, not even sitting in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room shoulder-to-shoulder with Ron and Hermione.
Ron. Hermione. They were probably going mad with worry about his disappearance. Harry hadn’t ever told them the secret of his soulmate, since his parents had never wanted him to open a channel that could have made it back to Tom.
But he was sure Tom would announce this in the newspapers soon enough. The important thing was the warmth around his shoulders, for once, not what his friends would think.
Harry leaned harder on Tom, and let as much as possible go while he was still awake.
*
Harry could understand Parseltongue, although not speak it. Harry had a boomslang Animagus form, another thing he’d hidden, since Tom recruited those with serpentine forms and set up lessons to pay for their extensive training as soon as he found out they had them. Harry was deft, and powerful, and quick, and turned to Tom with the kind of hunger a flower exhibited for the sun.
Tom learned all this as they sat having a quiet dinner together in front of the fire, with the strongest wards he’d been able to pay for on quick notice wrapped around the house, and Harry leaning towards him from the other side of the table. Tom finally gave up and dragged their chairs as close together as possible, even though it made it more awkward to meet Harry’s eyes while he was speaking.
He couldn’t do anything that would push Harry the slightest bit away. Couldn’t.
Harry finally ran out of words and lay against Tom’s shoulder, head tilted so that his ear rested there, his chest rising and falling with breaths as harsh as though he’d been running. Tom tucked him closer, and closer still, and murmured, “What made you decide to come to me now, instead of hiding the secret for longer?”
It was the one question Harry hadn’t answered.
Tension flowed down Harry’s body—no, down the bond between them, along with a chaos of random memories. Tom held carefully still as he sorted them out. Until their bond was fully settled, it would be difficult to pick out one image from another, and he had to concentrate instead of just asking Harry.
Harry at seven, listening to his parents tell him his soulmate was a Dark Lord. Harry overhearing his father say that it would have been easier if Harry had never been born. Harry trying rituals to erase the soul-mark, all of them failing. Harry standing exhausted before a window in Gryffindor Tower and deciding he couldn’t carry this burden by himself.
Tom clung to the last one, because it was the answer he had asked for, and disregarded his towering fury at the others. Being angry at Harry himself, or his parents, wouldn’t help forge the bond, and Tom would rather understand these things than not understand them.
“Are you disappointed?”
The words jolted Tom enough—well, they were accompanied by a mental jolt that was like an unexpected icicle to the neck—to make him sit up. “What? Disappointed? Why would I be?”
Harry swallowed and gestured at the fire and the room around them. “Because obviously you aren’t the madman they told me you were, and—I wasn’t courageous enough to seek you out before this. Or smart enough to doubt them.”
Tom raised Harry’s wrist and ran his fingers over the mark again. The blue flames rose, but they were nothing to the way Harry relaxed under his touch.
“You were a child,” Tom said quietly. “Of course you believed what you were told. And you were still taking an enormous risk when you ran away to me. You didn’t know what you were coming towards. You did it anyway. No one can ask for a more courageous soulmate, Harry. You were well-placed in Gryffindor.”
Harry’s eyes were wide with happiness. He took a deep breath, and asked, “And a smarter soulmate? Did you want one of those?”
“I have the chance to help with your education,” Tom said simply, “making sure that you pass your OWLS and NEWTS with all the flourishes you need. I can help you achieve your Animagus form, and become whatever you want to be.”
Harry blinked a little. “So I won’t be going back to Hogwarts.”
“It’s up to you,” Tom said. He could compromise. He would have to, even though part of him wanted to build a personal Chamber of Secrets and lock Harry up in it for the rest of his life. “But there will be some precautions, yes. Like a personal bodyguard to go with you. Regular visits with me. Visits with tutors if your professors treat you differently.” He knew some of the professors at Hogwarts believed that nonsense about Tom being a genocidal Dark Lord and would do their best to interfere with Harry’s soulmate bond.
Like Dumbledore.
Tom bared his teeth. He had many, many thoughts as to what to do with dear Albus, but he would enjoy the expression on his face when he saw Harry and Tom walking side-by-side for the first time, which Tom intended to be before the news of their bond was released to the public.
“If I don’t want to go back?”
Tom paused and tamed his wild joy. “Why wouldn’t you want to?”
“Dumbledore,” Harry whispered, and took a deep breath that seemed to tear something in the center of his chest. “He’s going to be so disappointed in me. He told me over and over again how much I could help by staying away from you, and now…”
Tom caressed Harry’s hair, the scar in the center of his forehead that Tom knew he had got from an old broom accident (he knew that now; he knew things about his soulmate), and the side of his ear before Harry relaxed. “It doesn’t matter. You can make the decision. Or you can stay here with me for a fortnight or so and then make the decision about going back to Hogwarts.”
“Yes,” Harry said instantly. He turned and pressed closer to Tom, laying his face against Tom’s ribs, as if that made him more comfortable, or he just wanted to feel the rise and fall of Tom’s chest. “Please. I don’t—I don’t want to go back right now.”
“Then you shall not,” Tom said, and they listened to the crackling of the fire.
He became aware that Harry was asleep next to him not long after. Tom got up and gently Levitated Harry to the bed, then Transfigured a few chairs into a bed for himself. Harry might welcome Tom’s presence at his side, for all Tom knew, but he hadn’t asked Harry, and he would wait until he had.
Tom’s dreams were beyond pleasant, were full of fire and light.
*
Harry blinked his eyes open slowly. For long moments, he didn’t know where he was. The ceiling certainly didn’t look like the one in the fifth-year boys’ bedroom in Gryffindor Tower, and the light of the fire fell differently—
Then he felt the hum of contentment from the fulfilled soulmate bond, and closed his eyes with a half-sob.
Yes. He’d run away. He’d taken a chance, so much of a chance that it made him a little dizzy even now to contemplate.
And found salvation waiting at the other end of it.
Whatever happened now, he would always have Tom.
The End.