A Prick of the Tongue Upon the Spindle

by beetaker

Summary:

On the night of Harry's eleventh birthday, she dreams a wonderful dream of sulphur and brimstone, as though she is descending down a spiral staircase in the oven-roasted centre of the earth. The way is dark and treacherous, as there are no handrails with which to steady herself, and no light by which to see. But the air smells warm and heavy, like burying her face in fresh mulch and breathing in life and the smell of sweetly rotting strawberries. And there is something else alongside Harry, some weighty presence following her, looming over her so she will know she is not alone.

Notes:

burning the animal skin didn't quite scratch my itch for writing a fairytale so I wrote this to tide me over. expect my usual long, politics-heavy, in-depth tomarrymort soon, because this one didn't quite scratch my itch for writing dykery.

Chapter 1: It's True That Visions Are Seldom What They Seem

On the night of Harry's eleventh birthday, she dreams a wonderful dream of sulphur and brimstone, as though she is descending down a spiral staircase in the oven-roasted centre of the earth. The way is dark and treacherous, as there are no handrails with which to steady herself, and no light by which to see. But the air smells warm and heavy, like burying her face in fresh mulch and breathing in life and the smell of sweetly rotting strawberries. And there is something else alongside Harry, some weighty presence following her, looming over her so she will know she is not alone.

It won't be long now, the something promises, voice like a playful wind waving its fingers through Harry's curls, the way she imagines a friend might, if she had any friends.

How will I know that it's time? Harry asks, knowing, in that curious way of dreams, exactly what it is the voice is talking about.

You will know, the voice assures her.

Waves of blinding light begin to echo out at her, still a long way down, but bright enough that she knows she must be approaching the planet's core, that molten lake of fire. What if I do it wrong?

Impossible, the voice says. Don't worry. I will be with you. I will guide you.

Always? Harry asks. She's never had anyone offer to guide her, before. It sounds too good to be true.

Always, the voice promises.

 

Harry had presumably once had parents, as parents were something she'd been assured by several adults speaking with authority which every child had. That Harry had somehow managed to lose hers was quite distressing in the beginning, so much so that she, on several occasions, took it upon herself to head out into the world to try to find them.

But the world was very large and Harry was very small at the time, and she did not know anything about her parents, so she did not know what to look for. She didn't even know their names.

After the third time, Aunt Petunia finally saw fit to speak of Harry's mother and father, something she had never done before.

“They're dead, so you can stop all this nonsense,” Aunt Petunia snapped, leading Harry by the arm back towards her cupboard, Uncle Vernon having found and snatched her from the local shopping centre, where she'd been asking passersby if they'd happened to see a mother and father who were missing the child that made them such. “You're to stay here until you're old enough to be sent to that blasted school, and then we'll be rid of you.”

“What's a blasted school?” Harry asked and, when Aunt Petunia refused to answer her, asked Dudley again in the morning, once her cupboard had been unlocked.

“It's a place for other freaks like you,” her cousin explained. “A big castle like in Dracula. It's probably filled with monsters that'll eat you that first night.”

“Oh,” Harry said, scrambling to catch a plate as it slid in her slackened grip, sudsy marigolds too big for her hands.

Harry considered this school for freaks she was destined to attend when she grew up, and considered her own freakishness. For as long as she could remember, Harry had been capable of doing impossible things. Setting fires just by thinking about it. Breaking glass from across the room during bouts of anger. Appearing on a nearby rooftop as though she'd spread two wings and flown there. Speaking to wandering snakes as they passed through the garden.

Bringing the dead back to life was, according to everyone who had anything to say on the subject, impossible.

There was a neighbourhood cat which had lost a fight with a motorcar, its broken body sinking into the grass just up the street. Harry began there. A dead cat couldn't be too terribly different from a dead parent.

 

Harry did not think much more about the mysterious school she would be shipped to in some nebulous, far away future. Day by day, she washed the dishes and weeded the garden and chatted with the grass snakes and honed her freakishness like coiling a particularly wily rope.

And then, the morning of her eleventh birthday, there was a woman standing on the Dursleys’ front porch. She gave Harry a peculiar look, before handing her a letter.

“My name is Professor Riddle,” the woman said, and the voice from Harry's dream seemed to sleepily rise up from the recesses of her memory, already mostly forgotten in the wake of sunlight.

Found you.

 

Hogwarts is both exactly as Dudley had described it with his childish spite, and nothing like it. Professor Riddle doesn't even introduce herself to Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon, ignoring their squawking and See here!s entirely, instead simply taking Harry's arm and whirling them away to some pub. Harry's never been inside a pub. She's never teleported across London, either.

“Are you the Doctor?” Harry wonders.

Professor Riddle frowns. “No. I'm a Professor at Hogwarts, school for Witchcraft and Wizardry. A school of magic.”

“Magic,” Harry nods. “Right. Do they have snakes there?”

“Why?” Professor Riddle glances at her quizzically. “Are you frightened of snakes?”

“Oh no,” Harry hurries to correct her. “I love them. They follow me to school, sometimes.”

“Is that so?” Professor Riddle listens idly to Harry's chatter as she leads her through a busy shopping district, where everyone's dressed like reenactors at a history museum. She guides Harry by the shoulder in and out of shops, brusque and methodical, working their way down the strangest school supply list Harry has ever seen.

At the end of the day, she escorts Harry back to Privet Drive. “You will be at platform 9 ¾ at eight sharp,” Professor Riddle repeats. “Or else the train will leave without you and you will be forced to wait until next year.”

“I won't be late,” Harry promises. “Will I see you on the train?”

“You will see me at Hogwarts,” says Professor Riddle, stiffening as Harry throws her arms around her.

“Sorry,” Harry jumps back, embarrassed. Aunt Petunia hates when Harry touches her, too. “I'll miss you.”

Professor Riddle looks at her for a long moment. She's got a face like a fogged up mirror. Harry's never seen a face like hers before, as smooth as it is pretty. Like she's got no feelings at all. “Goodbye, child.”

 

Harry sees her, as promised, at Hogwarts, seated among all the other staff at one long, raised table in the Great Hall. Harry doesn't realise until later that Professor Riddle is the Head of Slytherin, and by then it's too late; she's already convinced the hat to sort Harry into Gryffindor–”I knew your parents, the poor dears,” Mrs. Weasley had said on the platform. “A bit younger than me, but we were all in the Or–Gryffindor together.” Still, Harry gives her a wave from her own seat at the feast, and Professor Riddle's face flickers with something like amusement before she dips her head in response.

“Oh, don't mind the snakes,” Ron's brother, one of the twins, tells her, gesturing to Professor Riddle and the man sitting beside her. Now that Harry looks at him, he seems to be glaring at her, though more likely it's aimed at the twins, whom he must already know. He's never even met Harry. Surely she can't have earned a teacher's ire already. “Snakes hate lions. One of the fundamental truths of the universe.”

“Yeah,” his twin agrees. “The day Riddle and Snape stop sneering at this table is the day the world falls apart.”

“Professor Riddle is nice,” Harry frowns, moved by some urge to defend her. “She's the one who told me about Hogwarts. She helped me with my shopping.”

“Riddle helped you with your shopping?” The brothers share a laugh. “Merlin, I'd pay to see that. Say, Harry, if you're already teacher's pet, how bout you put in a good word with her for us?”

“Must be because your pardoning was so public,” Ron guesses, taking a brief pause from eating his way through the table. “I don't think Professor Riddle's ever done first year orientation. Everyone knows she's too busy being the Dark Lord's spy.”

“She's not a spy,” Hermione argues. “If she were a spy, it'd be a secret, and everyone knows she has the Dark Lord's favour. Maybe he wanted her to check up on you,” she tells Harry. “It was your father who tried to kill him, after all.”

“I know,” Harry ducks her head, embarrassed by the thought that Professor Riddle had only been nice to her on some sort of orders from her boss, the Lord Protector of Magic. The Dark Wizard who'd killed Harry's parents when she was a baby, but had allowed her to live as an act of mercy, pardoning her for the sins of her parents.

It doesn't feel like mercy.

 

“Do you think the Dark Lord could have made a mistake?” Harry asks.

Dark Arts is her favourite subject, the classroom a wide-mouthed space with walls cluttered floor to ceiling with shelves shouldering all sorts of curiosities, and Harry has taken to staying behind after everyone else filters out at the hour's end.

“What do you think he's mistaken about?” Professor Riddle asks mildly, not at all startled by Harry's questioning of the Lord Protector, which is why she's the one Harry's come to about this. She knew she wouldn't react with the immediate nonsense most others would, telling Harry to hush, to never say such a thing, as though the man himself might overhear and manifest right in front of her. Professor Riddle is too clever for all that.

“Maybe he thought my parents were someone else's parents,” Harry theorises. “Or maybe he thought my dad was his enemy, but it was actually someone else.”

“I see,” Professor Riddle hums, waving a hand so the whatsit Harry's fiddling with flies up above her head and settles on a shelf she can't reach. “Harry, it's natural to be curious about your parents. But if anything, losing them before you had the chance to know them was a boon. The only thing a parent will ever do for their child is disappoint.”

“Did you know your parents?”

“I was raised in an orphanage,” says Professor Riddle, and it isn't so strange, Harry is far from the only orphan; Hogwarts is filled with them. Hermione, her roommate, is an orphan too, though the loss of her parents was much more recent.

Still, having something in common with the Professor, even if it isn't a happy thing, brings Harry comfort. “You're like me,” she smiles, warmed by the sterling of Professor Riddle's eyes.

“In some ways. Yes.”

 

Harry receives her first ever Christmas–or Yule, rather, since Christmas isn’t celebrated at all in the Wizarding world, and is in fact banned, something which Harry did not know Christmas could be–presents over the holiday break; a jumper from Mrs. Weasley, and an unsigned package carrying some illustrious pile of fabric which feels like water in Harry's hands.

“It's an invisibility cloak!” Hermione gasps. “But who could have sent you that?”

Harry has an idea who sent it, which is quickly proven right by Professor Riddle's narrowed eyes as she gazes out at the seemingly empty corridor after Harry's knock upon her door.

Finally, she sighs and leans against the doorway. “I should have known you would immediately use it for mischief.”

“It's not mischief,” Harry says, shrugging the cloak from her shoulders. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

“Go thank the Headmaster, then,” Professor Riddle raises a brow, not falling for it. “He's the one who's had it in safe keeping for you all these years.”

Harry shudders involuntarily. She knows it's unkind to think so, but Headmaster Dumbledore gives her the creeps. With his syrup-glazed stare, how often he trails off mid-sentence or has an outburst of incomprehensible anger out of nowhere, like thunder cracking in the middle of a sunny day. He feels wrong, like he's missing some paramount piece of what would otherwise make him a person. Most of Harry's classmates whisper about how senile he is, how it's only a matter of time before he retires or trips to his death from the Astronomy Tower. Harry's never spoken a word to the man.

“But you're the one who sent it to my room,” Harry says, confident in this. The Headmaster had probably forgotten all about her father's cloak, which must have been given to him a decade ago.

“Ten points from Gryffindor for being out past curfew,” Professor Riddle smirks, shutting the door in Harry's face.

 

“Will I be staying here over the summers, too?” Harry asks. “Like during the winter hols?”

“Yuletide,” Professor Riddle corrects, not looking up from the essays she's marking. Harry is supposed to be levitating chairs into stacks, but she's gotten distracted by a family of ants that have taken up residence on the leg of a desk. “If you would like, then yes. There are a number of students who choose to stay at Hogwarts over the summers.”

“Will you be staying?” Harry asks hopefully.

Professor Riddle does look up at this, raising a chair pointedly until it just brushes the tip of Harry's nose. “I'm fairly busy in the summers, doing work with the Ministry. But other staff will be here to chaperone troublemakers like you.”

“I don't make trouble,” Harry disagrees, accioing a bit of parchment from Professor Riddle's desk and using it to redistribute the ants over to the window sill, where she's hopeful they'll manage to climb down the castle wall without issue. It'd be a long fall.

“You trouble me greatly,” says Professor Riddle.

 

Harry steps slowly and steadily downward, following the buzz of burning below, heat stretching its hands out in search of her.

What do I do once I find it? Harry asks, feeling fretful with ignorance.

As always, the voice carries a comforting reassurement. You swallow it, of course.

 

It takes Harry an entire year of badgering to convince Professor Riddle to attend one of her matches. The Professor never attends matches, not even when Slytherin's playing. She's a bit famous for it. So everyone makes a big deal when she finally shows up, perched between Professors Snape and McGonagall in the stands, where the staff all sit together irreverent of their own houses, except for Professor Sprout, who always sits with the rest of Hufflepuff.

Harry's pleased and boastful when she manages to catch the snitch and end the match mere minutes after it begins, despite Malfoy's gloating about his father buying the whole Slytherin team top notch brooms. Even Professor Riddle looks a bit impressed when Harry finds her after and asks what she thought.

“If you manage to end every match that quickly, perhaps I will attend more in the future,” Professor Riddle says, which is Professor Riddle-speak for You played well, Harry. I'm impressed you ended the match so quickly.

“Fastest seeker in a hundred years,” Harry says proudly, satisfied in her ability to interpret the Professor's compliments so easily. “At least, that's what Madam Hooch told me.”

“I'll be satisfied when you're just as fast with your spellwork,” Professor Riddle says, brow raised, Harry ducking to avoid her gaze. She's not slow at casting, but her mouth always seems to follow after her body, some physical instinct taking hold before her brain can manage to keep up.

“Yes, Professor.”

Professor Riddle leaves as Ron and Hermione come up to congratulate Harry, Ginny trailing after them, looking up at her with round, curious eyes. She's always asking Harry odd questions, like she's writing an encyclopaedia on Harry Potter, and only the most peculiar entries will do.

“Harry, if you had to choose between a newt with one eye or a toad with no tongue, which would you pick?”

“Um, I dunno,” says Harry, glancing at Ron who only offers her an eye roll. “The newt, I guess.”

“Me too,” Ginny grins.

 

The first time Harry hears the voice in the walls, she thinks she must be asleep. The third time she hears it, while plating herself some roast in the Great Hall, Harry figures it isn't some construct of her mind this time.

“Did you hear that voice?” Harry asks the table at large, only to receive quizzical glances from Ron, Hermione, and Neville, which tells her this is probably one of those things she shouldn't speak about to others.

She waits until she hears the voice a third time, which happily occurs shortly after midnight, so the rest of the castle is already asleep. Harry follows the sound–a low grumbling about hungriness and a petulant wish to hunt–through the walls, until she's reached the girls’ lavatory which she was warned off from using in first year. Apparently the whole thing has been claimed by the ghost of some girl who died there years and years earlier, and now mostly spends her time crying and sulkily flooding the stalls.

Harry creeps inside, keeping an eye out for any ghosts, moaning or otherwise, but finds the room empty. She searches the first stall, lacking any other real direction, before a sort of hydratic whispering seems to call out to her, leading Harry towards the sinks that form a pillar in the centre of the room.

It takes her a long moment of bewilderment to notice the silver snakes soldered to the faucets, their metallic voices tongueing at the ears of her mind.

It isn't so difficult to pry open the door, such as it is. Really, Harry only has to ask. She does not question the impulse to see where the tunnel leads; while curiosity might be deadly for cats, according to Aunt Petunia, it's primarily served Harry well.

It serves her well now. The tunnel opens into a fantastic space, in which sconces of green fire bloom across the walls, casting flickering light and shadow in a dance over the seemingly endless cavern. In the centre, on a luxurious, emerald chaise lounge, sits a man, if he could be called that.

“Who dares disturb the chamber of Salazar Slytherin?” he asks, not even bothering to look up from the book propped open on his lap.

“Oh,” says Harry, coming to an awkward stop. She suddenly remembers she's wearing pyjamas, invisibility cloak bunched up and useless under one arm. “Um, sorry. Are you Slytherin's ghost?” It seems a very Slytherin thing for him to be lurking in some sort of fancy cave beneath the castle, reading for eternity in a very posh-looking set of robes.

The man-or-ghost snaps his book shut and finally looks up, though Harry isn't sure how much he can actually see of her from beneath the heavy, skull-shaped mask covering his whole face. “I am his heir. Only direct descendants of Slytherin can gain entrance to this place.”

“Sorry,” Harry says again. “I didn't realise I was, um, not allowed.” It isn't strictly true; she'd been sneaking, after all. But she hadn't been specifically disallowed, and plans to use that to her defence. “You might want to fix the sinks, then. They'll let anyone down who asks.”

“On the contrary,” the man says, sounding amused, which at least means Harry might manage to evade detention. “They only allow those who speak the language of Slytherin.”

Harry frowns. “But they let me down.”

“Yes,” the man says slowly. “You are speaking the language even now. Can you not tell?”

“What?” Harry squints, like she might be able to see the words as they spill from her mouth. “We're speaking English.”

“Fascinating,” says the man. “No matter. What brings you to me tonight, Harry Potter?”

Harry startles, discomfited by the revelation that this strange skull-faced man already knows who she is. “I heard a voice in the walls…”

“My Basilisk occasionally grows restless. You are the first besides myself to ever hear her call.” The man tips his head. “You truly have no idea who I am?”

“Sorry, no,” Harry studies him, wondering if he's offended by her lack of recognition. “Should I?”

He merely sounds amused again. “Perhaps not. You were very young when you saw me last. An infant, in fact.”

“Did you know my parents?”

“In a way. Our relationship was short-lived, and volatile.”

“Because they were terrorists,” Harry surmises. Presumably this man had been on the winning side of the War, which would have made him an enemy of her parents. “Can you tell me what they were like?”

The man considers this question. “Tenacious,” he settles on. “Foolhardy. Not unlike most Gryffindors.”

“Hey,” Harry frowns. “I'm a Gryffindor.”

“As I said,” the man agrees, which Harry's pretty sure is an insult. “They were respectable opponents. They died with honour.”

At once, like the igniting of a lumos, Harry knows exactly who the man is. “Voldemort,” she gasps, and then looks around at the cavern again. “Do you live under Hogwarts?”

“I am merely visiting,” the Dark Lord says mildly, before adding, with a touch of reproach, “You recall that the speaking of my name is unlawful?”

“Oh, right,” Harry grimaces. First she broke into the Lord Protector's special cave–in her pyjamas–and now she's broken the law in front of him. So much for making a good impression. “Sorry. Why is it, though? Do you not like your name?”

“It is overly familiar. A sign of disrespect.”

“I thought people calling you by something other than your name was disrespect,” says Harry. “That's why Uncle Vernon never calls me Harry, or even Harriet, though I don't like Harriet much, either. I'd understand if you don't like yours. It's kind of long. But I think it's pretty. Voldemort. Can you write in cursive?”

The Lord Protector stares at her for a moment in silence. “You are not afraid of me.”

“No? Why would I be? You're friends with Professor Riddle.”

“Professor Riddle is my subordinate,” the Lord Protector says, though Harry suspects it means the same thing. “Is she your favourite teacher, then?”

“She's the best teacher I've ever had,” Harry smiles. “Can you stop giving her so much work to do in the summers? Maybe then she can spend more time in the castle.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“Do you come down here a lot?” Harry asks, can't quite help wrinkling her nose at the thought. Besides the sofa, and a small collection of well-kept books, the place is awfully dreary and cobwebbed, not very comfortable at all. Plus, he has to go through the girls’ loo to get here. “Can I visit again?”

“You need not seek me out,” the Lord Protector tells her. “I'm sure we will see one another again very soon.”

When Harry wakes, tucked safe and secure within Gryffindor Tower, she's content to chalk the whole thing up to a particularly vivid dream, until she receives an elegantly scripted letter from an austere horned owl. This isn't unusual in itself; all the second years have written a letter to the Lord Protector, as part of an assignment for History and Current Events, and everyone else has also received milquetoast responses from the Ministry.

But while all of her classmates’ letters bear the exact same words in the exact same order, Harry's contains a phrase which proves her strange memory of the man in Slytherin's chamber a reality.

I look forward to seeing what else we share, little snake.

 

Harry's picturesque mental image of her parents–the people they must have been, the love they must have held for her–is shattered quickly upon her introduction to Wizarding Britain, like the perfect encapsulated world of a snowglobe being dashed against the floor.

“As my father says, it's shameful that the children of terrorists are allowed to share classes with fine, patriotic families like ours,” Malfoy sneers down at her on the train platform, firmly dampening the wonder that has heretofore suffused her first forays into the magical world.

“We were p-p-pardoned,” Neville stammers in response, his shivery and ashamed demeanour not much of a good defence.

“No one gives a crap about your father, Malfoy,” Ron snarks, hustling Neville and Harry down the steps, Hermione hurrying after them.

“What's he talking about?” Harry asks. “What terrorists?”

“Oh, right, you wouldn't know,” Ron realises, and then hastily fills Harry in.

There was a War, big enough to earn capitalisation, with the Lord Protector of Magic and his army of Witches and Wizards launching a desperate, necessary defence of magic against the Muggle world, and the guerilla forces of Wizards and Witches who believed the statute of secrecy should fall. Within those forces stood the parents of both Harry and Neville, along with a dozen or so other students, all of whom were publicly pardoned of their parents’ crimes after the Lord Protector's victory.

The War had been tragic, yes, but sorely needed; the effect that magic had on any Muggle within close, extended proximity was deadly, akin to nuclear radiation exposure, and it wouldn't be long before whole swathes of Muggles began to take notice. And when they did, regardless of whether or not the Witch or Wizard in question had meant to or had even known they were causing harm, the Muggles would execute them hastily, in service of their own survival. The complete separation of their worlds was the only way to save both.

Harry doesn't understand how anyone could have fought against the Lord Protector and his valiant attempt to save as many lives as he could. She knows her mother was a Muggle-born, but surely even Muggle-borns, while sorry to say goodbye to their families, must prefer that to killing their Muggle relatives through long-term magical exposure. Nowadays, most Muggle-borns are found and collected within infancy, long before the magic within their blood has a chance to do any real harm, but there are still those who manage to fall through the cracks, like Hermione, who clearly has yet to forgive herself for the role she unknowingly played in the deaths of her parents.

Orphans like Harry and Neville are lucky that the Lord Protector is so merciful, so generous with second chances. Before his creation of magical protection to begin with, Harry might not have been so lucky, might have been thrown into Azkaban, the magical prison, to carry out her parents’ sentences in their place, or, even worse, expelled from the Wizarding world completely, forced to become some sort of necrotic pariah among the Muggles, killing them without even realising, doomed to be a murderer.

As it is, Harry's disappearance from Wizarding Britain on the same night of her parents’ deaths had caused quite a tizzy. For years afterwards, magical newspapers like The Daily Prophet would consistently raise the question over and over again: whatever happened to the Potter girl, who had been hidden away and was yet to return, even though the Lord Protector had pardoned her the very next day? It doesn't seem to matter that Harry had been with her relatives the whole time, that if anyone had only thought to check with her extended family, Harry might have been brought back into the fold much sooner, and thus not have caused whatever amount of ill health the Dursleys are sure to be dealing with.

Harry's a bit miffed at first to discover that the Dursleys had good reason to hate her, after all. She wonders briefly what sort of combined effect general magical exposure will have on Dudley, but puts it from her mind quickly, in favour of catching up to her Wizard-raised peers. It isn't as though there's much she can do about it now, anyway.

 

Harry finds herself standing in Slytherin's chamber once again, bathed in flickering green light, shivering from the cold breath of a draft. Before her, the Lord Protector stands and crosses the room, the billowing of his robes and silent, graceful steps giving him the appearance of floating.

“Little snake,” he sighs, and Harry has never seen his face, no one has, but the mouth of the silver skull shifts into a macabre smile, so she knows he's pleased to see her. A gloved hand moves to touch her face, thumb stroking the scar hidden beneath her bangs, the one she'd earned as a baby, a stray curse from her parents’ duel against the Lord Protector. It was a wonder she hadn't died, everyone claimed.

“I've missed you,” Harry admits, pressing into his touch, black leather nothing like the skin of another person. She wonders if he'd feel cool to the touch, like a snake. She's never touched him outside of the strange dream world they sometimes inhabit.

“Do you dream of me often, child?” the Lord Protector asks, and Harry can't stop herself from reaching up, running questioning fingers over the sculpted chrome of his mask. It melts away beneath her touch, revealing pale flesh, dark eyes, the sliver of a mouth.

“Do you dream of me often, Harry?” Professor Riddle asks, hand sliding into Harry's hair, grip tightening until Harry's breath hitches. She can hardly think enough to respond.

In the four years since Harry first met the Lord Protector, she has not seen him again in person, though she's managed to sneak back down to the chamber twice, only to find it chillingly empty. He occasionally writes to her, mostly polite platitudes and congratulations on her marks, of which it seems Professor Riddle keeps him apprised. He more often appears in Harry's dreams.

She swats away the dream, as with the others, like clearing a spider's web from her hair. She isn't the first person to dream about the Lord Protector, and especially not the first teenager–there are several, every year, who begin tittering about how tall and mysterious he is, how handsome he must be beneath that horrible mask. It seems to be a rite of passage among Hogwarts students.

Her dreams of Professor Riddle, though…those are less easily shaken off. Harry does actually interact with her in the wake of sunrise, is confident that for all her sarcasm and biting commentary, she does feel some measure of affection for her. Otherwise she wouldn't keep allowing Harry to spend so much time loitering in her classroom, sometimes even letting Harry follow her to her office to loiter there. Harry has seen Professor Riddle calmly but firmly shut the door in other students’ faces when they try to pester her after hours. But in the face of Harry's pestering, she only sighs, says something about how Harry's grown spoiled, and then sets Harry to task while allowing her to fill the room up with chatter.

And Professor Riddle is strong, the most powerful Witch Harry has ever seen, without even showing off, all of it just coming naturally to her. And she's elegant, and funny in a dark, wry sort of way, and a genius, and the best teacher Harry's ever had, to this day. And she's gorgeous, no matter the stupidity of Gryffindor boys who call her old, as if the strands of silver peppered through her dark hair aren't beautiful, catching the sunlight like ice.

Harry has been nursing her crush on Professor Riddle since she first knew what a crush was, and it's only gotten slightly less embarrassing over the years. If Professor Riddle knew about Harry's dreams, she'd no doubt have an even-toned, cutting comment about it which would mortify and amuse, but would foremost be a firm closing of the door. She's surely faced such situations before, being who she is, looking as she does. She's far too professional to give a schoolgirl crush more than a glance of attention.

It helps, knowing it's a hopeless thing. Harry will shoulder this feeling until she graduates, and then she will be able to look back on it and laugh, once she's grown up into a peer of Professor Riddle's rather than a lovestruck student.

Harry dresses hastily, waving off Hermione's invitation to the library after breakfast; she's only got a few more days before summer ends and everyone else returns for another term. Harry's hopeful her project will be finished by then, giving her something to show for her years of effort.

A thestral is not so different from a cat in some respects. Not so different from a cousin. They all die and un-die relatively the same.

 

During Harry's fourth year, Professor Riddle demonstrates the perpetuus curses.

“Once termed ‘unforgivable’ because the effects these spells produce are nearly completely indefensible and incurable. Like with the rest of the Dark Arts, this magic is not to be taken lightly, and certainly not to be performed lightly. You must never cast them unless you are willing to suffer the consequences.”

By turns, she first takes control over, tortures, and then kills a spider before the wide-eyed class.

“You will study the theory, though there will be no practical demonstration on your part.”

Once the class has ended and the rest of her classmates filed out of the room, Harry wanders over to the desk on which the spider's corpse sits like a skeletal, dehydrated flower.

“This is the spell my parents died from,” Harry muses, studying the corpse. She's never seen the killing curse cast, not that she can remember. She had no idea it would be so green, the colour she'd previously associated with life.

“Does it bother you to see?” Professor Riddle wonders, watching as Harry strokes a finger down one fragile spider leg.

“Not really. Actually, I wanted to show you something.” Harry doesn't dare look up at the Professor, doesn't dare look away from the spider and break her concentration. She's never done this with the victim of a perpetuus curse, but she figures death is death. It should work the same, but what should and should not happen doesn't always apply to magic.

It does today. After a long stretch of time which Professor Riddle generously allows to pass silently, simply waiting for whatever it is Harry plans to display, the spider's legs begin to twitch. One by one, they seem to wake, and then its entire body begins to shiver, as though shaking off the bedsheets of death. It wriggles itself back to standing, and immediately begins to scuttle across the desk, likely in search of a good hiding place, a creature of survival even after it's already died. Professor Riddle stills it with a wandless spell.

“It is not an Inferius,” she determines, studying the spider as it struggles midair. “How long will the enchantment last?”

“I'm not sure,” Harry admits. “Years? Or maybe just however long a spider's lifespan is. Maybe forever if it doesn't get killed again. I've never done it on a spider before.”

Professor Riddle shoots the spider off into some sort of terrarium and cuts a narrow eye at Harry, as though intending to see through her skin, all the way to her bones. “I see. But you have done it on something else.”

“A cat,” Harry confirms. “It'd been hit by a car. And–um. Another animal.”

Professor Riddle says nothing for a long time, long enough for Harry to think she might have made a mistake, that maybe this is a step too far for the Professor, too unnatural and freakish for even a practitioner of the Dark Arts.

Then she moves, only enough to reach Harry, brushing first a curl of hair over her ear before gripping her shoulder with a tight, affectionate squeeze. She doesn't smile, has never smiled so long as Harry's known her, but the warmth in her gaze is practically a fire.

“What a marvel you are,” she says–purrs, really–and Harry drinks it in like rich wine.

 

Harry's third year is framed by a meeting of sorts. She's been assigned an evening detention by Professor Snape, who seems to be hell-bent on shackling Harry just as often as he can get away with, charging her for every conceived slight under the sun. Tonight's punishment is for ‘talking disrespectfully during class,” despite the fact that Harry had only snapped back at Malfoy after he'd called Hermione a mudblood, a word which the Lord Protector has actually outlawed, but of course Snape hadn't reprimanded one of his precious Slytherins, nevermind that he isn't even Slytherin's Head of House. Professor Riddle, Slytherin's actual Head, would never be so disgustingly biassed. And McGonagall, despite being Harry's Head of House, never hesitates to snatch points from any Gryffindor who's earned it.

Still, Harry's at least netted a solo session, which means she won't have to abide Snape's dour presence, and she gets to spend the hour in the Forbidden Forest, which she's always enjoyed, the few chaperoned visits she's been allowed on. Ostensibly, she's meant to be searching for plants whose various limbs and organs can be used in potion-making, but mostly she's enjoying the still, moonlit night among the trees.

Her scar begins to tingle before anything else happens, a strange reaction she's learned over the years to represent danger–Professor Riddle, when Harry asked about it, said it was probably her magic lashing out, attempting to warn her. Magic, she’d explained, is a Witch's first and best line of defence.

Harry freezes, wondering if some predator within the forest might simply overlook her if she stays perfectly still, nothing more than another bit of foliage.

A twig snaps with all the violent threat of a gunshot. Harry can't bite back her gasp, can't help but turn and look over her shoulder, so she might at least see the creature she's sure is about to kill her.

It's a black wolf, or perhaps not a wolf, but some sort of huge, magical dog. His eyes gleam golden through the darkness, the growl rumbling through his enormous throat running like oil down the back of Harry's neck. Viscous saliva drizzles down from his fangs, his tongue where it coils inside his half-opened mouth, pooling atop the rotting leaves beneath his massive paws.

“Hello,” Harry tries, thinking maybe, like snakes, the wolfdog might simply want someone to talk to.

He does not speak, though his growl melts into a noise much less aggressive as he takes two slow steps towards her, nostrils flaring as he takes in her scent.

Harry's eyes clench closed of their own accord as she begins to feel–and smell–the wolf's heated, acrid breath against her skin, the scent of blood still drying upon it. Surely, any second now, his fangs will pierce the thin skin of her neck, and it'll be the last thing she'll ever feel.

Instead, she feels the cold, moist flesh of his nose press into her cheek, and then the quick, messy stripe of what must be his tongue, licking up the entire side of her face, there and then gone again.

When Harry finally wills her eyes open, the beast has disappeared, as if he'd never been there to begin with.

 

The faculty always returns to Hogwarts the day before the students. Harry spends a good two hours or so, after hearing the tell-tale sound of carriages, puttering around the dorm she shares with only Hermione over the holidays. She migrates to the Gryffindor common room after Hermione throws a book at her, saying “Good grief, just go for a bloody fly if you're so restless!”

Harry sits on the sofa and then shoots back up and then sits down again roughly six times in as many minutes, only pausing the manic cycle when Hermione stands before her, hands on her hips.

“Just go see Professor Riddle, honestly, what are you even worked up about? You know you're her favourite.” This last bit she says with mild distaste, still somewhat bitter about Harry managing to earn the favour of a Professor who has never treated Hermione with anything beyond distant professionalism.

Harry knows what she's worked up about, and she knows distinctly that it is something she can never explain to Hermione, nor even Ron. Their friendship is too important to Harry to risk losing, and they aren't like Professor Riddle, whose own interest in the disturbing and arcane is rivalled only perhaps by the Lord Protector's. They won't hate Harry for it, probably, but it will scare them. Harry never wants to scare them.

Professor Riddle's door is cracked ever so slightly open when Harry reaches her office. She knocks as she walks in, finds her directing two dozen or so books, instruments, and curiosities into their proper place within the room with lazy motions of one hand, while she sorts through a trunk with the other. She doesn't glance up as Harry enters, instead only saying “I wondered how long I'd have to wait before you accosted me.”

“Hey,” Harry says, affecting an air of offense even as she grins, scanning the newest additions to the classroom's shelves. “My accosting's gotten much more polite over the years. I gave you two whole hours. I know how you need your me-time.”

“My me-time,” Professor Riddle echoes, finally looking up, giving Harry a raised brow of disapproval. “You've grown over the summer,” she hums. “A whole half a centimetre, at least.”

“Shut up,” Harry scowls, her height–or lack thereof–always a sore point, ever since her classmates hit their growth spurts two years back while Harry's never came. Even now at sixteen, she hardly comes up to Professor Riddle's shoulder, though she comforts herself with the thought that Riddle is very tall, especially for a woman. “How was your summer?”

“Dreadful, with no teenagers around to constantly harass me,” Professor Riddle smirks. “Did you do any of your summer reading? Be honest.”

“Yes.”

“And how much of it was for Potions?”

“You asked if I did any, not if I did all of it,” Harry grumbles, finding a perch on Riddle's wide desk. “Did you travel anywhere besides London?”

“Yes,” says the Professor, flatly refusing to elaborate. Harry still doesn't know exactly what it is the Lord Protector has Professor Riddle do for him, only that she spends most of her summers on various excursions on his behalf, as well as disappearing periodically throughout the school year. “If you put even half the effort you do in my class into Potions, you would not struggle for an Outstanding.”

“If Snape was half the teacher you are, I wouldn't struggle at all,” Harry points out, relishing the microscopic wave of expression flitting across Riddle's face. She enjoys being Harry's favourite, and further, she knows Harry's right, no matter her own strange friendship with Snape, if it can even be called that, Snape himself being the least friendly person Harry's ever known.

During her third year, she'd spent a good twenty minutes complaining to Professor Riddle about Snape's incomprehensible hatred for Gryffindors, and his particular hatred for Harry, despite the fact that Harry had never even done anything to warrant it besides not being a Potions prodigy.

“I'm not even the worst in the class,” she'd bemoaned. “I'm not even the second worst in the class, but I still have the second worst marks, only because Neville really is kind of hopeless. I try, I do the readings, but every time I ask a question he takes points for not being prepared!”

“Professor Snape is a savant when it comes to Potioneering, but he cares very little for children, and I suspect you are also paying the price for your father's sins. He was, from what I understand, incredibly cruel to him when they were students.”

“But what's that got to do with me?” Harry said hotly. “I didn't even know him! Not even Voldemort holds my dad's treason against me!”

“Harry,” Professor Riddle admonished. “You really have got to stop invoking the Lord Protector's name.”

“I don't understand that either,” Harry had pouted, thinking back to the man in the chamber. He hadn't seemed to mind Harry saying his name all that much. “It's a nice name. What's the point in having a name like that if you never want to hear it?”

“The Lord Protector's reasons are not for us to question or comprehend,” Professor Riddle said, judiciously. “Nor are Professor Snape's. Continue to put forth your best efforts. He cannot actually fail you without reason. Should he try, your Head of House will step in.”

“Not you?”

Professor Riddle gave her a bemused look. “Do you truly need me to rescue you? I thought you more capable than that.”

This shamed Harry into silence, because of course she did want Professor Riddle to rescue her, but not at the cost of her pride.

Now, Harry's feelings towards Snape have hardened into a disinterested sort of disdain. Yes, it is unfair that she should be punished for whatever wrongs her father did upon the man–though, what with his general odiousness, she finds it difficult to totally blame her father, no matter his later acts of terrorism–but after five years, she finds it difficult to dredge up the energy to rage about it as she once did. The fact that she holds every other Professor's esteem–with the exception of Lestrange, who teaches History and Current Events, and seems to not care any which way about any student so long as they show up to class–is enough to satisfy Harry. Who needs Snape's favour when she has Riddle's?

“Did you ever teach my parents?” she asks, can't believe she's never thought to ask before. In fairness, the first time she'd ever approached Riddle about them, the Professor's opinion had been decidedly negative towards parents as a whole.

“I did not. I came on shortly after they graduated, I believe. I never knew them personally.”

“Do you think they were good students?” Harry wonders. For all that Mrs. Weasley has told Harry snatches of information about her parents, it’s always been about their adulthood, short as it was; Mrs. Weasley hadn’t known them well at Hogwarts, being several years older herself. Most people, when they speak of the Potters at all, don’t mention anything beyond their reputations as terrorists, her father’s particular reputation as the man prophesied to kill the Lord Protector–a terrible bit of prophecy, Harry’s always thought, given how thoroughly it’d not come true.

There are some, friends of the Weasleys, who were friends of the Potters long before Harry had any notion of her name or the baggage it carried–but Harry isn’t so interested in the gilded tales of nostalgia. She’s more interested in the facts of her parents, whether or not they were violent, whether or not they were kind. Before they were anything else, they were children who once haunted the very halls Harry does now. Surely, having haunted Hogwarts for several decades now, Professor Riddle knows something, and Harry trusts her ability to, above all else, remain unbiased.

“Would it matter if they were not?” Professor Riddle asks, unmoved by Harry’s awkward shrug. It wouldn’t matter, of course. They’d still be her parents either way. They’d still be dead. She’d just like to know, is all. “I don’t know much about your father’s skills beyond that of a fighter. But your mother, I believe, was a gifted Witch. She rivalled Professor Snape’s talent at Potions,” So perhaps Snape’s hatred of Harry was planted not only by her father’s teasing, but also by her mother beating him at his own passion. Harry hopes vindictively that Lily Potter’s N.E.W.T.s had simply slaughtered his. “And Professor Flitwick has spoken highly of her charmwork. Does this satisfy your insatiable curiosity?”

“Not really,” Harry laughs. “Isn’t that what insatiable means?” Suddenly remembering why she’d sought out the Professor to begin with, she asks “Can you see the thestrals?” Harry's always been able to, had at first believed, just as with talking to snakes, just as with undying, that every magical person could. She doesn't know the extent of Professor Riddle's actions during the War, whether or not she'd actually fought against the Order terrorists. She never keeps her sleeves rolled, as Snape and Lestrange and anyone else with a Dark Mark does, the symbol which proves they had been loyal to the Lord Protector since the very beginning.

“I can,” Riddle confirms, giving Harry a questioning look.

Harry grins, can no longer contain her excitement, feeling it well up in her and threaten to overflow. “Can I show you something?”

“You may,” Riddle allows, following Harry's path towards the Forbidden Forest, stopping just before the treeline, where Harry had discovered the bones.

It's taken her all summer to perfect, the magic itself unruly but inherent. She knew what to do; she only had to leash the necessary magic, like breaking in a horse, training it to heed her.

Professor Riddle's intense, nearly breathless witnessing as the bones first knit themselves together before sprouting arteries, then muscle, and finally the thinnest layer of moon-silver flesh, is as gratifying as Harry could have hoped for.

They stand shoulder to shoulder and watch as the thestral, newly alive, takes its first steps, hooves so gentle that the grass does not bend beneath its weight. It shakes its head, looking exactly as a hale thestral should.

“Miss Potter, I do believe you are the only person who has managed to astound me more than once,” Professor Riddle says, hushed, gazing at the revived creature, evidence of Harry's ability to do something so long declared impossible, the restoration of life, true life, as though it had never been lost at all.

 

The Yule Ball is open only to sixth and seventh years, and whichever enterprising younger students manage to accompany an upperclassman as their date. Harry knows several of her classmates have made a point to attend the dance every single year, vying either for older romances or gracious mentors willing to lend them an arm. Harry herself has never attended, and is partly considering keeping that streak going. A night filled with waltzing under the guise of networking among the several dozen Ministry workers and Mastery patrons who swan about the Great Hall in search of promising young apprentices and, in the case of many pureblood bachelors, promising young wives, sounds like something akin to torture.

But Hermione and Ron will be there, charmingly eager to show each other off as a newly minted couple, and some of Harry's other preferable classmates, and a lot of the staff will be there to chaperone and likely gossip with old students or peers who've dropped by. Which means it's a real possibility that Harry will get to see Professor Riddle done up in dress robes, or perhaps a bespoke suit.

“Will you be chaperoning the Ball this year?” Harry asks, not one to beat around the bush, even as she's supposed to be beating pixies out of a bush-head broom.

“I'm afraid that enviable position will be left to my more solicitous comrades,” Professor Riddle says, clearly feeling smug about the fact that her lesser colleagues will be the ones forced to stop unruly teenagers from getting handsy on the dancefloor or slipping firewhiskey into the punch. “Unfortunately, I have some work to attend to abroad.” She sounds as if she finds this very fortunate, indeed.

“Oh,” Harry glowers at the tittering broom in her hands. The pixies have begun to launch a defence in the form of dust bunnies shot at her by some sort of miniature trebuchet. “Would you like some assistance for that?”

“It is the kind of work I would no doubt be drawn and quartered by the Wizengamot were I to involve an underaged Witch like yourself,” Professor Riddle demurs, despite the fact that she absolutely would not be drawn and quartered by the Wizengamot for anything, on account of being the Lord Protector's left hand Witch.

“Bollocks,” Harry says glumly, shooting off a spiteful spell which sees every single pixie rounded up into a screeching tumbleweed of tangled wings and glittering dust, slammed into their proper cage like a bludger into its chest.

Professor Riddle raises a solitary, judgemental brow at the display. “You could have just done that to begin with.”

“Yeah,” Harry grumbles. Truthfully, none of the little odd jobs Professor Riddle gives her are at all difficult or time-consuming. But finishing them quickly defeats the purpose of staying after hours. “See you tomorrow.”

“You should go,” the Professor says, an unusual act of extension–while she never seems to begrudge Harry's dawdling, she never actually invites it. “To the Ball. The Lord Protector will make an appearance.”

Harry hesitates. The Lord Protector makes an appearance at the Ball every two years, ensuring he has the opportunity to personally greet and assess every student at least once during their Hogwarts tenure. Harry hasn't heard from him since she thanked him for returning the Potter trust to her–an act she's since learned had never been done before. Usually, once a Witch or Wizard is found guilty of high treason, all of their assets are forfeited to the government, to be redistributed as seen fit. Harry still doesn't know why she, of all the many children of traitors, has proven the exception.

“You have piqued his interest,” Professor Riddle adds. “I believe he has an offer you may find agreeable.”

Unless his offer involves finally introducing Harry to the elusive Basilisk beneath the school, she can't imagine she'll be interested. Working for the Ministry in any capacity seems relatively dull. “Is it about my…resurrections?”

“You shall have to ask him,” Professor Riddle shrugs, infuriatingly and obviously manipulative. She knows Harry's curiosity is an unignorable force.

“What are the odds of him rescinding all offers if I stomp on his feet during the waltz?” Harry asks, pleased by the noise of amusement the Professor can't contain.

“As with many things, I believe the solution is to practise.”

“But that's not as fun,” Harry says cheerfully, relishing the Professor's weighty sigh as Harry departs from the room.

 

Finally, at the beginning of Harry's second year, Professor Riddle broaches the topic all of the children have been awaiting with eager impatience: duelling. She calls for a volunteer with which to offer a short, practical demonstration. Harry is not the first to raise her hand–she’ll never beat Hermione to that finish line–but she is the one the Professor chooses.

A quick, simple spell, she tells Harry. Something Harry feels comfortable and confident casting. They bow. They take three steps. Raise their wands.

At Professor Riddle's subtle nod, Harry casts her favourite spell, something about the shape of the word feeling at home in her mouth, just as the Professor casts a spell Harry's never heard of.

At once, the room is an explosion of light–white and red colliding into a shower of gold, odd illusory shapes blooming from each of their wands and drifting around the room, Harry's a chorus of the charms she's practised lately; a rose-coloured rabbit she'd conjured to entertain Ginny, a tower of levitating books, more and more until she sees something that looks distressingly similar, the raising of a life like uprooting carrots from a garden.

The shapes dancing from Professor Riddle's wand are much darker, a midwinter's amount of shadows crowding around the Professor until she's wreathed in charcoal and smoke, as though stepping from a thunder-headed cloud. Finally, quick as a strike of lightning, the connection breaks, sending Harry stumbling back from the sudden snap of pressure.

Professor Riddle is staring at her as though she's never seen her before, face as unreadable as ever, while the rest of the class, previously rendered speechless by the cacophony of magic, erupt into excitable chatter, dying down again once the Professor raises a slender hand.

“You did very well, Harry,” she says. “You displayed impressive speed and concentration. You may take your seat.”

Harry tries to linger again after class, eager to receive an explanation for what sort of spell Professor Riddle had cast that was able to pull memories straight out of their wands.

“I cast a stunning spell,” Professor Riddle corrects her, hastily packing her satchel, clearly preparing to leave, which is a disappointment. “I'm afraid I cannot tell you anything about the magic our duel displayed.”

“I promise not to tell anyone,” Harry assures her, thinking that perhaps Professor Riddle is nervous about what spells her wand has tattled about, even though she needn't have been. The shapes had been incomprehensible, though beautiful to behold.

“I cannot tell you because I do not know, child,” Professor Riddle explains. “Not yet.”

“Oh,” Harry frowns. She hadn't thought there could be a type of magic which Professor Riddle did not know. “Well, when you find out, will you tell me?”

Professor Riddle eyes her up. “Yes. I'm not writing you a note for your next class.”

It takes two weeks, but Professor Riddle does keep her promise, giving Harry a highly condensed lecture on Priori Incantatem, and what it means for their wands.

“They're sisters?” Harry asks breathlessly, elation warming her to her toes. “So our magic is…similar, right? Wands respond to magic.”

Professor Riddle looks at her for an elongated moment, before patting Harry just once on the shoulder. “So it would seem.”

 

Harry ends up going to the Ball with Ginny. She's fun, and she's been nursing a crush on Harry for just as long as Harry's been dreaming about Professor Riddle. It's a strange sensation–flattering, but embarrassing too. Harry finds herself often vacillating between thinking she cares for Ginny as a sister might, and then thinking she probably doesn't, if what she's witnessed between the Weasley siblings is to be any indication.

Ron was absolutely no help when Harry asked in fifth year, during a regrettable stretch of time when the Gryffindor common room felt more like the battleground for a hormonal war of attrition–Ginny casting a strange look at Harry every time she and Dean did anything remotely romantic, while Dean shot harried looks over at Seamus, who was doing something with Parvati, meanwhile Ron and Lavenders’ many outbursts of snogging were sending Hermione into frequent fits of hysteria.

“Are all couples the worst?” Harry had asked Professor Riddle once, after a particularly frustrating argument had sent Ron and Hermione to opposite ends of the castle.

“I certainly think so,” Professor Riddle had said, which was a small comfort.

Ron had been no comfort at all, saying only that Ginny would get over her hopeless pup love for Harry or she wouldn't, and it wasn't really Harry's fault either way.

“Dunno why she's so obsessed with you, mate,” Ron shrugged, which had been both unhelpful and a bit insulting, despite the fact that Harry didn't understand Ginny's interest in her, either.

She still doesn't, and she makes it a point to continue treating Ginny as she always has, friendly without seeming intimate, Ginny seemingly content to enjoy a spot of Seamus’ spiked punch and the lads’ ongoing betting pool.

“Next round is Riddle versus the Lord Protector,” Seamus announces. “Potter, you want in?”

“Fifteen on Riddle,” Harry says, glancing at the chocolate frog card they've pulled for the match. The Professor looks back at her nonchalantly, hair perfectly coiffed behind her head. Voldemort's card sits a careful distance away, his silver mask gleaming in the candlelight. The cards are charmed; once they're put near each other, they'll begin tearing each other apart until only one stands victorious. It's a particularly vicious game, and a favourite among the Gryffindors.

“Why'd you even ask?” Neville laughs. “You know Harry never bids against Professor Riddle.”

“Which is why I've never lost,” Harry points out. Professor Riddle's cards, presumably like the Witch they portray, are singularly ferocious.

To Harry's surprise, Ginny doesn't ask once to dance, so she's spared Harry's clumsiness, and Harry the humiliation of failing to control her body in any way which might appear rhythmic. Instead, she spends a pleasant hour with her friends around a table; it would seem like any other evening if they weren't all stuffed into fancy dresses.

Eventually, Professor McGonagall calls the room to order–seems a bit strange, the Headmaster not being present, but then Albus Dumbledore is a strange man–and curtly introduces the Ministry guests and the Lord Protector, himself. McGonagall never took a side during the War, which is what saved her in the end, but it's plenty well known that she had more Order-leaning sympathies. She'd never deny outright the fact that magic drains Muggles’ health, or that Muggles themselves pose a danger to Wizards; she'd never commit such blatant treason. But she does little to disguise her distaste whenever it's mentioned, firmly listing half a dozen Muggles she knew quite well before the raising of the impenetrable wards of separation–able to be lowered only by the Lord Protector himself and his chosen officials–and how none of them had developed any cancerous tumours whilst taking afternoon tea at her cottage in Balfour.

Still, she's managed to keep her position at Hogwarts, and seems likely to hold onto it for as long as she wants. Harry suspects the Lord Protector cares more about her abilities as a Transfiguration Professor than her personal politics. After all, he also pardoned Dumbledore, despite the many substantial rumours that he was a high-ranking member of the Order himself. He's been stripped of all Wizengamot titles, obviously, but he's still the Headmaster, even if he spends more days cooped up in his office than not.

Harry watches as the Ministry and celebrity guests enter the room in rows of twos, with the Lord Protector and General Lestrange bringing up the rear. There's a round of clumsy applause from the students, most of them nervous, many of them in awe. This is the closest most of them will ever get to the Lord Protector, provided they don't somehow luck into a Ministry position of some importance. The Dark Mark heirs–those lucky enough to have parents who'd thrown their lot in with Voldemort before it became fashionable–are less impressed, knowing full well that they'll inherit their parents’ seats at the Wizengamot and share a court with him on a regular basis. Still, Harry can't imagine a presence as stark and oppressive as the Lord Protector’s could ever become mundane. It feels as though he's the only person in the room.

He delivers a rote, generalised speech congratulating them on their continuing education, wishing them well with their future endeavours, which will further build on the illustrious empire of Wizarding Britain. Then he waves for the music to start back up again, and begins to slowly cross the room.

Harry doesn't realise he's actually growing closer until he stands just before her, the opaque inkwell of his mask's eyes unimpeachable as he tilts his head, as if to look down at her where she sits. She stares first at his mask, and then at the gloved hand outstretched towards her.

“Miss Potter, if I may?” He sounds exactly as he does in her dreams, exactly as he does in her memory, for all it's been four years, and surely her mind isn't as infallible as all that.

“Um,” Harry says, and then scrambles to take his hand when Hermione digs her elbow harshly into Harry's side. “I mean, sure. Um, yes. Thanks.”

There's a rush of embarrassment as she lets him pull her to her feet and then stumbles as he leads her to the centre of the dance floor, as though her head's been submerged in the brackish water of the lake. She can feel hundreds of eyes on her, all of them envious and bewildered, no doubt. Harry's feeling pretty damned bewildered herself, hardly knowing how to breathe, even as she feels herself moving in step with him to the music, as if her legs have realised her brain is out of commission and have stepped in on their own accord.

“I did not realise you'd come to finally fear me over these last years,” the Lord Protector teases–he’s teasing her. Truly this moment feels more fantastical than the dreams.

“Not you,” Harry grumbles, staring down at her feet as they sway over the floor, not entirely sure how they're managing to actually do that. “Dancing. I'm usually rubbish at it. Even McGonagall thinks so.”

“You seem to be handling it well,” he points out, and Harry suspects he may have something to do with it.

It should be startling, perhaps, even troubling, the Lord Protector using some unvoiced magic to move her body according to his will. But all Harry feels now is relief that she doesn't have to struggle not to make a fool of herself.

“I've been told you have a particular, impressive talent,” the Lord Protector says, as though speaking of Harry's prowess on the pitch rather than her ability to restore life to dead animals. “I am interested in helping you hone it.”

“How?” asks Harry, before she remembers the many rumours of the Lord Protector's own proficiency in necromancy. “Oh, do you also…have that talent?” she asks clumsily.

He sounds amused when he answers. “Not in the same way. In fact, I have never heard of anyone else performing the act as you have. But I have…ideas on how to build upon your own efforts. How to sharpen them.”

“Um, alright,” Harry stammers. “I mean, how? Will you teach me?”

“Do you want me to teach you?” He leads her into a dip, and had Harry been entirely at the wheel of her own body, she'd no doubt have fallen, but the Lord Protector keeps a steady hold on her with his hands and his magic, bringing her smoothly upright again.

“I'm not, um, opposed. But I'm–I still have two years left.”

“One and a half, at the most.” He's teasing her again. Harry wonders how many students the Lord Protector teases at Yule Balls, if this is a long-running habit of his, or if she's the first, like she was the first to be allowed into the chamber. “I will be teaching you, in a way. Work for me during the summer. You will assist me personally throughout the workday, and in the times between necessary engagements, I will teach you all that I can.”

A job offer as the Lord Protector's personal assistant is something many of Harry's classmates would kill for. She has it on good authority that several past students have. It's a position that would normally be gifted to one of the Dark Mark heirs, as a reward for their family's loyalty. For him to be offering it to Harry, the orphaned daughter of traitors–it goes beyond shock, straight into disbelief.

“Did Professor Riddle ask you to do this?” Harry wonders, half mortified at the thought and half charmed by it, the Professor always finding little ways to push Harry towards success.

“I do not answer to your Dark Arts Professor, little snake,” the Dark Lord says, warningly. “She told me what you can do, that is all. This gift is my own.”

“Okay,” Harry shakes her head, tries and fails to swallow her smile. “Okay, then, yes. Please! Um, sir.”

“You have never stood on ceremony before, Miss Potter. Doing so now will only ring false.” He lulls them both to a stop, and Harry realises they've danced straight through several songs, a dozen other couples having joined them in the throng whilst she was preoccupied by the whirlpool of conversation.

He raises her hand up to the metal teeth of his mask, a pantomime of a genteel kiss, before stepping back, allowing Harry to be swept off by the tide of her friends, all of them buzzing to know what it was the Lord Protector had to say to her, and also when had she finally learned how to dance?

 

When Harry wakes, it's to a piercing headache and a mouth dry as cotton, the copy of the Prophet Hermione drops unceremoniously on Harry's stomach feeling as heavy as lead.

“Wha–?” Harry groans.

“Front page,” Hermione says, huffing before taking pity and offering one of the hang-over potions she makes and sells for five galleons a piece. “Read it.”

Harry peers blearily at the paper, holding it up to her nose so she can read without her glasses. DARK LORD AND TRAITORS’ DAUGHTER: LONG-LOST RELATIVES OR PARAMOURS? “Oh, Merlin.”

Hermione hums as Harry skims the rest of the article, which is just more of the same, wondering who Harry Potter is exactly, and why did the Lord Protector seem so taken with her, enough to offer her his coveted first dance? And how is it she can speak Parseltongue, famously the language of Salazar Slytherin and his descendants, including his only living heir, the Lord Protector himself? Evidence of a family connection, perhaps? Cousin? Sister? Daughter?

“What the fuck,” Harry grumbles, letting the paper slide off her lap into a heap on the floor. “I didn't even realise I was speaking in Parseltongue.” She never does, when she's with Voldemort. It always sounds like English in her mind.

“You both were,” says Hermione. “The whole time.”

Outside, someone bangs on the door of the dorm room. Seamus’ shout leaks in. “Pay up, Potter! Fifteen gold ones!”

Harry frowns, flickering over her memories from the night before. She groans, every muscle in her legs making their displeasure known as she waddles across the room to find Seamus wearing the self-satisfied grin of a house-winning bookie.

“She lost?” Professor Riddle's cards have never lost, not even against Dumbledore's, one of the longest paper duels on record.

“They both did, which means so did everyone else.” He opens his fists to display two piles of ragged paper, shredded past the point of recognition. “Tore each other to bits.”

Chapter 2: In Amongst All The Oddities

In the days immediately following the Ball, everyone is inundated with Prophet headlines speculating about Harry's relationship to the Lord Protector, some woman named Rita Skeeter apparently obsessed with the question to the point of ridiculousness. Harry has never cared much for the news, and now it takes all her willpower not to set every paper on fire as they shower the tables every morning. The other students are by turns pointedly ignoring Harry's questionable connection to the Lord Protector, or else seething with either envy or curiosity. The Dark Mark heirs in particular have begun sending Harry looks even more scathing than usual, along with a nasty hex or two, so she's taken to shielding herself whenever she leaves the Gryffindor commons, hopeful that all the hullabaloo will die down over Yuletide break so she can return to the comfort of obscurity upon the new year.

The day before everyone is set to depart for the holidays, Malfoy's patience seems to snap–not that he really had much to begin with. He was the first to start hexing, having been sure he'd be the one to receive the coveted position as the Lord Protector's summer assistant, only to discover through Ms. Skeeter's latest annoyingly informative article that the job was now going to Harry. He corners her as she's coming out of the lavatory, having hoped to duck into the chamber for a moment or two, and had instead found herself waylaid by Moaning Myrtle, desperate for company and conversation.

Harry manages to escape one irritation only to suddenly find herself being held at wand-point by another, Malfoy's usually pale face gone rosy with anger.

“How dare you, you little blood traitor,” he snivels. No matter what emotion drives him, Malfoy seems incapable of speaking in a voice that doesn't sound like a miserable whine.

“Sod off,” Harry snaps, incapable of ignoring him, as ever. He simply has too punchable of a face.

“How'd you manage it?” Malfoy sneers, wand hand trembling. Harry doesn't think she's ever received such a pathetic threat. “On your knees?”

“Don't pin your disgusting thoughts on me just because daddy couldn't bribe your way, this time,” Harry says hotly. “The Lord Protector cares more about actual magical ability than money, poor luck you.”

Malfoy snarls as he casts, and Harry hasn't realised until this very moment just how much of an effect her extra diligence given to D.A. has had; she doesn't hesitate, not even to blink, before she's dodged Malfoy's curse and returned fire, all in the same moment.

Not even Harry knows what she's cast until the spell hits its mark. Suddenly, Malfoy's skin opens up into dozens of holes, as if he's been bitten over and over by a vampire, or some equivalent creature–a snake, perhaps. Harry watches in horror as Malfoy pales dramatically, all of the blood rushing out of his body through the exits that have been suddenly provided. Malfoy's wand clatters to the floor as he falls heavily to his knees, upper body wavering as his eyes begin to flutter, crimson puddling out across the corridor floor beneath him.

Harry rushes to his side, has only just begun to call his name when suddenly a voice barks for her to stop, to not touch him. She looks up to find Professor Snape marching towards them, wrath and fear battling for dominance across his face, robes fluttering with a vengeance as he quickens his pace.

Just behind him, looking apathetic by comparison, is Professor Riddle.

Embarrassed shame wells up in Harry; she hadn't meant to seriously harm Malfoy, not to this extent at least, Professor Snape frowning with concern as he casts whatever healing spells have begun to slowly pull the blood back into Malfoy's body and close up the punctures in his flesh. And now her mistake–a mistake which might have otherwise killed someone–has been witnessed both by the Professor most likely to get her expelled over it, and the one whose opinion Harry respects the most.

“Professor,” Harry starts, unable to look at either of them, unsure which one she's even addressing. “I didn't–”

“Stop. Speaking,” Snape hisses, cutting her off with a fierce glare. Malfoy is groaning, leaning into Snape's hold like a child, and Harry suddenly recalls that Snape is his godfather, to say nothing of Malfoy being the son of the sodding Minister; she's so expelled. “We'll see what the Headmaster has to say about your act of attempted murder.”

“Really, Severus,” Professor Riddle clucks her tongue. “Then I suppose we'll see what Albus has to say about Mr. Malfoy's attempted assault of Miss Potter, to begin with.” She summons Malfoy's wand to her hand without a word and casts to see what spell it had last loosed. “The cutting curse,” she diagnoses, narrowing her eyes at Malfoy's shivering form. “Every bit as fatal as Harry's Parselmagic, which was evidently an instinctual reaction. Surely you don't mean to have a young woman expelled for the act of defending herself. What a precedent to set.”

“She nearly killed him,” Snape spits.

“And yet he still lives,” Riddle points out. “I say we call it a wash.”

Snape gapes at her, and were Harry's fate not currently under debate, she might have found the sight funny. It isn't everyday she sees Snape rendered speechless.

“You disagree?” Professor Riddle asks, tone mild, face impassive, yet some dark tension lurks around the corner of her voice.

After a short moment, Snape bows his head, studying his healing job on Malfoy, a few pink blotches of skin the only evidence of his previous wounds. “No. A wash. Yes.” He doesn't look up as Professor Riddle grips Harry by the shoulder, a wordless demand that she stand and follow her off.

Once they've rounded the corner, Harry finds herself stumbling over yet another apology, desperate for Professor Riddle to know that she never meant to kill Malfoy, that she doesn't even know what spell she'd cast, doesn't quite understand how she'd cast it, that she was planning to heal him as soon as she saw the damage, until finally Professor Riddle silences her with a stern look.

“Never feel guilt for besting your lessers,” Riddle tells her. “What I said to Professor Snape was true. You were defending yourself, nothing more. It was Mr. Malfoy's poor decision to attack a more talented duelist, and thus his consequence to suffer.”

Harry nods, even if some part of her remains cross-armed and unforgiving. If it was truly defence, that part of Harry points out, she would have cast the disarming spell, not some Parselmagic curse Harry didn't even know the effects of.

“Instinct is a powerful tool, which cannot be taught,” Professor Riddle says, likely sensing Harry's reluctance to release her own guilt, or perhaps pulling the thoughts themselves from her eyes. “Much like Parseltongue in itself. Your instinct protects you to the best of its ability. If your survival requires the pain or even the death of another, so be it. Do you feel guilt for every ant crushed beneath your shoe?”

“Yes,” Harry says. “When I notice them.”

Professor Riddle's gloved knuckles swipe a slow stripe across Harry's cheek, thumbing errant curls out of her eye, which Riddle meets with a look of intensity. “Of course you do,” she says flatly, earning a small smile from Harry.

“Have you ever…killed someone?” Something in the way the Professor spoke of survival has struck a match of curiosity within Harry.

Professor Riddle spends a long minute simply studying Harry before she answers. “Yes.”

“Who?” Harry's practically breathless with anticipation–her heart has paused its beating, her lungs seize and still, waiting for the Professor's response.

“My father,” she finally says, not pulling away when Harry reaches up to grasp her hand. If she was thinking any less clearly, she'd bring it to her mouth, some sort of courtly kiss given from sympathy.

“Did he deserve it?” Harry wonders, keeping her lips to themselves.

“Death and deserving have very little to do with one another,” Professor Riddle turns her hand within Harry's grasp, sliding beleathered fingers through the thicket of curls, Harry turning her face into the motion. “One day, you will understand that.”

 

Professor Riddle is wearing a silk pyjama suit, her dark hair falling like shadow over her shoulders, slivers of silver throughout like spider's thread. She's perched on the emerald sofa inside Slytherin's chamber, which Harry doesn't think to question. It feels right to be here, to have Professor Riddle here, looking completely at home, more herself than ever. Harry understands the feeling; as if a piece of herself she hadn't even realised was missing has slid back into place.

They're sitting closer than would be considered appropriate, Harry dressed only in the oversized Dudley-shirt she likes to sleep in on warmer nights, dark skin of her thigh pressed alongside the dark silk covering Professor Riddle's. Harry wonders if her whole body is one long, pale ray of moonlight, or if her arms and legs, wrapped as they usually are beneath suits and robes, are somehow lighter than the marble-smooth skin of her face.

“Do you like it?” Harry asks, gesturing around the chamber, which looks much cleaner than it ever has before, as though she'd taken a broom to the grime and cobwebs before presenting it to the Professor.

“I've always liked it,” Professor Riddle smiles, its appearance rendered uncanny by its unusualness, though this only warms Harry further. No one else has ever made the Professor smile, Harry's suddenly and unwaveringly sure.

“Me too,” Harry grins back, putting a hand over Professor Riddle's knee, thin and pointed beneath her sleeping trousers. “It feels comforting. I don't know why.”

“It is, in a certain respect, your birthright,” the Lord Protector says.

Harry tears her gaze away from her hand on Professor Riddle's knee, to find that the Lord Protector has somehow taken her place, wearing her pyjamas, leaning his shoulder back against the sofa. His mask is in place, but Harry feels confident that beneath the skull, he's looking down at her with amusement. She snatches her hand back, mortification rushing through her body in a wave of heat. Harry doesn't always realise when she's dreaming, but Voldemort's visitations are akin to a bucket of cool water being tossed over her head.

“Calm yourself, little snake,” he says, words curled by a smile. “You are hardly the first to have…improper dreams about their Professor.”

“They're not improper,” Harry grumbles, not feeling very calm at all. “I'd never disrespect Professor Riddle like that.”

“I doubt she would take any offence,” he says mildly. “Do you often dream of her in this place?”

“Sometimes,” Harry hedges, wondering if perhaps the Dark Lord might take offence to that, Harry sharing this space, even only subconsciously, with others. “Do you mind?”

“On the contrary. I find it intriguing.” He brings a hand up to the side of Harry's face, a mirrored reflection of how Professor Riddle had touched her the day before, his thumb slithering beneath Harry's bangs to stroke her scar. “Pardon my interruption of whatever proper turns your dream may have taken.”

“It's fine,” Harry sighs, having had some variation on this conversation before, when the Lord Protector's sudden appearance had put an abrupt end to her dream of winning the World Cup. “You can't exactly control it, right?” She wouldn't put it past him to have learned how to wield the strange bridge between them without telling her. He is the most powerful Dark Wizard alive; surely a little dream magic won't remain beyond his abilities for long.

“I cannot,” he confirms. “I admit, I remain reluctant to learn how to. I enjoy our visits.”

“You enjoy visiting my dreams, you mean,” Harry argues, shifting in her seat, wanting by turns to move closer and out of his reach. When she was younger, the Lord Protector felt like a friend in these moments, or perhaps how she imagined an uncle or godparent might feel. An adult who inspired trust and fondness by their presence alone. Now, she isn't sure what he inspires in her. A strange miasma of feeling. “I never end up in yours.”

“Because I do not sleep,” Voldemort explains. “If not for your welcoming mind,” his thumb digs a hint of pressure against her scar, warm and heavy, “I would never dream at all.”

“Do you miss it?” wonders Harry. “Did you sleep before you became the Lord Protector?”

“I did. I do not miss it, though I enjoy sharing yours.”

Harry surrenders to the urge to curl closer, tucking her legs up under her shirt like she did as a child, letting her hands land on his–Professor Riddle's–shoulders. She studies his mask, so close at this angle, its chrome burning green in the flickering candlelight. “Were you wearing your mask when you killed my parents?”

His hand has shifted in the wake of her proximity, now carding over her hair, up and down, as if stroking a cat. “No.”

“So I've already seen your face,” Harry realises, trying to recall the long-buried memory. “Can I see it again?”

Lord Voldemort hums, his mask cool beneath Harry's questioning fingers. “This is your dream, little snake. Can you?”

Harry snorts, the snarky pedantry putting her in mind of Professor Riddle, made easier by the fact that Voldemort is still wearing her clothes. She keeps her hands on either side of Voldemort's mask, framing it, as she focuses only on the thought of what might lie underneath, and how much she wants to see it.

Like clouds of steam being wiped from a mirror, the skull begins to melt away beneath Harry's touch, until only a void, vaguely face-shaped, remains, a pit of darkness with two crimson crescent moons where his eyes are set. They burn back at her as Harry takes in the sight, this exposure of darkness, nothingness.

“Is this how you see yourself?” Harry asks, because surely this is not the sight that hides beneath the mask in the waking world. Even the Lord Protector must have a face.

“I'm more interested in how you see me,” Voldemort says, with no mouth, no movement of a mouth, as though his voice is sprouting from the very air between them.

Harry closes her eyes against the sight and lets her hands quest across the expanse of shadow where his features should lie, over the hilltops of cheeks, the bridge of a long, aquiline nose. She leans forward, until her brow rests where his should be, then further still, until their foreheads would be kissing.

At the touch of her scar against him, Harry gasps, a pulse of heated pleasure zippering down her spine, the low whisper of Voldemort's hiss against her ear evidence enough that he feels it as well.

“What–?” Harry leans further against him, sounds she's never heard herself make expelled as he clutches her closer. The hand wrapped in her hair disappears before suddenly returning ungloved. From the corner of her eye, Harry glimpses long, pale fingers. She feels the sharp kiss of claws as he weaves them around the bowl of her head. “What is this?”

“I do not know,” Voldemort admits, his voice even more sibilant than usual. “Your power continues to elude me.”

“This isn't me,” Harry argues, unable to stop herself from pressing closer, seeking more warmth, more electric ecstasy. “I've never felt this before. I'd remember.”

“Of course not,” Voldemort hisses, pulling back so the embers of his eyes bore into hers. “Because, my dear, you have never before touched me.”

 

When Harry wakes, she's still shuddering through the aftereffects of the flood, its absence leaving an ache she thinks might never fade.

For the third year in a row, Harry spends Christmas at the Burrow. No other Witches or Wizards celebrate Christmas, or if they do, they keep it to themselves. Apparently it used to be more common before the War, before the jettisoning of all things Muggle, before the cleansing of Magical Britain from the stain of Muggle influence. But the Weasleys have always followed their own sway and no one else's, and they continue to celebrate Christmas with a warm, affectionate fervour, inspiring within Harry a fondness for the holiday she'd never felt before. She's always loved the Weasleys and their loud, topsy-turvy house constantly bustling with people and magic. She and Hermione always share Ginny's room, the lone girl in a houseful of brothers, the only sibling who's never had to share her bunk.

Every year, there are a handful of guests Harry doesn't know, each more eccentric than the last. Some, like Mr. Hagrid and Mr. Lupin, Harry recognises from her first year at the Burrow, when both men had, despite their grizzled appearances, proven to be kindly and warm, old friends of Harry's parents, who'd grown misty-eyed at the mere sight of her. They offer Harry stories of Lily and James Potter like handing her a basket of sweets which Harry never has the heart to tell them she has no taste for. At first, the sudden influx of information about her parents had been appreciated after so many years filled with nothing, a parent-shaped grave where two parents should have been.

But with each subsequent year, the reminisces have felt less like a gift and more like a hopeless request for Harry to suddenly remember two people she will never remember, for her to suddenly become the child of two people who did not raise her. She isn't sure what sort of person Mr. Lupin and Mr. Hagrid expected Harry Potter to be, but it's becoming increasingly evident that it is not her.

Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, at least, seem to like Harry for Harry. Her first time at the Burrow, Mrs. Weasley had shown Harry a single photograph, a dozen smiling Witches and Wizards, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley and Harry's parents among them, before hiding it back in the bottom of her sewing tin, and had never spoken of it since. Harry isn't an imbecile, wasn't even then; she knows the Weasleys, along with their wandering troupe of strange visitors, were members of the Order, the same militia as Harry's parents. It's strange to think of Ron's parents, the only good parents Harry has ever known, as terrorists, reformed though they may now be. They were pardoned the same night as Harry, alongside every other Order member who had never taken a life, themselves. But their Christmas dinner guests can't all say the same, Harry's sure, as evidenced by hushed conversations regarding border patrols and the evading of them, and Mrs. Weasley's fretting over malnutrition, badgering them to have a hot shower and home-cooked meal while they can.

And, beyond hosting several wanted criminals, there's Mr. Weasley's illegal collection of Muggle artefacts, his covert workshop behind the house, charmed to appear like a hollowed-out, ramshackle shed. Harry knows the deep-seated trust the Weasleys place in her each time they allow her into their home, each time they allow her to observe so many things which, with just one word, she could use to destroy the peace they've built for themselves. Harry was still a baby when the War ended. She never truly witnessed the destruction that the Order of the Phoenix brought about. But she has witnessed the care and kindness of the Weasleys, like the warmth of a hand-knit jumper. She'll never betray that gift, not for any law.

Mr. Lupin and Mr. Hagrid are both at Christmas dinner again this year, along with two men Harry's never met before, a Mr. Moody, whom everyone besides Mrs. Weasley calls Mad-Eye, which Harry thinks is a pretty rude nickname for a man missing an eye, and a Mr. Black, whom everyone calls Sirius, except for Mr. Lupin, who calls him Padfoot.

Mr. Black is perhaps the roughest-looking man Harry has ever seen. If the others hadn't introduced him to her with genuine fondness in their voices, she would have assumed he was a vagrant picked up off the street by Mr. Weasley as some form of charity. The Order photograph is once again taken out of its tin, Mr. Lupin cheerfully pointing out Sirius, a young, handsome man bearing very little resemblance to the haggard stranger before her.

“James, Sirius and I were best mates for most of our lives,” Mr. Lupin tells her. “James and Sirius lived together for a while, after Mr. and Mrs. Potter took Padfoot in. James named him your godfather, obviously.”

Harry studies her godfather dubiously as he practically licks his plate clean, like a street dog who's gone too long between meals. He doesn't look to be up for much fathering of any kind. “How come I've never met him before?”

“He's been…unwell, since your parents died,” Mr. Lupin hedges.

Sirius Black doesn't speak for himself at all, only communicating sparingly through grunts and grumbles and various shakes of his head. He stares at Harry unerringly whenever she enters the room, distracted from this task only by Mr. Lupin tugging at his matted hair.

“He's creepy,” Ron agrees, when Harry finally remarks on it. “Don't worry, mate. We won't leave you alone with him.”

“I wonder what he's been up to,” Hermione shakes her head. “Even if he's been on the run, like the others, you'd think he would have at least tried to find Harry before now. She's his goddaughter!”

“I was a baby,” Harry shrugs. “It's not like I remember him, and he didn't exactly know me. I'm not cut up about it.”

“I just hope mum doesn't let him stay in the Burrow all winter,” Ginny grumbles, shooting a terrific glare at the man in question from across the room. “He smells like wet dog. It's stinking up the whole house.”

Mr. Moody proves as talkative as Sirius is not, often regaling whoever has the bad luck to share the room with him with old war stories or, as he calls them, tales from the golden days, before the country went to hell in a hand-basket.

“You'll never know what you're missing,” he bemoans, gesturing with his flask at Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville, who's visiting with his grandmother. “There was a time this country used to be free, before Darkness took hold!”

“Mad-Eye's complaining about the Darkness again,” Fred whispers cheerfully, slipping a flask of his own beneath the table. “That's a shot.”

“Does he ever stop?” Ron asks.

“Never,” the twins say gleefully. George adds “Just be glad you're too young yet for his recruitment spiel.”

Fred affects a Moody-esque grumble in his voice and raises a fist. “The Order will rise again! Just like its namesake! We will vanquish the Darkness! Hear ye, hear ye!”

At the other end of the long table, Moody fixes his roving false eye upon them with a suspicious glower. “And what are you lot gossiping about?”

“N.E.W.T.s,” Hermione says promptly.

“Thought those weren't til next year,” Moody presses.

“Well,” says Hermione, “You can never be too prepared.”

Moody seems appeased by this. “Too true,” he agrees. “Constant vigilance!”

Harry is tiptoeing her way back to Ginny's room after a trip to the loo; the house is the quietest it ever gets, a dark shroud of sleep slipped over it, and so Harry finds herself alone when Sirius Black catches her firm by both shoulders, eyes dark and wide with burning intensity.

“I know you,” he rasps, the first words Harry has ever heard from him, as if scraped from the rusted pipe of his throat and dropped at her feet. “I know you.”

“I'm Harry Potter,” Harry says, wondering if the man's had a stroke or something, wondering what exactly Mr. Lupin had meant by unwell. “You knew my parents.”

“It isn't safe for you,” Sirius mumbles, as though speaking to himself now, though his grip on Harry remains uncomfortably strong. “You smelled like death in the forest–it isn't safe!”

“All right, Padfoot,” Mr. Lupin peels away from the shadows, landing a steady hand upon his friend's arm, calmly prying Sirius Black's clenched, dirt-ravaged fingers from Harry's shoulders. “Young Harry needs her sleep now. You'll see her again in the morning.”

“It isn't safe, Moony,” Sirius groans, shivering into himself as Mr. Lupin guides him down the hall. “I know her!”

“Of course you do,” Mr. Lupin says, comfortingly. “You're her godfather.”

 

It was during Harry's second year that she discovered Professor Riddle's birthday was on New Year's Eve.

“That's the best birthday ever,” she'd declared, in awe that in this, just as with everything else, Professor Riddle had managed to be perfect. “Your birthday's the day before the world's! So no one can ever forget it.”

Professor Riddle seemed amused by Harry's delight. “On the contrary, child. It means my birthday always went forgotten, overshadowed by the new year.”

“But that doesn't make any sense,” Harry frowned. “My birthday's always forgotten because it's just on a random day in the summer. There's nothing important about it. Not like Dudley's, which is three days after Mother's Day.”

Professor Riddle shrugged. “It's just as well. I don't celebrate my birth. It was the least interesting moment of my life. So boring, to tell you the truth, I don't even remember it.”

“No one remembers their birth, Professor,” Harry laughed. “But I'll never forget yours, I promise.”

“We shall see,” said Professor Riddle, likely believing Harry would forget, perhaps the very next day, but Harry proved her wrong happily. She's never missed Professor Riddle's birthday since.

Harry usually spends Boxing Day with the Weasleys, but she always makes sure to be back at Hogwarts by New Year's Eve. Unlike during the summers, Professor Riddle spends the winter holidays in the castle, apparently not needed by the Lord Protector during Yuletide.

Harry forces herself to walk at a leisurely pace towards the dungeons, wondering hopefully if one of the Merfolk will appear in Professor Riddle’s office window like the year before, and if the Professor will be pleased with Harry's gift. She's always seemed at least bemused by the presents Harry thrusts upon her, even the shoddily transfigured goblet Harry gave her in third year, which hissed every time someone besides Professor Riddle tried to drink from it.

Harry knocks twice, smiling helplessly when Professor Riddle opens the door, dressed as impeccably as she always is, despite it being the holidays. Every other Professor is likely in their house slippers and dressing gowns by now, but not Professor Riddle, who's still wearing her elegant black gloves, long hair pinned up perfectly. She gives Harry the same look she always does, like she can't possibly understand why she's visiting her rather than eating leftover treacle tart in front of a fireplace somewhere, before gesturing her inside.

“Happy birthday, Professor,” Harry grins, refraining from squeezing at the gift in her hands too tightly. She watches the Professor glance at the box placidly before waving a hand at the dresser, two glasses and a pitcher of drink heeding her call. “Which one is this, again?”

“Seventy,” Professor Riddle says mildly, waving Harry's glass towards her, the allotrope chalice floating daintily through the air, scent of spices and liqueur warming Harry through. “Ancient to you, no doubt.”

“Nonsense,” Harry takes a sip of the mulled wine, clearly Professor Riddle's own recipe, something dark and bitter lingering within the aftertaste. “You don't look a day over fifty-five.”

“Such flattery,” Professor Riddle hums, biting back a smile. She can be as aloof as she wants around everyone else, but Harry knows she enjoys these little visits almost as much as Harry does herself. “I can see the secret's about to burst out of you. Go on, hand it here.”

Harry passes over the parcel, wrapped in the only paper she'd had on hand and thus covered in the blaring orange of the Chudley Cannons. Professor Riddle gives an imperious sniff at the dressing before vanishing it completely, staring down at the diary left unveiled in her hands.

“It's a Memental,” Harry explains quickly, made nervous by the Professor's extended silence. “It's supposed to let you write messages to yourself in the future. It's a gimmick, really; enchanted parchment just sucks up your words and then spits them out at a later date. I've got these friends who make all sorts of joke items–”

“I'm well aware of the Weasley twins and their pursuits in the realm of jestership, Harry,” Professor Riddle says dryly.

“Right,” Harry shakes her head. “Course you do.” She'd taught them every year, after all. “Anyway, that's what it's supposed to do, but I, um, tampered with it a bit.”

“I can see that,” Professor Riddle muses, studying the diary. “This magic is…intriguing. What exactly is it meant to do?”

“Write messages to your past self, hopefully. I know she won't actually have the diary, obviously, but they should just manifest on whatever parchment is nearby. I think.” She'd worked on the enchantments all winter with Hermione, who had been good enough to do all the necessary reading and then regurgitate it back to Harry in more comprehensible terms, though of course it was all still mostly theoretical. Time magic was too dangerous for any practical texts to be accessible to students, but Harry figures the thought's what counts. “I thought you–younger you, I mean–could maybe do with a friend, you know. It might be nice to know someone's looking out for her.”

“I'm surprised it isn't made of snakeskin,” the Professor smirks, running a finger over the leather cover, the crude embossing of her initials Harry added at the last minute, moved by the sudden conviction that they were necessary.

“Couldn't find any on short notice,” Harry jokes, hoping she won't ask how Harry knows what her middle initial is. The truth is too likely to make Harry sound like some sort of obsessive maniac, which she isn't, no matter what Hermione has to say on the subject. “You're close to the Lord Protector, aren't you?”

If Professor Riddle is surprised at the sudden change in topic, she gives no sign. “In so much as anyone might be considered close to him, yes.”

“Have you seen his face before?”

The look in her eyes is unreadable. “I have,” she admits. “It is a face like any other.”

“Then why hide it?” Harry wonders. She's always assumed he kept his face covered because there was something about himself he didn't wish others to see. Why else wear a mask?

“Because it does not matter what he looks like. It does not matter who he is. The Lord Protector is a symbol, a demonstration of what magic can do, what every magical person is capable of if they simply put in the necessary effort,” Professor Riddle explains.

Harry frowns around a gulp of wine. “But he's not just a symbol. He's still a person, under that skull. Do you celebrate his birthday?”

“I do not.” She sounds amused.

“You should,” Harry tells her, trying to imagine what sort of birthday party Voldemort might like. Perhaps she should bring it up when they next share a dream. She could host it in Slytherin's chamber. She'll invite Professor Riddle, though Harry isn't sure who else Voldemort might consider a friend. General Lestrange? The Minister? But then how would Harry manage to invite them? Should she send a letter? “No one deserves to be alone on their birthday.”

“I feel confident that the Lord Protector does not mind,” says Professor Riddle.

“Bet he does,” says Harry. A man content with unsociable Lord Protectoring doesn't strike her as the sort to befriend awkward twelve-year-olds in secret sewers. “Being a symbol sounds lonely.”

“Loneliness is a weakness of spirit.”

Harry makes a rude sound at that, rolling her eyes at the thought and then laughing at the affronted look on Professor Riddle's beautiful face. “I wish I'd known you as a student. When you were my age, I mean.”

Offence shifts back to amusement. “It was a terrible time to live through,” she assures Harry. “Two great Wars taking place simultaneously. You're better off as you are, a child of peace.”

“Still,” Harry says, heated and lightened by wine, by the curls of candlelight and shadow dancing an intimate waltz across Riddle's study. “You grew up alone, like me. It would've been nice to have someone, don't you think?”

“Being alone strengthened me,” Professor Riddle declares. She crosses one long leg over the other, the motion parting her robes just for a moment, allowing Harry a brief glimpse of milk-white skin between her shoe and the hem of her trousers. Harry imagines sinking down to her knees on the cold stone floor, cupping that minute stretch of leg in her hands, and pressing a kiss to the slender ankle.

Professor Riddle, oblivious to the want burning, embarrassing and stupid, within Harry–or at least kind enough to ignore it wholesale–traces a finger over the letters of her own name. “But I suppose I would not have hated sharing those years with you.”

 

While Harry thought that being the Lord Protector's personal assistant–not to mention his student, what with his promise to teach her everything he knew–meant she would surely speak to the man on a regular basis, she's very quickly and efficiently corrected. She's sprinted through orientation at an impossibly brisk pace by Percy–and if Harry had expected her years-long friendship with his entire family to earn her some amount of kindness or reprieve from Percy Weasley, personal assistant to Undersecretary Parkinson, Harry was just as swiftly disabused of that assumption. He has just as little patience with her now as he did when he was Head Boy and she was a first year still getting her bearings about the castle, his hefty sighs at their lagging behind seeming a bit unfair given that the staircases were constantly moving while students tried to traverse them.

It strikes her as a bit unfair now too, what with the Ministry being by all appearances designed to confuse and disorient newcomers, and Harry having only spent thirty minutes chasing after Percy as he gave her what must have been a record-breaking whirlwind of a tour.

“If you have any questions, don't,” he tells her. “But if you really must, owl me directly. If I am indisposed, owl Miss Greengrass. She's the Minister's assistant. Do not, under any circumstances, bother the Undersecretary or the Minister. And it should go without saying, but I suppose I'll say it anyway; never bother the Lord Protector.”

“Um,” says Harry, apprehension having filled her up to the brim throughout the entire morning. “Aren't I supposed to be, you know, assisting him?”

Percy's laugh is more of a whispery bark, like that of a fox. “The Dark Lord doesn't need assisting, Harry. And if he wants something, he'll let you know, I assure you. But better that he doesn't want anything. Just keep your head down, file your paperwork, and keep his schedule in line.”

“How am I supposed to know his schedule if he doesn't tell me?” asks Harry.

Percy tips his head back towards the ceiling, as though asking the portraiture of past Ministers among the sparkling clouds for help. “Have you forgotten the charm I showed you already?” He shows her again without waiting for an answer. “There you go. There'll be a logbook on your desk; whatever you write in it will appear on his schedule when he casts the charm, as well. Though, again, you don't need to worry about that. The Lord Protector keeps impeccable timing.”

“So then what does he need an assistant for?” Harry scowls, beginning to think she's somehow been conned into spending an extremely dull summer babysitting a desk.

Percy only shakes his head. “You really don't get it. This is a favour, Harry. The Lord Protector has given you something priceless. Spending a summer as his personal assistant–any job you could possibly want after you graduate, any position within the Ministry, consider it yours. Provided you do not make a complete mess of things, by this time next year, you'll be fending off proposals.”

“Great,” Harry says morosely.

She spends her first day compulsively casting the Rationarium charm, gets lost on her way to the loo twice, and heaves a sigh of relief at the strike of five–only to remember she'll be reliving this day for the rest of the summer.

When she meets Mr. Weasley, who had graciously escorted her to the Ministry and is graciously escorting her back to the Burrow, as he will continue to do all season, he takes one look at her face and offers a sympathetic smile. “Not quite as exciting as you hoped, eh?”

Harry's complaints to her friends fall on largely apathetic ears. “It's a Ministry job, mate, could've told you all that,” Ron says, Ginny unsympathetic beside him, both having heard more than enough about mind-numbing bureaucracy from their father–who, despite his best efforts at a cheerful facade, clearly hates his job in the Seizure and Evaluation of Muggle Artefacts Department–and their brother, who loves his job so much Harry suspects he'd propose marriage to the Ministry as an institution, were it legal to do so.

Hermione only winces at Harry's disdain, and all of Harry's frustration is suddenly replaced by guilt. While it isn't impossible for Muggle-borns to succeed to enviable positions within the Ministry, it depends almost entirely on being well-connected, committed to networking and ingratiating oneself to those with the power to offer internships and entry-level jobs. Hermione, who has far too much self-respect to defer to anyone who hasn't earned her esteem, is abrasive, and does not believe in the socially acceptable white lie. As an orphan with no Wizarding name to fall back on, very few doors were open to her to begin with, and the longer she goes without securing a social benefactor, the less likely it seems that she'll be offered the positioning she deserves, no matter that she's a veritable genius. By all rights, she should be spending the summer as Voldemort's assistant, whilst Harry gallivants about the Weasleys’ garden, playing Quidditch and tossing gnomes over the wall.

Thus, Harry does her best to keep her complaints to herself, and performs her job, what little it entails, with minimal groaning. She commutes to the Ministry alongside Mr. Weasley six days a week for two weeks before she manages to have a conversation with the Lord Protector.

It is an unremarkable Wednesday. Voldemort's schedule is booked up, as it always is; meetings with officials and dignitaries and sessions in the court. As such, it never crosses Harry's mind that she might return to her little, boring office after a tea break–less because she wanted tea and more to simply break up the monotony of staring at a blank wall going slowly insane–only to find herself blinking back at the Lord Protector, biscuit half hanging out of her mouth like an idiot who's forgotten how to chew properly.

“Hello, Harry,” Voldemort says, sounding amused.

Harry quickly swallows the rest of her snack, brushing her chin free of crumbs. “Hi,” she says, before remembering to be annoyed with him. He'd lured her in with the promise of mentorship, only to abandon her to two weeks of tedium. “Finally deigned to grace me with your presence?” she scowls.

“Are you feeling neglected, little snake?”

“I guess I just thought you meant it when you said you'd teach me,” Harry grouses.

“Peace, child,” says Voldemort, as though physically putting Harry's frustrations to bed like unruly children. “I was unexpectedly busy with my duties as Lord Protector, but I am here now, am I not?”

“I guess,” Harry allows, her annoyance melting by the moment. For all that he's still robed and masked completely, as he always seems to be, he feels more relaxed now, leaning a hip against her desk, tilting his head down to look at her. He's so tall, much taller than any man Harry's ever known, besides perhaps Mr. Hagrid. Surely his height must be an identifiable factor; she imagines she would not soon forget meeting a man who towers at least three metres. “Are you part giant?”

“Certainly not,” he says swiftly, sounding mildly offended. “Do you know many giants? The beasts can hardly string two words together, let alone entire sentences.”

“That's rude,” Harry frowns. Mr. Hagrid has always been kind, if perhaps a bit thoughtless. He has many delightful stories about magical creatures Harry can only hope she'll never meet.

“I am frequently rude,” Voldemort points out. “Politeness is often nothing more than a gilding of hippogriff dung. Your nature, of course, is to be swayed by conscience rather than logic. You will grow out of that, in time.”

“Pretty sure I don't want to outgrow that,” Harry grins, shaking her head. “You talk such a big game for a man who was immediately kind to the annoying second year who broke into your secret clubhouse. You might have everyone else fooled, but I know your secret.”

If she could see his eyes, Harry knows their gaze would be burning into her. She can practically feel it even through the mask. “And what, pray tell, is that?”

“You've got a heart,” she says firmly. “You're a nice man, Lord Voldemort.”

Harry yelps when the stinging hex catches her off guard, directly to her chest. She scrubs hard at the spot, even as the pain dissolves completely, and shoots him a glare.

“Committing treason within the Ministry itself,” he clucks his tongue, finally withdrawing his long, gnarled wand from his robes. “Come, then. Let us prove what a nice man I am.”

Harry hadn't anticipated the Lord Protector's lessons to involve duelling him, though perhaps she should have. Luckily he had the presence of mind to throw up protective charms around the room, she thinks to herself woozily, still catching her breath while the man himself remains largely unaffected and clearly smug about the fact. If he hadn't, surely the office would be in shambles.

“Rise,” Voldemort orders, unsympathetic to the plight of her lungs, and also the sore muscles in her legs, and also the rest of her body. “Again.”

Harry's summer grows better seemingly overnight; clearly whatever had held the Lord Protector's attention over those first two weeks has been comprehensively dealt with, seeing as he begins devoting nearly half of his days to her tutelage–not just in the magical arts, which are enjoyable even with the aches and bruises, but also in politicking, which is decidedly less enjoyable. She often arrives to her little office to find the Lord Protector already waiting for her, impatiently instructing her to either arm herself or follow him at a brisk pace, not helped by the fact that his very legs are nearly the length of Harry's entire body, through the labyrinthine building as he instructs her on which department regulates which spells and artefacts, the information largely melting together in Harry's mind into one big incomprehensible soup.

He seems to gather this fact eventually, levelling Harry with a particularly judgmental sigh. “Did you understand anything I've just told you?”

“Not especially,” she admits, figuring lying is probably right out, considering he can just pop into her mind. “Something about this once being the place they kept prophecies–which is confusing, by the way. How do you store something intangible?”

“The Hall of Prophecies archived recordings of prophecy,” Voldemort explains. “I personally saw the destruction of each one. It is imperative that no Witch or Wizard be led down the treacherous, nebulous path of prognostication.”

“Right,” says Harry, giving the room, now dedicated to the Department of Muggle Contraband, a quick perusal. It's strange to see Ministry workers handling rubber ducks like they're radioactive. “What about the prophecy about my father? You never believed it?”

“Why would I?” Voldemort hums. “A formidable fighter your father may have been, but he was still simply a man.” The spine of his voice is steelish with the immovable implication that Voldemort is not simply a man–not simply anything at all.

Harry mostly manages to slouch her way through such days, noting anything of importance with her charmed quill whenever some more enterprising secretary like Daphne or Percy gives her a significant look or a subtle kick beneath the table. She doesn't pretend to be anything but eager to ditch the stuffiness and return to the excitement of Voldemort's private tutelage. Around everyone else, he's the Lord Protector, so unimpeachable, so vastly above all others that he's rendered nearly inhuman. But alone with Harry, he's just Lord Voldemort, as familiar and comforting as any other friend, even when he forces her to study potions.

“After all your bemoaning, I expected your efforts to be dreadful,” he says, studying said efforts as they simmer away in the cauldron. “But this is passable.”

“Thanks, Professor,” snarks Harry. “Ever thought of teaching at Hogwarts? You'd be better than Snape, at any rate.”

She'd first run into the Potions Master in her second week at the Ministry, during which he'd come to a complete standstill–out of shock, she supposed–before giving her his deepest sneer yet.

“The Ministry must be lowering their standards for employment,” he'd said in his snivelling way, before turning dramatically on his heel and striding off, robes fluttering behind him.

“Don't worry about him,” said Cho, one of the secretaries who'd taken pity on Harry and agreed to escort her to the womens’ toilet. “He's hardly ever here, and when he is, he never stays for more than four hours or so before flooing home. Daphne–she marks papers for him sometimes, being Slytherin's Head Girl–she says it's the same at Hogwarts. He'll floo home between classes. I reckon he must have a pet dog, but it's a bit difficult to imagine.”

“Pet piranha more like,” Harry agreed.

Now, upon the invocation of his loyal Potioneer, Voldemort hums. “Alas, you will have to make do with Severus for the foreseeable future.”

“Ugh,” groans Harry.

“Severus Snape is one of the most talented Potioneers of his generation,” Voldemort points out, as if the man's talent with a cauldron means anything compared to his outright refusal to teach.

“Yeah, well, maybe he ought to work for you full-time so I don't have to suffer his ‘lessons,’” she adds air quotes for emphasis, though Voldemort's generally dismissive demeanour lets her know he isn't impressed by them. “Oh, come on, you know I'm right. He's the most miserable man on the planet. He's even grouchy around you, which I wasn't expecting. I thought he worshipped you. Didn't he take the Dark Mark at my age?”

“He did,” Voldemort confirms. “Severus has grown…insecure. He believes I prefer Ms. Riddle.”

Well, at least that assumption is understandable. “Don't you? You should.”

“You are biassed,” Voldemort says, sounding amused.

“I'm also right.”

“You are both wrong,” says Voldemort, smile small yet evident in his voice. “Clearly, I prefer Minister Malfoy.”

Harry can't help making a face at that, thinking back to their morning meeting with said Minister, who's lovely enough, if a bit stiff, and about as expressive as the frozen surface of a lake, but can't hold a candle to Professor Riddle. Ah well, she figures there's no real accounting for taste.

 

Harry had never had a birthday party before her thirteenth year, the first summer she'd spent with the Weasleys, who, upon realising Harry had a birthday, and that it was occurring during her stay in their home, had become something of a storm of hosting, casting colourful tirades of spells until the whole Burrow resembled one massive birthday cake that had been besieged by a particularly vicious gang of mice. Since then, they've taken it upon themselves to outdo their own work each subsequent year, resulting in quite a few small-scale catastrophes, including the year Fred and George managed to somehow catch the thatch roof on fire.

Still, every year–even the one in which they were summarily overrun by the garden gnomes’ daring rebellion–has been yet another treasure to be hoarded and nursed by Harry's heart as if it were a dragon. When she was eleven, humming to herself in her locked and darkened cupboard, she could never have dreamed up how many people would even remember her birthday in the future, let alone congregate around her to celebrate it, as if Harry herself was worth celebrating.

Her seventeenth birthday falls on a Sunday, so she has the day off to begin with, which the Lord Protector had mentioned blithely the previous afternoon.

“Yes,” Harry agreed, biting her tongue back immediately, which did not escape his notice.

“You have never refrained from sharing your every fanciful thought with me before,” he said. “You need not begin now.”

“I just–the Weasleys are throwing me a party, and I wanted to invite you. But it's their home, and I don't think…I just don't think it'd be very polite, without their permission.” Mr. Weasley would have to spend hours hiding his expansive collection of Muggle contraband, for one, to say nothing of the unlicensed ghoul living in their attic. Harry can't subject them to the dangerous discomfort she knows Voldemort's presence would bring, no matter how much she'd enjoy having him.

“They would not feel honoured by having their Lord Protector as a guest?”

“You intimidate people,” Harry says flatly. “You know you intimidate people. And you're Arthur and Percy's boss.”

“I am also your boss, a fact which you seem intent on forgetting,” he points out. “But fret not, little snake. I have already committed to a prior engagement.”

“I figured you'd be busy,” Harry admits, disappointed and relieved in equal measure. “Plus you probably can't even eat cake, what with the mask. I don't suppose you could spare Professor Riddle? I owled her this morning but haven't gotten a response yet. I know she does, um, stuff for you over the summers.”

Harry feels confident that Voldemort knows she's fishing for information about said stuff–subtlety is, according to everyone who really knows her, not her strong suit–which means he's purposefully ignoring it when he switches the focus to a box withdrawn from the depths of his robes.

“Seventeen is a sacred number,” he says solemnly, passing the box to her.

Harry opens it to find herself staring at a locket, gleaming gold and emerald in the light. Harry finds herself speechless, stroking the filigree with a reverent hand.

“The traditional gift for this year is a watch,” Voldemort explains. “I thought this to be more fitting for your pedigree.” At Harry's bewildered look, he adds, “Open.”

The locket's face unclasps, revealing a pearlescent watch face inside, ticking silently. Harry grins. “You got me a pocket-watch?”

“It is a timepiece, yes,” Voldemort corrects mildly, because of course he doesn't use something so Muggle as pockets, the loony that he is. He probably just uses a dozen different magical inter-dimensional capsules or something to hold all his things, which are still, Harry feels the need to point out, pockets. Of a sort.

“I love it,” Harry tells him, not one to check a gifted horse's teeth, freeing the locket from its casket and slipping it over her head. It's surprisingly warm against her skin. “Thank you.”

Voldemort steps closer, reaching a gentle hand out to frame the locket where it rests over Harry's chest between his thumb and forefinger. Harry feels a sense of strange satisfaction she isn't sure is her own.

He moves more quickly than should be humanly possible, from one end of the room to another within one blink, something which makes him nearly impossible to defeat in their practice duels. Harry has never had time to questIon him about it before; usually one of his hexes is flying towards her from the space he's just vacated.

“Can you Apparate silently?” Harry asks.

“Such a thing is impossible even for elves,” Voldemort says, though he sounds amused by Harry thinking him capable, as though he hasn't spent a lifetime doing impossible things, many of which have been recorded and told to her as Hogwarts curriculum. “It is a stride-lengthening charm of my own invention.”

“Merlin's tits,” Harry grins, excitement eating away at any decorum she could possibly have left at the thought of what she could do with such a spell. There'll be no more of Ron leaving her in his dust on their walks to class, for a start. “You should teach it to me.”

“Hm,” says Voldemort, which is not a no, though admittedly he might be wordlessly judging Harry's invoking of Merlin's tits. The Lord Protector can be oddly stuffy at times. “Go. Enjoy your festivities.”

“I'll save you some cake,” Harry promises, just to make him sigh.

Mr. and Mrs. Weasley surprise Harry with a watch too, lovingly if a bit clumsily wrapped and waiting by her bedside the morning of her seventeenth birthday. It's significantly less magnificent than Voldemort's gift, but the signs of wear and tear don't make Harry love it any less.

“It's traditional,” Ron explains, happily charming an extra hole into the leather band so it won't hang too loosely over Harry's bony wrist. “Every Weasley gets one when they turn seventeen. Lucky thing we've so many aunts and uncles to pass things down, eh? Got mine back in May. I think it was my Uncle Fabian's.”

Ron's Uncle Fabian, who had died alongside most of the Order, only a few months before Harry's own parents. Harry wonders how many rigorous interrogations Molly and Arthur had been forced to sit through before being granted clemency. She'll never ask–she can't imagine it's something they'd like to talk about.

The first time Harry spent a summer at the Burrow, she thought she must be dreaming. A warm, knitted jumper of a dream, the kind you never want to wake up from. Now, it's become familiar enough to feel comfortable, but not enough to take for granted. Harry can't see herself ever thinking of this house and its family as being anything other than a gift, some rare, generous hand held out by the universe.

Except, of course, for Percy, who does his level best to ruin Harry's good mood, bolstered in no small part by the boozy cider Luna and her father have contributed, by insistently talking shop.

“No Ministry talk at the Burrow!” Mrs. Weasley says crossly, again, swatting her son's bum with a ladle.

Percy looks indignant. “Half the people here work at the Ministry,” he points out. “It's honourable work. You'll have to get used to it eventually–it isn't your precious Golden Age, anymore. Our country is progressing more than–”

Harry lets herself tune out of the commonplace debate, one which she'll never take part in if she can help it, torn between loyalty to the only woman who's ever tried to be a mother to Harry, doing her best to fill in the cracks and gaps left by her motherless existence, and affection for the Lord Protector, who has been a friend, however remotely, and, more than that, doesn't seem to be that bad of a leader. Yes, he killed her parents, and a lot of the Weasleys’ friends besides, but Harry's read her histories, or at least skimmed them, and she's suffered through enough lectures from Hermione to know there's never been a successful revolution without bloodshed.

Also, there's no world in which Harry will ever take the side of Percy, who's been a pretty unbearable swot since she's known him. How Oliver manages to put up with him, and has done since their sixth year, she'll never know.

Harry's wandering her way to Mr. Hagrid, who's always good for a laugh, when an owl she doesn't recognise sweeps down in an elegant spiral before alighting gracefully on her shoulder, foot outstretched to offer up a letter attached by a pretty green ribbon.

“My word,” says Mrs. Weasley, who always seems split between annoyance and envy when she sees an owl better at owling than Errol which, to be frank, is all of them.

“Who's it from, then?” asks Ron, slurring only a little, having imbibed his own cup of cider, or perhaps two.

Harry carefully unties the letter and watches as the owl, now freed from its burden, takes off again. Must have been told not to wait for a response. She opens the scroll, letting it unfurl completely, and watches as scarlet letters appear one by one.

Miss Potter, after all the years you have spent pestering me on my birthday, I thought it prudent to return the favour. Congratulations on reaching your majority. –T. Riddle

As Harry finishes reading the elegant signature, committing its spiralling cursive to memory, the scroll zips itself back up and bursts into a cloud of flames, from which a stunning dragon made of smoke and embers emerges, revealing its enormous wingspan in all its inflamed glory. Steam hisses from its flickering jaws as it takes to the sky, growing with every metre it climbs, until it stretches well above the treetops. Harry is aware, distantly, of everyone shouting and falling away around her, fearful of the danger this sudden, strange creature of fire must pose, but Harry ignores them all, ignores everything but Riddle's creation, the most magnificent thing she has ever seen.

With one last flap of golden wings, and a terrible, sirenous screech, the dragon bursts into an explosion of green sparks, streaming over the glen in a verdant celebration.

At this display, clearly more harmless than some of the twins’ enthusiastic fireworks, the crowd finally stops their flailing, replacing it instead with cheers of relief and delight.

“What was that?” Fred asks, clearly awed for the wrong reasons.

“Yeah, Harry, I thought we were your only friends of the explosive persuasion.”

“It's from Professor Riddle,” Harry says, only a little smug. She doubts anyone else has ever received an explosive dragon charm from Professor Riddle for their birthday–she doubts anyone else has received anything from Professor Riddle for their birthday.

“Course,” Ron rolls his eyes, a smudge of ash somehow having landed over his left eyebrow, Hermione going after it with a wet thumb. “Should've known.”

Harry ignores him, floating through the rest of her party, well into the evening, carrying the budding fever in her chest, nurturing it like oxygen feeding the flame, coaxing it to larger and more combustible heights, a dragon of fire in itself. She closes her eyes and pictures that signature scrawling in flickering starlight across her mind; T. Riddle. Harry isn't sure what the T stands for, had been similarly curious about the record she’d managed to hunt down in the student archives: T. M. Riddle, listed as a member of the Slug Club, whatever that was, surely not an organisation dedicated to the study of the insect.

She's sure it's the most beautiful name in the world.

 

Harry occasionally dreams as she imagines other people must; free of visiting Lord Protectors and invisible, familiar-sounding voices that cradle her in the dark.

But tonight, she dreams of the staircase. She does not dream of it often, but when she does, it feels as if her spiralling journey downward has picked up where it last left off, no matter how many nights have passed in between.

It won't be long now, the voice, warm like an arm around her shoulders, warns her.

Will it hurt? Harry wonders.

Most things hurt, says the voice, as though soothing a small child in a doctor’s waiting room, suffering from a fear of needles. We can handle pain.

 

Harry returns to the Ministry to find General Lestrange waiting at Harry's desk, looking very much like a queen draped over her throne. Harry pauses in the doorway, wondering if she's somehow missed an important meeting on the docket; she's never even spoken to the Dark Lord's general before, beyond the courtesy greetings typical of early morning, brain-numbing conferences with the Minister.

“Hello,” Harry offers, letting her bewilderment show, hopeful that the general will take it upon herself to explain her presence without Harry having to ask outright.

“Schoolgirl,” General Lestrange smiles, her voice pitched just as high as some of Harry's younger schoolmates, for all that this woman is old enough to be their mother. There's something cat-like about her, or perhaps perpetually childlike. She's voracious on the battlefield, textbooks filled with detailed descriptions of her many grisly triumphs in the name of her Lord. She'd been the one to kill Neville's parents, by way of torture.

But the woman before Harry now seems legions away from the one she's read about in books. This woman carries a feline smile always upon rouged lips, slinking her way through the Ministry as though she never has a destination in mind, instead turning towards any distraction that catches her fancy. If Harry didn't know better, she'd think Bellatrix Lestrange was little more than another pureblooded housewife, content to merely waft her way through a gilded life.

“What can I do for you, General?” Harry asks once it becomes clear that she isn't going to receive an explanation.

That crimson smile widens like a pool of blood. “You've done such good work for our Lord Protector,” she coos, reaching over Harry's desk to pinch her cheek with painful, possibly mockful, affection. “I've brought you a reward.” She plucks a previously hidden basket from the floor, revealing the most ruby-like apple Harry has ever seen, presented like a tiara on the pillow of the general's pale hand.

It glistens as though wet, its particular shade of red so vivid it looks unnatural, perhaps enhanced by magic, or crafted by some artisan’s hand. Harry stares at the fruit as the general wriggles her long, spidery fingers.

She takes it, hesitantly, waiting for the moment that, surely, General Lestrange will snatch the jewel back. “Thank you,” Harry says, half sincere, once it becomes clear that the apple truly is hers, should she want it, a strange gift from this strange woman.

The general looks pleased. “It’s nothing, schoolgirl. The Black grove holds plenty of others just like it. My grandmother used to say only three bites from one could keep you fed for eternity.” She cackles at this, as though it’s the best joke she’s ever heard, laughter still leaking from her in shrill notes as she swans out of the office, the sound growing distant with each sharp-heeled step she takes down the hall.

A curious start to the morning becomes even curiouser when a knock on the door reveals the Minister’s husband.

“Mr. Malfoy?” Harry watches, growing only more confused as the severe man wordlessly slips into her office and casts a wordless locking spell on the door. First she’s cornered in her own office by the Minister’s sister, now by her husband–is Harry next to be accosted by Malfoy? Surely not. “Did the Minister–”

“It’s me, girl,” says Mr. Malfoy, which does not lessen any of Harry’s confusion. “Moody,” Mr. Malfoy adds.

“Mr…Moody…?” Harry squints. She’s definitely looking at Lucius Malfoy, husband of the Minister of Magic, head of the school board of governors, father to the biggest git in all of Wizarding Britain. The hair is very distinctive.

Mr. Malfoy withdraws a beaten flask from his flashy robes and shakes it at her. A strange scent wafts from the bottle, something so sweet it turns sickly, scratching uncomfortably at the back of Harry’s nose. “Spot of polyjuice does the trick,” he explains, taking a hearty sip. Now that she’s searching for it, the hawk-like look in his eyes, and the suspicious hunch with which he’s carrying himself, do put her in mind of the odd-eyed outlaw.

“Alright,” says Harry, figuring she might as well treat him like any other Ministry visitor. “How can I help you? Did you…want to request a meeting with the Lord Protector?” She’s not sure she has the power to set that up, but she can at least ask Voldemort, perhaps as a favour.

Mr. Moody-Malfoy cuts her a glare. “Don’t be daft, girl. No, I’m here for you. You’re back at Hogwarts in two weeks.”

“Yes,” Harry says slowly. “I know.”

“You’ve got to speak with Dumbledore,” Moody-Malfoy insists. “He’s in a bad way, he’s got to be. They’ve done something to him.”

“Who?”

“Who do you bloody think?” he hisses. It’s strange to hear Mr. Moody’s affectations in the posh, pureblood lilt of Mr. Malfoy’s voice. “If You Know Who hasn't got Albus under an Imperius, I'll eat my own eye.” You Know Who was the nickname the old Order members used for Voldemort, which had always struck Harry as strange; surely, after committing so many larger types of treason, something as minor as saying his name wasn't so bad.

“But why would the Lord Voldemort–”

Mr. Moody-Malfoy’s sharp hiss stops Harry short. “Don’t say his name,” he curses at her, eyes roving wildly about, wand out, in preparation for the storming of Harry’s miniscule office. “Are you trying to get us killed, you damned child?”

“I say his name all the time,” Harry points out, eyeing him warily. He seems…unstable. Volatile. She’s not entirely sure he’s not drunk, that it’s only polyjuice being kipped at from that flask.

“He outlawed it for a reason,” Mr. Moody-Malfoy tells her, quite affronted by her habit of treason, for a terrorist. “It’s got a Taboo–any time someone says that name, an enforcer of his–hit-Wizards, Snatchers, we call ‘em–pops up and they’re sentenced for sedition.”

“But I have said it before,” Harry frowns. She can’t even picture what he’s describing. Surely if that were the case, Harry would have been snatched away at age twelve. “I’ve said it in front of him, even. Here, and at Hogwarts.”

“Can’t Apparate into Hogwarts,” Mr. Moody-Malfoy grumbles, reasoning with himself as much as he is Harry, still prickly by the threat her utterance of Voldemort’s name has apparently caused. “Guess they can’t Apparate into the Ministry either. You’re damned lucky.”

“Fine,” Harry says, growing impatient. “Why would the Lord Protector Imperius the Headmaster? He pardoned him after the War.”

Mr. Moody-Malfoy makes a rude noise, casting his eyes towards the heavens, and then sighs heavily. “I know it's not your fault,” he says gravely. “You were too young when it all happened. You'll never remember the truth–the real truth, what it was like before that madman took over…just talk to Dumbledore. Better yet–get into his office.”

“You want me to sneak into the Headmaster's office?”

Moody-Malfoy gives her a shrewd look. “Don't pretend to be some goody two-shoes with me, girl. I know you've got the Potter nerve in you. The cloak too, most likely. Your father once–nevermind all that. Just get into his office, you'll see what I mean. Password's a type of sweet, no doubt. Peppermint Weasels or something of the sort.”

“Why don't you just talk to him yourself?” asks Harry, who isn't opposed to sneaking, but she can't see how her wandering about looking for some vague proof that her Headmaster is being mind-controlled could possibly make more sense than Mr. Moody dressing up as Mr. Malfoy and doing it himself.

“You think we haven't tried?” he crows, banging Mr. Malfoy's cane with frustration. “He raised up wards so no Order member can enter the castle–the Forest is the closest we can get. No, girl, it must be you. Listen, Dumbledore tried to save your parents–they'd still be alive today if they'd trusted him instead of–nevermind that. Point is, Albus Dumbledore is a good man, and a great Wizard. He'd never give up fighting for justice so long as he was in his right mind. We need him, Potter.”

“Alright,” Harry says, attention flickering towards the warmth in her wand where it's holstered against her wrist, the indication that Voldemort has arrived and is on his way to see her. “The Lord Protector is coming, by the way. I'm not sure if you wanted to see him while wearing Mr. Malfoy.”

“While wearing–” Moody-Malfoy stares at Harry for a moment before shaking his head. “Best not. Thanks for the heads up, Potter. Remember, don't trust anyone in this pit of vipers.”

“Right,” says Harry, watching as he first casts a spell to ensure the corridor outside is clear of any witnesses before giving her one last, sombre nod, and slipping out the door.

Harry doesn't know how long it will take the Lord Protector to arrive at her office in particular; sometimes her wand warms and then she doesn't actually see him for hours, his time stolen away by business more important than tutoring a summer intern. She doubts she'll have much time to eat once he shows up, so she pulls the apple from her desk, quietly pleased she won't have to brave the Ministry cafeteria.

Upon the first, crisp bite, Harry quickly realises this is to be the most delicious thing she's ever eaten, likely ruining her for any other apple for the rest of her life. She wonders if the Blacks sell them, if she can somehow manage to get her hands on a dozen or so every week. She thinks it might be possible to subsist entirely off of the Black apples, it tastes that divine, this one, modest bite that fulfilling, sending a blaze of heat through her whole body, as though the tree had not only eaten sunlight, but found a way to bear sunlight of its own in the form of its fruit.

The warmth and sense of filling, like water being poured into a hungry well, grows with each bite, until by the seventh, Harry realises she's begun to sweat through her shirt, rivers of it running down her back, her face, salt slicking her lips alongside the juice. By the eighth bite, her eyesight has begun to blur and darken, as if her glasses have somehow vanished, though she can still feel the weight of them on the bridge of her nose.

I think I might be allergic to magical apples, Harry thinks to herself, as she sinks into unconsciousness.

 

Harry is fourteen when she first meets Nagini. The long saber of a snake has accompanied her Lord and master to the chamber of Harry's dream.

“Is that the Basilisk?” Harry frowns, a bit disappointed. She'd expected something…bigger, at the least.

The snake, currently doing her best impression of ivy wrapped around the tree of Voldemort's body, gives a sibilant roar. Harry can taste her offence in the air.

“Sorry,” Harry offers. “Didn't realise you spoke English.”

When the snake speaks, it is not with the voice of a snake, which carries the sound of salt water against stone, but with the voice of a human woman. “I speak many tongues, impetuous child. I was once as human woman as you. Now I am something greater than a Basilisk.”

“What's greater than a Basilisk?” Harry asks. She knows the snake is the Dark Lord's familiar–everyone knows that. But a familiar, while rare, hardly seems as impressive as a Basilisk.

“I am soul,” Nagini says with great regality. “I am light.”

Harry supposes it should be expected for the familiar of a great Wizard such as the Lord Protector to have a fair few delusions of grandeur. Silently, she thinks she’d have preferred an introduction to the Basilisk. Judging by the tilt of Voldemort’s head, the strange sensation of minute reprimand, he’s heard this thought and taken offense.

But, for all that Harry is not quite impressed by the creature's self-aggrandisement, she is intrigued, and, ignoring the Lord Protector for a moment, prods the snake to speak further. “What made you decide to stop being a woman?” Being a snake might not be so bad, Harry can admit to herself, but surely the limblessness is inconvenient, no matter the particular difficulties of womaning which Harry has experienced, herself.

“No decision,” Nagini tells her. “Only the illness which affects every living thing, including me, including my Master. Including you.”

“A snake disease?” Harry asks, growing curiouser by the second. Surely Nagini does not mean to say that Voldemort is suffering from some serpentine syndrome as well, his apparent ability to speak their language notwithstanding. He is very clearly a man, standing before her on two long, solid legs. Harry can speak a few rudimentary phrases of Latin; this does not make her some ancient Roman.

“No, girl,” Nagini hisses, the word girl throwing itself from her lips like a curse. “A disease of the blood. My mother had it and so I have it, just as you carry whatever nightmares gifted by your mother.”

“I haven't got a mother,” Harry tells her, feeling, perhaps for the first time, grateful for the fact.

“You have,” Nagini argues, though not with any real heat, merely stating a fact in her cold way, as is to be expected from such a cold creature. “Not in the blood, perhaps. But in the eyes.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about me,” Harry surmises, gaze flickering to the Lord Protector for explanation, though masked as he is, he remains unreadable, all thoughts curtained from her despite their current shared space of dream. He seems content to let his familiar and Harry chat amongst themselves, himself only a prop for Nagini's perching.

“Of course I do,” says Nagini. “We are kin, you and I. Of a sort.”

 

When Harry is ten years old, she discovers genetics as portrayed to her by the overhead projector and Mrs. Haggarty’s smudged handwriting.

“Certain features are stronger than other ones,” the teacher, in her usual bored intonation, explains. “Dark hair over light hair. Dark eyes over light eyes. When someone has brown eyes, for instance, it’s because at least one of their parents carried the gene for brown eyes. This doesn’t mean their parent has brown eyes themselves, only that they carry the possibility, genetically; perhaps one of their parents has brown eyes. Same thing for blue eyes. But green eyes, those are the most rare, because both parents must carry the gene. Has anyone in here got green eyes?” Even as she asks the class as a whole, her focus drifts lazily over to Harry, whose eyes have always snagged some amount of interest. “Miss Potter is a perfect example,” Mrs. Haggarty says, though Harry hasn’t said anything at all, discomfited by attention. “Harry, have either of your parents got green eyes?”

“I don’t think so,” Harry says, dubiously considering the question. “They’ve both been dead since I was a baby, and dead things don’t seem to keep their eyes for very long. I reckon they haven’t got any at all anymore.”

Mrs. Haggarty doesn’t seem to know what to do with the fact of Harry’s dead, eyeless parents, only staring at her for a moment before clearing her throat as Harry’s classmates erupt into hushed laughter and gasping, Harry sinking down into her seat like a worm into soil.

“Well,” says Mrs. Haggarty, coughing again. “Anyone else with green eyes?”

“I’ve got them,” says Mary Alistair, whose eyes look more like a dark yellow to Harry, but she supposes not every green is all green; some are only mostly or partly green, like the stem of a dandelion, or the dirty water of a swimming pool. “And I’ve got parents with eyes,” she adds with a nasty smile, to much giggling. “My mum has the same colour.”

“There,” Mrs. Haggarty says with a relieved sigh, beginning to erase the words on the laminate and replace them with the next bit of lesson. “See? A prime example of genetics.”

The lesson follows Harry home, nibbling at her heels the whole way, chasing her into the kitchen where Aunt Petunia is snipping the thorns off of roses so they might sit more prettily in her vase. Harry has always hated the snipping of thorns, figuring that roses grow them for a reason, for protection, and the slicing of them must feel painful, the green juice that flows from each wound reminding her of blood.

“Aunt Petunia, did my parents have green eyes like me?” asks Harry, who hasn’t pestered Aunt Petunia about her parents in a very long time, and hopes this will play to her favour. Perhaps, having gone unpestered for so long, her Aunt will find it in herself to speak of them.

“What are you on about?” Aunt Petunia says distractedly. “No. Well, Lily did. Exactly like yours, actually. They were creepy.”

“But not my father?” Harry presses. Perhaps his weren’t exactly like Harry’s, more like Mary’s and her mum’s.

“What? No,” Aunt Petunia frowns at the mass grave of thorns cluttering the kitchen sink. “He was Indian, or Pakistani, or something. Those people don’t have green eyes. They were dark, I think. I only met him the once, you know. He was a nasty man.”

“Oh,” Harry frowns, not sure she understands genetics at all. “What about my hair?” she asks, remembering the second bit of lesson. “Did she have hair like mine, too?”

“No,” Aunt Petunia murmurs, peering out the window, as if reading her response off the flowers in the garden. “No, hers was red, and fine. It was…pretty. You have your father’s hair,” she sniffs. She’s always hated Harry’s hair, how it eats up each comb and is impervious to scissors. She calls it greasy and unseemly. Like an animal’s. If Harry’s hair wasn’t so ungiven to being cut, she’d shear it all off Harry’s head, just like the rose thorns.

 

Harry knows she’s dreaming, just as she knows this is a dream free from any visitations. This dream is hers alone.

She’s standing in some sort of village, in the dying grass just in front of a building that had once been a house before some fatal wound had been torn through it. Around her, snow begins to fall daintily, and she knows instinctively that it is the first of the season, what will be a brutal winter, night stretching long and cold over this village like a black hood.

The murdered house is not only a house; it is a gravesite. Two headstones, lovingly crafted as a matched set, sprout from its porch like the white heads of daisies. Harry moves closer to read the words etched into their surface. James and Lily Potter. Harry bends her ear down to the floorboards and hears the soft birdsong of a beating heart.

She cracks into her mother’s grave like the shell of an egg. Copper silk spills up and out, and Harry grips it and tugs, as though pulling a turnip from the earth. Lily Potter’s body is whole and warmed through with life, her eyes closed in peaceful slumber. She’s lovely, the vague shape of her, Harry’s subconscious unable to conjure much in the way of specificity. But Harry knows she’s beautiful in the way only living things are.

Harry moves to wake her with a gentle shake, not wanting to startle her, but as her hand brushes the fair skin of Lily’s shoulder, the body begins to disintegrate, large swathes of rot blooming all over as she first decays and then crumbles into dust.

And from the dust, like a vicious green arrow, Nagini springs forth, jaws wide, splitting around the piercing sound of a woman’s sharp scream.

 

Harry wakes with a lurch and is immediately beset by a thorough soreness spread throughout her whole body, as though she’s spent the last seventeen years tumbling down a very long hill. She feels the soothing rush of a cleaning charm relieving her skin of stale sweat and turns to find the Lord Protector sitting stoically in a chair not two metres from her bedside.

“How do you feel?” he asks, tone unreadable behind the mercury of his mask. Harry wonders if this is his bedchamber, the luxurious room, stuffed with antique, heavy-looking furniture unfamiliar to her.

“Like I just fell off a cliff,” Harry croaks, deciding to be honest. “What happened?”

“You ate well over half of a poisoned apple,” he tells her, with a faint hint of reproach, as though Harry should have suspected the fruit of being poisoned and acted accordingly.

“Oh,” Harry frowns, thinking back to the apple in question, doing her best to sweep the dregs of the fever-fed dream from her mind entirely. “But why would General Lestrange want to kill me?”

“She didn’t,” Voldemort hums. “She was fed such a poison herself, when she was much younger than you. It is a tradition among the Blacks, an intemperate attempt at inoculation. You were never in much danger. Your instinctual magic is uncommonly strong. It overpowered the poison within just one night.”

Harry’s frown only deepens. How young had General Lestrange been when she was given her apple? It doesn’t seem like the proper way to be handling children, but then, Harry supposes she's hardly ever seen children handled in a proper way. “What if they couldn’t overpower it like I did?”

Impassively, the Lord Protector says “Then they died.”

Chapter 3: But When Can I Hear The Next One?

On the first day of seventh year, Professor Riddle introduces Harry's class to a dementor.

The dementor doesn't have a name. Harry asks for it, and Professor Riddle gives her an inscrutable look before saying, as though it should be obvious, that it doesn't have one.

“But then how can anyone tell them apart?” Harry wonders.

The amusement in Riddle's eyes is just barely visible. “There's no need to tell them apart, Miss Potter. Dementors have a sort of hive mind. Each one is attached to all others. It's why they make such successful hunters and guards. Their prey need only be seen by one to be seen by all.”

Well, Harry thinks to herself as the Slytherins laugh nastily, even half the Gryffindors snickering like the idea of respecting a dementor’s individuality is a good joke. At least dementors can never be lonely.

“You each successfully cast the Patronus charm during last year’s exams,” Professor Riddle declares, putting an end to the cachinnations. “While it is all well and good to be able to cast spells when in a relatively safe and mundane environment, by necessity you will sometimes be forced to cast while under dire circumstances. Should your instincts–your ability for recall, your speed, your technique–fail you then, it will not matter how high your marks are. So now, a different kind of testing. Form a line, single-file.” At the lethargic pace of the students drifting, warily, towards the back of the classroom, each of them hoping to be the last, Professor Riddle smirks. “Come now, don’t be shy. Surely you have more faith in your skills than this.”

The dementor seems properly, improbably leashed by Professor Riddle, hovering expectantly exactly where she’d first gestured for it to stand–or, rather, float–waiting patiently for its lunch line of victims. Harry knows dementors are employed–ordered? Collared and chained, like dogs?–by the Ministry, and thus answer to the Lord Protector, who likely granted Professor Riddle some amount of control over this one in particular, but it still seems impossible, as likely as harnessing and commanding the earth-rending sea. Its magic feels different from any Harry has ever experienced, as though it’s nothing but a mouth, a sucking vortex licking experimentally at the world around it in search of something to its taste, hungry for anything that might be considered food.

“I’ll go, Professor,” Harry declares, striding right up to the front of the line, ignoring the looks of dismay from Ron and Hermione, their persistent conviction that Harry’s survival instincts leave much to be desired. She doesn’t understand how they can worry that something bad might happen to her here, under Professor Riddle’s careful watch. And even if she doesn’t step in, Harry managed her first corporeal Patronus back in third year, just to see if she could. There’s no fear when she moves to face the dementor. Only a sudden and overwhelming sense of sadness.

Soon even that is washed away, replaced by nothing, a deeply dug and quickly flooded well of absence, not a single scrap of feeling escaping the expanding void. Harry tries to raise her wand, to cast the spell–even a murmur will do, she’s cast it so many times before–but her hand does not obey her, her mouth remaining slack and stupid, the words pulled out of her just as succinctly as the emotions. What had she been meaning to do? She can’t remember, can’t focus on anything because there’s nothing to focus on, nothing beyond this lack, nothing beyond the veil of darkness obscuring her vision, her every sense muffled into uselessness. The sound of wind through a tunnel, and a woman’s scream–Harry glances around to see her, but there’s no one to see. Who’s screaming, then?

At once, like the crack of a whip, Harry lurches back into consciousness, back into the shaky stability of her own trembling, sweat-slicked body. Professor Riddle stands right in front of her, so close Harry can’t help falling forward, head finding purchase on the back of Riddle’s robes. She peeks over her shoulder to find the dementor cowering away, as though Professor Riddle truly does wield a whip, an angry lion tamer taking frustrations out on an unruly beast.

“What,” Harry croaks, throat sore and brittle–had she been the one screaming? Merlin, that’s humiliating. “What happened?”

“That will be all for today,” Professor Riddle announces, sending the rest of the class off with an impatient wave of her hand, using the other to direct the dementor back into the heavy wardrobe it’d come out of, locked up tight with half a dozen ornate chains which helpfully fasten themselves once the door folds shut.

She doesn’t step away from Harry, who’s still a fair bit wobbly, still leaning against her like a frightened child, and so Harry stays put. “Professor?”

“Dementors do not eat as any living creature does,” Professor Riddle says, once the last of the other students have filtered, bewildered and shaken, out of the room. She turns slowly, offering Harry a stabilising hand as she walks her towards a desk, which replaces her as Harry’s anchor. From one of the labyrinthine drawers in her monstrous desk, she retrieves a bar of chocolate, breaking off one of the dark segments and bringing it to Harry’s shocked mouth. “They do not need sustenance. They would never die from something like malnutrition. They cannot die at all, as they are already, in all ways that truly matter, dead. But they do crave. It is the only thing that drives them.”

“So they’re…ghosts?” Harry guesses. She supposes what little she knows of the creatures is vague and poetical. Dark beings that inspire hopelessness. They supposedly eat happiness, happy thoughts, and no one really knows where they come from, or why they seem beholden to the Ministry. “They aren’t Inferius.” The books are, at least, explicit on that point.

“More dead than an Inferius but less living than a ghost,” Professor Riddle corrects, feeding Harry another bittersweet square, seeming not to care about the chocolate melting against the leather of her gloves, nor Harry’s tongue doing its best to clean them. “A dementor is what happens when a host is drained of its soul. Not merely separated, but completely emptied of that integral spark of life.”

“So it, what, craved my soul?” Harry shivers, obediently eating the next bit of chocolate from Riddle’s hand. She wonders if she could conspire to be always fed like this, as if she’s little more than the Professor’s pet to be doted upon.

“I have never seen a dementor react so strongly,” Professor Riddle confesses. “It seems that, much like your uncommonly strong core, you possess an uncommonly bright soul. If I’d suspected such a thing, I never would have put you in its sights.”

Harry quickly swallows the last bit of chocolate and then takes Professor Riddle’s hand in her own, pressing it hard against her cheek, meeting the look of surprise in silver eyes–gone so quickly it might as well never have appeared. “I know,” Harry assures her. “It’s not your fault. You stopped it.” She looks back towards the wardrobe, wondering if Professor Riddle will let Harry have another shot, knowing now how quickly she’ll have to react to avoid another fainting spell. It bothers her, the failure, the weakness she’d displayed in front of Riddle, in front of the entire class. “Was I screaming at all?”

Professor Riddle looks intrigued by the question, thumb brushing slowly once over Harry’s cheek before her hand falls away completely. “No. You remained silent the whole time.”

 

Growing up, the television was an unapproachable symbol, something which called to Harry incessantly with constant light and sound, but which she was never allowed to touch. She was occasionally allowed to quietly watch whatever it was Dudley or Uncle Vernon elected to see, but only if Harry assumed what she privately considered her Furniture Position; completely still and silent, as though she wasn’t a person at all, nothing more than another of Aunt Petunia’s many little tables.

As neither Dudley nor Uncle Vernon were fond of any media which might be considered girly, Harry had never seen a single princess-led film, which seemed to be ubiquitous and beloved among the general little-girl population, until she reached primary school. Mrs. Birdsong was away–if a reason was given, it was lost nearly instantly to the carelessness of Harry’s childhood mind–and the substitute teacher rolled in a huge, boxy television on a mobile cart. The class curled up in piles across the carpet like enthusiastic puppies, eager to spend the school day curled up in front of the screen, something which, for most of them, was an after-school only affair. For Harry, it felt like the filling-in teacher was a kind of angel sent to deliver Harry her wish like a mail-order cake.

The film was Sleeping Beauty. Harry watched, enraptured, as magic came to life in swirls of pink and blue across the screen. She watched in horror, the rest of her classmates cheering, as the prince stuck his sword through the magnificent dragon; as he woke the titular sleeper from her rest, a state which Harry thought seemed quite peaceful. How wonderful it must be, to simply dream one’s way through life, kept safe and untouched from the brambled darkness of the outside world.

 

Shortly before their O.W.L.s, Professor McGonagall told Harry's class they ought to begin thinking about what they'd like to do after graduation.

“I already know what I'll do,” said Harry. “I'm going to be a Dark Arts Professor. Like Professor Riddle.”

“And to which school will you apply for such a position?” Professor McGonagall asked primly, having some sort of a professoring feud with Riddle, which Harry imagined was sort of like her own ongoing competition with Malfoy, to prove who was the best Seeker on the pitch. “Seeing as Professor Riddle is Hogwarts’ Professor of the Dark Arts, and likely will continue to be for some time?”

“Can't there be two?” asked Harry, shifting awkwardly at the stern frown McGonagall levelled her with.

“Can't you have an assistant Dark Arts Professor?” Harry asked Professor Riddle later that day.

“I believe the word you are looking for is apprentice,” Riddle said, only a little haughtily, mostly sounding amused. “Are you asking me for a job, Miss Potter?”

“Maybe,” Harry hedged. “Would you say yes?”

“I don't have the authority to say yes. That is a decision for the Headmaster.”

“What if I ask V–the Lord Protector?” Harry wondered. He'd been showing up in her dreams more and more lately, and while he did still treat her more like a little kid than anything else, he was awfully indulgent for a Dark Wizard. She was pretty sure he'd say yes if she asked, so long as she didn’t get in the way of Professor Riddle's errand-running for him.

Professor Riddle gave her a critical look, like she'd heard the treason Harry had swallowed back, loud and clear. “The Lord Protector is too busy to be bothered with such things,” she said primly. “When applying for an apprenticeship underneath a Professor, you must apply to both the Professor and the Headmaster of the school at which they teach. You must also have received an Outstanding in the subject on both your O.W.L. and N.E.W.T.”

“And if I do, you'll say yes, right?” Harry pestered, excitement taking hold of the reins in her mind. “When's the last time you had an apprentice?”

“Never,” Professor Riddle smirked. “No one has ever been worthy of my time.”

Harry reminds Professor Riddle of this conversation at the end of the first week back, unsubtly and impatiently waiting for the rest of the seventh years to slink their way from the classroom before rounding on the Professor, who seems not at all surprised to be once again hosting Harry after hours. “Are you still willing to take me on as an apprentice after I graduate?”

Professor Riddle finally glances up from her pile of mark-ready parchment. Clearly Harry’s question was unexpected, though Harry can’t tell if it was unwanted as well. “I’m surprised you don’t wish to apprentice under the Lord Protector,” she finally says, voice annoyingly free of all inflection. Merlin, Harry wishes the woman was easier to read. Does she want Harry to apprentice under the Lord Protector instead, finally freeing her from Harry’s persistent presence?

“Um, I can, if you’d prefer that,” Harry offers, miserable at the thought, which feels a little mean. It isn’t that she wouldn’t enjoy furthering her training under Voldemort; it’d been the best part of the summer–besides her birthday–but she can’t imagine wanting to do anything more than she wants to stay in Professor Riddle’s life, soaking up her library’s worth of wisdom, following in her footsteps to one day provide even half as good an education for future children. “But I’d rather stick with you. You’re my favourite teacher. Best I’ve ever had, really. And I don’t really want to leave Hogwarts yet, if I don’t have to. It’s, you know. Home.”

Professor Riddle hums, and Harry knows she understands, having stuck around the castle as long as she had likely because it’d been her first true home as well, what with the orphanage of it all. “Yes, so long as you’re serious about this ambition. And I don’t see why we should wait for your graduation. If you’re to assist me in the next school year, we may as well begin now. You’ll report here every other afternoon after your last class for the day.”

“And weekends?” suggests Harry. “Except for Quidditch days, of course.”

“Perhaps you aren’t serious, if you aren’t willing to sacrifice sport in the name of academia,” Professor Riddle says snidely, though Harry’s mostly sure she’s joking. “Fine. We may train on some weekends, provided I am not busy with other affairs. It won’t be easy, you know. I hope you’re prepared.”

“I won’t let you down,” Harry promises, smile feeling fit to burst free from her face and run about the room, jumping for joy.

“We shall see,” says Professor Riddle, dismissing her.

 

Professor Riddle begins Harry's after-school lessons by levitating a terrified rat from its cage and ordering Harry to Imperio it. Harry watches with dismay as the creature squirms fitfully in the air, already quite a bit banged up, missing most of its tail, an ear, and some fingers.

“Should you perform the spell correctly, it will feel no pain,” Riddle tells her, and Harry takes a breath before casting perfectly, wordlessly instructing the animal to calm itself, sending soothing thoughts as she watches it begin to hang limp, looking peaceful and drowsy.

“Bleeding heart,” Riddle smirks, though she doesn't critique her, which means Harry must have passed this first test.

As the spells she requests grow more violent in nature, Harry finds herself faltering, unwilling to inflict pain on any living thing, even a thing so pitiful as this half-mauled rodent. Finally, when she hesitates at the name of the cutting curse, Professor Riddle gestures for Harry to lower her wand.

“None of these spells are beyond my capacity to heal,” she tells her. “And we will not know if they are beyond your capacity to heal until that capacity is tested. Would you prefer to discover you lack the ability when a more dire case presents itself?”

Shaking her head, Harry shakily raises her hand back up and casts, blinking back tears at the animal's cries of agony, wand shivering as she tries and fails to cast the counter which would send the blood directly back in, stitching each wound in the process–the same spell she'd seen Snape perform on Malfoy the previous year.

When she fails the second time, she begins to panic, magic lashing out wildly as a hiss spills itself from her mouth, the word heal given like an order, and the rat, improbably, obeying, blood inching upwards from its puddle on the floor, the creature's eyes rolling back in its skull as its flesh begins to mend itself.

“Very good,” Professor Riddle says, despite the fact that Harry had failed twice. “Your Parselmagic is just as much a part of you as the more standard sort. You should never hesitate to utilise it whenever it feels natural to do so.” She forces the rat back into consciousness before returning it, quietly shrieking, to its cage. “You needn't worry. I won't let it die while I still have use for it.”

“I just wasn't expecting to have to torture animals,” Harry admits, wondering if perhaps the Professor was right to question her fortitude. The thought is painful where it gnaws at her mind.

Professor Riddle gives her an assessing look before crossing the space between them, laying a gloved hand lightly upon Harry's shoulder. “You've done well,” she reiterates. “You are afflicted by a strong sense of compassion which will diminish in time. Compassion leads to hesitation. Do not think of it as torture, but as practice. Your infliction of the cutting curse on a rat may one day result in your saving a child's life from the same spell in the future.”

Portrayed in such a way, Harry is able to finally regain control of her breathing, leaning gratefully into Professor Riddle's touch. “You're right. Thank you.” She takes a deep, steadying breath, preparing herself, reluctant to give Riddle any reason to regret taking Harry on as an apprentice. “What's next?”

 

Voldemort is waiting for her within the dream-chamber. He pets the space on the sofa beside him, gesturing for Harry to take her usual seat at his side. Her stomach clenches when he begins to peel his left glove, finger by finger, from his hand. These dreams only ever traverse one path.

Harry's eyes slip closed as cool skin slides over the curve of her cheek, ecstasy ripping through her as his thumb traces the line of her jaw before slipping up to run along the jagged lines of her scar, a tender caress that nearly makes her whimper.

“I hear you're to be the next Master of the Dark Arts,” he murmurs, pride carried along on the back of his voice. Harry turns her face into his touch, nuzzling his palm, feeling like a dog desperate for affection. She can hardly think when he touches her like this. He never touched her at all during the summer, not in the waking world. Only ever here, in the comfort of their shared dreams.

“Worried I'll be Professor Riddle's new favorite, instead of you?” she teases, pressing a silly, childish kiss to the heel of his hand before raising her own, grasping the cold bar of his wrist, shivering as another wave of thrilling intensity wrings her spine like a wet cloth.

“Insolent girl,” he says, voice soft, grip firm as he tugs her forward until she's curled up in his lap like a child, shuddering beneath the stroke of his hand, petting the slope of her bared throat. “You would choose academia over a life by my side?”

“Don't worry,” Harry assures him, smiling helplessly against his robed shoulder, melting beneath the onslaught of warm electricity his touch brings. “I'll still share my dreams with you.”

“I do not need your permission,” Voldemort reminds her, because of course he doesn't. Voldemort doesn't need anyone's permission to go anywhere that he wants. “Though it is appreciated.”

 

Harry has not forgotten Mr. Moody's strange visit to the Ministry while wearing Mr. Malfoy's face. She's spent the first weeks of term surreptitiously looking for the elusive Headmaster, whose presence at meals is intermittent at best. She studies Ron's map of Hogwarts, inherited from his more mischief-minded brothers after their graduation, every evening and finds his dot completely still within his office, unmoving for hours and hours, visited only by a handful of Professors–Riddle, Snape, and McGonagall mostly–and someone named B. Crouch Jr., whom Harry thinks must work for the Ministry. Harry's begun to suspect that Dumbledore spends most of his time asleep at his desk, age finally having caught up to him, succumbing to that affliction rather than whatever menacing Mr. Moody thinks might have been done upon him.

She studies Professor Riddle's dot too, which is much busier than Dumbledore's, bouncing between her quarters and her classroom and half a dozen spots in between, often blipping out of existence at odd hours, likely off running errands for the Lord Protector. Harry likes to imagine what she might be doing as her dot dodders about; making tea or marking parchment or practicing one of her many illustrious, dark spells.

Harry's at first concerned and then delighted when she sees a second name consistently at home in the Dark Arts classroom, discovering the truth of things only after she dons the cloak in the dark of the night, in search of this strange interloper. When she enters the room she finds it empty, despite the map's insistence that a P. Pettigrew is assuredly inside. Harry, still shielded by her own invisibility, crosses the room slowly until her own dot rests just on top of the first one, and looks up to find herself standing before the cage of the shivering rat the Professor uses for Harry's training.

“Pettigrew,” Harry says softly, not wanting to terrify the thing. It's a fitting name for a rat, and the fact of it shifts her own view of Professor Riddle, who apparently contains enough sentimentality to have named the creature she uses to test her armada of curses and spells.

It's sweet. Harry summons a carrot for the thing, swiped from the kitchens, and leaves it to shiver through whatever sort of things a rat might dream.

 

“Again,” Professor Riddle commands, and Harry quickly wipes sweat from her brow with her sleeve before settling back into her duelling position.

They aren't duelling today; rather, Riddle is making Harry practice one specific duelling spell, a nifty thing that vanishes any shield or cover her opponent might be hiding beneath.

Harry's out of breath from the strain of her attempts; she can feel the magic lashing out of her, feral and uncontrolled, too unfocused to remove the perfect shield the Professor has maintained since they first began this lesson.

When her spell once again flies out with abandon, shattering a vase to Riddle's left, the Professor tries a different tactic, moving until she stands close enough to touch Harry, laying a gloved hand over Harry's quivering throat.

“Breathe deeply,” she instructs, feeling the motion of Harry's throat as she desperately sucks in air. “You're an athlete, and your magic responds to things physically. You manage to control your breathing while on a broom.”

“I'm never thinking this hard while on a broom,” Harry argues. “Flying's just…instinct. It clears my head, actually.”

“All magic is just instinct,” Riddle explains. “You're currently just building a different type. Now cast again.”

Professor Riddle has moved her shield to hover before her unmanned desk, but Harry can hardly look away from the woman in front of her, can hardly focus on anything but the weight of the hand on her neck. She casts.

Riddle's glove is suddenly gone, leaving the cool sensation of skin against overheated skin, and Harry's knees nearly buckle beneath the wave of instant bliss, mind blinded entirely by the feeling. It feels just like Voldemort's touch in her dreams; alarmingly overwhelming, and even better because this touch is Riddle's.

She hears the Professor suck in a hissing breath and then her hand moves, sliding around to cup the base of Harry's skull, wrenching a groan from her as she struggles to stay upright, trying to recall if she's ever seen the woman's hands bared before, and determining quickly that she hasn't. Professor Riddle has worn her gloves even within the privacy of her own quarters, the few times Harry's stopped by. She must have a reason for that. She probably isn't too happy at having her personal boundaries summarily trampled by Harry's lack of control.

“Sorry,” Harry offers, tongue feeling sluggish in her mouth. She doesn't pull away, she's not strong enough to surrender this electric warmth, but she figures an apology is probably in order.

“Never apologise for how powerful you are,” Professor Riddle murmurs, fingers catching Harry's curls between them and giving a curious tug, her eyes narrowing at the hitch of Harry's breath in response. She doesn't look angry or upset. She looks intrigued beyond belief. “Even while uncontrolled, your magic is responsive. I can feel the wild expanse of it.”

Now that she's thinking about it, Harry can feel Professor Riddle's magic too, licking at the air around her, like a murky pool of obsidian water. “I can feel yours too, sort of,” Harry tells her.

“What does it feel like?”

It feels like a well Harry longs to dive into head-first. “Dark,” she says. “Cloudy. Like it's…veiled, maybe. Or holding back.”

“Clever girl,” Professor Riddle smirks, the closest she ever comes to a smile. Harry turns her face, slowly, in case Riddle decides she's had enough of holding the weight of Harry's head. When she doesn't pull away, Harry moves until her mouth is pressing against the beautiful, pale line of her wrist. It could almost be considered a kiss.

Professor Riddle wrenches herself away so quickly she nearly stumbles, Harry unthinkingly reaching out to steady her with a hand at her waist. She watches, that searing warmth quickly dissipating beneath the absence of touch, as the Professor smooths a hand down the front of her robe, as if wiping away the feeling of Harry's skin. In the space of a blink, the hand is once again hidden by sleek, black dragonhide, and Professor Riddle is marching, business-like, back across the room.

“Again,” she says, clearing her throat as she casts a wordless shield, the last one having been shattered by distraction.

Harry sighs and then breathes deeply as instructed, trying to steady her riotous mind. She casts again.

 

Hermione is agitated when Harry returns to the dorm, flipping this way and that through a heavy book about memory runes. She's always agitated this time of year, when summer begins to give autumn its way; it was September when her parents had finally capitulated to the deterioration brought about unknowingly by eleven years in extended and immediate contact with Hermione's magic.

“They didn't even recognise me by the end,” she'd told Harry once, as Harry had, out of sympathy, pretended not to notice her tears. “By the time I left for Hogwarts, they didn't remember they had a daughter at all. Then, in my second week, I got the letter from the Ministry. They were dead from magical exposure. I killed them.”

“You didn't kill them,” Harry had told her then, and she still believes now. “Magic has a mind of its own, sometimes.” Harry has to believe this because she has witnessed it time and again, the leashing of magic like trying to bridle a horse. Magic can be as vicious and unpredictable as any wild animal, which is why it needs to be taught at a place as secure as Hogwarts, and kept away from vulnerable Muggles, who will never be able to defend themselves against it, at all costs.

“New project?” Harry asks, keeping her tone light, always unsure what sort of comment might set Hermione off into a storm of grief this time of year.

“I'm saving up for a pensieve,” she tells her, scribbling furiously across a sheet of parchment. “I don't ever want to forget them. Not a single part.” She sets her quill down with a sigh. “In five years, I'll have spent just half my life with them. In six, I'll have been an orphan for the majority of my life.”

“It's not so bad,” Harry offers, scuffing a shoe against the floor. Hermione gives her a look curdled by pity. “It's not as hard for me as it is for you,” Harry assures her. “I don't remember them at all.”

“I'm not sure that's better,” Hermione muses, though she doesn't try to argue the fact.

Harry knows it's true, down to her bones. She hardly even thinks about her parents most days, finding it difficult to picture them, though she's seen photographs. It might be easier if she had portraits, if she was able to converse with some version of them, able to gain an understanding of the people they had been, young and in love and willing to give their lives fighting for something they believed in, even if it was the wrong thing. She can admire the idea of them, and she can wish she had at least some memories of her own, rather than the regurgitated tales of others. But she never knew them, and she never would. It's difficult to miss the idea of a person, like trying to find an image within flames flickering too quickly for the brain to cling to anything.

 

It has been one week since Harry felt the addiction of Professor Riddle's touch. One week of the Professor skirting about the rooms they share, always ensuring at least three paces separate them, Harry embarrassed and furious to find herself unable to stop watching those gloved hands as they move, as they craft magic expertly, as they staunchly refuse to touch Harry, even while clothed.

Harry stares as Riddle casts–a levitation spell meant specifically for use on a human body, utilising a training dummy as the subject–and feels something within her split apart like the firm cracking of an egg.

“Do you think of me as just another student?” Harry asks, unsure where the heat in her words has sparked from, leaking out of her with hot demanding and humiliating need.

Professor Riddle doesn't look at her, has been avoiding looking at Harry for just as long as she's been avoiding being within close proximity, as though Harry is something contagious and meant to be dodged. “You are my student,” she says, infuriatingly mild, as though she hasn't the faintest idea what Harry's upset about.

“You know what I mean,” Harry says harshly. She has never spoken harshly to Professor Riddle, about whom her thoughts range across a spectrum of affection. She has never felt angry with her before, the sea of it rushing up in her, boiling and hungry for any type of response Riddle might give, desperate for her to at least look at Harry, even if it's a glare. Harry has never thought of her as cowardly before. “Do you think of me as nothing more than some stupid girl?”

Professor Riddle's eyes, when they finally, finally land on her, hold Harry in an unforgiving grip, the feeling within them dark and fathomless and unreadable. “I think of you as the girl. You are many things, Harry Potter, many of them difficult to comprehend, but above all you are mine. You are my student, you are my apprentice, you are my girl.”

As she speaks, she begins to cross the distance between them, walking slowly and with purpose, a predator circling its prey.

Harry stands frozen, on a precipice, anger washing away with each of Professor Riddle's steps, until it leaves her completely, replaced by something even hungrier, a mindless sense of need. She can't blink, can't look away, and wonders if the Professor is reading every thought as it pops into her head.

Kiss me, she thinks, willing Professor Riddle to hear it. They're very close, now. She can feel the edges of Riddle’s magic as it begins to caress her own, not unlike a hand stroking her cheek, and Harry wants that too, picturing it clearly, wants the weight of Professor Riddle against her in as many ways as she'll allow. Kiss me, she thinks again, though she can't imagine saying it; her voice would break against the very first word. I'll do anything, she thinks, anything at all, just kiss me, damn you–

When Professor Riddle kisses her, it feels as though she's taken every scrap of light from the world and pushed it down Harry's throat.

 

When beginning a furtive affair with one's Professor, it is standard practice to establish rules early-on.

“You can tell no one of this,” Riddle murmurs, words falling from her mouth into Harry's, having spent the past however long–an hour, an eternity–kissing Harry into submission, and then heaving her up onto the table to kiss her some more. Harry wants to keep kissing her until they age into disrepair and the flesh rots off their bones. Then she'll bring them both back to life and continue.

“I won't,” Harry promises, shifting her legs where they've wrapped around her, holding her close, revelling in the Professor's allowance of such a thing. She feels pleasantly numb all over, sensitivity so spiked by extended touch that she can hardly feel a thing, like her overworked senses have quit completely, abandoning her to pleasure. She pulls away just enough to look at Professor Riddle, who looks more rumpled than Harry has ever seen her, hair and blouse uprooted by Harry's wandering hands, mouth reddened by Harry's eager mouth. “You aren't going to avoid me again, are you?”

Professor Riddle's mouth quirks, amused by Harry's worry. “I have seen you every other afternoon this past week, you spoiled thing.”

“You wouldn't look at me,” Harry reminds her. “You wouldn't touch me.”

“A brief attempt at morality,” says Professor Riddle. “It will not happen again.”

“Because I'm yours?” Harry grins, reassured by the thought, the memory of Professor Riddle stalking her, claiming her.

She claims her again, now. “Yes. Mine.” Her teeth dig harshly into Harry's lower lip, wringing a whine from her. Riddle's hands, where they're gripping Harry firmly, as if Harry could possibly want to escape her hold, one on Harry's hipbone and one on her upper arm, clench. “Am I the first to touch you in this way?”

“Who else would have touched me like this?” Harry wonders, gasping as one of those hands slides up her belly, thumb grazing the curve of her breast. “You're the only person I've ever wanted.”

Riddle's groan is heartfelt, dropped down Harry's throat like a stone in a lake. She feeds Harry one last, languid, suckling kiss before pulling back and then stepping away. “Stand. Pull yourself together. Don't assume this means you will be free from my lessons.”

“I don't want to be free from your lessons,” Harry assures her, kicking her foot, sparkling with pins and needles, against the table before she shakily attempts to stand. “I want all of it.”

“Greedy,” Professor Riddle says approvingly.

 

What follows is two weeks rendered largely forgotten to Harry, swallowed up by lust. When she's not with Professor Riddle, she's thinking of her; when she is with her, she's still thinking of her, plagued by an inability to shirk the knowledge of what Professor Riddle tastes like, incapable of thinking about anything beyond how to contrive managing to taste her again.

Harry is ripped from one persistent fantasy involving the Professor's tongue by the sharp bite of the woman's stinging hex. “In order to learn, there is an expectation that you pay attention,” Professor Riddle drawls, frowning at whatever she's seen in Harry's head. “If such episodes continue to addle your mind, I will put an end to them.”

“Sorry,” Harry offers, willing her brain to focus on anything at all besides the tantalizing patch of pale skin on display between the Professor's chin and the collar of her shirt, and how easily it would bruise beneath Harry's mouth. She closes her eyes, takes a breath, and then casts, wordlessly and wandlessly.

She feels the shield bloom, intact, just as Riddle asked for, and grins even before she opens her eyes to see it for herself. There it shimmers, casting an iridescent veil between Riddle and herself.

“Very good,” Riddle says primly, unaffected by Harry's palpable delight.

“Do I get a reward?” she asks, mostly joking, but, looking again at that beautiful throat, not completely.

Professor Riddle raises a single perfect brow. “Is the satisfaction of a job well done not reward enough?”

“What if I want my reward to be a kiss?” Harry tilts her head in what she hopes is a seductive manner.

“A kiss?” Riddle hums. “I suppose I could get my hands on another Dementor.”

“You're a Dementor,” grumbles Harry, beginning to sink into a pout.

Professor Riddle hums again before settling back against her own desk, vanishing Harry's shield with a wave, and then holds out a hand, coaxing Harry closer. When Harry happily bounds up to her, intending to study each crevice in those thin lips with her tongue, Riddle stops her with a hand on her shoulder, pushing down.

Harry, vision blackening with lust, sinks to her knees without a word, shivering as her skin comes into contact with cold stone. She watches, mouth watering, as Riddle's thighs clench beneath her slacks before slowly parting.

Harry moans, leaning forward to nuzzle against the weave of dark wool, wondering if she'll be able to smell Riddle through her trousers. Riddle's fingers card through her hair gently before gripping tight and pulling back until Harry's blinking up at her blearily.

“As delectable a picture you make like this,” Riddle murmurs, running a gloved thumb over Harry's jaw and across her lips, eyes darkening when Harry sucks the leather into her mouth. “I had planned on something different.” Without another word, she pushes Harry back and then raises one foot, clad in her usual snakeskin boots, pushing her toes against Harry's shoulder until she's sprawled on both elbows, knees spread to keep from falling flat completely.

Riddle's foot slides down Harry's quivering stomach, unheeding of whatever grime from the floors she may be leaving across the white starch of her shirt, and slips up, under Harry's skirt, brushing her crotch tellingly. “Do you know what to do? Or must I instruct you in this, as well?”

Harry mercifully does not pass out, which for a moment seems like it might be a real concern, this being the single-most sensual experience of her life. She moves slowly to grip the Professor's ankle, sliding her hand up over silk stockings in search of the bare flesh of calf, shuddering at the sensation skin-on-skin brings. She licks her lips, mouth suddenly overflowing with more saliva than she knows what to do with. “Teach me?”

Riddle's mouth curls, pleased with this answer, scraping her boot over Harry, unfailingly finding that button that sends a pulse of wet heat down her spine. “Take your reward, Harry. Slowly.”

Harry bites her lip to stifle the whines that tumble out of her at each movement, thrusting clumsily at first before she settles into a rhythm, slow, just as Riddle directed, canting her hips up against that boot, squeezing the flesh of her leg with each perfect wave of pleasure. She comes, can feel it gushing out of her, wetting her knickers and likely the sole of Riddle's boot, losing her glasses when her head falls back on a gasped “Professor!”, Riddle's shudder a full-body thing, felt beneath Harry's hand.

The Professor falls upon her immediately, pressing until Harry's flat on her back, Riddle drawing that hand from her leg up the inseam of her trousers, to the hot center of her, grip fierce around Harry's wrist as she moves it how she wants, rubbing herself off through the wool, on Harry's hand, groaning long and deep as she lurches forward, burying her teeth in the soft give of Harry's throat, right over her jugular.

Harry feels Riddle's orgasm as if it's her own, shattering anew and coming back to her senses at the sensation of Riddle's tongue, slow and exploratory, tasting the mess she's just made of Harry's neck.

“Very good,” Professor Riddle purrs, chuckling when Harry shudders underneath her.

“Merlin,” says Harry, gazing unseeing at the blurry ceiling.

“No,” Professor Riddle smiles, pulling back until she's all that Harry can see. “Just me.”

 

Hermione catches Harry out as she slithers into the darkened dorm, waiting until Harry's shrugged off the cloak and climbed within the safety of her bed curtains to whisper a lumos, startling Harry half to death.

“What were you up to this time?” Hermione asks, though the judgmental set of her face speaks to her knowing–or at least suspecting–already.

“Nothing,” says Harry, which is a mistake. Never in her history at Hogwarts has Harry ever been up to nothing. “Um, I mean, no rule-breaking.” Double-bad. Hermione will never believe Harry's late-night disappearing act didn't break a single rule. Her being out after curfew alone is breaking one, not to mention the fact of the cloak, which Harry only ever wears while rule-breaking, a fact Hermione knows well by virtue of her being present for most of the rules Harry's broken. “Well, nothing I'll get in trouble for,” Harry amends.

Hermione promptly reaches over and presses a finger harshly against the bruise flagrantly displaying itself on Harry's throat. She says, gravely, “I hope you know what you're doing.”

“Me too,” says Harry, having already forgotten about the evidence left on her skin. She'll never bruise as obviously as someone pale, like Professor Riddle, but the bite had been harsh, only the barest amount of pressure away from breaking skin, and Harry can still feel the dull throb speaking to its visibility. For someone who doesn't want anyone to know about their after-hours recreation, she'd clearly wanted Harry to walk away marked. “I don't think my tie will cover this.”

Hermione hums, considering her. “I'll teach you a spell to hide it. Unless you want it vanished.”

“Hidden is fine,” says Harry, wondering why it is Hermione knows such a spell in the first place.

 

The first time Harry meets Remus Lupin, he hands her a beautifully packaged parcel of chocolate which, when she unfolds its wrappings, begins to sing a melody Harry remembers from her years in primary, a sing-along song meant to help young children tie their shoes. She is still standing on the bridge between adolescence and adulthood, still helplessly charmed by magic in all its many beautiful, terrible forms, still delighting in any spell new to her, which is itself perhaps a gift, there being so very many spells she does not know, and so an endless amount of delights.

“It's nostalate,” he explains, as Harry lets the song and its accompanying memories wrap around her like a jumper, wondering how she could possibly eat something so lovely. “It evokes a memory of pure happiness. Best antidote for despair there is.”

“Can I preserve it?” Harry asks, already beginning to worry over how best to keep the singing chocolate so that it never melts or rots. “Is there a spell?” She wonders if perhaps the magic which she used on the cat could be used on anything that decays.

Mr. Lupin is apologetic when he tells her that there isn't a spell for preserving something indefinitely. “Everything has to end sometime,” he tells her. “So it's best to simply enjoy it while you can.”

That evening, Mr. Lupin stays out in the wood shed, which is strange in itself, and made stranger by the sounds that echo across the glade from the building throughout the evening, as if he's been joined by a dozen banshees, each of them competing against the others’ screams.

When she asks Mrs. Weasley about it the next morning, she only pats Harry's shoulder and says “He's sick, dear. He has an illness and, when it's contagious, he keeps himself away from everyone else. So it doesn't catch, you see?”

“Oh,” Harry frowns. She doesn't want the kind man with the singing chocolate to be sick. Except for the Dursleys, Harry has never known a sick person–and the Dursleys’ illness was nothing like Mr. Lupin's shrieking symptoms; Harry hadn't even been able to tell, with the Dursleys. It strikes her as very unfair, that Mr. Lupin's sickness should be so much worse than theirs, though perhaps the worstness is relative. After all, magical exposure is fatal to Muggles. Whatever Mr. Lupin has, it probably isn't rotting him slowly from the inside out. “Will he ever get better?”

Mrs. Weasley's eyes moisten with an unnameable sadness. “No,” she tells Harry. “He never will.”

When Harry finally succumbs to temptation and eats the nostalate, she's pleased to find it evokes her tongue's memory as well; it tastes like her first bite of treacle tart, ice cream and birthday cake, all at once.

 

Voldemort has been busy for the past several weeks, or else he's purposefully been keeping his distance, which Harry has been grateful for, the idea of his intruding on a dream like this one–Professor Riddle spread out beneath Harry's devoted hands, her eager mouth, like a buffet spread of everything she's ever wanted–extremely awkward at best and an invasion of Professor Riddle's closely guarded privacy at worst.

But it seems Voldemort has grown bored with keeping himself away. He sprawls where he sits, comfortable as he pleases on a conjured sofa, watching with interest as Harry looms over her own conjured form of Professor Riddle, yelping as she hurries to block what she can of Riddle's lithe body from his view.

“You need not shield her for my benefit,” he says, amusement wafting from him in thick, bubbling waves. “It's nothing I haven't seen before.”

Harry, whose emotions had plummeted from joyful lust into stark surprise and distress, now plateaus sharply at bitter envy. The revelation that the Lord Protector, who has never hidden his preference for Professor Riddle, has possibly seen her in such a state–namely, nude and writhing with pleasure–should not feel so shocking. It doesn't, but Harry still finds herself angry to hear it said with such disregard, as though such a sight was one of many women, as though Professor Riddle is not as singular and enrapturing as she is, a work of art spread out, pale and long as a knife, across Harry's bed.

He clearly doesn't hold the vision in as high esteem as he should, and thus he clearly does not deserve to have ever witnessed it.

“Go away,” Harry barks at him, attention split in half by the interloper and Riddle moaning beneath her, slender arms sliding up Harry's back, ushering her to get back to where they'd been heading, over the cliff's edge of commingling pleasure.

“You've never been shy before, Miss Potter,” Voldemort says, and Harry can hear the smile in his voice, can hear his interest, and she knows he won't be leaving anytime soon.

It has never before occurred to Harry that since they're in her head, she can choose whether or not to allow him entrance. It occurs to her now.

Voldemort seems to sense the thought, because he softens, reining in his bemusement at her anger and becoming at once the friend she's shared so many dreams with; he was right when he said she's never shied away from him before, has never tried to hold herself apart from him, has only ever viewed him with affection borne from that night, years ago, when he'd greeted a trespassing, curious child with kindness, something Harry had not experienced much of before his sudden appearance in her life.

“This is your dream, little snake,” he says, reminding her of her own authority, despite the fact that he's never respected it before. “You choose where this leads.”

“Why are you even here?” Harry asks, torn between her instinct to extend her hand in friendship, to dissolve the current portrait of lust beneath her and instead host him in some more wholesome dream so they might chat as they usually do–Harry has missed him, when she hasn't been too distracted by Professor Riddle to miss anything–and her instinct to evict him from her mind, to keep Professor Riddle and the relationship blooming between them to herself, as promised. Harry doesn't want to share her. She already feels bereft at having to share Professor Riddle's time, her duties to the Lord Protector and Ministry of Magic still an ever-looming player that makes Harry feel as if she's been cast in a secondary role, nothing more than a temporary diversion for when Professor Riddle isn't busy with more important pursuits. She doubts the Professor dreams of her.

“Should she have control of such things, I have no doubt that she would,” Voldemort assures her, apparently confident enough in his welcome to let her know that yes, he is shamelessly reading every one of her thoughts. “You are far from unimportant, Harry. Now, I believe you were intending to put your tongue to good use?”

As if he'd given her permission, the dreamed Professor Riddle begins pressing at Harry's shoulders forcefully, directing her as she had while awake, Harry dutifully moving in response, eagerness taking the place of all reticence; she'd wanted so badly to put her mouth on Professor Riddle, to test if she tasted as good as she smelled, to wring the same pleasure-wrought noises from her that she'd pulled from Harry with little more than a few touches and her stiff boot, little more than the sight of her, the knowledge that she found Harry worthy of her time and attention.

She wants badly to taste her now, any version of her, even if it's only a dream, Harry's own assumptions of what she might taste like here, where she burns hot and wet, thighs spreading across the sheets like pale butter over bread. Harry licks, tentatively at first, and then with reckless abandon when it begins to net her those throaty moans, exact replications of the true Professor Riddle's voice when she'd pulled Harry's hand against her.

“Very good,” Voldemort purrs, and Harry is only half-aware of his eyes on her, though she can't ignore the weight of his gaze, his interest, completely. The realisation that said interest is sexual in nature–lustful–settles against her mind cautiously, as if he's testing the limits of her allowances. When she glances at him from the corner of her eye, she sees his hand has disappeared beneath his robes, the material too thick for her to make out any movement, though the context renders it unquestionable. “Quite the eager student.” He sounds delighted by Harry's eagerness, the same eagerness that makes it impossible for her to stop. She can't even dredge up fresh irritation; she's the one letting him stay.

And, shamefully, a piece of her enjoys his enjoyment, his obvious and single-minded focus on her, on what she's doing, becoming nothing more than a tool for pleasure, both his and Professor Riddle's.

“You perfect thing,” Voldemort says, voice ragged and hushed, as Professor Riddle's thighs become a vice clutching at her head, finally cresting over into orgasm.

When he touches her, his hand is bare, sending a shock of pleasure deep into Harry's belly as his fingers force their way into her mouth, her tongue wrapping them in welcome without any input from her mind, too whited out to even begin offering up an opinion. His skin tastes the way sunlight feels on tender flesh, and a bit like the sea, briny and pungent.

The chrome of his mask is cold against her neck. His hand brushes her hair back and strokes her cheek with the power of a million stars. “Does it meet your expectations?”

Harry has no idea what he's talking about. She feels as if she's falling down a bottomless well, so dark that she may as well be blind.

 

Shame and guilt dog Harry's steps as she makes her way to the Dark Arts classroom. All morning she'd wallowed in her bed, the scene of the crime, allowing the misery to fester. There were too many thoughts to sort through them all–had she truly enjoyed Voldemort's witnessing of her depravity? Had she welcomed his participation? And what did this mean for her feelings for Professor Riddle? Had she ever glimpsed Voldemort in even remotely the same light?

She feels confident that the answer to that is no; she'd never before thought of him as someone to want, not in that way, and is quite thrown by the suddenness of it all. And, more than that, she dreads the question that now bites at her heels, deserving an answer she can hardly bring herself to make: to tell or not to tell Professor Riddle?

The woman herself is packing when Harry arrives, settling Pettigrew's cage with the rest of her bags on the table.

“Where are you going?” asks Harry, eyeing the bags with frustration. The last thing she wants is to lose Professor Riddle to some sort of quest on Voldemort's behalf so shortly after they've finally begun seeing one another.

Harry's brought up short by the thought of Voldemort–could he be pulling Professor Riddle away on purpose? Perhaps Harry's reminded him just how wonderful it can be to bring her pleasure.

Or perhaps he wants to separate her from Harry, wants to have one–or both–to himself. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing Voldemort would do. He's never been possessive of Harry before. But before last night, Harry also would have said he never felt lustful towards her.

Professor Riddle studies Harry, who becomes acutely aware that she's a Legilimens, and thus could know everything about the dream within seconds, should she choose to. Harry wouldn't bar her from her mind, even if she could. But she doesn't sense anyone prodding curiously at her thoughts. It seems the Professor is looking at her just to look.

“I am needed by the Lord Protector,” she says, finally. “I will be back this evening.”

At the news of her imminent return, Harry lets relief take hold, and turns her attention to the rat currently shivering in a ball of terror within his cage. She's truly never seen a more pitiable creature. “And he needs him as well? Why? He's not going to feed him to Nagini is he?”

Professor Riddle shakes her head, amused as always by Harry's ability to feel sympathy for anything. “No, Harry. The rat will simply be bait.” She moves before Harry can ask any follow-up questions, until she has Harry pressed up and onto a desk, mouth curling when Harry instantly opens up to her, legs coiling around the back of her thighs and pulling her close, head tipping back invitingly.

“So willing,” Professor Riddle muses, running a thumb up the gooseflesh skin of Harry's thigh, ducking down until her lips scrape against Harry's neck with each word. “So eager. So good for me.”

“Yes,” Harry agrees, doesn't even realise she's spoken Parseltongue until she feels Riddle's laugh against her throat.

A knock at the door sees Professor Riddle suddenly across the room, as though she'd Apparated silently, whilst Harry attempts to right her hopelessly ruffled uniform, her tie pulled askew by the Professor's hands.

She hears Ginny before she sees her. “Harry? Hermione said you're probably–” She steps into the classroom, takes one look at Harry, who’s only just remembered the bruise which she'd revealed in the hopes it would entice Professor Riddle to leave another; the bruise which Ginny is now staring at, the fire of her gaze flickering from Harry's throat to her ruined tie, her skirt lying several inches higher up her thighs than it does generally, to Professor Riddle, who's looking apathetically back at her from across the room.

“What the fuck,” says Ginny, giving the Professor one last, horrible glare, before whirling out of the room in a hurry.

“Gin!” Harry calls after her, giving Professor Riddle a harried look. “I'll talk to her,” she promises, not bothering to wait for a response.

Ginny is putting her prowess on the pitch to good use, so Harry nearly has to sprint to catch up to her, grabbing hold of her wrist to pull her to a stop. She can't have this conversation, which will no doubt become a shouting match, what with it being Ginny, in the corridor where anyone might hear; she tugs her into the Charms classroom, which is mercifully empty.

“Let go of me,” Ginny says stiffly, scowling at her wrist when Harry does. “What do you want?”

“What do you want?” Harry counters. “Where were you going?”

“To tell the Deputy Headmistress that one of her Professors is fucking a student,” Ginny hisses, the boiling wrath in her voice sucking Harry's breath from her lungs. It's the worst case scenario; Ginny isn't Hermione, who may disapprove of Harry's choices but will always respect her right to make them. If Ginny has her way, she'll see Professor Riddle sacked.

“She isn't,” Harry argues, her own anger and desperation ratcheting up in response. “What you saw–it isn't like that. I'm her apprentice–”

“That's even worse!” cries Ginny, and Harry can't stop the rage from bubbling out of her.

“Look,” she says hotly, which is not at all the way to respond to Ginny when she gets like this, but strategy and keeping a cool head have never been Harry's strong suits. “Just because you're jealous doesn't mean you should ruin her life–”

“Jealous?” Ginny scoffs.

“Yeah, jealous. I know about your crush on me–”

“You think I'm upset because of a bloody crush? Newsflash, Potter, I didn't exactly hide that, yeah, I like you, but I know you don't have feelings for me. I'm fine with that, I thought we were fucking friends,” her voice hitches on the last word, and Harry feels like she might just melt into the floor when she sees Ginny blinking back hot tears. “I had a crush on her too, you know, back in first year. But of course I never did anything about it because she's our Professor. And now I find out she's been messing about with my friend. How am I meant to feel, Harry? She's–it’s–fucking despicable.”

“She isn't,” Harry says, softening in the face of Ginny's despair. She's right; they are friends, and Harry hates to see her friend hurting. “She isn't, Ginny, you have to believe me. I…I pushed her, it was me that started it. And she cares about me. It's not what you think.”

Ginny gives her a pinched look. “I think you're in love with her, and I think you'd let her do anything because of that. And that isn't a good thing, Harry.” She takes a steadying breath as Harry tries to determine whether or not she'll have to argue further. “What she's doing is wrong,” Ginny says firmly. “But…I don't want you to hate me. So I won't say anything.”

“I wouldn't hate you,” Harry promises. “Come on, Gin, I could never hate you. I just…I really like her. I've never–had anything, not like this. I'd like to keep it.”

“For Godric's sake,” groans Ginny, which is the closest to an oath of silence as Harry will get.

 

Harry rushes back to find the Dark Arts room shut and dark; Professor Riddle must have already left. She spends some time pacing just outside the classroom before enough strange looks from passersby chase her down to the dungeons, where she shamelessly breaks into Riddle's office–is it breaking in, when Harry's only using the password that Riddle has used in front of her? Surely if she didn't want Harry to use it herself, she would have changed it. She knows about Harry's habit of slithering into spaces she isn't explicitly allowed–to wait for her return in privacy.

Being surrounded by Professor Riddle's things and scent and the faint but devastating traces of her magic brings some measure of comfort. The quiet solitude does not, Harry finding herself thrust down a tunnel of worry.

What if Voldemort tells Professor Riddle about their shared dream and all it entailed? What if he convinces Professor Riddle she's better off with him, surely a more experienced and talented lover? The Lord Protector must have dozens of attributes that make him more enticing than Harry, a teenage virgin with little to offer beyond an embarrassing amount of eagerness.

What if Ginny's discovery has scared Riddle off of Harry for good? What if she decides she doesn't want to waste her time on some illicit affair? What if she never comes back at all?

By the time Professor Riddle reaches her, looking unsurprised to find Harry sitting in a puddle of worry on her settee, Harry's worked herself up into the beginnings of a proper sulk.

“Why are you staining my cushions with gloom?” Riddle asks, more amused than Harry expected her to be. “Surely your little fight with your friend has not injured you this greatly.”

“Ginny won't tell anyone,” Harry assures her, watching as the Professor sinks into the lounge chair across the small sitting room. “But if you–I'd understand–if you don't, you know, want to anymore…” She's lying, and poorly, demoralised further by the silence that stretches between them.

Finally, Professor Riddle says “Come here.”

Harry slinks from the couch to stand before her, watching with badly concealed hope as Professor Riddle reaches for her hips, moving Harry until she sits perched on her lap, bracketing the Professor's hips with her thighs. As Riddle speaks, Harry's shirt begins to helpfully unbutton itself, revealing a spread of skin ready to be plundered. If she's upset to see the locket, another man's gift, hung around Harry's neck, she gives no sign, only gently pressing it to Harry’s skin and then turning her attention elsewhere.

The Professor runs her hand down Harry's stomach, thumb hooking into her navel and pushing a gasp out of her. “You are a fool if you think I will ever let you go.”

“Really?” Harry asks, relief and want swelling up in her, punctured like a needle by Professor Riddle's sharp kiss.

“What did I tell you before?” she murmurs, coaxing Harry's tongue into play. “You're mine. You'll find I can be very greedy, Harry.”

“Yeah?” Harry asks, feeling flung far out of her depth as that perfect mouth begins its descent down her throat, carving a slick, biting path to her breast. “What about lustful? Envious?”

Professor Riddle hums, vanishing Harry's sports bra to better suckle a nipple, grinning at the cry it earns. “Exceedingly. Prideful, too.”

“All the sins, then?” Harry asks, laughing at the ticklish sensation of a hand grazing the skin of her thigh, and then not laughing at all.

“Only the deadliest,” Riddle says with a smile promising much fatality, indeed.

 

Harry wakes to find Professor Riddle watching her, looking pleased and well-rested, though she'd still been seeing to the clean-up when Harry had plummeted into sleep. She gazes openly now, watching the play of sunlight through water, refractions of light spreading a mosaic across Harry's bare skin, her hair mussed beyond hope across both pillows.

“Have you been watching me sleep?” Harry asks, voice hoarse from hours without use, laughing helplessly with happiness. Never had she thought she might one day greet the morning with Professor Riddle sharing the sheets, never; she'd been content to live out the rest of her days hopelessly in love with her Professor, just another tragic schoolgirl crush doomed to forever be unrequited.

“You look good in my bed,” says Professor Riddle, stretching her long, pale leg over Harry's, each of them shuddering at the bliss which touch inspires within them. Harry hadn't thought being in love could produce a physical sensation, but she knows that's what this is, it can't be anything less than love.

She curls as close as Riddle allows, which is very close, pressing a greeting kiss over the flat skin above her heart, Riddle's fingers softly detangling her curls, soothing the sting of each knot as it unwinds. “I have an errand to run this evening. Will you accompany me?”

Harry pulls back so she can see her face, those lovely eyes, like the lacework of frost on a window. “You want me to?”

“I do,” Professor Riddle confirms. “And I'm not the only one.”

“V–the Lord Protector?”

Her thin mouth quirks in the biting back of a smile. “Your insistence on calling him by name borders on impertinence.”

“He's my friend,” says Harry, never sure how to explain she doesn't mean it as treason or offense; it's not like she goes around calling Ron Mr. Weasley.

Professor Riddle gives her an inscrutable look, and Harry's once again reminded that she and Voldemort are friends–or something like it–and perhaps one-time lovers, besides. Harry clears her throat as she dusts the wonderings from her mind. “Um, okay. Yeah, of course I'll go with you. I'd love to.”

Professor Riddle skims a hand up the bulge of muscle in Harry's arm. “You'll have to do exactly as I say. Follow my every order. Which I do not doubt your ability to do.” The slyness in her voice speaks to the idea that she must be recalling exactly how happy Harry had been to follow her orders the night before.

“Okay,” Harry agrees. “Do I get to know where we're going? Or what the errand is?”

“I believe that will best be left as a surprise,” Professor Riddle murmurs, sliding until she looms over Harry, a canopy of ivory skin begging for her touch. “We have hours to fill before then.”

Harry shakily grasps those sharp hips, still shocked that she's allowed to, welcomed, even. “How will we fill them?”

“I've some idea.” She kisses her, and then again, and again. There is not much talking for some time, after that.

 

The surprise is a castle.

The only castle Harry has ever seen in person is Hogwarts, which did a great deal to inspire within Harry a conviction on how castles should look, and this one, while nowhere near as welcoming or well tended to as Hogwarts, does a good job of fulfilling it. It's dark and imposing, nestled deeply within mountains already crowned with snow. It carries turrets in all the right places and is bordered by a monstrous gate that looks able to defend against any enemy imaginable.

“What were they trying to keep out?” Harry wonders.

“Not out,” Riddle replies. “They were trying to keep something in.”

Riddle leads the way through the gate without fuss, into the darkened castle, which looks to have been unmanned for quite some time. Harry briefly recalls a Muggle cartoon she'd seen when she was very young and, driven by some half-buried memory, instinctively looks towards the stairs, envisioning the highest room in the tallest tower, but Riddle catches her by the arm and directs her elsewhere; whatever they seek lies below.

Professor Riddle escorts Harry through dark, unforgiving corridors thick with damp and whatever living things prefer the cover of shadow. She marches them past a pool of murky water, thick as soup, so green it looks nearly black in the moonlight. She brings her to a crypt.

Before the tomb of stone, into which are carved runes so ancient and eroded by time that Harry cannot decipher them, a sea of bones stretches. They are not scattered, instead sprouting in patches the size of human bodies, the bones themselves some strange braid between human and animal, with skulls that look familiar in shape but carry lupine fangs.

“The Lord Protector used werewolves to guard this prison, for a time,” Professor Riddle explains. “Until they were no longer a necessary evil.”

“I thought all magical creatures were to be preserved?” Harry asks. It's why the Lord Protector reclaimed so many areas of protection from the clumsy hands of Muggles, so magical beasts might have somewhere to live where their existence would prove unharmful.

“Some creatures act in the disinterest of their own preservation,” says Riddle. “You are not here for them. You are here for him.” She nods at the crypt, hosting any number of possibilities. Whatever made its home there has been dead too long to tell.

Harry steps towards the stone, which is shockingly cold to the touch, as if made of ice. “Who is he?”

“The Dark Wizard Gellert Grindelwald. He died shortly after the War ended.”

“The Lord Protector wants me to undie him?” Harry guesses.

“He has some questions which he was regrettably unable to have answered before Grindelwald's untimely death,” Riddle confirms. “He has been decaying for the past sixteen years. Do you think you can manage?”

“Yes.” Harry can feel the magic in the earth beneath them pulsing towards her, eager to be used. “He may not look very nice, though. I've never brought back something that dead.”

“So long as he can speak.” The Professor looks her up and down appraisingly. “Do you need me to open the stone?”

Bones buried in stone aren't so different from bones buried in the earth. Every hole can be a grave; every container can be a coffin. Harry can reach through them either way.

She shakes her head. “You might want to cast a shield, though.”

She's looking at Harry as if she's been searching for something and is delighted by what she's found. “Try not to bring the entire castle down on us.”

“No promises.” Harry closes her eyes, better to concentrate, better to see with her other senses what exactly she's searching for, that particular, peculiar thread she needs to pull. It isn't obvious unless she's looking for it, but when she is, she can see the familiarity of it, like a mirror lurking behind a veil.

As she begins to tug on what's left of the frayed thread buried behind granite, the castle begins to shake.

“I did not realise it was a true concern,” Riddle says, tone light but not completely hiding her frustration as she strengthens the shield sheltering them from harm.

“It shouldn't be,” Harry frowns, focus beginning to stray as the building around them gives another groan of displeasure, boulders chipping off from the ceiling and bouncing harmlessly off the Professor's perfect umbrella of iridescence. “I don't think I'm doing this. It's never happened before.”

As if she's spoken the truth into existence, the wall beside them buckles beneath an enormous pressure from outside, only Riddle's quick reflexes preventing them from being buried beneath the rubble.

“Behind me, now,” she barks at Harry, who scrambles to comply, the crypt and its contents forgotten for the time being.

From the torrent of dust and the evening's snowfall step a small crowd of faces Harry recognises, wands outstretched and faces menacing. Mr. Moody leads the charge, with Mr. Lupin and Mr. Shacklebolt behind him, and half a dozen others that Harry has met over the years, though she's glad to see none of the Weasleys are among their number.

Each of them wears the look of a man prepared to die fighting.

Mr. Moody’s strange eye finds Harry first, and then his un-mad eye, which softens subtly with something akin to regret. Then, without hesitation, he waves his casting arm through the air about him as though rounding a lasso. From its tip bursts forth a cyclone of green fire, beautiful and terrifying, erupting up and out and into the shape of a burning, emerald dragon.

Harry is at once reminded of the magnificent dragon of fire which Professor Riddle had sent to herald her seventeenth birthday, though this dragon seems much less harmless in nature. In front of her, just beneath the cacophony which the flames produce, she hears Riddle suck in a sharp, fearful breath.

The heat is nearly unbearable; Harry can feel her skin being burned by sheer exposure, as though she'd stood beneath the sun for every hour of the day. It scalds even the air, making breathing painful, and Harry watches, unsettled, as the dragon eats Professor Riddle's shield, shattering it with one bite.

Harry has never seen Professor Riddle fight outside of practice duels, which are, for obvious reasons, much less high-stakes. She is not a War hero; tales of her prowess on the battlefield do not precede her. Still, Harry has always known the Professor must be a power to behold; she would not be held in such high esteem by Voldemort otherwise, for one, and for the other, Harry can nearly taste it within her magic, which coils up around them now, like a massive serpent intending to strike.

“Close your eyes,” she whispers, somehow legible through the melee, and despite every instinct in her screaming that she must see, must watch her death as it comes to swallow her, Harry does as she is bidden.

Harry might not see how Professor Riddle manages to turn the battle's tide, but she can hear it–the mens’ screams of torment before they succumb to silence–she can feel it–the heat of a fiery tongue so close to her face it feels likely to melt off before it's suddenly replaced with nothing but the cold, shivering air of the night.

When she opens her eyes, Harry sees the castle's innards have been destroyed; walls splintered and sprung outwards, the crypt diminished to rubble around their feet. It takes her a moment to realise much of what she thought was stone fallen from the castle is actually scorched bone.

Professor Riddle must have gained control over the fire somehow and turned it against the ambushers, though why they'd wish to ambush Harry and her Dark Arts Professor, Harry does not know. Perhaps they only wished to hurt the Lord Protector by killing one of his favourite errand-runners; surely they don't know about Harry's friendship with the man. They probably didn't even expect Harry to be in the castle, since Harry is not the type of person who goes around visiting different castles across Europe willy-nilly. More likely, they suspected the Lord Protector himself was accompanying Professor Riddle, as he no doubt has on many similar excursions.

“We need to leave,” Riddle says, casting a look of strangled frustration at the crypt, which now lies shattered beyond recognition, the Dark Wizard Grindelwald likely pulverised within. Harry's never raised a living thing from mere dust before, but she's willing to give it a try–perhaps at another time, when Professor Riddle isn't ushering them from the remains of the castle with such urgency, as if expecting a second attack.

Upon their return to Hogwarts, Riddle leads them straight to her quarters, pulling Harry after her without a word, where she stops suddenly, as if at a loss at what to do now that they're safely hidden behind the skirts of home.

Harry, who has been merely riding a wave of numb shock for the better part of the evening, snaps back into awareness, enough to really get a look at the Professor, who is covered in ash and blood and the faint grime of whatever residue such magic leaves behind. “We need a bath,” Harry says, speaking softly, not wanting to startle her anymore than she already has been. Fending off a brutal assassination attempt must be nerve-wracking, even for a Master of the Dark Arts. Professor Riddle isn't a soldier. Killing her father, who must have hurt her beyond repair, is not the same thing as killing half a dozen men in battle. “Come on,” Harry leads her to the ensuite, where the bath sits, beckoning them to luxuriate. “I'll wash your hair.”

Riddle is uncharacteristically pliant when Harry first removes her clothing and then directs her into the bath, which sits beckoning with steamed water. Harry hastily disrobes and folds herself down behind the Professor's back, her skin as smooth as ice. Harry nabs one of the potions sitting on the lip of the tub, whose scent tells her it's likely some sort of soap, and spreads some over her palms before running her hands across Riddle's shoulders, down her long arms, around her midriff to stroke her stomach and small breasts, heat combing through her at the wanting hitch of Riddle's breath.

She catches one of Harry's hands in her own and brings it down between her thighs, Harry thumbing gently at the sensitive flesh around her cunt before slipping inside, letting Riddle's sounds of pleasure direct her how she wants to be touched.

Riddle's head falls back heavily against Harry's shoulder, a wet hand pulling at Harry's chin until they're kissing, each of them apparently uncaring of the awkward angle, only wanting to taste, to feel the other.

“You are singularly tempting,” Professor Riddle murmurs, finally relinquishing Harry's mouth, only to moan once again at the ministrations of Harry's fingers. “You perfect thing.”

Harry ducks her head to bury her whimper in Riddle's throat, breaths coming harsh and heavy as lust sets fire to every inch of her, desperate to feel the slick rush of the Professor's orgasm placed in her hand like a wonderful gift.

Riddle hardly takes enough time to catch her breath before spinning to face Harry, snatching up the soap and wiping her down at a torturous speed, slow and impossibly thorough, until Harry's shaking helplessly beneath her hands.

Only then does she remove them from the bath, casting a quick drying charm on them both before laying Harry out across her bed and carving pleasure out of her with a vengeance.

Harry doesn't mean to cry those three words, turned wet from tears brought on by the overwhelm of sheer sensation, as Professor Riddle successfully undoes the last scraps of her virginity. It's awfully cliché, and a bad idea besides; surely Professor Riddle does not feel the same way, no matter the affection she holds for Harry. It can only end in disappointment.

But to Harry's surprise, Riddle does not hush her, nor does she pull away. Instead she moves closer, staring intently at Harry's eyes, as though looking for the truth within them. Apparently satisfied with whatever she's found, she presses Harry into the mattress with a hard, unforgiving kiss.

When she pulls away, Riddle slowly, refusing to release Harry's gaze, removes the ornate ring from her left hand, slipping it onto Harry's finger.

“Tom,” Riddle tells her. “That's my name. I know you've been curious about it.”

“I'm curious about everything,” says Harry, studying the ring that's just found a new home on her hand. It's beautiful and so is the name, just like she'd always suspected. “It suits you. Are you sure–?” The ring looks awfully important, is all. Like some sort of family heirloom. Not the sort of thing one gives to their teenage mistress. More like a gift for one's future bride.

Tom braids their hands together, still looming. “It suits you,” she says, mouth turning wry. “I stood no chance,” she sighs, bending down, folding the skin of Harry's neck between her teeth with a hiss. “You smell divine.”

“I smell like you,” Harry laughs, happiness threading through her until she feels like a tapestry of joy. “You narcissist.”

“Such sweet things you call me,” murmurs Tom.

 

Harry isn't exactly surprised by the summons which requests she pop by the Ministry to deliver her own report of the evening's events to the Lord Protector. She is surprised to be shown into his empty office to await him there. It seems awfully dangerous to just allow someone to poke around his space unchaperoned.

When she mentions as much to the secretary who's apparently replaced Harry–he looks vaguely familiar; perhaps an upperclassman she'd never gotten to know–he only gives her a curious look.

“No one poses a threat to the Lord Protector,” he says, as if explaining something to a child. “Honestly, everyone usually stays in the waiting room until called upon. But he said you were to await him here. And to be offered refreshments.” When Harry only shakes her head at his questioning look, he gives her a professional nod before departing.

Harry takes in the room. She'd seen it a few times over the summer, though never for long, and never unsupervised. It looks largely unchanged, save for the massive head of a black dog perched on the back of the door, its face frozen into a permanent snarl.

Voldemort does not make her wait for long, not seeming displeased to find her perched atop his desk, the chair meant for guests exceedingly uncomfortable, likely on purpose. He only crosses over to her, placing a careful hand around her shoulder.

“You remained unharmed?” he clarifies, though Harry’s sure he's already heard most of the details from Tom.

She nods anyway, keen to put him at ease. “T–Professor Riddle protected me,” she assures him. “I hardly saw anything at all, really.” She's hoping he won't ask her to identify their attackers and, if he does, she hopes he won't ask her how exactly she knew them. She's already dreading the coming Christmas at the Burrow, which is sure to be a mournful affair after the recent, explosive loss of so many of their friends.

Voldemort hums, hand drifting up the slope of Harry's neck, thumb coming to land on the pillow of her lower lip, as though asking entrance. Harry ignores the tense wall of pleasure building up in her at the touch, and what it might entail.

She catches his wrist, gently, so he won't think she's upset. “We can't,” she says, more apologetic than she'd expected. “I can't. I do like you,” she promises, hoping to ease the sting of rejection. She can't imagine he's experienced much of it. “But you deserve someone who isn't, you know.” She can't say in love with someone else. She can't believe she'd managed to say it to Tom, only a possibility while deep in the throes of orgasm. It was the first time Harry had ever said the words.

“True loyalty,” Voldemort muses, though he takes back his hand without complaint. “Is quite a rare thing.”

“You need better friends,” surmises Harry, casting her mind about for any change in topic, having grasped that Voldemort likely had received all the information he needed from Tom, and had only summoned Harry for something entirely different, which she cannot give him. The searchlight of her gaze lands again on the dog's head. “That's new.”

Voldemort gives the beast only a passing glance. “A recent triumph, long in the making. It is enchanted to snarl at any who intrude upon this room without invitation. A good way to keep such an impressively persistent creature from going to waste.”

 

Hallowe'en has always carried with it a strange tide of feeling for Harry. It was the night her parents died, the night she received her scar before being spirited off to poison the Dursleys like a cuckoo being placed in the nest. But it's also a night born and bred for magic, a veritable feast for any Witches and Wizards industrious enough to feed from it. As such, Hogwarts always holds a feast of its own, celebrating the favoured holiday with sumptuous delicacies and floods of hovering candles offering flickers of light and warmth, suffusing the air with the faint scents of spice and spellcraft.

The strange dichotomy within Harry's chest is turned stranger by Professor Riddle's absence, needed at the Ministry, and by the strange dream Harry'd had the night before, in which she saw from Nagini's eyes as Voldemort pricked the elderly Headmaster, crippled by agony, with one hundred needles as though he was a pincushion, blood pooling from his weathered skin like spools of bright red thread.

It wasn't Harry's usual sort of dream; Voldemort never seemed to notice her presence, and not once did he respond to her many cries for him to stop, to explain what it was he was doing, as if it might be anything other than the cruel torture it obviously was. Harry has never known the Lord Protector to be cruel.

Even if the scene was only sprung from the fertile imagination of her subconscious, the dream has unsettled Harry. She isn't sure why her own mind would cast Voldemort, who has been a good, if complicated, friend to her over the years, in the role of unrepentant sadist. The Headmaster is attending the feast, looking no worse than usual. Harry surreptitiously checks Ron's map beneath the table, searching for any sign that either the Lord Protector or his familiar might be loitering in the Headmaster's office, in which case she might finally grant Mr. Moody's wish after all.

She doesn't find Voldemort or Nagini's names poised over black dots anywhere in the castle. But she does see Dumbledore's dot ensconced in his office, just as it usually is.

Harry glances up to check that the Headmaster is, indeed, perched at the staff table. Then she looks back to the map, where she sees B. CROUCH JR. hovering over the Headmaster's seat in the Great Hall.

“I'm going to bed,” Harry announces to her fellow Gryffindors, ignoring the concerned looks Hermione and Ginny shoot her. “Don't feel well.”

“Perhaps you've caught what's been bothering the thestrals,” Luna suggests. “They aren't feeling well, either.”

“Want us to go with you, mate?” Ron offers, which is awfully kind of him, since Harry doesn't know a single person who loves the Hallowe'en feast as much as he does.

“No, I'll be fine,” Harry assures him, taking off before any of the others can get it in their heads to accompany her or perhaps shepherd her off to the hospital wing.

From beneath the invisibility cloak, Harry throws the name of every confection she can think of at the gargoyle, which remains stubbornly in place. Then, recalling that of the Professors, Tom seems to visit the Headmaster's office the most, Harry tries the password she favours, and this ingenuity is repaid by the gargoyle shifting to reveal an entrance.

Harry slams the lid shut on the curiosity which pushes her to spend long, precious moments studying the many curiosities within the ovular room. She doesn't have time for indulgent snooping; the Headmaster isn't sitting anywhere that she can see, as she'd expected, though his dot remains steadfastly within the space, which means he must be hidden.

She wonders if he perhaps has an invisibility cloak of his own and then dismisses the thought. More likely, he's in some sort of ensuite. Surely the Headmaster's office contains more than just the one room, clearly meant for entertaining visitors. He likely has his own sleeping quarters set off from the main room, which is where she'll find him.

It takes a bit of rummaging around, pulling books from their shelves and twisting odd knobs, before she manages to stumble upon the hidden room, whose door slides open between two panels of wall. She gives a thought to the portraits of old Headmasters, which all seem to be sleeping thickly through her blatant trespassing, worrying they might wake and raise an alarm. When none do, Harry slips into the dark, windowless room.

It stands empty of all furniture save one worn work table hosting several glass bottles and a cauldron, and a large standing mirror, before which the Headmaster hangs limply, strung up by half a dozen chains which root him to the spot.

He looks, on the surface, like the Dumbledore Harry has spent the past seven years watching haunt the halls of Hogwarts. But beneath the most shallow similarities, she can plainly tell this is a different man altogether.

The smell hits her first, oppressive and sour, as though he hasn't bathed nor changed his clothing in years, the undercurrent of blood cloying her senses. He stares at the mirror unseeingly, and when she approaches, Harry's surprised to see not the Headmaster's haggard reflection, but her own, uncloaked, standing hand-in-hand with Tom, who smiles down at her.

“Erised,” Dumbledore coughs out, voice strained and choked with phlegm. Harry glances down to find him staring unerringly at where she stands, as though the cloak's powers are rendered impotent by his own. “It shows what one desires most. What is it you desire most, Miss Potter?”

Figuring the jig is up, Harry slowly slides the cloak from her shoulders and crouches down so he needn't tilt his head painfully to look at her. “Right now, I want to get you out of here. Are the chains under any spells?”

“An armada of them,” Dumbledore says wryly, speaking very well for a man who looks and smells to be on the brink of death. “It's nearly flattering. No, my dear. I'm afraid there is only one way for you to release me. I suspect you already know the spell.”

Harry has never cast the killing curse, and she doesn't intend to do so now, no matter how merciful it may be. As though sensing her reticence, Dumbledore gives her a kind, if wilting, smile.

“It's quite alright,” he assures her. “But before I go, I must share something with you.” Harry watches as his pale blue eyes begin to well up with luminescent tears. “You'll want something to catch them with,” he tells her, and Harry fetches a glass bottle from the table, tilting its mouth to first one eye and then the other. “There's a pensieve in the office. I doubt she's moved it; Hogwarts, and its many treasures, has always been sacred to her. Now, if you please, Harry. I have lived sixteen years in this room. Do not condemn me to another.”

Harry does not withdraw her wand. She doesn't need to, not for this kind of magic, which has always come so naturally to her.

If undying something is akin to harvesting from a garden, then causing death is akin to the planting of a dark seed. It's only the second time Harry has done something like this, but the magic of it responds to her as if she's called upon it every day of her life rather than just once as a child. It is painless, she's confident about that. A more gradual, peaceful death than what's offered by any curse. She watches as the wear of hard years melts from Dumbledore's face, replaced first by understanding and then wonder, before dampening entirely, his last breath leaving pruned lips as a sigh of relief.

She finds the pensieve in the office, accioing it from its cupboard with little patience, unsure how long she has before the false Headmaster will return to his torture chamber. She tips in first Dumbledore's memories and then her own face, descending into the misty well of the past.

 

Harry's parents are beautiful with liveliness and youth. They are hardly more than children themselves when they join the resistance and, shortly after that, have her to worry over and care for. In the midst of a civil war is not the best time or place to become parents, but they love Harry no less for her being unplanned, no less for how her sudden arrival into their lives has disrupted what plans they did have.

She watches as they become teenage revolutionaries, as they give up whatever future they may have forged for themselves in favour of becoming fugitives fighting Darkness, dedicating their very lives to the endless siege, a fruitless and desperate attempt to ensure the survival of both the Wizarding and Muggle worlds as they know them.

Harry watches as they find themselves pregnant, a hasty but mirthful wedding held at Potter Manor shortly before James’ entire family will succumb to a case of Dragon Pox which will tear through them without mercy. She watches as they mourn friends and family over years of War, Harry becoming a bright spot for them to focus on when the Darkness threatens to overwhelm.

She watches the youthful versions of people she knows herself–Misters Black and Lupin fawning over this baby Harry as if she were their own; Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Mr. Hagrid, even Mr. Moody making more than one appearance in Harry's infant life, long before she can ever hope to remember them.

Dumbledore, of course, is there as well, these being his memories, his witnessing of her parents’ short but star-bright time on this earth.

She watches as Peter Pettigrew–certainly rat-like to look at, now that she knows the truth–her father’s best friend, his somewhat brother, gifts Harry with a rattle charmed to levitate and shake itself, shortly before what everyone will come to realise as his betrayal; he leads Voldemort, like a hungering ax, straight to the Potters’ cottage, where the necks of Harry's family lay ripe for the severing.

She does not see her parents’ deaths; Dumbledore arrives at the cottage in the aftermath, bundling Harry, who sleeps soundly though her father's corpse lay cold on the floor, into Mr. Hagrid's arms, charging him with delivering Harry to her Muggle family, where she will hopefully remain beyond Voldemort's grasp. Dumbledore remains at the house for a time, investigating. While James’ body remains crumpled and hollow at the base of the stairs, Lily's is nowhere to be found.

The Headmaster, recalling a memory too distant for Harry to see, journeys to a Muggle home someplace in the north of the country. It is here that he finds Severus Snape, poorly attempting to block his view from the doorway. It is here that he finds Lily Potter, alive, if not well, the brightness of her eyes which everyone her whole life has seen fit to remark upon dulled nearly beyond recognition.

It is here that Dumbledore, seeing Severus Snape as only the boy he'd once been, nothing of the fierce Death Eater he's become, meets his end.

It is a slow ending, to be sure. Sixteen years trapped like a rat in the walls, held in place both by chains dripping in Dark magic that will never allow escape, and by the mirror, Voldemort's own personal torture device, Dumbeldore frozen in the agonising position of seeing what he wants most but never reaching it. Harry looks at the mirror through his eyes and sees a man she does not recognise, standing hand in hand with the Headmaster, both of them young and overflowing with love.

They keep the Headmaster alive because things will become complicated should he die, especially so soon after the War's end, when so many of his Phoenixes were still scuttling about, only waiting for a reason to launch some new assault. The death of a martyr, either Harry's or Dumbledore's, would bring more than enough tinder to strike the match.

Instead, Harry watches as Voldemort directs Snape to brew more and more doses of Polyjuice, to be fed to a young, adoring soldier, who soon grows addicted and addled by the potion's effects. He loses himself beneath the costume of Dumbledore, forgetting on several occasions who he truly is. Voldemort does not seem bothered by this. So long as he maintains his cover as the doddering old fool, Voldemort does not care if he loses Barty Crouch Jr. in the process.

Snape never speaks to Dumbledore as he brews, stubbornly ignoring the Headmaster's pleas to free Lily, to reunite her with her daughter. Voldemort speaks, though he always mutes Dumbledore beforehand, strangling any attempt at response.

Harry has never thought that Voldemort might hate someone. When he spoke of Harry's parents, it was with the honour of respected opponents. But she can see that hatred now, directed at the Headmaster like a powerful curse in itself, and the smugness he feels at having brought an enemy so loathed to his knees.

The pain of seeing her parents as they were, as living, good people, is nothing compared to the pain of reconciling it next to this, the Lord Protector, her Lord Protector, as someone capable of such atrocities without remorse or hesitation. Reconciling their deaths with the fact that it was Harry's fault; the prophecy had named a child, not a man. Voldemort had gone to the cottage to kill Harry. If not for her, James and Lily Potter may have found a life for themselves which, while perhaps not what they had planned, contained at least some sort of happiness, like the Weasleys. They might have had another child, planned and better for it, to spoil and raise with love and tenderness as they'd intended to raise her.

Harry withdraws from the pensieve to find the office as she'd left it. Gathering the cloak around herself once again, she slithers back out into the empty corridor, the feast still dwindling on. After checking the map to be sure Snape is still sitting at the staff table beside the false Headmaster, Harry makes her way down to the dungeons.

She doesn't bother trying to think up what Snape's password could possibly be, instead using magic like a battering ram to force the door. His office is as dark and dank as Tom's isn't, but Harry hardly spares it a glance, instead moving directly for the fireplace and the floo powder resting in a pot atop the mantle.

Snape's fireplace at home opens not into a living room as she'd expected, but a kitchen. And there, scrubbing dishes at the sink like a good Muggle housewife, copper hair catching the fluorescent light until it resembles fire, is Lily Potter.

She's wearing an apron and yellow marigolds, as if she can't just have the dishes sparkling in their cupboards with one wave of her wand, like Mrs. Weasley. She doesn't seem at all upset by the sudden trespassing of a teenager, instead turning with a bright smile of welcome, which only slightly dims with surprise when she sees it isn't Snape coming through the fireplace, but some stranger. Harry imagines she can't look very much like the infant she was the last time Lily had seen her, though she knows now that her resemblance to her father has only grown with age.

Still, Lily shows no sign of recognition. “Hello,” she says sweetly. “Can I help you?”

“My name is Harry Potter,” says Harry. “Do you remember me?”

As she'd expected, Lily only looks more confused. “I'm sorry, I don't know any…what did you say? Potter? I don't know any Potters.”

“Not even James Potter?” Harry presses. “He was your husband.”

Lily only smiles apolgetically. “I'm sorry, you must be confused. My husband is Sev. Severus Snape. Are you a student of his?”

“I am. I'm also your daughter. Harry.”

At the second utterance of her name, Lily's eyes begin to shimmer, tears spilling silently down her freckled cheeks. “I'm sorry,” she says again, wiping at her face and staring at her wet fingers in surprise. “I don't know why I'm crying.” She chokes on a sob before suddenly straightening, blinking rapidly as if only just waking. She gives Harry a curious look and then smiles. “Hello. Can I help you?”

Behind Harry, the fireplace erupts into a cloud of green flames, from which Severus Snape emerges, looking murderous. His surprise to find Harry quickly gives way to pure rage. He ignores Lily, who appears not to notice the magic crackling between her husband and their visitor, offering him only a tender greeting Harry's sure she'll repeat again twice before the evening's end. She doesn't know what exactly Snape has done to her mother, whether Obliviation or some mind-altering potions are involved, perhaps even the Imperius. But it's clear he's done something, something which Harry despairs may never be undone. She knows enough from Hermione's delving into memory spellwork to know that mind-altering magic is some of the most difficult to heal, and can almost never be undone completely.

Snape even sneers as he casts, Harry quickly shielding herself from several nasty curses before she finally unleashes her own anger, anguish and wrath braiding together to lend power to her spell, recalling the memory of when she'd last used it, before she even knew what the spell was, what it meant that it leapt from her tongue so easily.

Just like Malfoy, Snape pales almost instantly, crashing first to his knees and then his belly, blood gushing out around him in thick waves of crimson.

Lily seems unmoved by this as well, even as she tuts. “I'll have to mop again,” she sighs, staring down at the bloody mess of her husband, resigned to cleaning it. She glances over at Harry, brightening at the sight of her. “Hello,” she smiles, so beautiful it breaks Harry's heart. “Can I help you?”

 

For the first time, Harry enters the chamber hoping to find it empty. Her wish is granted, Voldemort nowhere to be found, and so no one there to stop her from investigating the whole cavernous expanse in a way she never has before.

Beyond the sofa, beyond the strange open-mouthed stone face of Slytherin himself, Harry finds the massive, mythic Basilisk, coiled up and asleep, perhaps permanently, the air around her thick with enchantments. Her mouth sits oddly in sleep; Harry sees her fangs have been forcibly removed, leaving only impotent, scarred orifices where they'd once sprouted. And beyond her, in a room reminiscent of Dumbledore's prison, Harry finds a strange menagerie. A golden chalice, a gleaming tiara, and an old, beaten diary perch on a shelf that circles the room. In the center sits an empty coffin of glass. Harry knows somehow, from some belly of instinct within herself, that the coffin is meant for her.

She expects to touch the glass and find it as smooth as the votive of a candle. Instead, she finds the edge as sharp as a knife, biting into her finger and, alongside the sharp sting, a wave of sleep crashes over Harry just as thick as the Basilisk's.

 

This dreamscape is different from the kind Harry's used to. But of course it is; Voldemort does not dream.

Harry drifts along in the shadowed crevices of Voldemort's mind, letting thought and memory wash over her, giving occasional tugs to brief golden threads to retrieve the answers she seeks.

She sees the Lord Protector bloom into existence; Voldemort could never successfully wash the Wizarding world free of its Muggle stains through brute force alone. Instead, a masterful scheme is designed, the concept of necrotic magical exposure, sure to convince even the most Muggle-loving Witches and Wizards because the risk of the damage, should it be true, is too great.

Manufactured cases, Muggles easily made ill and Obliviated to lend credence to the idea, and a good deal of impeccable propaganda, and Voldemort soon has his world exactly as he'd dreamed it, back when he could still dream.

She pulls that thread too, and sees the horrible, fascinating truth. Voldemort's soul shattered like a mirror, a glass shard embedded in seven ports, the final one with its bright heart landing right in Harry's mind. Voldemort had tried to kill her, after all. He'd simply failed, though he'd succeeded in a different way, Harry's existence like something of a master work created by his hands, however accidentally. Another jewel to add to his hoard.

She watches the betrayal of her parents, first by Snape, who begs Voldemort to spare Lily, to kill only her husband and child, Voldemort agreeably handing the unconscious body of her mother to his favoured servant as a reward of sorts. Then by Pettigrew, that snivelling man who ends up imprisoned in his rat suit by the very Wizard he'd turned to; Voldemort abhors disloyalty. He could never trust that Pettigrew's faithlessness would not target him next.

Harry watches Pettigrew's death with troubling apathy, his rat self laid like a marshmallow trap meant to lure out a cockroach, Sirius at least managing to crush him within his canine jaws before General Lestrange cuts him down, finally putting an end to his frustrating longevity.

She next pulls the thread belonging to Grindelwald, and sees the conversation that leads to his death, how his taunts and vague non-answers, his cackled retlling of a children's story as though it carries necessary meaning, cause Voldemort's anger to get the better of him, severing the man's head from his shoulders with little thought beyond the frustration of not having gathered the information he needed, first. He needs the child, that strange creature, the only thing he's ever failed at killing. Even this far back in his memory, his thoughts when focused on Harry are not wrathful. They're unmanageably curious.

Harry doesn't know how long she spends traversing the tantalising mountains of Voldemort's head, glutting herself on the knowledge contained within him, the mirage he's painstakingly created slowly replaced by the flesh-and-blood person he is.

She feels a hook pulling at her belly, as though Harry is a thread herself, and finds herself sitting beside the Lord Protector on their usual sofa.

“You've been busy,” he says, voice tight with tension. “Tell me how to wake you.”

“You don't know?” Harry asks, genuinely surprised. She can feel his anxiety, his worry that she may never wake again, trapped within the labyrinth of their shared subconsciousness for eternity. “It was your spell.”

“A miscalculation,” Voldemort says, perhaps the first time he's ever admitted fault. “Come back to me, little snake.”

“Why did you let me live?” Harry wonders, reaching to run fingers over the chrome folds of his mask. “The prophecy was about me.”

“I had intended to kill you that night,” Voldemort admits. “But then I watched you simply…absorb the curse as you slept, something impossible. I knew then that I could not kill you, at least not until I solved you. I meant to take you as my own after doing away with the rest of the Order that night, but Dumbledore managed to spirit you off to those Muggles, who proved infuriatingly difficult to find.”

“And did you?” Harry asks. “Solve me?”

Voldemort catches hold of her wandering hand and presses her palm against the silver teeth of the skull, as though he'd be kissing it, were he able. “I have begun to think you as unsolvable as one of the Christians’ beloved miracles. Dumbledore claimed it had something to do with your parents’ love for you, but he was always a fool. I am now convinced it was due entirely to your own marvelous magic. You are singular.”

And Harry sees the vast, terrible expanse of Voldemort's heart, a black ocean, a bottomless well of ink-like blood. Voldemort, who had never before known love, who had thought love to be the swindling of fools, something beneath him, pigs wallowing in mud. Voldemort who had been venerated, yes, revered, worshipped even, but never loved truly, not for the person beyond the name, beneath the mask–not until Harry. Not until some miraculous child had pulled Voldemort into her dream, into the burning sun of her heart, and called him lonely.

“Tell me of your cousin,” Voldemort demands. “You now know of my secrets. I would have your own.”

He knows already, Harry can tell. Which means there isn't much point in not telling him.

She sees it happening as she speaks, Voldemort doing whatever he does to open her mind up like an envelope and peer inside. She's ten years old. It's been months since she revived the cat, who she still occasionally sees wandering around the neighbourhood. She isn't sure what will happen if it's struck again, if it will die for a second time or simply shake death off of its fur and run along.

Dudley does something. She doesn't remember what, she never has, the immediate minutes leading up to the moment long ago eaten away by the fear and shame that erupted within her. He might have been playing a particularly violent game of Hunting Harry. He might have only been tormenting her in some mundane way. She'll never know.

She does know he is holding her down, her glasses lost on the other side of the garden as Dudley presses her into the grass. She doesn't think, doesn't wish for his death. She only grips his wrist and somehow feels the thread, so similar to the one she'd used for the cat, burning within him. She feels its warmth like the sun beating down on her face and she extinguishes it.

It's the most terrifying sixty seconds of her life. Dudley drops dead, strings snapped and eyes empty, and Harry sees herself being carted off to prison, rendered in horrible detail after years of Aunt Petunia's Dateline marathons. She heaves his body off of hers and searches again for that thread grown cold within him, and tugs with all her might.

As with the cat, Dudley seems to have no memory of being dead. Harry never mentions it, dread overruling curisoity for once within her. She never tells a soul. Until now.

“I killed him,” Harry says, tonelessly. “And then I brought him back.”

“I paid a visit to your Muggle relatives some years ago, once I realised what you'd done. I wished to study him.”

“Is he still alive?” Harry wonders. She hasn't given much thought to the Dursleys since her introduction to Hogwarts.

“He is,” Voldemort confirms. “Though the same cannot be said for his parents for much longer. It seems your undead creatures drain the life of those around them. I suspect they will hardly last another three years.”

“The same thing's happening with the thestral,” Harry realises, recalling Luna's words at the feast. It's as funny as it is terrible; it's monstrously unfair, and also the only reason she's still alive. “I'm the only person with necrotic magic,” she tells him. “I'm the only one you weren't lying about.”

“Come back to me,” Voldemort demands. He will never beg her, though this comes close.

Harry shifts, placing her hands on his shoulders, bringing the crown of his mask to her forehead, right where her scar, his first kiss, sits. “Not yet,” she whispers, pressing a kiss to his cold, metal cheek.

 

Harry trades one dreamscape for another, trades Voldemort's past for her own.

She finds herself in a cupboard, looking down at a slumbering eleven-year-old girl. It's easy enough to blend into her dream, nothing but her voice carrying down beside her as they descend the staircase together.

I will guide you always, she promises, just before Harry wakes. It is a strange way to care for oneself. Harry looks at her and thinks, Was I this small? Was I this alone, this desperate to be guided?

It's no simple task to infiltrate the dreams of yourself across a path of seven years. Harry does her best to weave the truth along the way, trying to feed her answers, but dreams are an unwieldy textile and irreverent towards the loom. But always, she keeps descending, sometimes accompanied by her younger self, sometimes alone, the heat growing hotter and hotter, the light shining brighter and brighter, until Harry steps from the last stair and feels as though she's stepped into the sun.

She knows this fire is the soul she and Voldemort share between them, and she knows what it is she must do, the only way she can ever be with him again. She opens her mouth, taking their pulsing heart in hand, and swallows it into the depths of herself, where it beats like the drum of a dying star.

 

Harry wakes lying prone upon the sofa. She can feel the crushed velvet beneath her body, the exhaustion that has permeated her very bones, can smell the damp moldiferous air of the chamber. She can see Voldemort perched on the other end, staring down at her, can feel the worried roiling of her magic, her concern that Harry might never wake from the enchantment she'd designed years ago, before she'd ever realised how deeply she wanted Harry, as she was, forever by her side. Nagini lays coiled, silently awaiting her master's orders, at the foot of the sofa.

Harry sits up slowly, watching as Voldemort's hands clench, clearly keen to take hold of her, to feel that she is safe and hale. “I know,” Harry tells her, reaching to grasp either side of the mask, pulling it away when Voldemort makes no move to stop her. “I know all of it.” She lets the mask fall to the floor, hands sliding now to frame Tom Riddle's beautiful face, still etched with worry. “I love you,” Harry says, grieving the words even as she speaks them. She says it again into Tom's thin mouth, and then again, until she feels Tom's arms come up around her, wrenching Harry forward into her lap, groaning heartfully as she artlessly takes Harry's lip between her teeth, desperation turning her violent.

“I love you,” Harry promises, knowing that it's true; seeing the monstrous truth hasn't changed it. Loving Tom Riddle, loving Voldemort, feels as intrinsic to Harry as anything else about her. As inherent as the colour of her eyes. As inherent as the scar which shines violet on her forehead, the inch of skin which Tom now presses the softest kiss to, as if in apology, an apology Harry does not want.

She doesn't want Tom Riddle to apologise for her nature, just as she'd hate for Tom to ask Harry to apologise for her own.

“You'll never leave me,” Tom commands, her voice feverish against Harry's tongue.

“No,” Harry agrees. “Never.”

“You'll be mine always.”

“Yes,” Harry assures her. “Always.” Tom shudders beneath her hands, beneath her words. Harry doesn't have to ask if Tom has ever had something like this, someone who was so entirely hers, not out of duty or fear, but simply because they wanted to be, as Harry wants to be, cannot bear even considering existing in a world without the woman trembling beneath her, looking up at Harry with worship in gunmetal-gray eyes. She knows. She knows Tom as she has never known anyone, even, perhaps especially, herself.

“I'll stay with you,” Harry promises, as heavy with devotion as a wedding vow. “No matter what happens, no matter where you go. You'll never be alone again.”

She'd nicked Tom's bone-white wand–Dumbledore's wand, and Grindelwald's before him. The Elder wand–when she'd first woken up, a wordless expelliarmus, just as Tom had taught her. Tom, who'd been so overtaken by Harry's return to her arms that she hadn't noticed the absence of its weight on her hip.

Harry brings it up now, behind Tom's head, as she kisses her for all she's worth. She's never cast the spell, but she's never forgotten its movement, the overwhelming breadth of its heated fury.

Tom wrenches herself from Harry's mouth as the fiendfyre stretches its arms throughout the cavern. It will consume everything, craven as a Dementor; the Basilisk, every single Horcrux, the sofa, and them. Within spare moments, there will be nothing left, not now that Tom is wandless and rendered frozen by betrayal, though Harry doesn't mean it as such.

She loves Tom Riddle. She loves Voldemort. She cannot survive without her. But the world cannot survive Voldemort. So many people have already died needlessly. So many more will. Any Muggle who has the bad luck to have a magical child; any Witch or Wizard who recognises the truth and opposes Voldemort's genocide. How many more children will be like Hermione, wracked with guilt because they've been taught that they were the cause of their parents’ demise? How many more parents will end like the Grangers, executed for the crime of loving their child?

Without Voldemort present with her commands, without her impeccable, scheming mind, the empire will crumble. Perhaps not immediately, but eventually the Death Eaters and Ministry sock-puppets will falter with no one from whom to take direction. Without Voldemort thoroughly feeding the headlines, the public will begin to question things. Whatever remains of the Order will, like their namesake, be reborn. The foreign Wizarding worlds will begin to prod at the wards Voldemort has used to sequester Wizarding Britain. The empire will fall, be it tomorrow or ten years from now. Cut off the head of the serpent and the body will follow.

“It's alright,” Harry soothes, running a hand over Tom's hair.

But Tom isn't in the mood to be soothed; she writhes in Harry's grip like a frantic animal, first trying to Disapparate and then shifting through her many forms in an attempt to cast Harry off her–her hair dissolves into a scaled, moon-white scalp as her entire body lengthens, hissing with a serpentine mouth in outrage; she sprouts dark feathers and talons which dig into Harry's flesh; she undulates beneath her clenched thighs and digs sharp fangs into Harry's neck. But still Harry holds fast, holds her through all of it, even as the skin threatens to blister on her bones.

“It's alright,” Harry says again, whispering into Tom's ear as their flesh boils and melts, Tom finally settling beneath her hands into the resignation of death. It's the most pain she's ever experienced, but still she holds her. “I love you. I'm with you. You'll never be alone again.”

“I have never felt for anyone the terrible things I feel for you,” Tom says, lips falling away from sharp teeth. “You terrible thing.” She meets Harry in a savage kiss as they flare up like Roman candles until there is nothing left to burn.

 

And there is where we will leave them, though it is not where they remained. It isn't often that I happen upon a Master who claimed their Mastery by accident, let alone two in the same night–and they couldn't have been more different. One I loved. One I hated. Both determined to carry on, perhaps in one form or many, perhaps in this life or the next.

I will not talk about where they wandered, or where they woke, or what shape they took when they awakened. I will say only that fate is a fickle thing, not given to change. Perhaps they will face the same ending for a second time, and then a third, doomed to the repetition of humanity, rolling their tiresome boulder up that hill again and again.

Or perhaps not. It isn't for me to say. I am only a shepherd. I care not where the sheep choose to lay their heads, so long as they arrive to be led through the mists of Otherside.

And for those who don't, like the Masters, I say: Good riddance.

Notes:

chapter title soundtrack: once upon a dream by lana del rey / harlequin by vana / blue by billie eilish