Chapter Text
Not a week after the end of term, Tom is busy composing an email to his thesis supervisor to the effect of Can I submit early in the privacy of the Reptile House’s back office when Dumbledore Apparates into the room. “Tom,” he says, as Tom shuts his laptop in resignation, “it’s good to see you looking well.”
“You too, Professor,” Tom says, before motioning at the second chair, though his head hurts and the last thing he wants to do is talk to Dumbledore. “Please sit. What can I help you with?”
Dumbledore casts a Cushioning Charm before taking a seat, which is smart, because it’s one of those folding metal chairs designed to murder its occupant’s tailbone. “I have a contract,” he says, as he removes a rolled parchment to place on the table. It looks incongruous beside the laptop, as does Dumbledore in his pale blue robes and with his long beard against the backdrop of this drab Muggle office. “Everyone else has signed it. All that’s left is yours.”
“But I’m not twenty-four,” Tom says, reaching for the parchment. Suddenly, the headache doesn't matter at all.
As he unrolls it, Dumbledore says, “But you will be for the spring term. If it all goes to plan, then you’ll act as a temp for your own position for first term.”
“And if it doesn’t go to plan?” Tom almost has a heart attack at the sight of the pay. Though he knew it was good, he wasn’t expecting that. It specifies that though this is a residential position, he’s only required to sleep four nights a week within the school, as every professor has that many late night patrols. There’s a pension plan. Required research output goals that must be met, and a discretionary fund toward that aim, and expectations for office hours and exam vs class time.
This is not a contract for a first-time, emergency hire meant to start midway through the year. The section on research talks about establishing a five-year plan.
He’s so engrossed that it takes him a moment to focus when Dumbledore says, “I’ve spoken about the matter extensively with the Board of Governors. They and I, we’ve had our differences over the years, but we’re in uniform agreement that it would be to the school’s misfortune should the Ministry inflict upon us one of their own choosing. They’ve yet to go on the attack, but we all know it’s coming. Hiring you was a unanimous decision. Unfortunately, the age restriction comes from the Ministry, so it seems unwise to tempt fate trying to ignore it. But even Fudge can’t supersede a signed contract, particularly if the signatures include every Governor and member of the current Hogwarts staff. Should he try to place a spy amongst us, he’ll only manage for half a year.”
“How likely is it?” Tom asks as he blindly reaches for a pen and starts rereading the contract. Like most Wixen contracts, it’s straightforward, and unlike Muggle contracts, doesn’t leave space for negotiation. “Are there restrictions on my curriculum?”
“Only the obvious,” Dumbledore answers. “I thought you did rather admirably when attempting to fix the disaster Gilderoy left in his wake. It certainly impressed the Governors. To answer your first question, though, I think it’s only a matter of time before Fudge approaches me with his choice. If he also intends to force my hand about the matter of Severus’ employment, then I’ve already extracted a promise from Horace to come out of retirement and assume the position. You’ll give him a bit of a shock, of course, but he’ll convince himself he’s simply seeing things much more effectively than Minerva.”
Privately, Tom thinks that he would rather lie to Slughorn’s face than deal with Snape as a full-time colleague. He signs the contract. “I’ll try to get you my book list within the next few days, Professor,” he says, handing it back. “I assume you need this.”
“Yes,” Dumbledore says. “Ah, this is yours.” He withdraws another. “Identical, of course. How is Miss Vance?”
Though he doesn’t know where they are—a fact he so generously agrees with, he let Sirius know the other day, as the fewer people who are aware of the Death Eaters’ children they have under their protection, the better—he knows Emmeline is with them. It took no convincing on her part; Tuscany with Tom and safety and no Quidditch but also some ex-Death Eaters sounded better than the UK with no ex-Death Eaters, but none of the rest, either.
Dumbledore doesn’t need to know all the details, though, like how she’s still mostly sleeping (which is normal, says Hermione, because a fifteen-year-old unfortunately has a bar for normal in this situation), but keeps waking from nightmares, and can’t even make it as far as the grove without growing winded. “She’s doing better” is what Tom says, because it’s true, just like she should be back to form by September, according to both Madam Pomfrey and Adrianna, the mediwitch from town. She smiled when she said it, but sadly, mostly because Emmeline will recover, but Rosie Greengrass will not.
“That’s good to hear,” says Dumbledore with a much less sad smile of his own that draws out the wrinkles in corners around his eyes in full force. “Oh, and Tom?”
“Yeah?” Tom says, suddenly wary.
Dumbledore’s eyes finally twinkle. “We’re to be colleagues,” he says. “I believe it’s time you call me Albus.”
Harry’s always known that his cousin isn’t good at dealing with too many people for long gaps of time, so when it reaches the point that Tom looks ready to scarper under the weight of all the contracted-related questions everyone’s asking, Harry makes some excuses, and drags him out to the gardens.
The moment they’re away from the portico (a term Harry learned from Blaise), Tom relaxes. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says, which is ridiculous, because he’s still absently spinning his wand between his fingers, “but thanks.”
Rolling his eyes, Harry says, “Don’t be stupid. Besides, we’ve barely talked alone. I’m just making excuses for me obviously.”
“Obviously,” Tom says, and lets Harry lead him toward what Blaise calls the giardino segreto, the secret garden. It’s not a real secret garden, like in that book he and Hermione read in their last year in Muggle primary, but there’s still a half-circle bench where they can sit. “It’s not my fault, though, that you have a thousand friends. Do the twins still have it in their heads that all of you are going to Florence tomorrow?”
“Blaise knows the city,” Harry says. “We’ll be fine!” And they will be. Even Arthur agreed when Tom suggested breaking the Trace on everyone’s wand, so it’s not as if they’ll get in trouble for Transfiguring their hair and eye colour or anything. “Do you have work?”
“Yeah,” Tom says, as they pass into the grove of pomegranate, easy-peeler, and lemon trees. There are so many lemon and easy-peeler trees that from here to the house, the air’s always bright with the smell of citrus. “I might be late returning, depending on if and when Morrison can meet with me tomorrow. Even if I can’t technically have my diploma in hand until at least next September, it would be good to see if I could submit and defend before January.”
From the very little bit Harry understands about the PhD process, he can’t imagine Tom’s supervisor liking the request, but if anyone can do it, it’s his cousin. “Will you miss it?” Harry says. “All the Muggle science, I mean, when you start at Hogwarts.”
“Not particularly,” Tom says. “Once Voldemort’s dead for good, who cares if it’s known I’m a Parselmouth? Or you, for that matter. I’ll just be the first person to synthesise Muggle science and magical theory. People have tried before, but I’ll have the credentials proving I’m able to do it.”
Harry doesn’t doubt that. He’s suspected for years that Tom could probably do anything, except play a sport. Any sport. It makes no sense. He’s not Hermione or Blaise or Theo, who have no coordination, but instead, it’s for the same reason as Pansy: zero interest. If he wasn’t dating a professional Chaser, he wouldn’t even have a team!
It’s a shame the Harpies only accept women. One day, when Emmeline is playing again (because she will, of course), and Harry’s been drafted as Seeker to another team, Tom will be forced to make a choice.
But at the moment, that’s neither here nor there. “Maybe you’ll start a trend,” he says, as they take a shortcut off the path to wend between the trees. Shifting topics, he asks, “Even if the Ministry did put someone in for a half a year, how bad could it be?”
The adults who were not Tom grew tense the moment he passed along that part of Dumbledore’s message, like they all understood something Harry and his friends didn’t, though they were trying not to show it. Tom was just resigned, probably because he’d had hours to accept the information already. “Rather awful, I figure,” he says. “Fudge won’t instate anyone unless they entirely agree with his policy of denial. Ben’s suggestion was a good one. If it happens, we should look them up the moment we find out their name.”
“Can they even do that?” Harry says. “You said your contract had thirty-two signatures on it.”
“Honestly, I’ve never really understood how the Ministry’s relationship with Hogwarts works,” Tom says. “I think it’s just one of those things that’s a bloody mystery if you aren’t raised in a Wixen household. Or a British one. Felicia doesn’t understand it much either. But Fudge posted the Dementors when the staff and the Board argued against the decision. Arthur can explain it best, though the reasoning still lacks any logic, if compared to the politics of Muggle academia.”
They enter the secret garden, passing through the narrow opening into the circle as the sky fades to the purply-blue of dusk over the nearby hills. In the center is a fountain with a bunch of fish spitting water, and the moss covered benches are surrounded by hedges and oak trees. The second Hermione saw it, she declared this is where they’d be doing their summer work, though not until August. Even she agreed their July was for fun. In the meantime, it’s been where Blaise has been giving them sporadic Italian lessons, which mainly consists of how to insult people.
If Felicia ever does turn this place into a school, though, Harry doesn’t see how anyone would get work done. It rains so often at Hogwarts that they’re forced inside; here, all they want to do is swim in the pond, or pick fruit from the trees, or play friendly games of Quidditch above the grassy patch between the kitchen and flower gardens.
Still. Forcing himself through the distractions would probably be better than dealing with whatever the Ministry dreams up, if the look Narcissa and Molly exchanged is anything to go by. “Well, whatever,” he says as they sit, though he knows he should probably worry more. “Here I thought I’d have until next year for you to be my teacher.”
“You know, most teenagers want to escape the people they live with,” Tom says.
“Yeah, well,” Harry says, “other people aren’t you.”
Tom looks away, like he’s trying to hide a blush. “If you say so,” he says. “Has your scar hurt at all?”
“What?”
“I’ve been meaning to ask. Has your scar hurt?”
“Maybe?” Harry says, trying to think. Even if he’s surprised by the sudden turn in conversation, it’s not as if he doesn’t understand the question. “On, well, you know. That night. Well, I don’t know what time it all…happened, but I paired up with Cedric because we both ended up in the same part of the maze as this blast-ended skrewt thing. We were able to stop it, but we did get blasted. I hit my head. If my scar also hurt because Voldemort made himself a body and not just because the hedges were weirdly hard, I don’t know.”
For a moment, Tom doesn’t say anything. Then he casts a Silencing Charm and shifts to face Harry. “We need to talk,” he says, “and now that I think about it, I don’t know the next time we’ll have any privacy at all. If your scar hurts at any point, or you have any odd dreams, or feel anything that doesn’t make sense, I want you to tell me immediately, all right?”
“I will,” Harry says, suddenly wary. “What’s going on?”
“Well,” Tom says, “you know how Trelawney’s confused because she keeps saying you must have ‘died’ so-and-so times in the last two years?”
Harry blinks. “Yeah?”
Another pause. Then Tom says, “So, there’s this thing called a horcrux.”
Though Tom had always intended to tell Harry about the horcrux in his scar this summer, he meant to save it for August. Sitting here, though, on the moss-covered bench in the reading garden at gloaming, forces Tom to realise how scattered their real alone time is. This isn’t something he wants to do with anyone else, not even Sirius. When it all comes down to it, the truth is that this is a Tom-and-Harry matter.
When he finishes, Harry’s quiet for nearly five minutes. The sky is just about dark now, with the stars all alight and the moon shining large and round above the hills, which are still fringed in a paler shade of blue. The lights in the garden emphasise the structure of his face, which is starting to lose the softness of childhood, and darkens the green of his eyes. Despite how long he’s had it, his scar looks barely past fresh, even more than usual. If Tom removes the horcrux, will it finally fade to scar-tissue white?
He hopes so.
Finally, Harry says, “Who else knows besides you and Dumbledore? Not about the horcruxes in general. About me.”
“Sirius,” Tom says. “It was how he figured out everything about me. Narcissa put it together because of something I said about the snake, but she had more context than anyone else. And she’s—well, I trust her.”
“Are you only telling me now,” Harry says, furrowing his brow, “because I’ve hit the ‘older’ for ‘when you’re older,’ or because I’m the last one left?”
“The former,” Tom says. “It just happened to coincide with the latter, and even that’s really a maybe. I made a real cock up of the snake, now that he’ll know the horcrux is gone. If it’s possible for him to make another, I reckon he will.”
“But how does someone split their soul seven times?” Harry says. “How are we getting it out? When are we getting it out? And I know there’s something you still aren’t telling me. You said you ‘guaranteed’ that no one was going to bother me about it, but what does that mean?”
There’s no way Tom’s about to tell his cousin by the way, I’m probably going to die, nor Dumbledore was all too willing to set you up to die. “Nothing quite so severe as it sounds,” he says. “I’ve just been handling the issue. I mean, with help. One was in Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault. Tonks got that one. She was brilliant doing it. There’s nothing any of you could have helped with, before you start on that. The spell it takes to destroy one in an inanimate object is so illegal I only know how to do it because I saw Grindelwald do it once first, and I’m fortunate enough not to need more than that to learn something.”
Though Harry isn’t happy about that answer, he at least accepts it for now. “Fine,” he says. “But what about the one in my scar?”
“I have a working theory,” Tom answers, “but I’m not doing anything to you unless I’m certain you’ll live.”
“Then what about Voldemort?” Harry says. “If he can’t die as long—”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Tom. “I could always turn him into a doll, I suppose.”
Again, Harry rolls his eyes, because he’s a teenager, and that’s what teenagers do. “No way,” he says. “Won’t that just kill the body in real life and we’ll be back where we started?”
“Not if I’m clever about it,” Tom says. “Would be his fault, that, for tethering his soul outside his main body, because it would make it easier to tether what’s left of the original to the bit of wood and cloth that used to be a body. Now, the issue is, naturally, that it would be worse than death, as he would remain continuously conscious, but unable to act, until both you died and someone destroyed the doll, which, I don’t know, I’d bury in a magically fortified lunch tin under the boards of the now inaccessible Gaunt shack in Little Hangleton—and I simply I can’t do that to another person unless it’s a last resort, in which case I will. But as I said, I have a theory.”
Hopefully, but not as if he thinks it’ll work, Harry asks, “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when I know it’ll work,” Tom says, just as a large screech owl glides down from the shadows of the trees, and lands neatly in his lap. Both he and Harry stare at it. To Tom’s incredible offence, when he doesn’t react quick enough, it bites his hand. “Hey! All right, here just let me see that.”
“Is that from St Mungo’s?” Harry says, shamelessly peering down at the card untangles from the owl’s leg. The second it’s free, the owl flies off, but makes sure to hit Harry in the face with its tail first. “How is that from a bloody hospital?”
“Perhaps it’s just annoyed about delivering binnable post nearly a thousand miles from home,” Tom says, as he stuffs the card, now folded, into his pocket. “Let’s go in before you lose all say in girls’ inevitable attempt to schedule every minute of tomorrow.”
“They can try,” Harry says, standing as he does. “It’ll fall apart within minutes. Why are you getting post about follow-up appointments? You said you weren’t even hurt.”
“What scrapes and bruises I had, the mediwitch fixed up in a minute,” Tom says. “I’m sure it’s just routine for people who haven’t been hurriedly moved to Hogwarts.”
Harry frowns, and doesn’t start walking, though Tom means to leave. “You’re lying,” his cousin says. “You never lie to me.”
That is, unfortunately, true enough. Tom omits, which is a form of lying, but hardly ever does so directly. Sighing, he says, “Look, I had a very complicated childhood, and I wasn’t in any fit state to explain to the mediwitch that my blood tests were so alarming because I was raised on powdered eggs and beets, so she had something of an overreaction.”
“Are you sick?”
“No, which is why I didn’t want to mention it. It’s just—complicated.”
Still uncertain, Harry says, “But you would tell me, right? If something was really wrong, I mean. Because I’m almost fifteen. That’s old enough.”
“Of course,” Tom says. “I couldn’t expect you to do the same otherwise, could I?”
It’s not like he’s lying, he thinks as they start to head back. He’s not sick, so there’s no reason, then, why he feels so immeasurably guilty.
“The Temp is awfully useful,” Draco says, as he lounges with his friends on the pondside and flips through one of the files on Dolores Umbridge, their Defence professor for first term, with Pansy and Theo. “Is he sticking around?”
“I think he might,” Blaise says, from the other side of the loose circle they’ve made. He, Harry, and Hermione are all in the sun, like they’re desperate to absorb as much of it as they can before returning to Scotland, while Draco and the others stick to the shade of the cypresses. He’s been sunburnt enough this summer. “Anyway, he’s the first I’ve ever liked, so I hope he does.”
“How is this woman not a Death Eater?” Hermione asks, incredulous, without lifting her head from whatever file she’s leading. The Temp liberated a fair number within twenty-four hours of Dumbledore passing along the name to Tom, under the principle of Know Thy Enemy. The adults have all already looked through these, but agreed her actual soon-to-be students deserve their own firsthand look as well. “She proposed making the pre-H Registry available to the Ministry in order to create the ‘Muggleborn Registration Commission!’”
Pansy looks away from the file to peer at Hermione through her bug-like sunglasses. “Just because she didn’t take the Mark doesn’t mean she didn’t aid and abet,” she says. “You-Know-Who never would have gotten control the first time if the majority of the Ministry hadn’t gone along with him.”
“Oh this is bad,” Ron says from behind Draco, where he’s going through a file with Daphne. “She tried to legalise corporal punishment again. That hasn’t been around since my mum’s great-aunt Muriel’s day.”
“Well, she did fail,” says Daphne, as Draco turns a page and finds the words, Anti-Werewolf Legislation staring back at him. “If she tries to cane us, just remind her that you have connections to Internal Affairs.”
Distractedly, Draco says, “I don’t think Percy counts, Daph,” before adding to the group at large, “She’s the reason Remus can’t save himself from the homeschooling post. Any business or independent employer licensed by the Ministry can only legally hire a werewolf if they can prove ‘there is no proper Wix who can do the job just as well.’”
“That’s not surprising,” says Harry, speaking for the first time since they opened the files. “She’s the reason he didn’t adopt me.”
As they all exclaim in shock, Draco reflects that no one is as good at derailing a conversation as Harry, and he never even means to do it. But how does he know! Well, Sirius never Silences anything, not like Tom, so it’s remarkably easy to overhear conversations, especially when they assume Harry’s asleep. This was ages and ages ago, before Remus even started at Hogwarts. “It stuck, her name,” Harry says, “because I thought it was umbrage, like A.G.E., not I.D.G.E., like taking umbrage, being offended—it was on a vocabulary list when I was still in Muggle school, and Tom actually made me study—and that seemed kind of backward, because she was the one being offensive.”
“Well,” says Theo, who flips to another horrifying proposed legislation, but one that didn’t pass, “if she’s really bad, we could just pitch her in the lake. Seems like she’s taking umbrage at the existence of anything not fully human, because she wants to have all merpeople tagged. Say, Harry, having met them, how’d they take to that?”
“They might feed her to those fucking grindylows,” Harry says with a shiver. “You know, I thought those things swarming were never going to leave my nightmares, and then I fought a giant spider.”
“Now you see the wisdom of my boggart, mate,” says Ron. “Bloody terrifying. Just not right, anything in nature having eight legs.”
“I thought they’d be mine,” says Blaise, which is news to Draco. He’s known Blaise his entire life, and had no idea he had such an ordinary weakness as arachnophobia. “There was this incident in Sicily. Ended up being a strix. And all of you were such arses, thinking it was an ordinary owl.”
“What’s a strix?” Harry asks, as their other Slytherin friends protest that it’s not their fault the not-owl looked so much like an owl.
Holding up his hand to about two and a half feet, Blaise says, “A bird about this tall. Looks a bit like an owl, but isn’t. White wings. Drinks blood and eats humans, especially children. We don’t have them in Britain. When I was little, Mamma used to tell me if I went out after dark here, the strix would come and eat me.”
“Are they real?” Hermione says. “Or is it just something she said to keep in bed?”
With a sigh, Blaise pats her hand. “My dear Muggleborn friend,” he says, “the sad thing about being a Wix is that all of the stories your mother tells you to keep you in bed are real.”
“Maybe yours,” she says sceptically. “Luna might be a lovely girl, but nargles are patently imaginary.”
“Everyone knows her father’s barmy,” Draco says. “Might take a while, but she’ll figure that out eventually.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Pansy says. “Nothing’s better on a bad day than having Luna Lovegood sit down with her radish earrings and talk about how you need to let the wrackspurts untangle your thoughts. There’s a method to the madness.”
“Well, then that’s the answer,” Daphne says. “If this woman proves as evil as these files prove she will be, we’ll just Luna tangle up her wrackspurts. Who wants to go for a swim?”
That sounds better than making themselves depressed over the future. Draco stands, stripes off his shirt, and follows his friends into the water.
In mid-August, when Emmeline is feeling well enough to travel, Tom fashions them a portkey, and they travel for a couple of nights back to the Island of Thousand Names. What he wants to accomplish here could be done in a few hours, but he would also quite like some time alone with his girlfriend.
“You would think privacy would be easy to come by in a place that big,” she says as they set down their rucksacks in the bedroom of her cousin’s house, which is empty for the month while they escape the heat in Argentina or something. “Come here.”
She draws him down into a kiss, just as the first raindrop strikes the window overlooking the forest outside. “Well,” he says, “we have privacy now.”
The sun is out by the time they decide they’ve made decent headway into making up for lost time, largely caused by there being too many teenagers underfoot. It’s been especially bad over the last week, now the Emmeline’s tentatively taken to the air again. She’s still winded easily, so can only spend so long on a broom, but Harry and his other Quidditch-loving friends are all desperate to fly with her. It’s very endearing. It’s also not all conducive to spending any time alone together.
There’s a new scar on her side where she’d been hit, which formed during the healing process, not from the Curse itself, but there aren’t any lasting effects, mostly thanks to Madam Pomfrey having the potions at the ready. She doesn’t like it; the sight of it, for him, is a relief, because it’s just a reminder that she’s alive. Bad enough she tends to die in his nightmares. He’s had enough people in his life do that already.
“Adrianna says I’ll be able to fly normally by November,” she says, when they lie facing each other on top of the sheets, both propped on one elbow. He ghosts his fingers down the scar absently, hardly aware that he’s doing it. The post-storm heat, worsened by the bright bright sun beating down through the open windows and the humidity still weighing down the air, turns the room sticky. “Good for the future, bad for the season. Can you believe the bloody Tornadoes are in line to win?”
“I know,” he says, running the hand up to move her hair from her face. “You’d think Theo would be happy about it, but he’s just depressed, because Cho Chang sent him tickets and he can’t go. They’re such teenagers now. I don’t know what to do.”
“At least you’ve been kept out of the speculation about their love lives,” she says. “Mind, not that I’m complaining at all. But why do you think Percy and Gwain have suddenly decided you’re the new best friend? I always knew Sirius was an unrepentant gossip, but Merlin, having him in the same room with Cissy and Molly? Arthur’s no better. Turns out Felicia and her husband might be the worst of the worst.”
“And here I thought they were trying to solve the Azkaban issue,” Tom says, with no small degree of consternation. Particularly he and Sirius have been bouncing back and forth between Revised Order Italy, Revised Order UK, and Actual Order, with others dragged along in various combinations, so at least he hasn’t had much time for non-relevant conversation. That’s all been taken up by work.
But she smiles at him fondly, like he’s being an idiot, “Oh, it’s that too. Felicia probably would have done it by now if Fudge wasn’t being so obstinate, but it really just proves what argument she used to convince the Italian Ministry to take the prisoners is true—they are better equipped to handle it, and we could learn by example. You know, I thought she was joking about piloting a pre-H summer programme here, but she’s really not.”
“Do you regret coming?” he asks, which doesn’t quite relate to what she said, but near enough. Sirius and the Greengrasses were able to circumnavigate most long-standing issues they had almost immediately, once they sat him down and said, look, this is what really happened to your brother, who died wishing you could be proud of him, but Emmeline has no such complicated feelings about the Lestanges that might need straightening out.
“Who could regret Tuscany?” she says, with another smile. “But no, seriously. They mostly make me sad. I always thought Slughorn was such a wonderful professor, but Rosie explained what the Common Room was like, and how could anyone be considered good at their jobs when students are terrified of other students punishing them if they step out of line? There’s a vast difference between even a fifteen-year-old standing up to an adult and an eleven-year-old telling a seventeen-year-old no.”
Tom’s been wondering about that for ages; he wonders it even more about Snape. Every time someone mentions that he shouldn’t be sacked over Rita Skeeter’s article, Tom agrees that Skeeter shouldn’t be given that much power, but not that Snape deserves his position. Even if it’s not directly espousing the ideology once again germinating amongst the second (and presumably incoming first) years of his House, the fact that he isn’t addressing it makes him complicit. The concept of the Bystander Effect exists for a reason. He should have been out the door long before he had the opportunity to turn to any student and call her an insufferable know-it-all just because she knows the answers to his questions when no one else does. Tom, who the man hated on sight, only escaped the same fate because he freaked Snape out when Tom forced him out of his head with the very loud thought that the use of even weak Legilimency on students proved he was an unscrupulous twat.
A man like that, Tom suspects, wouldn’t have needed to be subjected to various fear tactics at all. Bad luck, is what it is, for Voldemort, that Snape’s obsession with a married woman outweighed his devotion to his cult leader, if Emmeline’s guess is right.
“Well,” Tom says after a moment, “it’s good you don’t completely hate me for ending us up here. I’ll try to solve all issues before next autumn, so you can once again defeat the Tornadoes as they deserve.”
“Only if you promise to live at the end,” Emmeline says crossly. “You and Harry. I simply refuse to believe you saved my life in the daftest way possible just to die as a martyr.”
“Martyrs are too Christian,” he says, “and fuck Christianity. Can I kiss you again?”
They do much more kissing, but that’s fine, because it’s noon, and too bloody hot to actually be out of doors.
Eventually, they do venture outdoors. Whatever was a path in January, the month when the wet season is still wet but takes a minor break, is a surging river thanks to early monsoons that have pelted the island since the beginning of the August. A dugout canoe with a folded down sail is tied to one of the house’s silts; he climbs a couple rungs down the ladder, drafts it alongside him with magic, and slips in. Once he steadies it with a spell, he helps her down. Last year, she would have rolled her eyes at that, but though she’s almost better, that’s not the same as all-the-way better. Still, she handles unfurling the sail. It’s flat-bottomed, a real river boat meant for rapids and shallows, apparently, which makes more sense to her than him, so she works with the sail—non-strenuous enough—and leaves the paddling to him.
Whole swathes of the lowlands are flooded, but the area with the banyan she showed her last time should be high enough ground that the land around it might be bog-like, but still technically solid. Using the waterways, though, forces them through a different route than last time, so they pass other silted houses of various sizes, and other dugouts going to and from town. It’s as they’re passing a house with a family’s worth of broomsticks propped up on the veranda out front that she suddenly says, “I’m worried for Ron.”
“What?” Tom says, looking away from the tropical birds in the treetops to focus on her. “Why?” By all accounts, Ron seems pretty stellar, now that he isn’t stressing about Draco leaving and doesn’t have to worry about either his or Daphne’s parents making a fuss about the two of them dating.
“Well, he wants to try out for Keeper this year,” Emmeline says. “He’s very good, you know, when it’s just us and his friends, but the second his twins or Ginny start teasing him, he’s dropping the Quaffle left and right. I dread to think of what it’ll be like if he tries playing on a team with a real captain and the twins, and the more embarrassed he is, the worse it will be.”
“But they won’t tease him when they’re all working toward a common goal,” Tom says, startled. “I mean, that’s just bad sportsmanship, isn’t it?”
She waves her hand. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “They’re siblings. Edgar and Amelia Bones were both on the Hufflepuff team as Chasers—pair of twins, couple years older than Sirius—and I swear they never won a game when they were on the field together because she just couldn’t leave him well enough alone. When she left the team to be Head Girl, they improved remarkably, and it was only for a year. And Ron already feels like he isn’t good enough at anything.”
“He’d be fine if people didn’t fake fun of the Chess Club members,” Tom says. That was true in 1947; it’s still true now, in 2005. “Oh, looks like we have a decent cut through here. We should Charm our shoes first. Learnt that the hard way the last time I was in mud.”
“Anti-Theft Jinxes are always good, too,” she says, once they’ve done just that. Again, he leaves first, then helps her out. She looks perfectly all right, but he’s seen in recent weeks how abruptly she can tire. “Crime here is low, but not nonexistent, especially now in the off-season.”
Seems sensible, he agrees, though he lets her do it. He doesn’t think he’s ever cast Anti-Theft Jinxes before, but he watches her do it. Might be a good early lesson for his third years, he thinks. He’s never heard of anyone being pickpocketed in Hogsmeade, but there’s a first for everything.
They move slowly through the forest, as their shoes keep sinking into the viscous mud and leaf rot. Though they see birds and little geckos and small rodents, there’s nary a snake to be seen, which he takes to be a bad sign. With this break in the rain, and so many diurnal animals active, it’s a good time for hunting, which begs the question of why. They receive at least part of an answer when a bright green, arboreal ratsnake pokes its head out from the hollow of a laurel tree with glossy leaves and says, “Speaker?”
Though Emmeline can’t officially understand Parseltongue, she has, interestingly, picked up the specific sounds the various animals he can communicate with make when they address them. They exchange a glance before he says, “Yeah,” and stretches out his hand. The ratsnake must be female, because she’s at least eight feet long when she emerges full from the hollow to curl defensively around him. “This is my mate. Be nice.”
The ratsnake bobs her head, as if to say hello. “Speaker’s mate does not smell afraid,” she says. “You have chosen wisely.”
“You’ve received this snake’s stamp of approval,” he tells Emmeline, who smiles, but still asks what’s wrong. This is understandable; the ratsnake is pressing in so close it’s like she’s looking for Tom to escape with her. “Has someone been here stealing snakes?”
“They try,” she hisses. “The python and the spirit of the big roots made peace. Trees know. They tell us to hide. The Two-Legged strangers want to put a spirit in us too.”
Tom passes on the message. Emmeline raises her brows. “Well,” she says, “the cooperation is nice, I suppose, but I’ll be honest, I was hoping to learn all was boring as paint drying here. Why’d they return to the same place twice? Seems like an awfully good way to get themselves caught.”
“Magic isle equals magic automatically imbued in even non-magical creatures,” Tom says. “An ordinary snake probably wouldn’t survive the horcrux ritual, but one from here could. If I had to guess anyway. Doubt he’d move on to monitors or iguanas at least, since he’s too caught on tradition for experimentation. Have any Two-Legged strangers been bitten or eaten?” he adds to the ratsnake. It’s not very nice, but after finding out Voldemort planned to feed Emmeline to his python while Stunned, conscious, and alive, the idea of him losing one of his followers (dead) to a snake’s belly gives Tom a petty sort of satisfaction.
The ratsnake nods. If snakes could smile, he thinks, this one would be. “Mangrove pit viper gave one a bite,” she says, “and left the python a tasty snake.”
That’s hopefully good news, but it’s not like a ratsnake could look at photos of various Death Eaters and identify which one it might have been, so it also could have been an ordinary tourist in the wrong place/wrong time. At the snake’s request, they bring her deeper with them into the forest, as they’ll pass her usual haunt, because whoever after Voldemort’s next horcrux left traps on the ground. It’s a good warning, as now he and Emmeline know to look for and disable them.
Very politely, the ratsnake asks to wrap around both of them, so she won’t be so close to the ground. Tom says yes, but no biting, so Emmeline steps close enough for the snake to wrap around her shoulders and her head atop hers. “I can’t wait until you start publishing research that makes everyone jealous that they can’t talk to extremely dangerous reptiles too,” she says, sighing, as she takes Tom’s hand. “Really, they’re just so darling. It’s unfair.”
“I actually think maybe it could be taught,” he says, glancing sideways at her. The ratsnake has made herself well at home in Emmeline’s hair. “Not to the degree that I can, where they just know before I speak, but you’re starting to recognise sounds, aren’t you?”
“A bit,” she says. “I’ve never tried to imitate it, though, but if it’s just the terms referring to you or me, and there are few others that crop up sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. But your magic might trigger it. It might not work without you present.”
“That’d be an interesting experiment,” he says, considering the implications, as well as how much his long-dead ancestor would absolutely hate it. And Voldemort. How funny it would be, to be able to tell Voldemort right before died, By the way, I taught a bunch of Muggleborns and blood traitors Parseltongue, so you’re not special at all. “Who knows? Maybe it could be a language option in Felicia’s new school.”
He means it as a joke, but Emmeline’s quiet for a minute before saying, “It’s a grand idea, you know, if she could miraculously convince Dumbledore to open the Hogwarts Registry to her. With the Ministry embedding itself in school, how long until they have access? Which means You-Know-Who will, if he gains control. It would be such a good way to keep children safe before they enter Hogwarts, or even the summers in between. And not just Muggleborns. Think about how terrified Theo is of even stepping on board the platform for the train. The problem, of course, is who’s recommending it. Dumbledore will never go for it.”
“Molly’s planning to propose the idea,” Tom says, “for all the good that will do. He probably thinks us all something like traitors, I reckon, though it can’t be entirely, or I never would have been offered the job. Or it’s just because he sees no other course of action. Entirely possible. Fudge is a fucking idiot. Spencer-Moon must be bemoaning that this is his successor from the afterlife.”
“Spencer-Moon was decent, I’ve always heard,” Emmeline says, “though he didn’t deal with Grindelwald making his way into Britain here. How’d he avoid making the same mistake?”
That’s much too complicated of a question for Tom to be able to answer, since Wixen politics where he comes from aren’t quite identical. “Grindelwald wasn’t ‘coming back from the dead,’” he says, after he thinks of a suitable answer. “That he crossed the Channel was sudden, but not entirely unexpected. Think about how easy it is to Apparate from London to Paris. And Britain was accepting refugees in waves, despite the official declaration of neutrality, so the major political debate back then was about accepting refugees indiscriminately, which was Spender-Moon’s platform, or only those that could pass a careful vetting process. Year before I ended up here, this cafe in Diagon Alley—it’s the ice cream parlour now—that acted as a sort of meet-up place for refugees and expats from Eastern Europe was destroyed by a Blasting Curse, and Spencer-Moon personally led the taskforce to find the Wix who did it. Fudge would probably blame it on a faulty oven.”
“We went through four Ministers during the the—the last war,” Emmeline says, as a slight crease forms between her brows, “if you include Leach and Bagnold, though Leach being forced from office is potentially what started it, and Bagnold only served for a week before Lily and James died. On paper, it looks like they did these seemingly anti-Death Eater things, but everyone knows it’s why there are so many ‘acquitted’ Death Eaters still in high positions of power. Really, unless Crouch was the one on the attack in the aftermath, the likelihood of the accused walking free was high. Bagnold made sure of that.”
That, Tom thinks, explains a lot. People tend to assume he knows a lot more about this time than he does, particularly after he’s spent so much time living here. For the most part, he has caught up on his history, and some of the rest is common sense. Without a second war about to start, he likely wouldn’t consider the gaps in his knowledge as much of an issue at all, but they’re rapidly becoming one. It’s Fudge’s fault. Or, the Ministry’s general policy of denial anyway, which extends beyond Fudge. Using the past to predict the present is a difficult endeavor when discussion of the past itself has become functionally taboo.
By this point, Tom knows a fair bit about the war itself from the perspectives of both sides. He still does not know much about the Ministry response, other than it was a puppet under Voldemort’s control. As it’s technically not now, Fudge has no excuse for acting like it is. It can’t even be considered appeasement, since appeasement requires acknowledgement of an issue or action to be achieved.
Still. He wonders if Fudge will ever read the book Tom owled him on the life, failures, and legacy of Neville Chamberlain.
They enter the banyan before Tom comes up with a response. When the same python from last time immediately comes slithering along the lowest branches of the crowns, he’s far more relieved than he thought he would be. This snake is so insanely trusting Tom was afraid he’d be the first to go. “Hello,” he says, as the snake loops around the branch a few times to fit comfortably before lowering his head level with Tom’s. “We came back to see you.”
The python flicks out his tongue and licks out Tom’s forehead. “You are nicer than Other Speaker,” he says. “We all hide from Other Speaker. He wants one of us now, full grown, but we’re not eggs. He smells of sickness.”
Tom translates. Emmeline raises a brow. “It could be the splintered soul,” she says. “Animals smell souls, right? Can’t imagine one that’s been ripped to bits smells any nicer than a cancer.”
It’s a shame that snakes can’t recognise faces. Overall, they don’t have the brain structure to feel emotion like affection, though they can feel trust, and it takes very basic instinct for that to occur—clearly, the inherent combination of being a Parselmouth in combination with having a whole soul is enough to create that trust, even in the most aggressive snakes. What this ultimately means, though, is that Tom can’t start Conjuring photos of known Death Eaters from memory and tell the python to spread the world that eating other humans might be bad, but they’re all full liberty to have a nibble on these.
Instead, they should probably speak with the local authorities.
He pets the snake. “I want you all to be very careful,” he says. “Do you know if anyone has been stolen?”
Three, they learn, but only after the Other Speaker did something to turn another banyan into a bad place where no animal dares tread anymore. No, the python doesn’t know how to get there, but the tree spirit might know!
This is when Tom finally realises it’s getting dark. “You should go back,” he tells Emmeline. “I have a feeling I’m about to be sent on a night-time hike with either a ghost or a reptile, and Adrianna will murder me if we return and you aren’t perfectly healthy.”
No one ever wants to risk angering Adrianna, so however reluctantly, Emmeline kisses his cheek and Disapparates. A moment later, the ghost from last time emerges, displeased to see him. He placates her with all the food they’d brought for hiking in his rucksack, until she finally concedes to calling on an earless monitor lizard, who scurries through the mud from the direction of the river and scrambles up his body to come to rest on his shoulder. Snout to vent, she’s only about six inches long, so even with her long tail drooping down his back it’s a comfortable fit.
He bows awkwardly to spirit, thanks her, and lets the lizard direct him on his way, most of which is done in the boat. Now that he and Emmeline aren’t just having fun with it, he steers and sails it with magic alone.
Eventually, he pulls the dugout onto the muddy bank, lights his wand, and follows the lizard’s instruction’s until the little animal suddenly tenses on his shoulder and declares he’s doing no further. That’s fine—Tom can find his own way back. The lizard nips him, scrambles down his back, and disappears in the direction of the water, as he walks through his own blood ward. Voldemort’s blood ward.
The banyan in the center is massive, and the original host tree that made up its centre is long dead. Through the tight knot to strangler vines masquerading as the original trunk, he can just make out an indistinct shape that pings against his every instinct to run. Tom doesn’t like death, and never has managed to adapt to the sight of it, but he needs to understand what he’s looking at before he involves anyone else. After a moment of stealing himself, he circles the trunk until he finds a narrow opening, and slips inside a space the size of his first bedroom in Glasgow. It’s a marvel, but he doesn’t have time to appreciate it, because he immediately sees two dead bodies: Igor Karkaroff and a nineteen-foot reticulated python. All over the ground and on the wood of the vines are the runes for the horcrux ritual.
Tom crouches down to inspect both the man and the snakes’ faces. “So here’s the limit,” he says, looking in the python’s golden green eyes. It stares back at him, unseeing. Sighing, he stands, and slips out, preparing himself to break another blood ward before he can make this objectively ordinary murder someone else’s problem.