Embryo

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Light, newborn and stumbling, is slow to flicker idly—down through the Black Lake and into the Slytherin Common Room, a cool pall that lightens the shadows and casts everyone’s skin with a deep, slumbering blue. But for the bright orange of the Samhain fire still crackling in its hearth, all is dark and still.

Tom awakens, eyes upward to the domed stained-glass far above their heads, at the dark shapes of grindylows and lake serpents that twist in and out of the searching fingers of the sun. In the distance, he can just make out Slytherin’s stone face in the depths of the lake, and he feels acutely full of pride knowing his ancestor watches their revelry.

He rises, taking in the room as it tilts around him, a consequence of a day full of heavy indulgences: ritual magic and spirits, both. His blood may be half liquor at the moment. His Knights, along with many other Slytherins, lie in a heap all around him, evidence of their revelry scattered across the Common Room. Empty goblets, tarot cards, half-pillaged platters of fruits and cured meats, even a pipe of mostly smoked Alihotsy.

It appears he is the first to stir, as the time is early still, and their celebrations, only a few scant hours prior, went very late indeed. Lestrange is curled up on the opposite end of Tom’s place on the velvet chaise, his vulture mask held tight in his hands. He snores and mumbles incoherently, no doubt dreaming induced visions of the future. The rest are slumped together before the warm hearth or heaped upon the chairs and sofas, in all manner of disarray. Walburga is missing, likely in her rooms though with whom Tom cannot guess. Walburga’s cravings are as unpredictable as they are insatiable. Perhaps Diggory or Mulciber or Dolohov or even little Orion, or all of them as none are immediately discernible in the dark, figures bleeding together in shadow.

Tom levers himself up, smells the soot and lingering power on his own skin. He savours it, the tantalising memory of the ritual, the rush, the blood. He feels tapped into the very earth, the soil in the forest, the morning frost upon it. Hogwarts has always been his to inherit as the heir of Slytherin; he has always felt a kinship to her. Now, it is deeper, to the deepest root in the wood. He inhales, weary but satisfied, but for the odd feeling he is forgetting something. Ah.

Harry is nowhere to be found.

Tom is neither surprised nor disappointed. Crowds tend to repel Harry just as he repels the crowd; a result, perhaps of the force that keeps him out of memory.

It is no matter, for Tom never forgets. There is a ring of pleasure to it; that Harry is not here among the rabble where Tom will have to share him. He is uniquely enjoyed when he is Tom’s secret.

Assured that the Samhain hoard will be fine without him for a moment, Tom closes his eyes and turns inward. There is the brush of Self, the embrace of one’s own power and thought. Flesh and mind vibrating seamlessly together. The cord that runs away from him is all the more noticeable for it. Tom follows that cord, that still, slumbering river that has bled so wholly with his own. It flows through him and out of him, down to the bottom of the Black Lake, perhaps even to the Earth’s core. He follows to its end, a tug behind his navel like apparition, allows the feeling to guide him through the Common Room and into the dorms where it is still dark as night and the heavy tapestries muffle his footsteps.

Tom approaches Harry’s bed.

His face is tranquil, smooth as undisturbed water, and Tom would stir him up. Shatter the illusion, and the image of his own reflection within it.

He straddles Harry.

The boy mumbles something, head turning, but he doesn’t wake.

Tom is holding his breath. Why? His heart is beating. His mouth waters. Excitement. Curiosity. As a child, Tom was rarely asked to play, and he rarely wanted to.

He wants to play now.

His hands creep up Harry’s chest and neck. He grazes the wild, sleep-damp hair at his temples. Runs his finger over the scar that arcs across his flesh. His scar, the one Tom put on Harry, he is certain of it. Maybe not here, not this time, but somewhere. The paradox stings him, and the jealousy too, that somewhere, somehow, another version of himself has touched Harry.

He wraps his hands around Harry’s neck and squeezes.

He watches, waits.

Harry’s face flushes quickly, cheeks blooming before his eyes. The brow creases, the lips thin in a grimace. Eyelids flicker, and then Harry is looking back. There is confusion, then sweet, unmistakable recognition; and fear overtaken with fury. Tom drinks it in, gorges on it. His belly is full from the Samhain feast, and yet he hungers.

Harry fights the moment he registers Tom’s grip around his throat. He is a beast, of survival and resistance, but of the two, Tom is the greater beast.

The discordance ripples through their connection and across his flesh, and Tom groans, falling with fervour upon the creature as it kicks and thrashes at him.

Tom holds on to the apex of that feeling, clings to it. He holds on to Harry’s throat, his face pinched with a darker, more dangerous shade of red now, and it’s good, so very good. They are close, pressed together, and warm with the heat of adrenaline. He could kill him. Already has, offered him to sidhe. Who could stop him?

Why should he stop?

Tom wakes with a gasp.

Harry stares back at him, breaths heaving.

“Awake, you two?” Lestrange calls cheerfully.

The Common Room is alive with the tempting scent of breakfast wafting forward to greet them and the sound chattering students. The feast has continued, as has the air of celebration.

Tom sits up, watching Harry carefully feel around his own neck.

A dream. Tom had dreamt.

Tom caresses his warm ring, its black stone throbbing in time with his heart. It shouldn’t be possible.

He rubs his face and looks over his coven. They are awake, alive with a ritual-induced mania, true, but the ritual of over-indulgence wins out, makes them groggy and bleary-eyed.

“Is it true?” Mulciber rushes to ask once Tom has sat up. “Did you really offer the sidhe a human sacrifice?”

“Was it a Muggle?” asks Diggory, and Tom must admit, it isn’t a terrible idea.

“Your passion is admirable,” Tom answers, “but we must respect the clandestine nature of the spirits. They may take offence if we are careless with our regard, and so soon after being graciously blessed by them.”

“Of course,” Lestrange says with visible relish, gloating over all who have gathered. “I’m sure everyone understands. You simply had to be there.”

Diggory makes a short noise of disgust, eyes rolling.

“The sidhe were kind enough to impart upon me ancient knowledge that shall benefit us all,” Tom offers in exchange for their unsated curiosity. “They recognize me as the wizard who will lead our people into glory. It is an honour to serve.”

He smiles, the easy, boyish smile. Is he joking, they’ll wonder, making light of it. Until they know he isn’t.

“But for now, let us continue our merrymaking.”

“Here, here!” Prewett says. “Before we’re called back to our responsibilities. Or in my case, three essays and the most boring five chapters on runic mutations. Rookwood, you were going to read something for us?”

A small girl pops onto her feet and steps into the centre of their circle, nodding. She clears her throat. She stands before Tom, looking to him for approval, which he grants.

Walburga passes him a cup of tea.

“I was going to sing an Òrain Luaidh my mother taught me. Coisich, a rùin.”

The gathered Slytherins quiet down, enough that Rookwood feels she may begin her waulking song on love and cold nights. A few verses in, Tom feels Harry lean into him, his breath near his ear.

“What’s this language?” he whispers.

“Careful, Harry,” Tom answers, low and with a warning smile. “You will ostracise yourself quickly with a question such as that. It is Gaelic.”

Harry looks back to Rookwood and her steady song, considering. She has a sweet voice, the little songbird of Slytherin.

“What is she saying?”

Tom turns to Harry, still smiling. He is in such good humour, Samhain giddy. Perhaps it was the dream too, the feel of Harry’s pulse rushing under his hands. He mimics Harry’s earlier whispering, pressing his mouth very near to Harry’s earlobe.

“It is a love song,” he tells the fine hairs by Harry’s ear, and watches the boy’s skin grow mottled and red under his intensely dissecting eye. “Come, my love, hù il oro; keep your promise to me.”

Rookwood finishes to enthusiastic applause, and she gives them a pretty curtsey. Others follow, songs, poems, hymns. Declarations of loyalty and power. Abraxas stands to deliver his Ode to Charlamagne, some wretched essay he insists on foisting upon his peers every damned year, and is shouted from the stage.

Lestrange, having the good sense to keep his oratory short but compelling for a disgruntled crowd, recites to Tom a prayer from Skovoroda, concise and without frills.

“I should have given You my early years,

I give You all the rest.

Deliberating with you, taking counsel,

Like the sunset, like the rising sun.

Oh, this is an age of golden years.”

“Very sweet, Raynaldus, you do our coven proud,” Prewett laughs, but Lestrange is not bothered by his teasing at all, pleased with himself like a puffed up bird. He has eyes only for Tom, and Tom rewards his devotion with appreciation.

Harry scoffs.

“And what have you to offer, then?” Lestrange demands of Harry. “You sit here and judge us and do not understand us. I can see in your face you think very low of our traditions.”

“Mind yourself, Raynaldus,” Tom chides, his arm slipping from the back of the sofa to Harry’s shoulders. “But you are right. Harry, you are one of us now, and so you must perform for our pleasure. For mine.”

Harry looks as though he would rather Tom had strangled him to death after all.

“What will it be?” Walburga asks, delighted. “A poem? Song? A political recitation?”

Harry shakes his head, eyes darting around the room. Tom feels a syrupy delight at his obvious apprehension. They are surrounded by Slytherin House, a not so easily appeased audience, all awaiting him to take the stage.

“I don’t know any poetry. Or—or speeches or prayers. And I can’t sing!”

“No poetry?” Rosier asks, aghast. “Socrates? No? Not even Shakespeare? What do you read?”

“Quidditch?” Harry offers with a queasy look on his face, and there’s an uproar of giggling. His skin goes a deeper, mottled red, and his eyes look to Tom beseechingly. Tom offers him no refuge.

Prewett pulls Harry up by his arms, Harry’s hands clinging to Tom’s robes before they are forcibly pulled away. “Philosophy? History? Erotica? Nothing? What’s in that head of yours?”

“Erotica!” Alphard laughs. “I’ve got a few excerpts, real crowd-pleasers they are.”

“No—” Harry chokes as he is shoved to the centre of the circle. “Tom, please—”

Tom cannot decide, even if his own life were at stake, if he prefers the Harry who begs or the Harry who resists.

“No one wants your cheap magazine smut, Alphie. I think a poem will do just fine,” Walburga says. “Eileen, fetch me your book of Stromm, no—your Byron. Tom, you approve?”

“By all means, let us have a taste of Lord Byron,” Tom says, making obvious his pleasure, gaze fixed upon Harry’s cringing form.

Eileen scurries from her place on the floor with the other younger years and hurriedly scours a bookshelf for her collection of Byron poems. She extracts it from the other books and delivers it, quiet as a mouse, to Walburga’s waiting hands.

“There you are,” she says and passes it to Harry, further pushing him up onto the sofa table so that he stands as though on a stage.

Once up there, Harry is frozen on the table, clutching the book like a life line in the heavy quiet of the Common Room, the weight of many eyes pinning him in place. He looks at Tom, one last time, and Tom offers no mercy. He gestures with a hand for Harry to go on with it.

Harry screws up his face and opens the book to a random page.

“When—” he starts and stops, voice apparently lost. He looks up and again sees the eyes on him, the room waiting. Tom leans back in his seat, one leg crossed over the other. Between the two of them, Tom is certain Harry knows which has more patience.

Harry tries again, weakly. “When we two parted, George Gordon Byron.”

“A good choice,” Walburga says, and Harry just grimaces. Tom sits in anticipation.

“When we two parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy k—”

Harry stops and looks up again, licking his lip nervously, their eyes meeting. He hurriedly looks back down at the book, so deeply his face is obscured by the cover. His exposed neck and ears are dark. Tom laughs. It takes Harry a moment to start again.

“—Colder thy kiss.

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning

Sunk chill on my brow–

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Harry takes a large breath. His rhythm is terrible, his sense for the end of a turn and the start of another artless. Tom wonders if he has ever read poetry at all. He speeds through the next bit, clearly wishing for the ordeal to be over soon. Someone giggles.

“Louder!” Rosier heckles. Harry pauses and scowls at her, straightening up. He continues, voice stronger now.

“In secret we met–

In silence I grieve,

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How… How should I greet thee?”

He looks up at Tom again, a magnetism that cannot be resisted, but Tom cannot understand the expression he sees there nor the feeling that follows. “The last line has been scratched out.”

“With silence and tears,” Tom finishes.

—

“I’m going to see Dumbledore today,” Harry says, jumping in front of Tom as he makes his way to the class. “Right now.”

“Where do you think we’re going?” Lestrange scoffs, shaking his head. “Second Monday, nine o’clock, ring any bells? We’ve had double Transfiguration this same time block all term.”

“You really are worried about your project,” Rosier laughs, jabbing Harry in the ribs with her elbow. “Lighten up. Dumbledore may not care for us very much, but he’s not that strict about marks.”

Harry’s cheeks colour.

“Well, I’m still going to talk to him, and you can’t stop me!”

He marches ahead of them.

“Is he mental or what…” Lestrange mutters.

Tom watches him go. There is nothing he can do now—only watch the cards fall as he has arranged them. He has timed this carefully, deliberately, nudged the pieces in their places, and built a welcoming house of cards for Harry… All he needs now is for Harry to topple the house himself.

“Tom, I was wondering when we might have our next,” Nott’s voice drops to a whisper, “you know what meeting. Since we’ve been inducted and all.”

He is clearly anxious to share with Prewett his plans for his father.

“Your card will tell you when the time comes.”

The cards, blank until the secret phrase is spoken, will provide the secret locations and times for the Knights of Walpurgis to gather. Tom is still considering that secret location…

And the cards themselves are a temporary measure—Tom is not satisfied with their security. They could be lost or stolen, and while one needs the phrase to activate it, a clever idea he took from Harry’s own head, the blurred memory of a similarly enchanted parchment and a handful of coins, Tom now wonders if there might be something more reliable. Someone might overhear the phrase or guess it, after all. Dumbledore might steal it from their heads, as Tom himself has felt the grazing of Dumbledore’s hand in his mind during class.

An untrained mage would not feel it as the intrusion it is, but Tom knows the touch of Legilimency.

There needs to be something more hidden, more secret. Something his Knights cannot drop or lose or have stolen away. Jewellery, no; conspicuous. An article of clothing, worse; what if a house elf took it to launder? Something on the skin, a sticking charm, a mark…

A mark.

Could he brand them? Tom wonders, eyeing each of his peers—his followers.

Tom stares at them, imagining what he might use; an iron brand? He could enchant it to burn on command when he means to summon them, but could he do so and allow it to heal? Not ideal either, Tom admits. It would be messy. He has not studied healing magic as thoroughly as he has other arcane practices. And it would be alarming to any professor if his fellow students were forced to seek treatment in hospital. Dumbledore would converge on him the moment any kind of ritual branding was revealed.

Unlike an unspecified children’s romp in the forest for Samhain, such a mark is undeniably Black Magic.

They are young, as he is, but they, unlike he, will always be young: to the universe, to time itself. They are forever children for this world is too old to see them be anything else. They will not join him in ascension, into immortality. It is an advantage, for now. Teenagers are known to be rash.

“Raynaldus,” he purrs, and Lestrange visibly shivers. “Have you ever considered getting a tatau?”

“Um,” he gulps. His good breeding is no doubt wrestling with his urge to please Tom in any way. After all, only sailors, criminals, and uncivilised peoples mark their skin in such a way.

“Alphard has one,” Rosier blurts.

“He what?” Nott exclaims. “Does Walburga know?”

“I’m supposed to keep it a secret. It’s of a buxom young woman with a large co—”

“Cordillia!” Nott interrupts, scandalised.

They round the last corner to class and find Harry standing outside the classroom with Professor Dumbledore. Tom slows his step.

“Could we talk after class, Professor?” Harry is asking him, his eyes flicking down the hall where Tom approaches. “It’s really important.”

Dumbledore follows his telling gaze. He watches Tom with the same sense of chariness he is always met with, a sort of simmering mistrust that plays beneath the surface of their every interaction.

Dumbledore’s instincts are accurate, and it is very annoying.

“Tom, I am surprised to see you this morning,” he says. “Professor Slughorn mentioned you and several of your Housemates were ill over the weekend…”

Tom glances at Harry, the way his face is falling, his brow pinching in confusion.

“Of course, Professor,” Tom answers, gesturing to Lestrange and the rest with a shepherding hand through the open door. “I would never miss one of your lectures, not for anything.”

“I’m sure,” Dumbledore says with no small amount of disapproval. It is a pebble to the mountain of already existing slights between them, and so Tom bears with it easily.

Tom glances over his shoulder as they slip into the classroom, a sly smile on his face. “Coming, Harry?”

“I don’t understand,” Harry mutters, following Tom and the rest to take a seat. “It’s like I wasn’t even there. He ignored me!”

And here, Tom pinches the truth. Not so much as lying, but emphasising less pertinent information.

“Reflect on yourself, Harry. You are a Slytherin, you are closely associated with me, even if Dumbledore, like many, does not remember why. You have participated in an unsanctioned Samhain ritual, which Dumbledore undoubtedly knows, as you were seen with us in masks with three dead chickens walking into the woods at dusk.”

“But I didn’t do anything!” Harry exclaims, and at the front of the class, Dumbledore clears his throat. Harry continues in a furious whisper. “You said you had permission. All I did was show up and get poisoned! It’s not like I’m your dog doing everything you say.”

“You’d be better trained if you were,” Lestrange mutters.

“Tom seems to like him untrained,” Nott says into the palm of his hand, and hasn’t he gotten cheeky as of late?

Tom gives them a look, but continues.

“It does not matter how you participated, only that you did. It is considered old fashioned and traditional and anti-progress, and so follows assumptions about your character,” he says, relishing in twisting the blade.

Harry glares down at his balled fists.

“You are welcome to try again,” Tom all but sings.

His bet has paid more than he hoped. Perhaps any other day, when Dumbledore is not freshly back from an arduous Ministry conference, when the pressures of the war aren’t weighing on him, when he hasn’t just learned that the student he is most suspicious of led a Midnight Mass, when he does not have a thousand and one other needling distractions, perhaps then he might have overcome the hex on Poor Harry, and probably would have helped him upon request.

As it is, it’s a wonder Dumbledore even noticed Harry standing in front of him at all.

“Miss Dodge, will you start us on our journey through organic transfiguration by discussing our assigned reading?”

She beings, stumbling her way through Thales’ water principle of matter, because Dumbledore believes children learn better when they participate in their own lectures.

One of the Seven Sages of Greece, Thales is considered the father of the holy sciences, as he was the first to apply reason to explaining matter, rather than attributing it to the gods. Thales' hypothesis that the originating principle of nature and the nature of matter was a single material substance: water.

“The nourishment of all things is moist, and even the hot is created from the wet and lives by it."

With his own eyes, he witnessed the beginnings of a new magic, the transformation of moist substances into air, slime and earth, Transfiguration. So strongly Thales felt of water, he believed the whole universe floated upon a vast ocean.

“Thank you, Roberta, five points to Hufflepuff. But what was the significance of believing all matter originates from water, when the substances around us are so different from one another?” Dumbledore asks when the student has finished her stuttering contribution to the lecture.

“It asserts that transformation is a part of the natural world and that it can be done by man’s own hand,” Nott answers with his hand raised.

“Correct! Five points to Slytherin. It changed the way we perceive the world around us. Take this egg for example,” Dumbledore pulls an egg from his sleeve. “An ordinary chicken’s egg. It seems simple and predictable. We know where the egg came from. We know what it will become: breakfast, perhaps, or another chicken. But after Thales’ origin of matter, an ordinary egg might become a gemstone, or a child’s toy, or a Basilisk!”

Harry takes a sharp breath, something sparking him. Tom grasps at it, but it does not keep.

“The cascading result is that of other philosophers following in Thales’ example; Anaximander and his infinite matter principle, Empadocles and her four elements principle, all the way through to Democritus and Aristotle. Ordinary items become potential for extraordinary results. And what a wonder that is, for us and for magic.”

Tom glances over and finds Lestrange enthralled, seemingly hanging on every word. It is irksome. Has he always been so interested in Transfiguration? Tom could teach him so much more than Dumbledore’s rather twee summation of ancient understanding of magics. He hasn’t mentioned Heraclitus and his experiments with matter deriving from fire, how he explored the differences between an object that burns and an object that becomes the burning, and where those two mate. Nor has he mentioned Aristotle’s explorations with the fifth element, aether; space. Tom could regale Lestrange, with them all, of its particulars if he were so inclined.

“And so today, we will continue our course into intra-organic transfiguration. You will transform this egg into the creature of your choosing, but the challenge is that it must hatch from inside the egg. This will prove your aptitude and resilience in preparation for your NEWTs. Proctors do love a bit of flair as well,” Dumbledore chuckles. “Let us now spend the second portion of our class convening in the library for research. Ah, and I should say, please no Basilisks, or we will all be in quite a bit of trouble.”

Harry huffs out a laugh.

“Is it better to hatch something more anatomically complicated, like a scorpion, or something that doesn’t hatch from an egg at all?” Rosier muses as they gather their class materials. “A fox?”

“I’m going to hatch a manticore,” Lestrange declares, egg held high.

“If you can hatch a fully grown manticore, I’ll eat my wand,” Nott laughs.

“Leave off,” Lestrange grumbles. “Tom, what are you going to do?”

Tom considers. What is the greatest feat he can achieve on this stage? A small one, but a stage all the same. It is important to distinguish himself wherever possible, for his future, for the one visions have promised him. What is the most astonishing animal he can create? A unicorn? A phoenix? The strangest and most bizarre creature Tom knows is Harry himself and—ah, there’s an idea.

“We shall see,” he says, not giving anything away.

Nott rolls his eyes, clearly where he thinks Tom will not see, and as they rise from their places to slowly meander to the library at Dumbledore’s behest, Tom muses:

Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration has five Principal Exceptions for what cannot be transfigured.

In all the universe, Tom supposes he cannot resent that there are five, only five, those things which cannot be conjured, transfigured from the air: Food, dragon’s blood, unicorn’s blood, gold, and human beings. These things may be manipulated, multiplied, or transmutated with, from, or into other materials, but they cannot be created from the air itself.

Tom has tried.

There are several instances of human transmutation and the creation of life outside of the womb.

There are homunculi and automatons, golems, all caricatures of man and life, humans made and not born. They come at a price, as without very high sanction or sacred reason, wizards are likely to be cursed in the process of making them. When Tom is feeling truly exalting of himself, of his power, of his affluence and achievements, he wonders if he himself sprung up not from his mother’s womb those nearly seventeen years ago, but from the earth’s core, unshakable and burning. Born of the celestial spheres and holy metals themselves, the universe his birthright.

He could call the moon mother and claim the earth as his prize—

Harry darts past them, nearly knocking Rosier’s books out of her hands, and weaves through the flow of students leaving the classroom.

“Professor Dumbledore!” he calls

The boy is persistent, isn’t he?

Tom hastens his own steps so that he might hear, and his Knights follow suit.

“I need your help,” Harry tells Dumbledore in a half-jog, struggling to keep up with the man’s long, swift steps.

“Is this about your project, Mr…?”

“Harry. And no, not exactly. I’ve been having a bit of trouble with something lately.”

“Ah, bits of trouble are the spice of life, aren’t they?” Dumbledore says, not slowing his steps at all, not looking down at Harry once.

“Sure, I guess. Could you help me, Professor? I’d like to talk to you more about it, it’s really—”

“At the moment, I am sorry to say that I find myself limited by an abundance of responsibilities, and not so much as an abundance as a bombardment,” Dumbledore sighs. “I highly encourage you to seek out the counsel of your Head of House. Professor Slughorn is nothing if not a friend.”

Harry’s steps trail to a stop, students flowing around him in the corridor and sweeping Professor Dumbledore away in the stream.

He jumps when Tom’s hands land on his shoulders from behind.

“Come along; pick up your broken heart,” he teases.

“I don’t get it…”

What a delight. See? Tom wants to ask him. See his demeanour for yourself now! There is certainly no trace of the man who gazes upon Harry with kind, open affection, the man from his visions. I win, I win.

He is only a dream now.

They reach the library, the quiet flow of hushed conversations drifting naturally from the clusters of students researching their transfiguration project, social groups forming largely along House lines. They are scattered throughout the library at tables and upon chairs and couches, books already stacked high. Dumbledore moves between them, stopping to consult and advise. Tom quickly cuts through them, dragging Harry along.

His Knights will have found a more private place for study.

“Well, well,” Walburga greets them as they round a corner and she, along with Abraxas and Prewett, become visible from their dimly lit alcove of shelves and low-seating chaises. This must be their independent study hour. A small radio sits on their table, and when Tom gets into range of the muffling charm, the sound pops into the air.

…interrupt this broadcast to report that Grindelwald’s forces have been pushed out of Kiev along with the Fourth Panzer Army of Muggle Germany. The occupation began two years ago, and the Germans at last have been forced into retreat by the Soviets. We can expect a rush for the reclaiming of the neighbouring towns and the securing of the nearby rail link that has been critical in supplying and transporting Grindelwald’s campaign of harassment. The Soviet Council of Magi’s Commissars have announced the imminent elimination of all German presence in Kiev by the end of the week. This is an enormous change in tide in the East, and no doubt a—

“Who killed your cat?” Prewett asks when he spies Harry’s dour face.

“That would be Dumbledore,” Rosier laughs, collapsing into a chair. “What you witness before you is perfect rejection.”

“I don’t get it!” Harry repeats in his frustration. “He’s nothing like the Dumbledore I know!”

“Perhaps you don’t actually know him at all,” Abraxas says.

“He looked at me like…”

“Like you were me?” Tom asks silkily. Some appendages must be cut off for the health of the whole, and Dumbledore is definitely one such appendage.

“This is your fault,” Harry hisses. “Maybe if you weren’t going around doing magic that makes you sacrifice people—”

“Oh, darling, we didn’t have to sacrifice anyone for the Samhain festival, we just thought you would make a particularly lovely one,” Walburga laughs.

Harry gapes, and swivels around to look at Tom—for denial, to say she is joking.

Tom can only shrug his shoulders.

“You were the quintessential lamb; why waste the opportunity?”

Harry stands, eyes clenched, hands curled tight. He is thinking about how badly he wants to hit Tom.

Tom brushes past him with a laugh and falls into a chair. Time to sever any lingering sentiment Harry might be harbouring for one Albus Dumbledore.

“Dispel your complex for Dumbledore. You see, he is not ‘the greatest wizard there is.’ He is merely a man, one who judges quickly and well. He was actually the one who came to deliver my Hogwarts letter, did you know? And when he discovered that I could speak to snakes and that I was already powerful enough to use my magic at will, he set my wardrobe and all my possessions inside on fire.”

Harry gapes.

“What? I don’t believe you!”

But Tom is already conjuring up the memory, Dumbledore’s cold face coloured in orange as Tom’s wardrobe goes up in flames.

“It is your disbelief that powers him. Your stubborn faith blinds you to his deception. You may ask him yourself. He disapproved of me from the start. He sensed great power in me, and resented it. Still resents it.”

Dumbledore would stamp out everything we wish to preserve, but no worry, Tom will resist.

Harry mulls this over in sullen silence, and the rest return to their research, dispersing for books and materials.

“You hatched a jaguar from your egg last year, right Walburga?” Rosier asks, clearly aiming for flattery. “I heard it was brilliant.”

“I did. Do well on yours; Dumbledore picks his favourite and awards fifty points.”

“Tom’s will be the best,” Lestrange asserts. “I’ve no doubt.”

“Though Professor Dumbledore still isn’t likely to pick it,” Rosier complains. “He’ll pick one of his precious little Gryffindors. His bias is so much worse this year than last.”

She sets her egg on the table and multiplies it.

“Raynaldus,” Tom calls. “Write to your mother and have her send me an English translation of Sefer Yetzirah.”

“Right away,” Lestrange agrees. He actually sets aside his tome and pulls out his parchment, inkwell and quill. Tom glances at Harry, brows raised. See how a well-trained dog behaves, he thinks.

Harry scowls.

“Looking to achieve unity with the Nameless God?” Walburga asks as Tom steps up to the nearby library index table and begins summoning other materials in the meantime.

“I have an interest in the esoteric. I must, if I am to be the best.”

“Rosier, what are you doing to your eggs?” Nott exclaims with no small measure of disgust.

Tom looks.

Rosier has a row of cracked, botched and half-transfigured egg yolks, spotted with clumps of flesh and fur.

“Trying to transfigure different animals to see which is easiest. But it’s a bit tricky—ever since Samhain, my magic is crazy amplified.”

Indeed, they've all been bursting with magic. Tom can taste it on them.

“You’ve created a mess. Egg whites are everywhere!”

“Are they?” Wablurga asks curiously. She leans over Rosier where she’s seated and studies the smeared puddle of clear slime.

“Hmm.”

“Read anything interesting?” Lestrange asks.

“Apparently I’ll have two children, how fascinating.”

“An heir and a spare,” Abraxas reasons.

“As if the Black line will ever be so diminished,” Walburga laughs. “I’ve so many cousins, preserving the line of inheritance is the least of my worries.”

“Enough of you to form a Quidditch team,” Lestrange snorts and is kicked in the shin by Walburga’s pointed-toe boots for his trouble.

“I have to try again,” Harry mutters. “I’ll make Dumbledore see.”

Tom laughs outright. I don’t think so…

He stands from his seat and stalks toward Harry.

“Trying to run away already?”

I have been so patient, so good. I have neither pressed nor bruised…

Well. Tom recalls Harry’s blue face staring up at him from the forest floor. Maybe he’s bruised Harry a little.

“You tried your way, Harry, now you’ll do as we agreed.”

My turn.

“Now?” Harry asks, alarmed and trying to back away.

Now.

He grabs Harry.

“Take my things back to the Common Room after class,” Tom tells Lestrange, then calls over his shoulder, “and don’t forget to send that letter!”

“What will I tell the Professors if they ask where you are?” Lestrange calls after him. “Tom? Tom!”

—

Water is what is spiritual.

Consider Thales, who believed all matter is derived from water. Who can blame him for this belief? From water springs life itself. Like the frozen edge of the Black Lake, where water bleeds into shore, it is etheric, a portal. Like blood or time, it pours out, in rapturous motion or pools utterly still.

It has worn many faces, Manannan mac Lir, Njord, Sobek, Nu, Neptune, and on and on, bringing the primaeval waters before creation, the dark watery abyss before time began, birth, then life, then death, then afterlife. As the water reflects the face of those who see themselves in it, so the heart of man is open to the eye of the wise man.

Water is a liminal space between here and the ether. The milk of knowledge and clarity that flows from the earth’s breast. The medium through which the sorcerer dives into the cosmic ocean, mingles with his own astral essence. Where he makes contact with his fellow beings and with the forces of the universe whose conversation is the genesis of all creation and all destruction.

Even Muggles know. If there is magic on this Earth, it is in the water.

“Why here?” Harry asks, voice reverberating all around him.

Tom thinks his connection to Harry is rather like a river. Swept away in Harry’s thoughts, a raging river, drowning in the tide of him, water seems the most obvious medium.

The Prefect’s Bath is cool, white marble and vaulted ceilings, warm chandelier light and the gentle aroma of bath oils, salts, and soaps. Anise, clove root, cypress and all manner of mind soothing herbs. The different shades of water swirl together as the bath fills.

“Embarrassed?” Tom asks, already untying the stays on his inner vestment.

Harry’s shoulders are up to his ears, his back pressed to the closed doors and looking moments from flight.

Tom sighs and takes pity on him.

“This is consecrated water. It has soaked under the light of the moon for three days and treated with silver. It is clarifying, healing.”

“But what’s it for? Why do we have to get in—” Harry chokes a bit, “together?”

Harry’s face has become very red, and the portrait of the mermaid mounted on the wall overlooking the Prefect’s bath laughs openly at him. Harry looks around as though he suspects someone will come flying in to ogle at them.

Was he always so shy? That brash boy who yelled Voldemort?

“The water will steady and focus our minds. With the power I’ve received from the Samhain ritual, the waters will allow me to take you through your memories like a guided meditation. A portal into the oceans of your mind.”

“You told me the Samhain ritual was like meditation too, and then you poisoned me!” Harry grumbles. “How do I know you won’t try to drown me?”

Tom smiles.

“No reward is without risk.”

No reward of Tom’s anyhow. And what other choice does he have? None other than Tom can help him, Tom has seen to that.

“Tom, I’m serious!”

Tom does not answer him. He sheds the remainder of his garments and slips into the warm, lustral waters. It envelopes him to his chest, his vision obscured by multicoloured steam. He drifts to the centre of the large pool and extends a hand to Harry. “Come here.”

Harry wars with himself, clearly caught between doing as he’s told and doing as his senses advise him.

“I can’t swim.”

“You are a poor liar. Do you want your memories or no?”

Harry grunts in annoyance and at last shucks off his outer robe until he stands pale and thin in an oversized vestment that hangs closer to a shift than a top, setting his dreadful, wire framed glasses on the tile rim of the large bath.. He drops roughly down into the water and disappears under the surface. It does something odd to Tom; he feels a tug, a lurch as though Harry might disappear into pools of another realm. But no, he breaks the surface a mere moment later.

He turns to Tom, squinting now through the steam, the humidity creeping into his curls and making them more wild. Harry’s undershirt, soaked and clinging to his body, reveals his thin arms, sags down his neck, ever so gauze-like. Tom can see how much thinner he is than he first estimated, pale, how his chest is pink and persuasive. Tom’s eye dallies there.

Their hands touch, and that creeping sensation of another limb or mind settles upon Tom in sharper focus. Harry snatches his hand back immediately, a noise of disapproval in his throat. Tom fights the urge to chase it down.

“Stop that,” Harry says, refusing to look up, rubbing at his own wrist. “I don’t want you in my head.”

Tom breathes deep the herbal miasma and settles his focus on Harry. He feels the not so distant throb of Harry, his adrenaline, dread, curiosity, shame? The pulse of his heart made so small in his hand. He feels the water between them, the cling of his wet shirt on his thighs, the tickle of Harry’s small breaths as they ghost over his face. They are quite close.

He resists no longer and cups Harry’s face in both hands, thumb brushing over Harry’s scar. Harry tries to jerk away in the water, their legs tangling, dancing.

“Why, I already am,” he says.

Something whispers, I always have been.

There is a strange heaviness in his core, a lushness. How his body aches so.

“Relax, breathe deep, let the soothers in the water work. It will mellow your natural resistances and open your third eye.”

“I think my third eye needs glasses, too,” Harry mutters, but does as he’s told, breathing. He is not pulling away anymore.

“Good. Now, how are your memories after Samhain? Have you noticed any differences?”

Harry’s eyes fall closed, seemingly of their own accord. His cheeks are darkening with the heat of the bath.

“Before, it was… Black. Sticky. It felt like dreaming. Everything I tried to hold onto turned to smoke.”

“And now?”

“I know things for certain, but not exactly how or why. I see shapes. Sometimes I hear voices. There’s a lot of you, and it’s actually very annoying. You’re constantly thinking about philosophers you disagree with.”

Tom feels an involuntary smile twitch on his mouth.

“I wouldn’t disagree with so many if they were wrong less often.”

“You’d find something wrong,” Harry retorts.

When did they start smiling at each other?

Tom refocuses himself.

“We’ll start. Don’t resist. It will be like falling asleep.”

At least, that is what the literature says.

“Feel your feet anchored to the basin of the bath. Imagine you are a stone, settled at the bottom. There are many stones in the bath, and they fill the basin until they lie just beneath the surface of the water,” Tom tells him. “You are every stone. They are our bodies, everything physical in our existence. Do you feel it Harry?”

Harry does not speak, but he does say yes.

“But between the stones of our body, there are still gaps, yes? Water flows between them, a quick current. Fill the currents with soft sand, a slow trickling weight that pours into those small gaps. The sands are our astral bodies, gentle and dispersive. Do you see it Harry?”

They see it together with a single eye.

“But even the sand can still allow water to flow between its grains, slow and quiet. That water is our thoughts, the mental in Men. They surround us but cannot overwhelm us; they are kept tame by the sand and stone, understand?”

They do.

They take a deep breath and disappear together under the water.

Look at me.

They open their eyes.

It is not like before, with Legilimency. There is no crushing outpour of storming memories, there is no clash on one against the other, no fight or fury.

They are one body, one mind. They look and see no lustral waters, nor the Prefect’s bath at all. They do not see each other through the waters, face to face, for Other has ceased to exist. They feel the gentle current flow, and they stretch out their arm and grab hold of it.

It surges—but it is only the wind. They are soaring in a bright, endless blue sky, the gentle roar of voices far beneath them. Their arm is outstretched, reaching, searching—they are on a broom, they realise, flying high over the Quidditch pitch, their team weaving below. They see the Snitch, it is within reach, just beyond their fingers. They lurch forward with a victorious shout of their voice—

Joy, pure and undiluted.

The river flows on.

They see faces, a young girl with hair more wild and bushy than theirs. She smiles at them, warm and welcome, scolds them for not doing their assignments, puts her life on the line for them. They see a young boy, red-haired and freckled, sharing much likeness to Ignatius Prewett, passing them scones over a crowded table, clapping them on the back, calling them family. He too gives his life.

There is a haggard man with a roguish smile who hugs them with such fierceness and abandon, it burns and burns.

There is a woman, a mother, with calloused hands and a warm, round face. She calls them dear.

There is Albus Dumbledore, aged, grey, solemn, and who looks at them with gentle love and care, a look so alien.

They see many more faces, many more smiles, odd places—cupboards, cabins, shacks—and many more creatures—Gimms, hippogriffs, thestrals, house elves. But through it all, they are suffused with the inescapable and pungent feeling of affection and love.

They would all die for you.

It is all so consuming and bright, so heavy, they do not know how they can bear it.

With a lurch, their heads break the water’s surface, and they look at one another, blinking. Recognizing self and other, and the water.

Tom and Harry.

They’ve been baptised.

Tom shivers, raw in his soul where it’s suddenly been shorn.

Harry’s wet face is streaked with tears.

“I miss them,” he whispers. “I don’t even know who they are.”

Tom breathes through clenched teeth, head bowed. He clutches tight at Harry’s shoulders as the strangling feeling in his throat eases. He wants it to stop. He wants more. His hands creep along to Harry’s neck where he is slight and thin and so easily breakable.

Harry is not like Tom, no. He has not been alone throughout his life at all. He is not the Will-’o-the-Wisp, a spectre only visiting where others live. He belongs to many—is loved by many. At this thought, Tom’s teeth ache with the want for blood, with the greed for what pours from Harry.

There are those who would say that happiness is found in accepting life moment to moment as it presents itself.

To live a good life, not be controlled by pleasure or pain, to understand the rules of a natural order, to be content… with virtue.

Such a life is sufficient for lesser men, for the Stoic, the Seneca and Epictetus.

But Tom wonders, why suppress desire or pain! Why, when each can be heightened to the point of ecstasy? When he is imbued with magical prohairesis, so divine and potent, why shackle it?

When he would drink from Harry until dry?

And leave nothing left to devour.

Harry can surely feel whatever it is crushing inside Tom at this moment, but Tom cannot name it.

He blinks water from his eyes and smoothes Harry’s hair away from his face, not gently. Drags his thumb slow and firm over Harry’s raised scar.

It seems this form of mind magic does not go gentle at all.

It hurts.

“Tom.”

Tom jerks out of his reverie.

“It’s okay.”

Harry’s hands reach through the water and close on Tom’s wrists.

“You’re lonely.” His mouth quirks to the side. “It’s funny, because you’re always surrounded by people.”

Lonely?

Is that the source of this wanting that cannot be soothed?

How silly a notion.

“Again,” Tom says.

They go under.

It suffocates.

Clings to every sinuous line of the body. It rubs their edges together and against one another, expands them in order to close the distance. Their atoms unspool and make space for communion. They share a body and do not have one. Tom feels he could live here, in dark and sleepless dreams, in this womb. He wonders what would be born out of it. Through the water, he finds Harry and imagines them taking that first breath together. They would be as twins; is that why Tom’s first instinct is to devour?

Is it not natural to meet with his brother’s embryo and swallow it down?

To live is to hunger, and Tom could carry him through aeons in his belly the way the water carries them now.

That is not loneliness, what is merely hunger.

Someone is chasing them. They are running down a long corridor, a heavy black door waiting for them at the end. It looms in the distance, so dark it is a hole, and though they are running, the door never seems to draw any closer. They can feel something sinister just on their tail, pushing their heels along. They must reach that door! The torches cast their shadows long and deep before them and a roaring wind sweeps up from behind.

The torches go out and the ground disappears from under them.

They are in a room, stacked high with shelves lined with neat, glowing glass orbs, their blue light casting a watery shadow everywhere they touch. They breathe hard, searching, searching, searching. Who are they looking for?

They stop, their hand reaching out to an orb that seems to glow more brilliantly, more blue than the rest, but before their fingers can close on that crystal ball, the shelf tips forward—all the shelves tip forward! They can hear a woman cackle, or perhaps it is just the sound of a thousand glass orbs shattering—

They are in a chamber.

It is so quiet, it seems the whole room is a void; a vacuum that may consume them at any moment. Dread rises.

At the centre of the chamber is a raised dais, over which an enormous arch rests, a black, slow-sippling veil draped upon it, a fluttering wisp. Its very image is cold, and the moment they see it, there come the whispers.

They draw them in, their feet pulled by an undertow of ghostly voices, until they are ascending the dais stairs. What are the voices saying? They cannot hear. They must get closer. They press their ear to the veil, where the whispers grow to a shriek, and they say—

They are at the bottom of the Black Lake, at the feet of the submerged statue of Salazar Slytherin.

His placid stone face is a murky green.

Out of the loamy silt on the lake floor, column rise, towering over them. They crane their neck to watch them disappear through the lake surface but—there is no surface.

It is a secret chamber.

NO!

At Slytherin’s feet lies a young girl with blood-red hair.

Tom, STOP.

They are thrashing in the water. Harry is thrashing.

He resists, but Tom latches on, feels bones grind. Doesn’t Harry know he could be ground to dust?

I have been so patient. Show me—

The images come quick now:

A heavy, ornate vault door. Dark tunnels. A basin.

Enemies of the heir beware.

And at last, the boy standing at the centre of it all: himself.

Tom comes face to face with his mirror image. They circle one another, step for step in perfect unison. His twin smiles. Its eyes are red.

Breathe, it says.

Tom’s eyes blink and he is back in the water.

He breaks the surface at the same moment as Harry, heaving for breath.

“You—!” Harry coughs, unable to finish, but shoving at Tom’s chest.

Tom can still see it, how close it was, how real!

The Chamber of Secrets. Here!

Under his nose, all this time.

He takes hold of Harry, ignoring his shouts, his flying fists. He pulls him tight against himself, feels his body twist and kick in the water, but Tom is immovable.

“You almost drowned me!” Harry coughs. “You could have killed me!”

Yes.

“But I didn’t,” he hisses, closer to beast than boy.

Can Harry even begin to appreciate what a marvel it is? Tom could kill him, could kill anyone. He has that power, that capability, and the ring on his own finger to tell it.

Tom is not certain in this moment that he won’t. He wants to hurt Harry, to force his fingers under his ribs and prise them open, he wants to push Harry back under the water and never let him surface. There is an urge to eat, to bite, to destroy. Perhaps Tom never wanted to kill him at all, he only wanted this, the fight. The beading of wet tears clumping on Harry’s dark lashes, the ruddy cheeks, the outrage.

He can feel the core of Harry, the centre that thrums with the same cut of energy that fuels his own super-humanity. The reason eludes him, but the truth remains. They are the same.

Tom has no choice but to succumb.

He lunges, bites Harry’s cheek under his eye, the soft swell of flesh yielding to his quivering jaws.

Harry screams, and there’s the copper of blood in the air, on his tongue. Tom groans, but it is not enough. The fire in his veins is still there, and when he releases Harry’s supple skin from the trap of his teeth, the image of mixed blood and water on his face and the imprint of Tom’s teeth burns into him like the sun. Harry stares at him, stunned, lips trembling, eyes wide awake. Brighter and clearer than they have ever been.

He needs more. More blood, more flesh. He could kill Harry in this moment, he knows, and feel a release of the burning under his skin. It would be so sweet. Harry would struggle, a rabbit caught in the wolf’s mouth.

Harry’s soft fur on his tongue, his heart in his hands.

Tom wants it. He wants it!

He could plunge his fangs into the tender hide of him.

Tom kisses Harry instead.