Embryo

XI

“Get off of me!” Harry screams, tearing himself away and falling back into the water. “What do you think you’re doing?!”

Tom allows it only because his body has been made slow with the sweet flow of ambrosia, that ichor called desire.

Harry stares at him, wild, expectant, and Tom stares back unashamed, unrepentant and breathing hard. He cannot resist licking his front teeth, tasting them for Harry’s blood.

Harry runs, of course he runs!

He splashes through the Prefect’s bath while Tom stares after him, his whole body throbbing. The sight of Harry’s back and thighs shrouded in translucent linen as he pulls himself out of the water has him itching all over again. He even permits Harry one single step toward freedom before he reaches with a hand through the air and an invisible lasso catches on that thin, knobby ankle.

Harry falls to the wet tile with a cry, and Tom advances upon him, starving.

He grasps Harry's ankle with his own hand now, the skin smooth and slippery with water, pulling as Harry kicks and screams. The room is a cacophony of angry splashing and angrier cries.

“I thought you might be better than him, but you’re not!” Harry shouts, and Tom twists Harry’s ankle and drags him closer by it. “You’re already just like him, you’re evil and mad! Don’t touch me!”

Tom laughs and levers himself out of the bath. He crawls over Harry, takes his wrists in hand and pins him to the wet tile. His hair drips down on Harry as he writhes, doing his best to buck Tom off, and Tom cannot resist kissing him again. It is sweeter than the first, Harry’s heat seeping into him in the cold, open air. Their bodies twist with the full weight of gravity and resistance upon them. Harry's tongue is a bold, burning velvet.

“Yes, I am Lord Voldemort,” Tom whispers into Harry’s mouth. “Do not doubt it. I am destined for power the world has yet to see.”

Tom digs his fingers viciously in Harry’s soaked hair, feels his wet curls tangle warm in his fingers, his thumbs stroking over scarred temple. One shade the more, one ray the less; had half impair’d the nameless grace, which waves in every raven tress.

“You are a part of that destiny, Harry.”

“No,” Harry denies, vehement. He twists his mouth away from Tom’s and gets painful pulls on his hair in return. Tom allows it so he can drag his tongue over Harry’s cheek, suck on the bleeding bite mark.

“You are,” he pants.

“I’m not!”

Harry's outrage rings on the bathroom tiles. His hands grip Tom's shoulders, anchoring him just as well as repelling.

“Then explain to me our connection! You want me, you cannot look away from me. I fill your thoughts and dreams alike. When you knew nothing, remembered nothing, you knew my name. Our minds weave together and never part. You are of me. Why else have you come? What other explanation is left?”

“You’re wrong!”

“Then leave. Go back to the realm from which you came. But you cannot. I know you cannot, because your nature is for me, and in me, you are mine. My guide, my light on the path.”

“I’m not your anything!”

“Oh, Harry. Deny me as you like, but I know the truth. How you long for it...”

Tom’s hands slide from Harry’s nape to his waist, and when Tom’s eyes drag downward to follow, he pauses to look at the pale rise of Harry’s bared thighs tangled with his own. His shift has slid upwards toward his lap in the struggle, pulled tight and twisted around him like the silks that drape Grecian statues.

Harry’s fist lands on Tom’s mouth with a jarring thud.

It pops his ears, his gums and jaw snapping together and exploding with a sharp pain. Tom grabs his chin out of instinct, holding the wound, and Harry scrambles out from under him. Tom takes a breath to orient himself.

Then he chases.

They fall into the wall together, Tom using his greater height and weight to crush Harry in, his head landing on the ceramic wall with a crack.

He presses closer until they are flush, sharing breaths. Their bodies slide together, and Harry involuntarily gasps in Tom’s ear.

They are both hard.

“You know who you are now, don’t you?” Tom whispers. His lip stings, split open and heavy from Harry’s strike, but not half so heavy as his groyne.

Harry glares up at him. Bright, bloodied. Tom looks at him and feels the plush texture of his snarling lips, the hard collision of their teeth, fission, fission, fission…

“Let me go,” Harry warns.

Never.

“You are my future.”

—

“I’ll stop you!”

Harry darts in front of Tom, wet footsteps slapping on stone, spectacles firmly back on his face.

He’s panting for breath, chest heaving, arms spread as though to stop Tom’s way down the corridor.

He wears only his soaked vestment still, and what a pair they make, bloodied, standing in a Hogwarts corridor, Tom in nothing but a cloak he’s hastily tied in the front and leaving puddles in his wake.

“Everything you do, every scheme, every twisted plan,” Harry promises, misting the air with the water that still clings to his lips. “I’ll be there, in your way.”

Tom closes his eyes and breathes.

His blood pounds, and it has swept him away from reason.

He has been too hasty.

He draws his wand, and Harry shouts, raising his own.

“I am only drying us,” Tom assures him.

What had he been thinking, storming out of the Prefect Bath like this? But he hadn’t been thinking, not of anything except how teasingly, tantalisingly close he is to having the Chamber of Secrets in his hands.

It's hidden entrance in the girl's lavatory is only steps away and anyone at any moment could turn down the hall and see them in this state. This Harry is different from the one who hadn’t yet stepped into the bath. He has met all manner of Harrys—the transfer student Harrison, the boy with cold feet, the Lamb, the Seeker, the righteous one. This is none and all of them, the Baptised Harry. What will emerge out of him?

Gently, when a hand raised so as not to frighten his prey, Tom waves his wand and the water away.

“You are right,” Tom says, thinking quickly. Calm him; he has followed you thus far; there is something in you he cannot leave alone.

I'll be there, he'd said. Tom intends to make Harry keep that vow.

And this culmination of Harrys, Harry the Baptist, believes in good and that good will prevail. 

He believes there is good to be found everywhere.

Tom will make himself his Messiah.

“I am alone,” he starts.

He breathes, fighting to calm the storm in his veins and hoping those smooth waters reach through the space between them.

“Others are born with—everything. Wealth, family, history, security. I was born without."

Harry’s arms drop minimally.

"Like you, I came into this world having nothing but my name.”

Soften your heart, Harry. Pity me with all of your soul…

“All I have is this legacy, Heir of Slytherin. His wealth is long gone, any political meaning he once held has evaporated. This is the only piece of my family I can claim! I cannot ignore or deny it.”

“I’m not going to fall for this,” Harry says viciously, but he is, he is falling for it. He grabs his head in his free hand. “I just need to think.”

“But it’s different now,” Tom continues, voice almost a whisper. He cups Harry’s cheek, nail just shy of digging into the hot, swelling wound just under the corner of Harry's eye. “Somehow, we’re tied together. I don’t walk alone anymore.”

Harry’s arms drop to his sides. The bright, livid bite on his cheek has yet to stop bleeding, and he has already surrendered. His heart is so young. How is it no one has plucked him yet?

“That’s why I’m here,” Harry says, eyes wide, then continues almost at a whisper, as though he were speaking only to himself. “You haven’t killed anyone yet. Nothing's happened that can't be undone... That’s it, it must be. There’s so much that happens, I remember all this… awful stuff. A horrible future. We can do things different—better, even!”

You haven’t killed anyone yet.

Oh, Harry…

His eyes give it all away. Remnants of a war, too many bodies to count, and the undying spectre responsible for it all. Horrible, yes… but so deliciously powerful.

“Yes…” Tom thinks. “Better… I think you’re right.”

Harry doesn’t realise it, not yet, but with every memory, every vision he hopes to avoid, he delivers to Tom an unspeakable proof: Lord Voldemort’s rise to power. His limitless reach. His immortality.

Tom need not hesitate seizing his destiny. Harry is proof of that.

“We will do it together.”

—

The basin in the girls' lavatory practically glows.

Could Tom really have been here only a short time ago, fishing a Mudblood’s glasses out of one of these toilets after Slughorn’s dinner party? Had he felt nothing, so close to the Chamber?

It seems impossible.

Looking at the basin now, light shining down upon it and making it glow in the din, Tom feels electric. He steps forward, surely one of the most historic steps he will ever take.

A moment of tension. What if it isn’t true? What if you never find—

“Open,” he hisses.

The air shifts, cools, and the basin sinks down into the floor and out of sight. It reveals a passage so velvety black, one could touch it. A rush of damp air greets them with the song of dripping pipes and scurrying mice.

Tom lights the end of his wand and peers into the bottomless slope of the smooth tunnel.

“Voco scalia,” he says, and stair steps carve themselves into the smooth tunnel.

“Come, Harry,” he beckons, voice thick with anticipation and wanting, hand held out to the boy who shivers and frowns beside him. Where has that fighting spirit gone? When Harry swore to always be by Tom's side?  Do not make me ask again, he thinks, teeth showing.

Harry takes his hand.

They descend together into the dark.

It seems not even the ambient light in the lavatory can penetrate into this place, disappearing as the basin rises back up behind them. They are sealed as though in a tomb. Tom’s wand is the only source of light. Down and down the stairs go. The whispers of their breath and step distort down the black mouth of the tunnel.

They could be the only wizards alive, Harry’s small and sweating palm in his, and how would they know?

The tunnel drops into a larger antechamber, disappearing in both directions, a misty, green glow permeating the passage. Rich, green moss grows on the curved stone walls, the air heavy with earthen, watery scents. It reminds Tom of the cave by the seaside he visited once in his youth, that deep, old smell. Harry pulls his hand free, his face strained and tinted green.

He is plagued by the foreboding remnants of a dream.

They walk deeper.

The tunnel bends and ends in a heavy, ornate vault. It is adorned with a pair of entwined snakes, in the shape of a circle. Again, Tom whispers the key, his rite.

“Open.”

The stone serpents' eyes, set with glittering emeralds and which had been totally inert before, blink at him and slither along their tracks on the vault door, a song of stone grinding on stone, until a there is a deep thud of a counterweight turning, and the door booms softly as it parts, each half sliding into the wall to open at last.

They may enter.

The air around them shifts as it is sucked through the vault, and Tom knows that this is the Chamber of Secrets.

Salazar Slytherin has stood in this spot, and every descendent until Corvinus Gaunt.

Now it is Tom.

He alone in all the world is the first to stand before it for over a hundred years.

No, not alone.

A giddiness, a mania sweeps over him.

He steps over the threshold of the vault door and looks upon the hall. It is grand, grander than anything he could have imagined, much more grand that Harry’s own hazy visions could ever hope to convey.

The chamber is so tall, the domed ceiling is made obscure by a delicate, misty fog, lush green moss crawling along the damp stones and filling the space with the chime of droplets, and when his neck cranes back down from looking at this great chamber, his eyes find the grave, wise face of Salazar Slytherin in white stone.

The statue of the great founder’s face stands over thirty metres tall, a massive simulacrum of such fine detail. It is a likeness to the one which rests at the bottom of the Black Lake, but so much the better. So fiersome, so powerful. His hair fans out over the walls, spiralling vines that crawl up great pillars and end in serpent heads.

He laughs, and the barking noise of it bounds around the room. He is here at last.

At last!

A path, lined with serpent heads and water on either side, leads to the base of Slytherin’s statue. Tom takes the last step down on that path, and with a shuddering clinking, the serpent heads open their mouths and water begins to jet out into the pond that surrounds him. An ambient glow brightens the chamber, the fountains glittering with cool light, and Tom turns to Harry, fearsome grin wide on his face.

Harry is feeling frightened.

Tom laughs again, elated, and jumps back up that step and approaches poor Harry.

“It is all thanks to you, Harry, that I am here now.”

“No,” Harry chokes, taking a step back.

Tom looks hard into his eyes, feels the fingers of his mind test then latch onto Harry’s. He sees himself, in double—just like he'd seen in the bath. Each Tom prowls toward Harry, savouring every step. Each Tom smiles at Harry, a pleased, dark smile.

Other than the body on the cold ground, Harry’s vision matches the reality that stands before him.

“Ginny,” Harry chokes.

“It is only you and I, Harry,” Tom says, Parseltongue hissing around the chamber seamlessly. They were made for one another, the serpent’s lair, the serpent’s tongue, and Tom the King.

And Harry.

The stone floor quakes.

A deep, low boom echoes along the chamber walls, and Harry and Tom turn toward Slytherin’s statue together, witness it as its mouth opens wide, and the head of an enormous beast emerges from the dark. Tom cannot look away.

The Basilisk, for it is a Basilisk, slithers out of its lair, scales scraping loudly on the stone floor as she comes nearer and nearer. It is full seconds for Tom to belatedly realise that he is staring into her eyes, beautiful and rancid yellow, and that he has not died.

The Divine Comedy comes to mind. Let all the sands of Libya boast no longer, for though she breeds chelydri and jaculi, phareans, cenchres, and head-tailed amphibenes, she never bred so great a plague of venom, not even if combined with Ethiopia or all the sands that lie by the Red Sea.

“Master…” she says, her hiss like that of a tiger’s deep roar so big is she. They grin in a fang-filled maw at one another, monster to monster.

“Yesss,” Tom relishes, reaching for her. Her cheek, though warm, is covered in blade-like scales that could slice him open and bleed him. They are rough on his palm, dangerous, so thick Tom doubts any magic could penetrate her. Just behind her powerful jaws, down the sides of her neck and into the length of her body, are iridescent proto-feathers, dagger-like and shining.

He rests his forehead on her hide, eyes falling closed. She smells of a deep earth and moss, the sort of damp that never sees the sun.

She rears her head up, towering over him and yet under his complete control. Her mouth opens, tasting the air, smelling him, and Toms sees the hint of retracted fang in glossy, pink gums. Her warm breath gusts over his head, rustling his hair.

Tom lets out a breath in tandem. They are beast to beast, and Tom is now not at all certain that Salazar Slytherin was not brother to basilisk after all.

The possibilities, the possibilities…! The power, the enormity of it.

“Your master has returned,” he tells her.

“Tom—”

Tom and Basilisk hiss as one, jerking to stare at Harry who so dared to speak in this moment.

He is curled behind Tom, head bowed, eyes shut tight, flinching away from them.

Tom coos, closing the distance between them, grabbing Harry’s face in both hands, his thumb pressing into the bite mark under his cheek, teasing. Harry keeps his eyes clenched closed.

“Open your eyes, Harry,” Tom says softly.

“I’ll die,” Harry chokes, shaking his head.

Would he?

Tom looks over his shoulder.

The great basilisk hovers metres over them, her head reared back, eyes steadily trained on them. Meeting her unblinking gaze, the gaze that separates soul from body in an instant, fills him with all at once a feeling of kinship and strangeness. It is fathomless.

Does she see him in Harry? Does she recognize the boy who oscillates between unknown and known as prey? Does she hunger for him as Tom himself hungers? He thinks on the silvery scales that line Harry’s skin and wonders.

“You might,” he concedes, turning away from the strange beast at his back to confront the one in his hands. “Open your eyes.”

Behind his round glasses, Harry’s eyes peek open just a sliver.

His eyes glow the same green as the wild moss around them.

He sees the Basilisk lunging, snapping at Harry, chasing him down like a mouse in the pipes, fighting for his life and for the life of a sweet girl, Ginny… Tom will remember that name.

He sees petrification, of Hogwarts ghost and student alike, the murky vision of their frozen bodies lining the hospital wing, and it all churns up in his blood in a fervour. It would be so easy, how had the last Gaunts who knew the Basilisk resisted using her power to transform Hogwarts? Why hadn’t Cornivus Gaunt commanded the Basilisk to protect the school rather than hide her? Why hadn’t any of Slytherin’s descendents?

Perhaps they were not worthy, a thought whispers. Perhaps this is your destiny alone.

The pieces have aligned so sweetly these months; the Lestranges and Blacks sponsoring him, supporting him through no other feat but his own, the Walpurgis Knights realised and full of so much promise, the rest of Slytherin House falling into his orbit. And Harry… His visions, his memories; a mystery as much as they are a boon. But even his appearance, mysterious as it is, is Tom’s benefit.

Yes, Tom is situated to be the one to restore the Slytherin legacy to its former glory.

He, the last and final heir!

Who could stop him now?

Kill, kill, kill!

“Tom!” Harry shouts.

Tom pants for breath, blinking. His arm is burning—no, the ring. It trembles on his finger.

Harry’s hands are on his shoulders, shaking him. He is frightened still, unsure what Tom will do now, but determined to stop him no matter what he must face.

“You could do all of that,” Harry starts, speaking slow. “Send it off, get someone killed. It would make the legend even bigger.”

Yesss…

“But what cost! Someone innocent dies for no reason, no reason at all—” little Myrtle Warren’s face, crying, pathetic, comes to mind—“and then the whole school closes and Dumbledore is even more suspicious of you forever.”

He stares hard into Tom’s eyes, just glass and space between them, paltry details that evaporate with the way they meet iris to iris. As if they were of one eye.

Have they ever left the bath? Are they still there floating in the waters? Perhaps they circled down the drain and found themselves following the stream down, down to the Basilisk's nest.

Perhaps Tom’s ancestors did not unleash a reign of terror with the Basilisk because they had their own Harrys to melt with.

“We should take it out of the castle.”

Tom feels his eyebrows raise—he’d expected Harry to plead with him, to beg him to keep her locked away, yes, but this.

“Think about it! It can’t live forever down there, and it’s Salazar Slytherin’s monster. She doesn’t belong in old sewers like this, she needs—I don’t know what she needs exactly, but we could figure it out. If you use it at Hogwarts, it’ll be discovered and killed.”

Tom can almost see it, a ruby encrusted sword piercing through her. It is a worryingly vivid picture.

“We can sneak it out, find a place for it to be cared for, and you’ll always have it as a—a proud part of your lineage. We should protect it—her. We could keep anyone from hurting her. It’s better for her that way, for everyone!”

Tom blinks, a slow smile creeping on his face. He sees a girl, lying on the cold tile, pale and still, the red-headed girl in Harry’s dreams and memories.

“Are you trying to manipulate me, Harry?”

He sidles up closer, chest to chest, looking down upon Harry.

“Help her, save her! Slytherin’s monster!” he mimics. “You do not believe you were sent here to help me rescue the Basilisk. You are trying to interfere with my legacy. To change me.”

Tom feels, rather than annoyed, a kind of boyish charm. Maybe it is because he can feel the Basilisk undulating in impatience behind him, not when Salazar Slytherin’s stone eyes stare down upon him, recognizing him, seeing him.

“I’m trying to do what’s right,” Harry argues.

“You are self-righteous,” Tom breathes, coming close to Harry’s ear, then back to graze his nose over Harry’s cheek and drag in the essence there, the soft, mammalian hair, the warmth, through his breath and over the back of his throat. “Moralistic, naive, and very, very simple.”

Tom watches Harry’s jaw flex.

“I know your future,” Harry says through the clench of his teeth. “And it isn’t glory or whatever you imagine.”

“That is where you are wrong, Harry. Because the monster you see in your mind right now at this moment, the one that claws its way back from the brink of death and raises an army of shadows, the one with stark white flesh and red eyes? He is beautiful.”

And he is mine as much as he is already in me.

“But let us not get ahead of ourselves.”

Tom releases Harry and turns back to the Basilisk.

“While the Basilisk is a grand thing in and of herself, she is not the only treasure in the Chamber—in fact, it is what she so faithfully guards and for what the chamber is so aptly named: The Secrets,” Tom says this, jaunting over to the base of Slytherin’s statue. “Come!”

He turns over his shoulder to find Harry covering his eyes again, refusing to look anywhere let alone for secret trapdoors, vaults, or alcoves.

Tom sighs.

“Return to your den,” he hisses at the Basilisk. “I will call for you.”

The Basilisk regards him, her long body gliding along itself before she turns her head and retreats into Slytherin’s mouth.

When the last of her enormous tail disappears into her den, Tom again beckons Harry.

“She is safely tucked away. You may rest easy.”

“As if,” Harry mutters under his breath, but drops his hands and looks around the chamber.

Satisfied, Tom resumes his search.

He watches water drip down Salazar Slytherin’s stone face so far above him. Each drop falls to his feet, bursting with musical plink before landing in a fine mist upon the mossy floor. As though the great legend himself were crying.

There is much to cry about, Tom supposes; the decline of Slytherin’s culture, his way of life, his hopes for the future of his people. Tom can imagine his disappointment that Slytherin’s aspirations have not been realised, that Wizarding Britain has been left to squaller. When Tom had first arrived at Hogwarts, the children of the traditionalists, mostly Slytherins, had been hostile and waspish; to the other students, to the modernised disciplines, to Dippet’s influence over the curriculum and general disregard for the old ways, and particularly, to Tom, who could claim connection to nowhere and no one.

Tom has never forgotten that treatment; the snide persecution, the scoffs of disgust. At worst, a Mudblood, at best, a bastard Halfblood. And now, how they worship him, how they eat from his palm the very same poison they once fed to him. The pleasure it fills him with, especially now that he stands here where few others have stood.

“I think there’s something here, Tom,” Harry says behind him. “It’s some kind of groove, maybe you have to put something inside like a key.”

Tom looks where Harry is knelt at the mouth of Slytherin’s statue, hand to the cold, stone floor. Tom looks up at the face of a great wizard, his own ancestor, and he thinks to himself, of course.

One must bow to receive the fruits of Salazar Slytherin. He wars with himself. It is as much a rite of passage as any other step to claiming the Chamber as his own. Countless of his other ancestors surely knelt to Slytherin in order to do the same. But it is grating.

He glances down at where Harry’s fingers are gliding along two small, oval depressions in the stone.

“Tom?” Harry asks.

Tom breathes.

He turns his back to Slytherin’s altar, and kneels in front of Harry, covering his fingers with his own on the engraved patterns in the stones at their feet. He taps the tip of his wand and whispers “Scurgify.”

The moss and grime crawls away to reveal a crisp pair of oval-shaped indentations, tied together in a Celtic Solomon’s knot.

“Simul sumus Oceanum?” Harry reads the passage inscribed in stone above the knot.

Tom studies the edges of the depression, his eyes falling shut.

In his search for his lineage, and subsequent discovery of it, Tom has spent many nights pouring over the histories of Slytherin inheritances. There are many lost to time and poor wealth management. The Gaunts all but squandered the ancestral wealth, and Tom knows to expect very little in the way of patrimony and heirlooms from them on the day of his majority. The Slytherin land and estate are long divided, sold in parcels centuries ago. The vaults in Gringotts have likely met a similar fate, divided among descendants, lost, and liquidated.

However, there are a few items of note which are, with great effort, potentially recoverable.

There is the Gaunt ring, an heirloom actually originating from the Peverell line when they married into the Slytherin line long ago. The Peverells were experimentalists, crafters, and were much to be admired. The stone set in the ring is a curious, deep black gem that seems to swallow up light as much as it gleams in it. It is of some debate whether the strange grooves carved into the face of the stone were placed by the original Peverell or added much later by a descendant. Tom of course has secured the ring already.

Since it has become a Horcrux, in a certain light, it appears to breathe, to beat with a pulse. Tom can sometimes catch a glimpse of himself inside the stone, a reflection maybe, or a hint at what lies within it.

Being from the Peverells, Slytherin would not have used the ring as a key to enter his vault.

No, he thinks, still feeling along the two grooves. There is only one other heirloom of which he is aware that would fit this place, and only one that ever came as a pair.

Slytherin’s locket. And the matching locket he gifted to his wife.

Simul sumus Oceanum.

Together we are an ocean.

Tom stands, walking with brisk, sharp steps away from the statue and back again, thinking.

“Do you know what it is?” Harry asks.

“I do,” Tom answers.

“But you don’t have it, do you? What is it? Where is it?”

That is the question, isn’t it?

One locket Salazar Slytherin wore and died wearing. It lies supposedly in repose in his grave.

But the other?

There is only rumour, speculation.

Slytherin’s wife wore the locket the whole of her life and passed it down, daughter to daughter. Theoretically, that should include Merope Gaunt, but it is not certain... Tom had once spent some time searching for the locket’s path, but he has not continued since acquiring the Gaunt ring from Morfin. It is likely to have been long sold off to some grimy peddler like all the rest of the former Slytherin wealth or it is in some smug collector’s vault gathering dust. It may not even be in the country!

Caracticus Burke of Borgin and Burke comes to mind, that odious creature, though he is merely one of many dubious collectors in all of England. If Merope had at one point had possession of the locket, poor and desperate, it isn’t altogether impossible that it would have passed through there… But without due reason, Burke will not divulge to Tom who may have purchased it. A dead end.

Surely someone in Tom’s sphere has influence, leverage…

Thadeus Nott, son of a manufacturer, Tom thinks. Thadeus Nott, for whom Tom is going to arrange to extrajudicially kill Nott, Sr. Yes, that could do. And if the locket indeed did not pass through the shop, Tom will search the next. And the next, and the next, and at every seedy little loan operation between Little Hangleton and Wool’s Orphanage if need be.

Tom kneels, touches the stone recesses where the two keys, the Slytherin lockets, must be placed. Have the lockets truly never been reunited since the day of Slytherin’s burial? A thousand years gone, twin souls kept apart. One, hoarded greedily by the lowest of the Gaunts until it was lost, and the other lying in repose with Slytherin himself.

A tragic love tale.

No matter.

Tom resolves himself, stands. He will retrieve both lockets, and soon.

And then he will devour Slytherin’s secrets, the school, and the world.

Tom retrieves a blank scroll from his bag, presses it to the wet stone over the locket-shaped keyholes and murmurs a spell. The exact dimensions and shape of the locket bleed into place on the parchment. He cannot go search for the lockets for another month at the soonest, not while school is still in session, but he can experiment on the locking mechanism.

Tom laughs.

There is much work to be done.

—

They leave the chamber together—Tom has been absent from the school for far too long.

He raps on Professor Slughorn’s office door with his knuckle.

“Hello, Professor,” he calls.

“Tom!” Slughorn stands from his desk. “There you are. Seems like half the school has been asking for you.”

The burden of excellence, Slughorn so affectionately calls it. It is not a small price to pay, and Tom pays in privacy, time, and solitude. He is always in demand, and everyone notices when he is gone.

“I apologise,” Tom bows his head a little. “I should have provided prior notice, but something came up unexpectedly. I was helping the transfer student with a… sensitive but urgent issue.”

“Transfer student?” Slughorn asks, then sees Harry stood slightly behind him, head dipped in an attempt to hide the raging bite under his eye. “Oh! Mr. Harrington, how could I forget?”

“Right,” Tom says through his teeth. “Mr. Harrington.”

“Well, an emergency is an emergency. You would never miss your classes without a damned good reason, so no harm done.”

“I take my duties very seriously.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less!”

Slughorn smiles at him and Tom stands there, waiting.

“Ah, a note pardoning my absence..?” Tom prompts.

Slughorn flushes and sits himself down at his desk again.

“Right, right!”

He scribbles on a piece of parchment, stamps it with the Head of House seal, and passes it to Tom.

Tom glances down at it.

Excusing Tom M. Riddle and Mr. Harold from class, November 8th

“Wonderful. Thank you, Professor.”

“I suggest you run to the Great Hall, now. Dinner will be starting soon, and I’m sure your friends are desperate to see you!”

Tom bows his head one last time and leaves, note in hand.

“Everyone really just does whatever you say, don’t they,” Harry mutters as they walk to the Great Hall.

“To be in my favour is a pleasure,” Tom gloats as they walk down the long tables. “And what is pleasurable is morally good.”

“That’s stupid. As if you know what’s moral,” Harry scoffs.

“Tom Riddle, espousing Naturalistic Ethics?” Walburga calls from her seat with a laugh. “George Moore is rolling in his grave.”

“George Moore is alive,” Abraxas snaps.

“He may be alive but his Principia Ethica will bore you to death,” Rosier sniffs.

“Cordillia, dead by reading. What a shock,” Nott says.

“Perhaps if Moore had not spent twenty odd pages waffling on about how good must be defined but can’t be defined, I might have agreed with him,” Tom says, taking his seat across from him. “I am a Hedonistic Ethicist when it suits me, just as a Hedonist ought.”

“Doesn’t surprise me you need a book to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong,” Harry says beside him, dry.

“Good Lord!” Prewett gapes at Harry’s face.

“What’s happened to you?” Nott gasps. “Your face…”

Harry’s hand touches the raw bite mark on his cheek with a grimace.

“Apparently I got in a fight with an ethics expert.”

Their peers stare wide-eyed at the sight of him, eyes darting from him to Tom. Their eyes catch on Tom’s swollen lip.

Prewett whistles.

“You should get some poultice on that, mate.”

“Pray tell, Riddle, what are you teaching Harry that requires your teeth?” Abraxas asks.

Tom smiles to show off those very teeth.

“You two have been together all day then,” Lestrange interrupts, not all that concerned with Harry’s obvious injury and more interested in Tom’s whereabouts.

“I don’t think I’ll be needing any of your lessons, anymore,” Harry declares brightly. “I think we’ve both gotten everything we need out of them.”

Tom is badly tempted to go for the bite on Harry’s cheek again—it has only just scabbed—to open it, then open it again in a few days. And again and again after. He wishes to mark or maim or mangle; which first, he isn’t sure.

Harry stares at him wide-eyed, appalled at the direction of his thoughts.

“If that’s your souvenir from Riddle’s teachings, I don’t blame you, mate.”

“Suffering is a virtue, and what is virtuous is good,” Tom replies, unable to stop his smile.

Laughter erupts at the table, all except Harry, who crosses his arms over his chest.

“A regular Aristotle in our midst!” Prewett chuckles, wiping a false tear from his eye.

“Never has the discipline been so bastardised,” Walburga sighs. “Riddle, you have a gift.”

“I’m hardly the first. Knowledge requires truth. If there is no moral truth, there can be no moral knowledge. Thus moral values are purely chimerical.”

“You’re not a hedonist, you’re a Moral Skeptic,” Nott says.

Such is the nature of ethics as a study. Any despot, dictator, or king—if indeed, there is a difference—have all manipulated and wielded this study alongside the instrument of tyranny.

Tom has fastidiously studied this instrument.

“True enough, though I despise metaethics,” Tom relents. “There is no moral knowledge. There is no quantifiable, predictable, measurable good. We are never justified in believing that moral claims are true as there is no way to know morality. What is moral is what is convenient in context to a given time and place.”

“We’re back to Aristotle,” Rosier complains. “Don’t become a Great Thinker, Tom, we’ll be hearing your name for a thousand years.”

Longer, if it’s up to Tom.

Food appears on the table and they help themselves to the feast.

“That’s ridiculous,” Harry disagrees. “You’re pretending you don’t get basic morality? You talk all day long about how bad Grindelwald is, but you don’t believe in good or bad?”

“'Good or bad for me' is different from 'universal, systemic good or bad',” Tom explains.

“Different from 'bad for Eastern Europe,' too,” Abraxas says. “Very bad in this case. Grindelwald’s forces will be fleeing west, with them being booted from Kiev. Into Poland.”

“They’ll have to cross through the Soviet controlled regions first,” Walburga replies.

“Then perhaps Romania. Grindelwald has more connections there, after all.”

Romania.

Harry’s mind lights up.

“Romania!” he exclaims. “Tom, that’s it!”

“What are you on about?” Rosier asks.

Harry seems to realise there are many eyes on him, and he grabs Tom’s sleeve to pull him close.

“Romania has a place for dragons, right?” Harry whispers.

“Do they?” Tom asks.

He honestly hasn’t a single clue.

“Well, if you needed to, if you had a dragon, you could arrange to have it sent there by dragon handlers.”

“What are you whispering?” Lestrange demands from Tom’s other side.

“Yeah, no one likes a whisperer,” Prewett heckles.

Harry huffs, looking at Tom meaningfully.

“Hypothetically, you might find out there’s a dragon somewhere in the school, perhaps in the pipes, and you’d need to get it out before it kills anyone, and take it somewhere safe and sound. Right?”

“You’re serious,” Tom murmurs.

It’s an interesting idea, but what does Tom have to gain from it? A Basilisk isn't much use if it's thousands of miles away in Romania of all places.

“So many secrets,” Walburga laments.

“Speaking of secrets,” Prewett mutters, leaning across the table at Tom. “When will a particular group of Knights of a particular Saint Walpurgis be meeting? Thad promised to tell me everything about you-know-what after Samhain but he’s been locked tighter than a Gringotts vault about it.”

Nott shrugs apologetically.

“Soon,” Tom says, and no more.

In truth, he is still considering where to meet. Without a dedicated gathering place, one would ideally change the location for meetings every time he calls on the Knights. They could meet in Hogsmeade, in the dungeons, in any innumerable unused classrooms. Tom even considered the Chamber of Secrets as it has the most space and the most secrecy. However, each of these locations pose a different risk for exposure.

He needs somewhere secret and secure, so a classroom or dungeon chamber will not satisfy. Somewhere accessible and not suspicious at all times, and so Hogsmeade will not do. And the Chamber of Secrets requires Parseltongue to enter, meaning the others cannot access it without Tom. And on top of that, the entrance is located in a highly conspicuous place.

“Why don’t you just use the Room of Requirement?” Harry asks, quietly.

The what?

Harry leans closer.

“The place you kept me locked up in. Haven't forgotten about that, by that way.”

“Slytherin’s Hidden Room?” Tom asks.

But that requires Parseltongue to enter too.

“It’s not—” Harry glances at the very interested listeners. “Look, I’ll show you.”

Harry stands, pulling on Tom’s arm.

“Leaving already?” Abraxas asks, eyebrows high.

Tom has already stood before he’s realised it.

“We’ll be back before dinner is over,” Tom assuages them.

“I’m seeing sides of Tom I’ve never seen before,” Nott says as both Tom and Harry rush down the tables.

“That’s what happens to a man when he’s got a new amante,” Prewett all but sings.

“Aman—” Lestrange chokes on his drink. “You’re not suggesting… Tom isn’t interested in that sort of thing!”

Their laughter rings out over the Great Hall.

—

Tom watches Harry pace in front of the blank wall on the seventh floor.

“You don’t need Parseltongue to get in,” Harry is saying, eyes closed as he walks back and forth. “And it’s not Slytherin’s room.”

On the third pass, a door melts out of the stone wall, exactly where it always has—but it is different from the door Tom expects, and Harry opens it with ease, without so much as a whisper.

Tom follows him inside.

“The Room of Requirement,” Harry says, sweeping his arm to present it to him.

The room is large, larger than Tom is used to, cosy, and full of mismatch furniture and patchwork pillows. On the walls hang red and gold tapestries and a warm, large hearth burns happily away. Above their heads, floating candelabras bob gently in the air, making the whole room glow, and in the centre of the sofas, there is a table of Wizard’s Chess.

“...The Gryffindor Common Room?” Tom asks.

“No. Well, kind of,” Harry answers. “It’s more like a close copy, not the real place. Look, the Room of Requirement gives you what you need. I asked for a meeting place. You asked for Slytherin’s secret room apparently.”

Tom takes this in, at a loss. He is… annoyed.

The castle is his, its secrets are his.

Yet here Harry is again, one step ahead.

“I propose a deal,” Harry demands. “I show you the Room of Requirement for your weird club and their meetings. And you recruit your club to help me get the Basilisk out of the castle.”

Tom considers this.

“You’re at a disadvantage. You should have bartered before showing me the room.”

“Consider it an act of good faith?”

Ah, but Tom has never been a man of faith.

Harry huffs, turning his back on Tom and moving one of the white pieces on the chess board.

“Whatever,” he says. “If you don’t help me, I’ll just get Dumbledore to.”

Rage drops into Tom’s blood so quickly his vision bleeds red and his hands close on Harry’s vulnerable back like talons. Harry shouts and thrashes.

“See, now you have made a mistake, Harry. You will not speak to Dumbledore, you will not acknowledge him, or the consequences for you will be dire.”

Tom even enjoys imagining it, keeping Harry in a dark, unforgiving, hide-away place for as long as he likes. Slytherin’s pet and Tom’s locked in the Chamber of Secrets. Harry flinches away from him, likely sensing the violence.

“You can’t order me around like that, Tom. I’m not one of your Death Eaters!”

Death...eater?

Once again Tom breathes, searching for a calm that he does not possess. Never has he so frequently had to plumb to such depths with breathing alone.

“Harry, consider this carefully. I am the only one who sees you, who remembers you. You are not of this realm, and without my help you are entirely stranded. Now, remember who I am. What you yourself have said of me and of which I am capable.”

Tom caresses Harry’s cheek where it’s mottled luscious red and livid purple.

“I do not go gentle. Considering all of this, will you not obey?”

Harry appears to steel himself.

“I won’t go to Dumbledore about the Basilisk if you help me get it out of the castle and somewhere it can’t hurt anyone.”

...

Stubborn boy!

Tom could make Harry do as he pleases, like he would with the children at the orphanage, like he would with the matrons and Walburga’s parents and Headmaster Dippet and anyone—anyone!—he can have a moment alone with to influence. And yet, Harry persists. Does he not realise the danger he is in? Does he not care?

“No,” Tom says, finally.

He drops his hands from Harry’s shoulders and moves away, but Harry catches him by the tie.

Tom looks down his nose at him, and Harry glares back.

“You’re the only one who knows me? I have a whole universe of people out there somewhere, and they love me, they would die for me. I’m the only one who knows you! I’m the only one who will ever truly know you. Where is your universe? You’ll never get it on your own. I can give it to you if you just—stop being an evil wanker for five seconds!”

Ah, Harry…

Tom smiles, the kind that foretells violence.

“How convenient an arrangement,” he sighs, stepping back up to the wall so that Harry is trapped between. “You, allowed to indulge in my pretty face and better still, pretend you do not want it. And me, the starving thrall permitted to drink from you so long as I am content to barter for it. Is that what you envision, Harry?”

“You do what I want, I do what you want,” Harry says, hoarse.

The boy only looks up at him in hard silence now.

“You are mistaken. I do not need a, how did you put it?” Tom laughs. “A universe of love. I do not need to barter for my future or for anything. Everything we’ve agreed on thus far we have done so on my terms. What I do with the Knights of Walpurgis is up to me. What I do with the Basilisk is up to me. Your longing for home, for safety, for affection? I have no need for it, and if I do, I can just as well take it…”

Harry frowns.

“You can’t take affection.”

A barrage of those familiar faces flow through their minds. The girl lying on the cold tile, red hair fanned out like a burning crown, and a whole family of red-heads, a freckled boy with dirt on his nose and a lanky arm always free to hug, a girl with wild hair and warm, brown eyes and uncompromising loyalty, a rugged, worn man who looks as though he could be Alphard Black, tired but enduring. And more faces, more love. Devotion pales in comparison. They flash like the bright, scorching blots of bombs on the horizon. These bright spots in Harry’s universe, soft like leather, suffocating like fire, steeping Tom’s bones in a stomach-lurching ambrosia. It overwhelms, it pours out of Tom—how does Harry breathe?

And Dumbledore, Albus Dumbledore, for it always comes back to him, wisened and white-haired, his face gentle and full of wonder, eyes welling up, and… feathery, fatherly love. Tom has never seen Dumbledore cry before…

“Do you understand, Tom? It’s only given.”