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Chapter Text

The circle burned.

Harry Potter knelt in the center of it, the stone floor slick with blood that wasn’t his. He could smell it — copper and smoke, incense that scorched the back of his throat. The chamber around him thrummed with power. Ancient magic, ugly and binding, like shackles forged out of pure fire.

And above it all, Albus Dumbledore’s voice carried. Calm. Soothing. A liar’s voice.

“It is our only chance,” the old man said, his blue eyes gleaming with false wisdom. “Harry is the Chosen One. If anyone can undo Voldemort’s darkness, it is him.”

Harry didn’t answer. His mouth was dry, his tongue swollen from whatever powder they had forced down his throat. His arms trembled where glowing cords of magic pinned them to his sides. The rune-carved stones pressed into his knees. He wanted to shout, to tell them all to fuck themselves. But he couldn’t.

They never asked him. They never did.

Not when they shoved him back into the Dursleys’ cupboard.
Not when they ordered him into the Triwizard maze like a lamb for slaughter.
Not now, when they decided his purpose was to travel through time and murder a boy he had never even met.

Tom Riddle. Eleven years old. Vulnerable. Kill him before he ever became Voldemort.

Harry’s jaw locked so hard it hurt. He hated them — Dumbledore most of all.

The chanting swelled. Wizards and witches in gray cloaks raised their hands, their voices humming with old syllables that felt wrong in Harry’s ears. Something in the air ripped open. A pull, like claws dragging through his veins.

And then—pain.

It started in his chest, sharp as knives. Then it spread, molten metal forced through his blood. Harry arched back with a ragged scream as the magic tore at him. His skin split in glowing lines, his scar burned like a brand, and somewhere inside his skull something snapped.

And he saw.

Flashes—memories not his, or maybe his all along. Dumbledore’s wand pressing against his forehead as a baby. Whispered compulsions stitched into his mind like threads of silk: Trust me. Obey me. Protect them. Sacrifice yourself.

Harry’s scream tore the ritual apart.

“YOU FUCKING BASTARD!” he roared. His voice echoed, shaking the stones. But the ritual didn’t stop. The magic ripped deeper.

His glasses shattered on his face as his eyes burned. Vision snapped into brutal clarity — every crack in the stone, every bead of sweat on the witches’ brows, every wrinkle of Dumbledore’s hand.

Bones stretched. His spine popped. His muscles trembled as if molten power poured into them. He could feel his body rearranging, burning away the scrawny boy they had shaped and forging something new. Stronger. Taller. Unbound.

He convulsed. Blood ran from his mouth and hissed where it hit the runes. His nails tore into the floor. And still the magic ripped at him, stripping him bare.

When it ended, Harry lay gasping, the cords burned to ash around his wrists. His skin was slick with blood, but the cuts were already closing. Faint glowing lines — runes, twisted and ugly — traced along his arms and chest. His scar had split open, no longer a neat lightning bolt but a jagged crack that oozed faint light before sealing itself.

He pushed himself to his knees, head spinning.

Dumbledore was watching, staff clenched tight, that same calm look in his eyes. As if Harry had done exactly what he was supposed to. As if this was fine.

Hatred burned hotter than the ritual fire.

The circle flared one last time, and then the world dissolved.

Harry woke choking on mold.

The air was damp, stale, clinging to his lungs. He sat up fast, clutching at the bedframe beneath his hands. The wood was thin, splintered, stinking of rot. Around him, he heard the uneven breathing of children — shallow, tired.

He blinked. His vision was perfect. Crisp, sharp, almost too sharp. The darkness didn’t bother him. Every shadow had texture.

His body felt…different. Longer. His knees bent at a sharper angle, his muscles taut under skin. His hands looked older, steadier. His chest rose and fell in smooth rhythm, no ache in his ribs for the first time in years. He touched his face — no glasses. His scar throbbed, but faintly.

And his arms. He held them up. The faint lines burned into his flesh were still there, like tattoos drawn in light, curling with serpentine precision. Runes, though he didn’t recognize them. Old. Powerful. His.

He exhaled. The stink of mildew caught in his throat. He gagged, then forced the nausea down.

The room was long and narrow, iron bedframes lined in rows. Sheets ragged, pillows flat as paper. Rats scuttled along the walls. The children in the other beds were thin shapes under gray blankets, asleep or pretending to be.

And across from him, propped on one elbow, staring at him with unblinking black eyes
-
Tom Riddle.

Even at eleven, he looked sharp enough to cut. Cheekbones too hollow, mouth pressed in suspicion, eyes gleaming like knives in the gloom.

For a long time, neither of them spoke. Tom’s gaze slid over him, measuring, dissecting. Not fear. Not curiosity. Hunger.

Harry should have hated him. Should have leapt across the space, grabbed that thin throat, and snapped it. Should have ended everything before it began.

But he didn’t.

Because he saw himself.

Another boy unloved. Another soul forged by loneliness into something hard and sharp. Another child the world had already marked as a weapon.

Harry smiled. Slow. Cold.

“I can teach you,” he whispered into the dark.

Tom stiffened. “Teach me what?” His voice was soft, careful, but the hunger bled through.

Harry leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Magic. Power. Everything they’ll never give you.”

For a second, Tom’s mask cracked. His eyes widened, not in fear, not suspicion, but something else. Something dangerous.

Worship.

The boy lay back down slowly, still staring. Harry stretched out on the thin mattress, pulse steadying. He had made his choice.

He wasn’t here to save Dumbledore.
Wasn’t here to save the wizarding world.
Wasn’t here to save anyone.

He was here to save himself.

And maybe—just maybe—shape a monster into something that belonged only to him.

The night dragged on, thick and damp. Harry didn’t sleep. He lay in the dark, cataloguing every inch of his body. The new length of his arms. The way his chest didn’t hitch when he breathed. The way magic curled hot in his veins, eager, restless, like a caged beast.

He flexed his hand. Sparks of light crackled over his knuckles, faint and red. Not wand sparks. Something older, more primal.

A rat scurried too close to his bedframe. Harry twitched his fingers, and the creature spasmed — bones snapping inside its body with wet pops. It hit the floor, a crumpled mess.

A hiss of breath. Not from him.

Harry glanced across. Tom was sitting up now, eyes wide and black in the dark, watching.

Harry tilted his head. “Curious?”

Tom didn’t answer. His stare was feverish.

Harry raised his palm. The rat’s broken body lifted from the floor, twitching. Another flick of his fingers, and it twisted in midair, blood dripping from its mouth, eyes bulging. Harry let it dangle for a moment, then clenched his fist.

The rat exploded in a wet crunch.

Blood spattered the floorboards. The carcass dropped, smoking faintly.

The silence that followed was thick.

Tom’s lips parted, a sharp intake of breath. He whispered, almost reverent: “How?”

Harry smiled again, sharp and slow. “Because I’m not bound like they are. Because no one owns me anymore.”

And Tom, for the first time, didn’t look at him like another orphan. He looked at him like something more.

Something to follow.

Something to worship.
-
The next morning, Harry was already awake before the others stirred.

The dormitory was gray with weak light. Water stains streaked the ceiling. The smell of damp wood and piss hung heavy.

Harry sat on the edge of the thin mattress, elbows braced on his knees, and flexed his hands. Magic whispered along his veins, eager and violent. He could feel it now, like a beast pacing just under his skin. No wand needed. No words. Just intent and cruelty.

He looked across the room. Tom Riddle lay on his side, eyes closed, but Harry could tell he wasn’t sleeping. The boy’s breathing was too measured, too deliberate. Pretending. Waiting.

Harry smirked. Clever little bastard.

The caretaker’s bell clanged downstairs, rattling the pipes. Children groaned and shuffled up, dragging their feet. Harry rose fluidly, his movements quieter, sharper than before. His body obeyed without ache, without hesitation.

He joined the slow march down to the dining hall.

The orphanage was worse in daylight. Walls streaked with mildew, windows smeared with grime. A sour chill clung to the corridors. The other children — thin, hollow-eyed, wary — barely looked at him. He could feel their avoidance already, the way they gave him space.

At the end of the table, a group of older boys laughed too loud. Cruel eyes, dirty knuckles. The kind who thrived on breaking smaller kids. Harry remembered their type too well. Dudley’s gang had worn the same sneers.

Tom slid onto the bench across from Harry, posture too straight, chin lifted in challenge to the world. The others kept their distance from him too.

They ate in silence. Watery porridge, stale bread. Harry forced it down, though his body craved something richer, heavier. His magic itched like hunger.

The laughter at the end of the table grew sharper. One of the older boys — thick-necked, freckles smeared across his face — glanced down at Tom.

“Well, look at this. Little freak’s got a new friend,” he jeered. “Didn’t know anyone was dumb enough to sit with the devil child.”

The other boys cackled.

Harry didn’t look up. He kept spooning porridge into his mouth, slow, steady.

Tom’s eyes flickered, just for a second. Rage coiled under his skin. He said nothing, jaw tight.

The boy sneered. “What’s the matter, Riddle? Don’t your fancy tricks work on him? Or maybe you’ve already bent over for your new boyfriend—”

The bowl shattered.

Harry hadn’t moved much — just flicked two fingers under the table. But the porridge bowl in front of the freckled boy exploded in a spray of ceramic and sludge. Shards sliced across his cheek, drawing red lines.

The hall went silent.

The boy lurched up, cursing. “What the fuck—”

Harry raised his head then. Slowly. His eyes burned, a green too bright, too sharp.

“Sit down,” he said.

The boy froze. Harry’s voice wasn’t loud, but it thrummed with something beneath it, something old and commanding. The hairs on every child’s arms lifted.

The boy’s mouth worked soundlessly. Then his knees bent. He dropped back onto the bench with a dull thud.

Harry smiled without warmth. “Good.”

Tom was staring at him now. Not in shock. In hunger.

By afternoon, the whispers had spread. The new boy had done something at breakfast. The big one bled and couldn’t explain how. Children avoided Harry’s path, skittering like mice.

It didn’t stop the older boys. Bullies never stopped because of whispers.

They cornered him in the laundry cellar after chores, where the air was thick with damp and soap rot. Three of them, led by the freckled bastard from breakfast.

“Well, freak,” the leader spat, balling his fists. “You think you’re clever? You think you can scare me with your little tricks?”

Harry leaned against the wall, arms folded. He didn’t bother to hide the smirk. “I don’t think. I know.”

The boy lunged.

Harry moved faster. His hand shot out, palm slamming against the boy’s chest. For an instant, nothing. Then Harry whispered the intent in his mind: break.

The boy’s sternum caved with a sickening crack. He screamed, high and raw. His friends froze, eyes wide.

Harry shoved, and the boy collapsed to the floor, wheezing, clutching his chest. Blood bubbled at his lips.

The other two scrambled back, horror on their faces.

Harry straightened, rolling his shoulders. His pulse was steady, calm. The magic purred under his skin, eager for more.

“You’ve got two choices,” he said softly. “Run now and forget you ever saw me… or stay, and I’ll show you what I can really do.”

One bolted immediately, stumbling up the cellar stairs. The other hesitated a second too long.

Harry snapped his fingers.

The boy’s arm twisted backward with a sharp crack. Bone tore through skin, white and bloody. He shrieked, crumpling to the floor.

Harry crouched down beside him, voice low, intimate. “Pain is a teacher. Remember the lesson.”

Then he stood, leaving them whimpering on the floor.

At the top of the stairs, someone was waiting.

Tom.

He leaned in the shadows, face unreadable. But his eyes… his eyes burned. Not with fear. Not with disgust. With fascination.

“You could’ve just scared them,” Tom said finally. His voice was too calm for an eleven-year-old.

Harry’s smile was sharp. “I don’t do half measures.”

Tom tilted his head. “You broke him. Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

For a long moment, they stared at each other. Tom’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, but he didn’t look away.

Finally, he whispered, “Teach me.”

Harry’s chest thrummed with dark satisfaction.

“Not yet,” he murmured. “First, you learn loyalty. Then, power.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed, calculating. But the spark was there. Hunger and… something else. Devotion, waiting to be fed.

That night, Harry sat on his bed in the dark. The dormitory stank of mildew and sweat. Children snored around them.

He felt Tom’s gaze on him across the room, steady, unblinking. Watching like a shadow.

Harry flexed his fingers, and faint red sparks danced across his palm. The rat bones from the night before still lay in the corner, gnawed by vermin. He let the sparks drift toward them, humming softly. The bones lifted, rattling in the air like puppets.

Tom’s breath hitched.

Harry closed his hand, and the bones crumbled to dust.

He looked up. Tom’s eyes gleamed in the dark, fever-bright.

Harry whispered, just loud enough for him to hear: “All yours, if you follow me.”

Tom didn’t answer. But he didn’t look away. Not once.

The next days blurred into a rhythm of tension and whispers.

Harry moved through the orphanage like a shadow stitched into the walls. Children parted for him in the corridors, too frightened to breathe in his presence. Caretakers muttered about accidents — knives falling, fires sparking in empty rooms — but no one dared confront him.

And always, always, Tom Riddle watched.

On the third evening, Tom cornered him in the abandoned playroom. Dust clung to broken furniture. The air reeked of stale damp.

“You didn’t answer me,” Tom said, voice taut with suppressed fury. “I said teach me.”

Harry leaned against the cracked wall, arms folded. “And I told you. Loyalty first. Power later.”

Tom’s jaw clenched. “I don’t bow to anyone.”

Harry stepped closer, slow, deliberate. He stopped just short of Tom’s space, looming a hair taller, close enough for Tom to feel the heat radiating from his body.

“You already are,” Harry murmured. “You’re standing here, demanding scraps from my hand. You’re watching me when you think I don’t notice. That’s bowing, Riddle. You just haven’t admitted it yet.”

Tom’s cheeks flushed, whether from anger or something else Harry couldn’t tell. His fists trembled at his sides. “You think you’re stronger than me.”

“I know I am.” Harry’s smile was a slash of cruelty. “And I’ll prove it if you push me.”

For a long moment, silence coiled tight between them. Then Tom stepped back, eyes glittering with defiance. “I’ll never be weak.”

Harry chuckled low. “Good. Then you’ll survive what’s coming.”

The test arrived sooner than either expected.

Two days later, the freckled boy with the broken sternum returned with a vengeance. His chest was bound in rough cloth, his steps stiff, but hate twisted his face. He’d gathered six others, desperate to reclaim his pride.

They caught Harry and Tom in the courtyard, the sky swollen with clouds above.

“There he is!” the boy snarled, spittle flying. “The fucking freak. You think you can humiliate me?”

Harry tilted his head, calm as ever. “I don’t think. I did.”

Rage boiled over. The gang surged forward.

Harry didn’t retreat. His magic flared, violent and hungry. The world sharpened to blood and breath.

The first boy swung a length of wood. Harry caught it mid-swing. With a twist of intent, the wood splintered in his hands — and so did the boy’s wrist. Bone burst through skin. The boy’s scream tore across the courtyard.

Another lunged with a stone. Harry thrust out his hand. The stone froze midair, then whipped back into the attacker’s face with brutal force. Skull cracked. Blood sprayed.

The others faltered, terror flashing in their eyes.

Tom stood beside him, frozen. His expression wasn’t fear. It was awe.

Harry smiled, feral and sharp. “Run, if you want to live.”

They scattered like rats, dragging the wounded with them. Only the freckled leader remained, trembling, eyes wide with hate and dread.

Harry stalked toward him, every step deliberate. The boy stumbled back until his shoulders hit the courtyard wall.

“Please,” he gasped. “Don’t—”

Harry pressed his palm to the boy’s chest again. The same place. The same bone.

“Beg louder,” Harry whispered.

The boy sobbed, tears streaking grime. “I’m sorry! Please—”

Harry’s eyes burned. He could feel Tom watching, drinking in every motion. He wanted Tom to see.

With a slow squeeze of his hand, Harry crushed the breath from the boy’s lungs. The chest caved. The body crumpled, lifeless.

Silence fell.

Harry let the corpse drop and turned. Tom was still there, staring. His lips parted, his eyes wide — not with horror, but with something sharper.

“Why?” Tom asked hoarsely. “You could’ve stopped. You could’ve just scared him.”

Harry stepped closer, close enough for Tom to see the blood flecking his knuckles. “Mercy is weakness. Fear lasts longer when it’s written in blood.”

Tom’s throat bobbed. He didn’t look away.

Harry tilted his head. “Does that scare you?”

“No,” Tom whispered. His voice trembled, but not from fear. “It… excites me.”

Harry’s smile was dark satisfaction. “Good. Then you’ll learn well.”

That night, Tom came to him again. Not with demands, but questions. Endless questions.

“How did you break his chest without touching a weapon?”
“Why did the stone obey you?”
“Can I do it too?”

Harry answered none of them directly. Instead, he set terms.

“Loyalty first. Kneel to me, and I’ll give you everything you want.”

Tom bristled. “I don’t kneel.”

Harry’s grin was sharp as knives. “You will.”

The first test of loyalty came with blood.

A rat scurried across the dormitory floor, its tail flicking through dust. Harry caught it with a flick of thought, suspending it midair. Tom’s eyes followed, wide and hungry.

“Kill it,” Harry said.

Tom frowned. “That’s nothing. I’ve done worse.”

“Not with me watching. Do it now. No hesitation.”

The rat squealed as Tom reached out. His hand closed around its tiny body. He hesitated only a second — then snapped its spine with a quick, vicious twist.

The sound echoed in the silence.

Harry’s eyes gleamed. “Good. Again.”

The next rat. And the next. Until the floor was littered with broken vermin.

Tom’s breathing grew shallow, his eyes fever-bright. He was shaking, not from disgust but from exhilaration.

Harry stepped close, towering just slightly over him. He laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder, firm and heavy. “You’re mine now. Say it.”

Tom looked up, chest heaving. For the first time, his defiance wavered.

“I’m yours,” he whispered.

Harry’s grip tightened. “Again.”

“I’m yours.”

Satisfaction flooded Harry’s veins like fire. He leaned down, close to Tom’s ear, and whispered: “And one day, the world will be too.”

Tom shivered, his eyes closing for just a moment, as if savoring the words.

When he opened them again, the worship was there. Barely hidden. Raw and real.

For the first time, Tom Riddle knelt. Not fully, not publicly — but his head dipped, his posture bent. Just for a heartbeat. Just enough.

And Harry knew he had won.

Days turned to weeks, and Wool’s Orphanage shifted beneath the weight of Harry’s presence.

The children no longer whispered. They avoided him entirely, skittering from corridors like vermin. The caretakers muttered prayers under their breath when he passed. Even the air felt heavier, as though the walls themselves knew a predator had taken residence.

And Tom Riddle was always at his side.

Not openly, not yet. But Harry saw the way Tom’s path bent toward him — at meals, in chores, in the hushed hours of night. The way Tom’s sharp words softened when Harry’s gaze turned on him. The way his cruelty, once scattered and unfocused, now sharpened under Harry’s hand.

It wasn’t love. It wasn’t friendship. It was something darker. Devotion forged in blood and power.

One night, the storm broke.

Rain lashed the orphanage, rattling the loose panes. Thunder shook the walls. The children huddled in their beds, wide-eyed.

Harry lay awake, magic simmering under his skin, restless. The storm stirred something in him, pulling at veins, whispering of fire and ruin.

He slipped from his bed, barefoot on the cold floorboards. The dormitory door creaked.

And Tom followed.

They met in the corridor, shadows sliced by lightning through the cracked window. Tom’s face was pale, eyes burning.

“You feel it too,” he whispered.

Harry didn’t answer. He only jerked his chin, and Tom obeyed. Together, they padded down to the cellar.

The air was damp and fetid. Rats scurried. Harry stretched out his hand, and one by one, the vermin froze. Dozens of them, squealing in terror, hung suspended in the air like grotesque ornaments.

Tom’s breath caught.

Harry’s voice was low, resonant. “Blood answers me. Bones answer me. It’s in me. In my blood.”

He turned his gaze on Tom. “You want it?”

Tom nodded, almost frantic.

“Then watch.”

Harry clenched his fist.

The rats exploded. Tiny bodies burst like overripe fruit, spraying the walls with gore. The air reeked of iron and filth.

Tom didn’t flinch. His pupils dilated, his lips parted. Awe rippled through him like a shiver.

Harry stepped closer, flecks of blood dripping down his arm. “It’s mine. All of it. And if you’re mine, it’s yours too.”

Tom swallowed hard, his chest heaving. “How?”

Harry tilted his head. “Kneel.”

Lightning split the sky outside, white fire flooding through the cracked windows. The cellar glowed with it, painting Harry in sharp relief — tall, blood-specked, eyes burning green.

Tom trembled. For a heartbeat, his pride warred with hunger. His jaw clenched, defiance a mask.

Then he dropped.

His knees hit the wet stone floor with a dull slap.

“I’m yours,” Tom whispered. His voice shook, but not from fear. “Only yours.”

The words thrummed in the air like a vow.

Harry smiled, slow and merciless. He reached down, tangled his bloodstained fingers in Tom’s hair, and forced his chin up until their eyes locked.

“Good boy,” Harry murmured.

Something broke open in Tom’s face — pride shattered and remade into something sharper. Worship, raw and unhidden.

The storm outside howled, as if the world itself bore witness to the birth of something terrible.

In the days that followed, Harry’s dominion became absolute. The bullies who had tormented Tom no longer dared breathe in his direction. Children who once mocked him now scrambled to appease him. And behind it all was Harry — silent, watchful, a hand always on the knife’s hilt.

Tom reveled in it, but only because Harry allowed it. When cruelty threatened to spiral, Harry’s voice cut sharper than any blade.

“Not like that. Never waste it.”
“Pain is currency. Spend it wisely.”
“Remember — you’re mine. Your power is mine.”

And Tom obeyed.

Not blindly — never blindly. His ambition still burned, sharp and dangerous. But his path curved toward Harry like a blade drawn to its sheath.

One evening, Harry slipped into the caretaker’s office. The old woman snored in her chair, oblivious.

On the desk lay a stack of records — brittle papers, ink faded with time.

Harry’s eyes scanned the words. His own name. His parents. And something else. A note scrawled in Dumbledore’s hand, hidden at the bottom.

Monitoring required. Bloodline unknown. Potentially unstable.

Harry’s jaw clenched.

Unknown bloodline. Blocked. Hidden. By Dumbledore.

The fury was cold this time, not blazing. A blade, not fire.

He closed the file, slipped it back, and left without a sound.

In the corridor, Tom was waiting, as though he’d known.

“What did you find?” he asked, sharp as ever.

Harry studied him. Lightning flickered again through the windows, illuminating Tom’s pale, eager face.

“Nothing you need yet,” Harry said softly. “But soon.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t push. Instead, he stepped closer, so close their shoulders brushed. “Then show me more. Make me stronger.”

Harry looked down at him — just a smidge taller, enough to force Tom’s chin up. The position was deliberate. Dominant.

He smirked. “Stronger comes later. First, obedience.”

Tom’s lips curved, twisted between resentment and longing. “And if I give it?”

Harry’s hand rose, thumb brushing along Tom’s jaw, mock-gentle. “Then I’ll make you unstoppable.”

The storm passed. But in its wake, something darker lingered in the walls of Wool’s Orphanage.

Children whispered of screams in the cellar, of bloodstains that wouldn’t wash away. Of two boys — one with eyes like poison, the other with shadows in his veins — who walked together, untouchable.

And in the silence of night, Tom knelt at Harry’s feet, devotion blooming where once there had only been hunger.

It was not love. It was not friendship.

It was the beginning of a kingdom.

The days that followed the storm blurred together, stitched with whispers of fear and the slow spread of Harry’s shadow. But the chapter of Wool’s Orphanage was not yet closed.

One morning, the freckled boy’s body was found in the courtyard, stiff and pale. The caretakers wailed, blaming the storm, a fall, God’s judgment. They whispered of sending for the police, but no one came. No one ever came for orphans.

The children knew the truth. They saw the way Harry’s eyes lingered, unrepentant, when the corpse was dragged away. They saw Tom trailing at his side, head tilted just so, as though awaiting orders.

Fear settled into bones. Wool’s was no longer an orphanage. It was a kingdom, and Harry sat its dark throne.

Harry tested Tom ruthlessly.

A stolen knife pressed into his hand in the dead of night.
“Cut him,” Harry whispered, nodding to a sleeping bully. “Not enough to kill. Enough to make him remember who owns his flesh.”

Tom’s hand trembled, but he obeyed. The blade sliced skin, and blood welled in shallow crimson lines. The boy whimpered in his sleep. Tom’s pupils dilated.

Another night, Harry forced him to drown rats in the washtub, holding them under until their bodies stopped twitching. Tom’s hands were pale with strain, but he did not falter.

Each task stripped more of his hesitation, hardened him into something sharper. Each success won him a touch, a word, a fragment of praise.

Harry rationed approval like blood to a starving vampire. Enough to keep Tom desperate. Never enough to sate him.

And Tom drank every drop.

One night, Harry woke to find Tom at his bedside.

The boy knelt in silence, head bowed. His small hands rested on his thighs, trembling faintly.

Harry sat up slowly, watching. “What are you doing?”

Tom’s voice was hoarse. “I dreamt… you left. I woke, and I couldn’t—” His words broke, sharp with panic he couldn’t mask. “I need to see you.”

Harry studied him. The vulnerability was real, raw, something Tom would have gutted another child for seeing. Yet here it was, offered to Harry alone.

Harry leaned forward, fingers tangling in Tom’s dark hair, tugging until his head tilted back and his throat was bared.

“You’re mine,” Harry said softly. “Even in dreams. Especially there.”

Tom shuddered, his breath hitching. “Yours,” he whispered. “Only yours.”

Satisfaction curled through Harry like fire. He pressed his thumb under Tom’s jaw, feeling the pulse hammer against it. “Good boy.”

Tom’s eyes fluttered closed, and for once, the sharp mask slipped entirely. Pure devotion, naked and unashamed, filled its place.

The caretakers noticed the change.

One by one, their spines bowed under the silent pressure. Harry didn’t need to strike them down. It was enough to let his presence loom, his smile linger too long. Keys rattled when they passed him. Doors locked tighter. But nothing stopped him.

Wool’s Orphanage belonged to him now.

And Tom — Tom knelt every night, willingly, hungrily, carving devotion into ritual. His cruelty sharpened at Harry’s command, his rage tempered by Harry’s hand. No longer a wild blade. Now a weapon.

Their bond was not gentle. It was not soft. It was iron fused with blood, a promise written in the marrow of their bones.

The storm had passed, but its echo lingered. Lightning lived still in Harry’s veins, thunder in his voice. And when he stood over Tom — taller now, glasses gone, power unchained — the world felt smaller, trembling at the edge of something vast.

At last, Tom lifted his face from the stone floor, eyes glowing with fever-bright worship.

“What happens next?” he whispered.

Harry’s smile was cruel and certain. “Next, we burn everything they ever thought they owned.”

The vow sealed itself in silence.

Chapter Text

The cellar remembered the storm.

Even with the sky clear and morning light smeared thin across the cracked windows, the stone still sweated, the air still tasted of old smoke and iron. Damp crept under skin, into teeth. The walls wore constellations of brown-black flecks where rats had burst midair. Tom Riddle stood in the doorway as if at the threshold of a chapel, thin hands folded, eyes devouring the room.

Harry was already there.

He’d stripped to the waist. Scars and new rune-lines latticed his torso like a map of a country no one survived crossing. The basilisk spine—black-green and coiled—ran from nape to the small of his back, each scale inked over old ritual seams. Power hummed around him the way heat shimmers over tarmac. He was all angles and intent, gaze bright and terrible.

On the overturned crate between them lay a shallow bowl of dull metal, scorched along the rim. Beside it, a rusted knife he’d sharpened to a wicked edge on the cellar stair.

“Close the door,” Harry said.

Tom obeyed. The latch clicked. Sound died.

Harry didn’t bother with soothing words. He lifted the knife, tested the balance, then pressed the blade to his own palm and drew it down without flinching. Flesh parted in a clean, red line. Blood welled, dark and thick, and hit the bowl with a heavy patter. The cellar air shifted, as if the room itself leaned in to listen.

Tom watched the blade like a starving dog tracks meat.

“Your turn,” Harry said, offering the knife handle-first.

Tom’s mouth twitched—some flicker of pride trying to live and dying under hunger. He took the blade, fingers careful on the hilt. For a heartbeat he studied his own small palm. He was eleven. Harry registered it—the boy’s wrists too narrow, his bones still bird-fragile under skin—and felt the knowledge slide off him like rain from oiled leather.

He doesn’t matter as a child, he thought, and his magic purred. He matters as mine.

Tom cut. The sound—soft, wet—landed in Harry’s chest like a promise. Blood beaded, then spilled, steam-sweet and hot. When it hit Harry’s blood in the bowl, the surface shivered. Red met red and turned almost black.

“Hold it,” Harry murmured.

They stood facing each other, palms hovering over the bowl, their breath fogging in the chill. Blood dripped slowly from both hands, the rhythm matching without effort. The cellar seemed to shrink around that sound, narrowing to two boys and a metal mouth that drank them.

Harry began to speak.

He didn’t need Latin. He didn’t need the prim little syllables Ministry-approved ritualists loved to mouth. The words came from behind his teeth like snakes sliding from a nest.

“Mine,” he said, low. The bowl trembled. “Mine in blood. Mine in breath. Mine when you stand, mine when you kneel.”

Tom’s pupils blew wide. He leaned closer as if dragged by a chain through his sternum.

Harry smiled without warmth. “Say it.”

Tom swallowed, the movement sharp in the hollow of his throat. “Yours in blood,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “Yours in breath. Yours standing.” A beat, as if he tasted the next word like a blade on his tongue. “Yours kneeling.”

A pulse ran through the bowl. The surface bulged, then sank, then began to burn—not with fire that ate, but with fire that bound. Red-black tongues licked at the rim. The smell changed: copper to clove, iron to something older. Magic tasted like a name remembered too late.

Harry felt it move up through him, into his bones, and for a blink the cellar was gone.

Serpents, not painted but living, wove through black grass. A tower older than Hogwarts breathed in the dark. Stone wore sigils that curled when you looked at them. A crest flashed—three lines interlaced with a blade. Not Potter. Not Peverell. Something buried.

A hiss coiled in his ear like breath against skin, syllables forming that were not English and did not care to be.

When the vision cut, the cellar slammed back into place. Tom staggered and caught himself on the crate, panting as if he’d run up twenty flights of stairs.

“What did you see?” he demanded, too fast.

Harry wiped the blood from his palm with the pad of his thumb, spreading it, smearing it into the lines like polish. The cut had already sealed to a pink seam. “Enough,” he said. “We’ll dig later.”

Tom drew breath to argue and swallowed it when Harry looked at him. Even now, sullen sparks lived under the worship; he’d beat them into coals and bank them where they served.

“Finish,” Harry said.

Tom pressed his bloody palm flat to the bowl; Harry mirrored him. Heat kissed skin. The flames licked higher and then—without smoke, without ash—folded inward until they were a single, pulsing coal at the bowl’s heart. It hung there, impossibly, between their hands.

“Say it,” Harry repeated, softer.

Tom didn’t flinch. “I am yours.”

The coal throbbed, then popped like a seed in a fire. A ring of warmth shot up Harry’s arms and into his chest. He saw it happen to Tom too—his spine flexed, his mouth parted. A flush climbed his neck like fever.

Harry closed his hand, slowly, over the phantom heat. “Good.”

Tom’s eyes fluttered and then fixed back on him, glass-clear and feral. “What now?”

“Now you learn to hold the knife where it matters,” Harry said. He picked up the blade, turned it, placed the flat against Tom’s throat with exquisite gentleness. Not enough to break skin. Enough to remind. “And we find the rest of what they hid from me.”

Tom’s breath shivered against steel. He didn’t move. He didn’t need to. The tremor that ran through him telegraphed surrender as clearly as kneeling could. He was an eleven-year-old boy with a knife to his throat and he was already choosing the altar.

Harry removed the blade and set it down. “Come.”

They left the bowl cooling on the crate. The cellar door groaned open; the corridor beyond smelled of mildew and soap rot. On the stairs, Tom kept a step lower, which put him where Harry liked him—chin tilted up to meet Harry’s eye, his mouth a little parted as if always about to ask. Or answer.

They didn’t speak past the dormitory. They didn’t need to. The other children shrank away without being looked at. The morning caretaker—jaw gray, eyes grainy with sleep—muttered a prayer under her breath when Harry passed; he heard her voice hitch and stop when Tom drifted in his wake like a shadow.

In the yard, the cold bit harder. Frost still clung at the edges of the cracked paving stones where the sun hadn’t reached. A crooked tree hunched in the corner, roots forcing up the ground, bark fissured like an old man’s hands. The sky was white as bone.

Harry walked to the tree and pressed his palm to the bark. Beneath skin and wood, something answered—faint, the echo of an echo. A ward thick with years and neglect. He let his magic slide into it the way a thief’s pick slides into a lock.

“Someone laid something here,” he said.

Tom’s breath fogged. “A spell?”

“A mouth for a house with no teeth,” Harry said. He turned his hand; the ward softened like fat under heat. “If we open it, it eats the first thing that tries to bite us.”

Tom’s smile was quicksilver and ugly. “Can we make it eat someone else?”

Harry’s answering grin was all bone. “That’s the lesson.”

He worked without wand or word, thumb pressing into the ridges of bark until blood beaded again. He smeared the print across the trunk and felt the ward take his mark. The thing under the tree woke like a sleeping hound raising its head.

“Bring them,” he said.

Tom didn’t ask who. He didn’t need to.

By nightfall, the whisper had done the work fear always does. The boys who had watched their little tyrant bleed out in the courtyard—who’d vowed revenge in whispers and tears and clenched teeth—had a plan again. Plans look like courage when you’re eleven and stupid.

Harry waited with the cellar lamp turned low and the ward humming like a cat at his ankle. Tom leaned against the doorframe, all wide eyes and sincerity when the older boys crept down the stairs with their stolen poker and their bottle of paraffin and their Saint George fantasy of dragon-slaying.

“Thought you’d try again,” Harry said pleasantly.

The first boy—freckled, a different freckled than the dead one; they all blurred at the edges when there were too many of them—spat at the floor. “You killed Miles.”

Harry’s head tilted. He let the silence pull tight like wire, then cut it neatly. “He begged ugly.”

The boy swung the poker. It cut the air with a whistle. Harry stepped aside by inches. The poker hit the post, sparks spitting. Tom laughed—high and breathless—and Harry felt that laugh go through him like liquor.

The second boy uncorked the paraffin with clumsy hands. “We’ll burn you,” he said. “We’ll—” The bottle sloshed.

Harry let the ward off the leash.

It happened quietly. No roar, no flash—just an instant and then another where the air went thick and hot, and then the paraffin leapt backward out of the bottle as if gravity had understood a new rule. Liquid fire bloomed in the air like a flower opening in time-lapse. It folded itself around the boy’s hands and then climbed his arms with the terrible calm of a lit fuse.

He screamed. They all screamed. Fire screams are different—there’s a note in them that doesn’t sound human. It went through the floorboards, up through beds and lungs. Children sat up, clutching blankets to faces. Caretakers spun in circles with buckets that would never matter.

The boy dropped, flailing, and the ward fed. Flame flattened against stone, turned inward, and ate him from the hands down. The others stumbled back, kicking at cobbles that wouldn’t hold. Harry stepped into them, not hurrying. When the poker swung again, he caught it bare-handed and broke it in two like sugar glass.

“Run,” he suggested mildly, and when they bolted, he let the ward choose one more.

It took the smallest. Fire wrapped him like a red sheet; his bony knees hit stone with a clack. The smell—fat, hair, something sweet—bloomed and turned.

Tom watched with eyes gone black to the edges. He didn’t look away. When it was done, when the cellar crackled with heat and the air was full of metal taste and the ward sighed and sank back into the roots, Tom’s hands were shaking.

“Beautiful,” he said. It wasn’t the word people usually chose. In his mouth, it was perfect.

Harry turned the lamp up a fraction. Light climbed the planes of his face, making hollows deeper, angles sharper. “They’ll say the paraffin spilled,” he said. “They’ll say children shouldn’t play in cellars. They’ll say prayers over ash. And then they’ll lock the door and pretend a door can keep me out.”

Tom’s mouth was open a little, breath quick. He was eleven, and he’d just watched boys his own age burn to bones, and what lived in his gaze was not horror. It was hunger, and something older, harsher, cleaner: relief. This, it said, this is the world as it should be—teeth and rules and a master who holds the leash.

Harry stepped close enough that their shadows fused on the floor. “Kneel,” he said.

The word wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It carried the weight of the bowl’s heat and the snake-words and the ward’s satisfied murmur. It carried the morning and the storm and the future like a blade under a cloak.

Tom dropped. His knees hit the warm stone where the ward’s breath still lingered. He looked up, throat bared, eyes blown. “I am yours.”

Harry put his hand on Tom’s head. Not gentle. Not cruel. Claiming. “Only mine,” he said.

“Only yours,” Tom echoed, and the cellar took the vow like another mouthful of blood.

For a long breath, neither moved. Outside, someone pounded on the cellar door and shouted for water that would never come in time. Somewhere a child sobbed. The house above them was an upturned hive, and down here the queen made honey from fire.

Harry let his fingers slide from hair to jaw, thumb braced against the hinge. He felt the tremor through bone, the edge of fear that tasted like respect, the steadiness under it that tasted like worship.

“Listen to me,” he said, and Tom’s breath stopped obediently in his chest. “I know what you are. I know what you’ll be. I know you’re eleven.” He said it without softness, like a diagnosis. “I don’t care. That just means I get to make you right from the start.”

Something broke in Tom’s face, not into tears, not into thank you—into something thinner and sharper: a tiredness cracking and letting light through. He leaned into the hand on his jaw with the careful courage of an animal accepting a collar because it chose the hand that holds it.

“Make me,” he said.

“I already am,” Harry answered.

He released Tom and turned back to the tree-rooted corner where the ward had sunk. The bark above the stones had shifted minutely; a seam hair-thin ran through it like a grin. Behind it, he could feel the echo of that vision’s tower, the snake-words breathing under the floorboards of the world.

“We’re not done,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s a door inside this house, and it has my name on it.”

Tom stood—fluid, a bow turned back into an arrow—and came to his right side, not his left, as if some instinct already knew where to stand. “How do we open it?”

Harry smiled, all teeth. “With more blood.”

Tom’s answering grin was an ugly, beautiful thing.

They worked the rest of the night. Harry bled his palm again, press, smear, speak; the ward shifted from hound to serpent, scales rippling under bark. Tom fetched, carried, watched with a zealot’s joy. When Harry told him to hold a line in his head—your breath for my breath; your pain for my pain; your power for my leash—Tom held it steady as a blade’s edge. When Harry told him to stop thinking like a child, Tom spit out the last of the softness like a loose tooth.

By dawn, the seam in the tree had widened enough to show stone—old, older than the orphanage, older than the street. Etched. The marks weren’t letters for human eyes. Harry spoke to them anyway, in a tongue that slid cold down the throat and left a taste of coil and damp and hunger.

“Open,” he hissed.

The stone moved.

It did not scrape. It re-positioned itself the way a snake repositions its ribs. The gap yawned and breathed. Cold air came out, and with it a smell like old books shelved in a cavern: parchment, dust, old ink, and under it a note of scale.

Tom leaned forward, already on his toes.

Harry held out an arm and stopped him an inch from the threshold. “Rule one,” he said. “I go first.”

Tom’s mouth twitched. “Rule two?”

“You go where I tell you,” Harry said, and stepped into the dark.

The space was narrow at first, then spilled downward, switchbacking steps that felt wrong in the way they counted—you could take ten and be lower by twelve. Harry didn’t need the lamp. The walls offered sight to serpents, and his eyes were serpents now when he wanted them to be. Runes crawled. Sigils turned to watch him pass.

At the landing, a slab waited, waist-high, pitted. Something like a book lay on it, but not paper—thin plates of stone bound with wire gone green. Harry touched it, and the wire cracked and fell like a snake’s old skin.

He lifted the top plate. The script inside hissed when it saw him and then curled into words he could read not with eyes but with the part of the brain that had dreamed the tower.

He did not try to sound it out to Tom. He read. He let the meaning move into him like cold water.

Not Peverell alone. Not Potter alone. A line that had split and split again, one branch polished bright for social rooms and Ministry benches, the other dragged under, dirt-fed and root-fed, carrying the old tongue in mouths that knew when to shut. Names that had been erased from registries, not with ink but with compulsion. A decision made by a man in half-moon spectacles with mercy in his voice and iron under his tongue.

Dumbledore’s hand brushed these pages once, Harry thought, and the rune-lines on his skin prickled as if remembering the wand against his baby skull. He pictured the old man’s blue eyes: pity-sharp, love-weaponized. The fury rose quiet and clean.

“What is it?” Tom asked, breath ghosting his shoulder.

Harry closed the plates. “Proof that I am more than what he tried to make,” he said. “Proof that I don’t just take Slytherin because I want it. I take it because it was already mine.”

Tom made a sound that wasn’t a word, raw and ecstatic. “Hogwarts.”

Harry put the stone book back and turned. “Hogwarts bows,” he said. “Slytherin kneels. And then the world learns our names one grave at a time.”

Tom’s grin was all teeth. “Teach me to make them kneel.”

Harry reached out and put two fingers under his chin, lifting. “You already know how,” he said. “You just needed the right altar.”

They climbed back up into a new morning. The orphanage shouted and clanked and pretended nothing had happened. The cellar smelled like cooled metal and singed hair. The ward slept with a belly full of boys.

Harry washed his hands at the pump, watching thin red swirl and vanish down the rust stain. The water stung his cuts like agreement. Tom stood at his shoulder, chin high, eyes bright and vicious.

“You’ll ask me again soon,” Harry said, for the pleasure of hearing it promised aloud.

Tom didn’t make him wait. He turned, slow and deliberate, then sank to his knees on the wet stone as if that had always been where he belonged. He came to heel like something too proud to be tamed and too clever not to choose its master.

“I am yours,” he said. “Only yours.”

Harry set his palm on Tom’s crown, felt the pulse through bone, and claimed him again.

“Good boy.”

Outside, the sun cleared the orphanage roof. The yard took its first thin breath of day. Somewhere far away, a school sent owls with letters that would think they were invites, not summons.

Harry smiled, and the basilisk on his spine seemed to smile with him.

“Hogwarts,” he said, and the name sounded like a promise and a threat.
__

The caretaker’s office smelled like cheap perfume poured over mildew. Paper stacks leaned like drunks. A chipped teacup sweated steam beside an ashtray packed with lipstick-smeared stubs. Miss Blight—gray bun, gray face, gray soul—squinted at the weekly ledger as if numbers might sprout legs and run.

Harry watched from the half-open door. Tom stood at his shoulder, still as a shadow.

“Today,” Harry said softly, “you learn precision.”

Tom’s eyes flicked to the cup. “Poison?”

“Rot,” Harry said, and stepped in without asking.

Miss Blight jerked, then exhaled when she saw him. She didn’t meet his eyes; adults with instincts left learned not to. “You two aren’t supposed to be in here. Out, now.”

Harry smiled in a way that meant nothing good. “We won’t be long.”

He brushed his thumb along the rim of the cup. No wand. No words. Just intent like a scalpel: tooth by tooth by tooth. The tea went dull a shade, as if the light had lost interest in it. He turned his hand, and for an instant the air tasted of clove and old bone.

“Drink,” he said, and stepped aside.

She blinked, then scowled, then did as people always did when told a small thing in a confident tone. The tea hit her tongue. She swallowed once. Twice. Her face changed on the third swallow, confusion folding into discomfort, into pain.

Her hand went to her jaw. “Ah—” She grimaced, lips peeling back. “What—”

A soft, soggy sound came from her mouth, like fruit being thumbed apart. A brown slick slid from the gumline. The smell turned sweet and rotten. One of her molars slumped sideways in its bed as if exhausted.

Tom’s breath snagged. He wasn’t disgusted. He was rapt.

Miss Blight gagged and coughed into her palm. When she saw what came away—flecks, a small gray-white chip like a seashell—she screamed. The sound went thin and high. She clutched at her jaw, knocked the cup over, scalding tea bleeding across ledgers in a tan flood.

Harry didn’t move. “Lesson one,” he said to Tom over the noise. “Not all pain needs a knife. Subtlety buys you time.”

He turned his head, met the boy’s blown-black stare. “Fix in your mind exactly what you want to fail. Enamel first. Then the ligament. Then the bone. If you can name it, you can break it.”

Miss Blight staggered, spit pink foam into the ashtray, sobbed, tried to stand, failed. Harry laid two fingers on the desk. Her vision tilted sharply to the left. Shadows on the wall grew taller and leaned toward her with interest.

She shrieked again, flailing at nothing.

“Hallucination?” Tom whispered, not looking away.

“A nudge,” Harry said. “Enough to make her tell the others she saw devils. Enough to make the children stop trusting her.”

He stepped back. “We’re done.”

They left her cursing and clutching her face while ghosts she deserved leaned in to ask if she’d like to confess anything before they began.

In the corridor, Tom pressed both palms flat to the peeling wallpaper and shut his eyes for a heartbeat, like someone trying not to come apart in public. “I want it,” he said, voice rough. “I want it like breath.”

Harry took his chin between finger and thumb and tilted. Tom’s skin ran hot. “You’ll have it,” he said. “But not because you want it. Because I tell you to. Understand?”

“Yes.” The word came out on a tremor that wasn’t fear.

Harry let go. “Next lesson.”

—

They found the dog in the alley behind the laundry—ribs like a rack under mangy fur, ear torn, eyes the yellow of old varnish. It growled when Harry crouched, then coughed, sound collapsing into itself. There was meat in a paper wrap near the bin. Someone’s pity. Not enough.

Tom knelt on the other side of the mutt. It looked at him and saw something it understood: hunger with teeth.

“Kill it,” Harry said.

Tom’s Adam’s apple moved. “It’s just—”

“Alive,” Harry said. “That’s all it needs to be.”

Tom glanced up, defiant because defiance helped him breathe. Harry didn’t let him have it.

“You’re eleven,” Harry said flatly. “Do you think that excuses you? You don’t get to be soft because a number says you should be. You will be what I make you. Do it.”

Something in Tom’s face shut, neatly, like a drawer. He looked back down at the dog. It bared its ruined teeth and tried to stand on shaking legs. Tom moved faster. He caught the scruff, thumb under jaw, and with a quick, vicious twist, broke its neck.

The crack was clean. The body went slack in an instant. No flailing. No noise.

Tom’s breath left him all at once. He held the limp weight for a heartbeat longer, then laid it down with surprising care.

He looked up. There was a brightness in his eyes that had nothing to do with tears.

“Perfect,” Harry said. He didn’t praise much; when he did, it landed like sunlight on a winter window. Tom stood straighter, shoulders squaring under the word as if it weighed enough to build on.

Harry drew a finger through a smear of blood on the dog’s tongue, then marked a line on Tom’s wrist with it. “Remember the feel,” he said. “Of the give. Of the angle. Your mercy is timing. Your cruelty is clean.”

Tom stared at the mark as if it were a medal. “Again,” he said.

“Later,” Harry said. “You’ll break what I point to. Not a thing more. Not a thing less.”

Tom nodded once. “Yes.”

Harry caught the paper-wrapped meat, opened it, and ate a bite cold. His magic liked iron. He could feel it hum. He held the second bite out. Tom took it from his hand without looking away from his face, as if the food was only a medium for obedience.

“Good boy,” Harry said, and half-watched, half-felt the way the words went through Tom like a lit wire.

—

The orphanage noticed the change in Miss Blight by supper. Her mouth was a ruin. She’d packed it with cotton and prayer. Children stared; she slapped their hands away from the bowl. When she tried to say grace, the words came out wet and wrong, and two boys at the end of the table laughed until they saw Harry watching.

He didn’t lift a finger. He didn’t need to. Power is a story other people tell for you if you keep your mouth shut and your eyes bright.

That night, Harry found Tom already in the cellar, on his knees, hands on his thighs, head bowed. It wasn’t supplication. It was readiness. He looked up when Harry stepped onto the bottom stair, and the look should have belonged to someone older. It didn’t. It belonged perfectly to him.

“Orders?” Tom asked.

“Three.” Harry held up a finger. “You will not act without a purpose I’ve approved. No petty cruelties. Every cut buys something.”

Second finger. “You will keep your temper when I take something from you to harden you. You are not allowed to resent me. You are allowed to worship me and hate everyone else.”

Third. “You will kneel when I tell you, and only then. Not for anyone. Not for anything but my word.”

Tom’s throat worked. “Yes.”

“Say the oath.”

Tom lifted his voice without looking away, each word clean as bone. “My breath is yours. My blood is yours. My power is yours to command. Only yours.”

Harry stepped close enough to smell the damp in Tom’s hair. He set his palm on the boy’s crown and pressed down until Tom had to shift his balance or fall. Tom shifted. He didn’t fall.

“Rise,” Harry said, and when Tom stood, he was still an inch shorter, chin still tilted up to meet Harry where he chose to be. It pleased Harry more than breaking bones ever had.

“Show me your cruelty,” Harry said.

Tom didn’t go to Miss Blight. He went to the ledger. He took a stub of pencil and sat in her chair and rewrote two lines: the date the milkman came; the number of loaves delivered. Beside them, he added a neat note in a hand that could have belonged to a priest: *Shortage reported thrice. Blight to be docked and inspected.*

Harry laughed, low and delighted. Tom looked up, hunger in his face for that sound.

“Mercy wastes,” Harry said, “but stupidity buys you power. Make her make enemies for you.”

Tom nodded. “Yes.”

They were halfway back to the dormitory when a small shape peeled off the wall and stepped into their path. A girl of maybe nine, thin as a calleague, hair hacked blunt with scissors. Her eyes were gray as dishwater and twice as tired. She looked at Tom, then at Harry, then back at Tom, and swallowed.

“Thank you,” she said, as if the words tasted of splinters. “For… for them not… for them not hitting me anymore.”

Tom stared at her as if she’d spoken in Parseltongue. Gratitude did not fit in his head. Harry felt the old ache of a cupboard door in the girl’s voice and didn’t let it move him.

He looked to Tom and said nothing.

Tom found his voice. “Don’t thank me,” he said finally, soft and cold. “Thank him.”

Her gaze crept to Harry like a bug across a dish. He held it until she flinched and dropped her eyes.

“You’re alive because I allow it,” Harry said, not cruel, not kind. “Stay out of the way.”

She bobbed a jagged nod and fled. Tom watched her go, some new expression like a torn flag flapping once and going still. He looked up at Harry, the question making his mouth clumsy.

“Should I have—”

“No,” Harry said. “You did right.” He touched Tom’s jaw with the back of his knuckles, a fleeting benediction, and left him standing in the corridor with that touch burning like a brand.

—

The next morning, Miss Blight came to breakfast with her mouth swaddled and her eyes feral from a night of visions no one else could see. She slapped the girl who’d thanked Tom for dropping a spoon. She slapped the wrong boy for laughing. She slapped and slapped until one of the boys in the corner said, “Miss,” very small, and she flinched like someone had fired a gun behind her ear.

“Saints preserve us,” she whispered, and crossed herself with a shaking, stained hand.

Harry put his spoon down and said nothing. Tom didn’t look at him. He didn’t need to.

A day later, Miss Blight was gone—sent to a cousin “in the country” to rest her nerves. In her place came Mr. Carter, a man who smelled of old beer and thought all boys needed was a fist and a good example of one. Harry let him be loud for an afternoon. On the second day, Mr. Carter missed the bottom step from the second-floor landing and cracked three ribs and a tooth on the banister on the way down.

“Careful,” Harry said, passing him on the floor with the kind smile that meant danger. “Stairs can be treacherous.”

Tom didn’t smile. Tom watched the way fear moved through a man like shock through a horse and memorized it.

—

After lights-out, Harry took Tom to the alley again. The dog’s body had already vanished—some night-crawling kindness had taken it away. Frost laced the bin lids. Harry’s breath smoked. Tom’s did too.

“Open your hand,” Harry said.

Tom did. His wrist still bore yesterday’s blood-mark, a brown-red streak that looked like a closed eye.

Harry caught Tom’s fingers and pressed the heel of his palm to the brick wall. With his other hand he wrote in skin with skin: three short lines down, one long across, a hook like a question mark at the end. It wasn’t a sigil in any book. It was how the ward under the tree felt when it ate. It was how a rat’s bones wanted to be when they remembered wind.

Tom watched the motions with the greedy attention he gave to knives. “What is it?”

“A hound that fits in your hand,” Harry said. “Call it when you need a bite no one will see.”

He stepped back. Tom stared at the mark as if it might blink, then turned and placed his palm on the brick. He drew breath and let it out in a hiss like a word with no letters. The air dented in a circle the size of his palm and then righted itself with a soft pop.

Tom laughed under his breath, the sound bright and mean. “Again.”

“Later,” Harry said. “Restraint is part of worship.”

Tom’s smile faded to something hungrier. “Yes.”

They stood for a minute in the quiet. Far down the street, a lorry groaned like a big animal rolling its joints. Somewhere a woman sang to a baby in a voice like damp wool.

“Do you miss anything?” Tom asked suddenly, as if the question had been gnawing the inside of his cheek. “From… before?”

Harry’s mind gave him a pair of round glasses looking up at a wand like the barrel of a gun; a Weasley laugh that felt like sun; a headmaster’s hand heavy and warm as a shackle on a child’s hair. He catalogued them like inventory and looked at the total.

“No,” he said. Then, because he could be precise when it cost him nothing: “I miss what I should’ve been if he’d left me alone. But that boy’s dead. Died the first time he told me I had to be good.” He looked down at Tom. “So I made something better.”

Tom’s face—sharp, hungry, ugly with hope—turned fully up like a flower to heat. “Me.”

Harry cupped his jaw, firm. “Mine,” he said, and left the alley before the night could decide it wanted to be kind.

—

By the end of the week, Mr. Carter walked with his back to the wall when he crossed the dining hall. The older boys studied their boots for wisdom. The little ones grew used to sleeping through screams.

Harry woke before dawn on the seventh day with the feeling that something under the orphanage had turned its head to look at him. He dressed in silence and went to the tree. Tom joined him five breaths later without being called.

The seam in the bark had widened to the width of a coin. The air whispering up through it smelled like snakes and old vellum. Harry laid his palm on the rough. The basilisk down his spine seemed to stretch, vertebrae clicking in satisfaction.

“Soon,” he said. “We’ll open it when we leave. Let the house argue with an empty room.”

Tom frowned. “We’re leaving?”

“Owls will come,” Harry said. “Hogwarts thinks it’s summoning students. It’s drawing knives.”

Tom’s heartbeat jumped, visible in the line of his throat. “You’ll be there.”

Harry looked at him until the answer was obvious. “Where else would I be?”

Tom swallowed and nodded, and would have knelt in the frozen mud if Harry had let him.

“Enough,” Harry said, amused despite himself. “Save it for when I ask.”

Tom forced his knees to remain locked. It cost him. Harry liked that it cost him.

“Now,” Harry said, and turned toward the building that thought it was a home. “Let’s go show Mr. Carter how quiet a house can be.”

They made the rounds without speaking—pipes that banged at night going silent as if soothed, a door that always stuck learning obedience, a draft that carried whispers slipping away like a thief through a cracked pane. Nothing dramatic. A hundred small dominions. By breakfast, the orphanage had forgotten how to bite.

Mr. Carter knew it. He flinched when he reached for the porridge ladle and it came cleanly to his hand without splashing. He grunted, confused, then set his jaw and did what frightened men do: hit something smaller.

The spoon clattered from the girl’s hand. He raised his palm.

Harry watched his wrist break from across the room.

It wasn’t loud. There was a pop like a finger pulled too far, and then the hand went soft and wrong. Mr. Carter screamed and clutched his forearm like a man trying to hold rain. The children stared at Harry. He didn’t move. Tom’s chair legs hit the floor as he stood in one smooth line, placing himself just to Harry’s right, where he belonged.

“Outside,” Harry said to Mr. Carter, not unkindly. “Before the children forget their appetite.”

He followed the man into the yard. The January light had all the warmth of a morgue. Mr. Carter wheezed and cursed, tears in his beard. Harry considered ending him, then didn’t. Mercy is what you call a choice that buys you more fear later.

“Resign,” he said. “Or you’ll fall down stairs again, and next time you’ll land on your head.”

Mr. Carter looked at Tom and saw a future that didn’t include his name. He nodded until his neck creaked.

“Good,” Harry said, and let him stagger away.

Tom looked up at him with something like worship and something like language starving for a word. “A king doesn’t always need a sword,” he said, as if telling himself a proverb.

“A king needs a leash,” Harry said. “And hands that know when to close.”

Tom’s smile was clean and terrible. “I’ll be both.”

“You’ll be mine,” Harry corrected, and walked back inside to finish his breakfast as if nothing had happened.

—

That night, in the cellar, the bowl from the blood ritual sat where they’d left it. Dried streaks along the curve looked like writing in a script only heat reads. Harry lifted it and felt a faint warmth, as if a coal still slept at the bottom waiting for breath.

“Again?” Tom asked, already rolling his sleeves.

“Soon,” Harry said. He traced the inside rim with his thumb, then looked up. “Tomorrow you’ll write a letter to a school you’ve never seen.”

Tom’s mouth went dry. “And when their representative comes to shake my hand?”

Harry smiled like a knife. “I’ll be standing right there to make sure he feels the bones in his.”

--

The cellar still hummed with the memory of screams, but by morning the air upstairs was stiff with anticipation. Harry felt it before he saw it—the shift in the children, the way they glanced at the windows as though expecting wings.

The owls came just after breakfast. Their talons rattled the cracked panes, feathers scattering soot. Miss Cole shrieked. Harry rose without hurry and opened the window. Two envelopes landed heavily on the table.

Mr. Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Mr. Harry James Potter.

Tom snatched his letter as if it were a relic. His lips moved silently across the parchment, eyes wide and fevered. “It’s real,” he whispered, clutching the seal. “A school. Hogwarts. They’ll teach us—”

“They’ll try,” Harry said, slitting his own with a nail. The words were expected, the names less so: Armando Dippet, Headmaster. Albus Dumbledore, Deputy. Harry’s mouth curved in something that wasn’t a smile. Of course. Even now, Dumbledore’s fingers were already reaching.

Tom’s knuckles whitened around his letter. “We belong there.”

“No,” Harry said. “It belongs to us.”

By evening, the bell rang.

The man who entered was tall, spare, silver hair catching the last red light. Half-moon spectacles glinted as he stepped into the hall. His eyes found Harry first. For the briefest moment, shock cracked the calm—recognition sharp and bare. Then it vanished under a warm, careful smile.

“Good evening,” he said, voice gentle enough to soothe frightened children. “My name is Professor Dumbledore. I teach Transfiguration at Hogwarts. I am here for Tom Riddle.”

He inclined his head at Tom, kind and admiring all at once. “You are a remarkable boy. At Hogwarts you’ll be safe, and your talents will be nurtured.”

Tom’s breath caught. His grip on the letter trembled.

Then Dumbledore added, smooth as silk: “Perhaps we should speak alone. Away from… distractions.” His glance slid briefly to Harry.

Harry descended the stairs, each step a deliberate weight. His voice cut through the hush like steel.

“If you want him,” Harry said, “you go through me.”

Gasps rippled from the children clustered in the shadows. Miss Cole wrung her hands until the knuckles blanched.

Dumbledore did not flinch. “Harry,” he said softly. “You’ve… grown.”

Harry bared his teeth in something colder than a smile. “I’m nearly fifteen. He’s eleven. And he’s mine already.”

Tom moved to Harry’s side, close enough their shoulders brushed. His choice was plain in every line of his body.

For a flicker of a heartbeat, the mask cracked. The warmth dimmed, the twinkle faltered. Then Dumbledore smoothed it all away with impeccable calm.

“Very well,” he said. “Headmaster Dippet will be glad to welcome you both. We will speak more when you arrive.”

He inclined his head, turned, and left with steady steps. But Harry saw the stiffness in his shoulders, the too-careful set of his hand on the knob.

The door closed.

Tom’s voice was hushed, reverent. “He was afraid of you.”

Harry’s smile held no mercy. “Good. He should be.”

--

Dumbledore returned the next morning with the calm of a man who had rehearsed every step. Miss Cole hovered like a moth while he spoke, gentle and deliberate, about deposits and books and school robes. He kept his gaze off the cellar door. He kept it off the crooked tree. He kept it on Tom as if he could will the boy into orbit around him.

Harry let him talk, then said, “We’ll need wands.”

“Of course,” Dumbledore replied. “Mr. Ollivander’s. A most… enlightening shop.”

He led them out, Tom on Harry’s right, where he belonged. London looked washed to bone by the weak sun, traffic grumbling, puddles oil-slick where the night had coughed up its filth. Dumbledore took them to a shabby pub that pretended it wasn’t a threshold, offered Miss Cole a mild Obliviation disguised as reassurance, and then tapped brick in a pattern the wall obeyed with a sound like a yawn.

The archway irised open. The alley beyond smelled of parchment and owl shit and sugar. Shop windows crowded with cages, cauldrons, brass scales, books bound in leathers that had once had opinions. Tom stared, greedy and devout. Dumbledore watched Tom’s awe like a gardener approves a seedling that has decided to live.

Harry watched everything else. The way heads turned and turned away. The way a witch with a braid down her back pulled her child slightly closer without noticing her own hand. The way the light lay on Gringotts like a bruise.

“We’ll begin with money,” Dumbledore said. “The school has arranged an advance for both of you. Mr. Riddle, Mr. Potter.”

Goblin ledgers hummed with arithmetic that disliked being counted by anyone who hadn’t mined it. The teller looked at Dumbledore with the professional loathing of old colleagues. A bag changed hands. Dumbledore pretended he hadn’t noticed the goblin’s smile at Harry’s rune-etched forearms.

Back in the alley, the street flexed around them. Tom wanted to stop at every window. Dumbledore indulged it, patient, teacher-pleasant. They bought plain robes, a set of standard books (Harry’s thumb pricked on a page and the paper bled ink that spelled a name older than its author; he smiled and shut it), pewter cauldron, brass scales. Tom’s joy was a firebrand; he devoured everything with his eyes as if memorization might feed him more cheaply than food.

They stopped at a window where a long, drowsy serpent lay draped over a branch inside a tall glass case. Its scales were the green of deep water. The placard read Boomslang — for demonstration only. Children pressed palms to the glass. The snake turned a lidless eye and seemed to hate all of them equally.

Tom leaned in. “Do you think—”

“Not yet,” Dumbledore said warmly. “Come, gentlemen. Wands.”

Ollivander’s was a ribcage of boxes from floor to ceiling, dust hung in the air in language. The bell tinkled with a sound like thin bone. A man unspooled from the back room—pale and bright-eyed, hair like cobweb clinging to his skull.

“Ah,” Ollivander breathed, as if they’d arrived in his dream. “I wondered. Professor.” A tiny bow to Dumbledore. His gaze clicked to Tom. “Mr. Riddle. I remember your file. I remember all my files.”

Tom tried on the thrill of being known. It fit beautifully.

Then the wandmaker’s eyes slid to Harry and stopped. The look sharpened. Not recognition—Ollivander had never met this face—but something like a scent caught by a wolf.

“You,” he said softly, eyes gone unfocused for a heartbeat, as if listening to a sound only he heard. “Yes. You will be… interesting.”

Harry smiled. “I intend to be.”

The measuring tape did its fussy ballet—shoulder to wrist, elbow to armpit, nostril (Tom swatted it away, then apologized to the tape, not the man; Harry filed the reflex away for later). Ollivander hummed, vanished, returned with a stack.

“Yew,” he said to Tom, like a priest intoning a sacrament. “Thirteen and a half inches. Phoenix feather. Try it.”

Tom took the wand. His fingers trembled. He lifted it as if unsheathing a blade only he could see. The air in the shop thinned for a heartbeat. Dust motes held their breath. A glow like a low-voiced chord flickered at the tip.

Ollivander’s mouth pursed in a smile that wasn’t quite kind. “Oh yes,” he murmured. “Curious… very curious.”

Tom blinked, hungry. “Why curious?”

“Because the phoenix which gave that feather,” Ollivander said softly, eyes sliding to Harry’s scar, “gave only one other.”

Harry’s skin prickled where magic liked him most. He let his expression show nothing.

“And him?” Tom asked, not taking his eyes from Harry. “What will his be?”

“We shall see,” Ollivander said, and went hunting again.

He returned with a procession—for Harry, wand after wand, wood and core and length measured and dismissed. Maple with unicorn hair that spat sparks like a cat yowling. Blackthorn with dragon heartstring that snarled and went cold. Vinewood, hazel, sycamore, rejection turning the little shop into an unhappy orchestra.

Dumbledore stood very still, gentle as a trap. Tom watched Harry with a devotion so naked it might have embarrassed someone with shame.

At last Ollivander exhaled and sank a hand deeper into the nest of boxes, pulling one from far behind the others. The lid had a streak of old scorch across it. He set it down as if he were placing a relic on an altar.

“Holly,” he said. “Eleven inches. Phoenix feather.”

Harry didn’t reach. He let the pause lengthen until the air noticed the silence. Then he took the box, slid the lid off, and closed his hand around the holly as if claiming a throat.

The world leaned.

It began at the point of his fingers, a thrum that ran up through his bones, up his spine, into the back of his eyes. Heat crowded his veins without burning. The basilisk down his back seemed to wake, each scale shivering in delight. Gold light spilled from the tip in a clean stream, not a spray, not a cough—steady, bright, certain. The dust motes applauded.

Ollivander made a sound between laugh and groan. “Ah,” he said, thin with awe. “I had wondered if it would choose you again, in whatever story you came to me.”

Dumbledore’s lashes flickered once. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. The give-away was how the corners of his mouth didn’t move at all.

Tom came a step closer, eyes greedy and shining. “Yours,” he said, like a prayer he’d learned to love. The shop took the word and tucked it away on a shelf.

Ollivander’s gaze ticked between them, fascinated and faintly appalled. “How curious,” he murmured again, like a man peering into a coffin that contained a mirror. “The same phoenix. Two feathers. Two wands. Opposed and… aligned.” He caught himself and tutted. “Well. The wand chooses the wizard. You will find holly—” he looked at Harry as if the wood might bite, “—particularly suited to… protection. And to overcoming… certain obstacles.”

Harry’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ve no interest in protection,” he said. “Only dominion.”

“Wands learn their masters,” Ollivander allowed, voice going dry. “Do try not to teach it something the rest of us will regret.”

They left with boxes under their arms. Dumbledore paid, pleasant as ever, eyes taking notes and secrets like a careful burglar. Outside, the alley felt different with the wands in their hands—closer to the skin, as if a layer of the air had decided they were friend enough to touch.

“Books next,” Dumbledore said. “Then—if you like—ice cream. There’s a shop boys your age usually enjoy after… such a day.”

Tom opened his mouth to agree and then shut it when Harry didn’t answer. He turned his face slightly toward Harry’s profile, the way men look to their kings in councils.

“Later,” Harry said. Tom nodded.

They walked past the serpent window again. The snake had lifted its head; its tongue tasted the glass with languid contempt. Children pressed closer, craning, squealing when it struck half-heartedly at a handprint.

Harry stopped. The basilisk ink along his spine prickled as if a big cat had woken and stretched.

The Boomslang’s eye fixed on him.

He didn’t speak English.

~Move~, he hissed, the word sliding from him like steam from a kettle, bright and cold.

The snake’s head jerked. It flowed off the branch and pushed its snout against the pane. The children scattered. A mother shrieked. Dumbledore’s hand tightened imperceptibly on the top of his cane.

The serpent’s tongue flickered. ~Speaker~, it said, surprise like a gust of warm air. ~Nestless king. You smell of stone and blood.~

Harry’s lips curved. ~You smell of boredom.~

It tasted the air again, then lowered its head until the scales lay flat against the glass, offering the ridge above its eyes like a bow.

Tom didn’t breathe. His pupils devoured his irises. “What did you—”

“Parseltongue,” Dumbledore said, tone mild as milk. “A rare gift.” To Harry: “Not uncommon among those linked to Mr. Riddle.”

“Linked,” Harry repeated, as if tasting a poor wine. “No. Owned.”

The glass fogged in front of his mouth; the snake watched the fog ebb as if reading portent in it. Dumbledore’s eyes were calm lakes with something dark moving in their depths.

“Boys,” he said gently, “we have a few more items and then we must get you home.”

They finished the list. Tom held every book like it might hold the secret to the world; Harry weighed each like a weapon. Dumbledore kept his mask meticulously polished, but every time Harry smiled at the wrong thing—at a curse whispering from a defensive text, at a set of ritual candles that hummed when he touched the wick—the old man’s breath changed by a hair.

At Gringotts again, they paused at the steps. Dumbledore offered to take their purchases with a charm; Harry said, “We’ll carry our own,” because submission, even in weight, is training.

“You’ll travel to Hogwarts on the first of September,” Dumbledore said. “From King’s Cross. Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.” He explained the trick with the barrier as if he hadn’t taught a thousand children how to walk through walls. “I’ll see you both there.”

“You’ll see us first,” Harry said.

Dumbledore’s smile held. “Will I?”

“You will,” Harry said, and the basilisk down his back smiled with him.

They returned to Wool’s through the dripping pub, Dumbledore smoothing Miss Cole’s mind with soft words and smaller magics. In the corridor, when the adults’ ears were full of something else, Tom pressed his shoulder into Harry’s, hard enough to speak.

“Everything bent,” he said, voice barely a breath. “Even the air.”

Harry didn’t look at him. “It learns.”

“Slytherin,” Tom said, and the word sounded like hunger.

Harry turned then, slow, letting Tom see the answer arrive before he spoke it. “Slytherin kneels,” he said. “The house first. The man in me it remembers second.”

Tom swallowed, throat working. “Yours,” he said, not as oath this time but as axiom.

“Only mine,” Harry said. He set a hand on the back of Tom’s neck, not gentle, not rough, and steered him toward the dormitory like a general directing a favored lieutenant.

That night, the orphanage dreamed of owls. In the cellar, the bowl held the ghost of heat as if coals slept at the bottom of it. Under the tree, the seam in the bark widened the width of a fingernail and breathed a little deeper.

Harry lay on the thin mattress and watched the ceiling. Tom’s breathing across the room found his rhythm and matched it without thinking. When Harry closed his eyes, he saw a tower older than the school that thought it would own him. He saw a crest that wasn’t the stag or the Deathly Hallows, but something cut into stone when ink was still an experiment—three lines intertwined with a blade, a serpent eating its tail.

He saw Dumbledore’s face when the holly lit, the way a man looks at a fire he’d meant to keep caged.

He saw Slytherin’s table, and all the boys who thought they were sharks learning they’d been minnows in a pond when the sea arrived.

He slept with a smile he didn’t show anyone.

In the morning, a girl dropped a spoon and didn’t get slapped. Mr. Carter packed a case with one hand and didn’t look back. The crooked tree’s bark felt warmer where Harry put his palm.

“Soon,” he told it, and the ward under the roots rolled over and offered its throat.

Tom came to his side without being called, hair uncombed, eyes already bright. “When we get there,” he said, “what do I do?”

“You take the chair on my right,” Harry said. “You keep your mouth shut unless I ask you to open it. You watch everything. You learn what faces boys make just before they’re brave.”

“And then?”

Harry’s smile was all edges and patience. “Then we teach them what kneeling means.”

Chapter Text

Steam licked the iron ribs of the roof and curled around the sign for Platform Nine and Three-Quarters like a languid serpent. The crowd moved in currents—parents with gloves and careful smiles, first-years with eyes too wide, trunks clattering, owls fretting in wicker cages. Someone laughed like glass. Someone cried into a muff, trying not to be noticed.

Tom stared at the scarlet engine as if a god had laid down in London and agreed to take them north on its spine. He stood where Harry put him: to Harry’s right, shoulder half an inch behind, posture straight. He didn’t fidget. Awe shook through him in small currents, tightened into purpose before it could spill.

Dumbledore’s hand hovered a polite distance away, as though he shepherded them with the air. He had not tried to separate them again; even politeness learns.

“Here we are,” he said, soft, as if the train might skitter if spoken to loudly. “Find a compartment near the front. It tends to be quieter.” A smile that was not advice so much as a way of measuring whether they took advice. “I’ll see you on the other side of the journey.”

Harry’s gaze slid past him, caught on names stitched in brass and blood. Malfoy, Black, Rosier, Burke—heraldic syllables worn like signet rings in faces that would one day sire boys Harry had already watched die. It pleased him to see the beginning.

“Come,” he said, and Tom moved.

They stepped into the corridor. Red plush, scuffed brass, the smell of coal and sugar and ink. First-years jammed like corks in the doorways, older students elbowing through with entitlement that smelled like cologne. Several heads turned when Harry passed—not at the scar alone, but at the way he moved, the way the air shifted around him as if making room.

They claimed a compartment and let the rest of the world arrange itself accordingly.

Two boys slid the door back without knocking after the whistle—a fair-haired one with a face composed for looking down, and a heavier one with shoulders built for other people’s doors.

“Compartment’s spoken for,” the fair-haired boy said, voice smooth as expensive paper. “By us.”

Tom looked at Harry instead of answering. Harry set his elbow on the windowsill and watched the steam draw a white veil over London.

“And you are?” Harry asked, not looking up.

“Abraxas Malfoy,” the boy said, and the name enjoyed itself in his mouth. “You’re in our seats.”

“Is that how it works?” Harry turned his head. Green eyes like broken bottle glass in sun. “Seats with little family names written on the air?”

The heavy one scowled, found no place to put it, and held it anyway.

“Stand aside,” Malfoy said. “You’ll find somewhere more… suitable.”

Tom smiled with all his teeth, a small, bright animal show. He was eleven and merciless. “He is suitable,” he said. “You aren’t.”

Malfoy’s attention cut to him as if to a draft he intended to close. “And you are?”

“Tom Riddle,” Tom said, and let the syllables ring with new coin. He kept his voice polite. It made the contempt prettier.

“Half-blood,” Malfoy murmured, the way one says rain to explain the wetness. “You’ll learn your place soon enough.”

Harry stood without haste. The compartment shrank by an inch. “He already has one,” he said. “At my side.”

The train coughed, shuddered, began to pull. Malfoy’s balance shifted; he reached to steady himself with a palm flat on the door. Harry flicked two fingers. Metal warmed. Abraxas hissed and snatched his hand back, shaking it once, affront cracking through the polish.

“I’ll remember you,” Malfoy said, which in his family mouth meant I will repay you with interest.

“You won’t have to,” Harry said, and closed the door on them. It clicked like a verdict.

Tom sat, triumphant and a little breathless. “Malfoy,” he said, rolling the flavor of it around in his mouth. “They’ll be useful.”

“Everything is,” Harry said. He watched London smear to brick and soot and fields. The world unspooled, green and gray.

After an hour, the corridor brought them visitors who did knock. A thin boy with eyes like cut slate and a girl with black hair braided tight, wearing a small silver pin in the shape of a star.

“Excuse us,” the boy said. “You’re first-years.” It wasn’t a question. He looked at Tom, then at Harry, then back at Tom as if something he didn’t have a word for had rearranged the furniture in his head. “House discussions usually happen in the second carriage. But Slughorn asked me to check everyone’s names.”

“Asked you,” Tom said, observant, filing ranks. “You organize.”

“Sometimes,” the boy said. “Nott.” He flicked his chin toward the girl. “Black.”

Her mouth didn’t quite smile. “Cassiopeia,” she said, the syllables quiet and sharp.

Nott and Black lingered at the threshold, the corridor filling with steam and shouts behind them. A trolley creaked somewhere, the smell of sweets and roasted nuts drifting in waves.

Harry studied them without moving. Nott’s gaze was measuring, the kind of boy who remembered debts the way priests remembered sins. Cassiopeia Black wore her family name like armor—chin high, braid tight, silver star glinting at her collar.

“You’ll be in Slytherin,” Nott said flatly. “Slughorn wants to know the first-years early. Family connections, expectations.” His eyes slid over Harry’s face, paused at the scar, but he didn’t ask. “Some of the older students are already gathering.”

“We’ll come when we choose,” Harry said. His voice was calm enough to sound like agreement until it wasn’t.

Nott’s mouth twitched—amusement, irritation, both. “Suit yourself. But don’t be late. They’ll take it as an insult.”

“It will be,” Harry said.

Cassiopeia’s smile sharpened. “Good. They deserve it.” She looked at Tom as she said it, and Tom preened like a cat at the sun.

The two older students withdrew, leaving behind their names like chalk marks on stone.

---

The train ran long. Countryside unspooled, sheep and hills and dark woods cutting the horizon. Tom’s nose almost pressed the glass. He tracked every flicker of green, every silhouette of tower in the distance, as if the land itself had been waiting for him.

“Magic,” he whispered once, when the outline of a ruined abbey bent the air strangely around it. “It’s everywhere.”

“Of course,” Harry said. His reflection in the glass was sharp, green eyes brighter than the passing sun. “The world was built on blood. You’re only seeing the stains.”

Tom tore his gaze away from the landscape, studying Harry instead. Harry’s calm was a fortress; Tom wanted its stones, its walls, its secret gates. He wanted to be let inside.

---

The compartment door slid open again after dusk, lanterns along the corridor burning low. Abraxas Malfoy stood there, this time with a pair of companions: Rosier, slim and sharp, and Burke, heavy and watchful. The three of them carried themselves like a heraldic crest, practiced in formation.

“House meeting,” Malfoy said, no preamble. His hand was still bandaged from where Harry had burned him. “Now.”

Harry didn’t move. “If Slughorn wants us, he can come himself.”

“You’ll come,” Malfoy said, voice a shade tighter than it had been that morning. “Slytherin isn’t a place for strays.”

Tom’s lips parted, words sharpening on his tongue, but Harry lifted a hand. He stood, deliberately slow, and Tom rose with him.

“Very well,” Harry said. His smile was brief and cutting. “Lead the way.”

---

The second carriage had been emptied of compartments. A space had been cleared, lanterns burning brighter, voices overlapping in the charged hush of a crowd. Fifth- and sixth-years stood along the sides, arms crossed, watching. First- and second-years clustered together in the middle, whispering nervously.

Malfoy’s group pushed Harry and Tom into the circle.

Slughorn wasn’t there. The gathering had nothing of professors in it. This was a parliament of serpents, older students measuring the new, deciding pecking orders before the Sorting Hat ever touched a head.

“Introduce yourselves,” Rosier said, his voice all silk.

“Tom Riddle,” Tom said immediately, chin high. “Harry Potter.” He left no room for doubt which name mattered more.

The circle murmured. Some tilted their heads, others frowned. Potter was not a name among the Sacred Twenty-Eight, not a family in their clubs or their vaults.

“Half-blood,” Malfoy sneered. He wanted the words to land like stones. “And an orphan.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “And already your better.”

The silence that followed wasn’t disbelief. It was outrage waiting for permission.

Burke stepped forward, broad shoulders blocking half the lanternlight. “Better?” he echoed. “Prove it.”

“Gladly,” Harry said.

The air thickened. The lanterns flickered as if listening. Tom’s pulse thundered, excitement beating against his ribs like wings.

Harry lifted his wand, holly glowing faint in the dim. “Duel,” he said. “Unless you’re afraid.”

Burke laughed. “Of you?” He drew his wand, polished oak with dragon heartstring, and the older students leaned forward, hungry for spectacle.

“Begin,” Rosier said.

Burke struck first, a hex sharp as spit. Harry swatted it aside with a flick, sparks scattering harmlessly against the floorboards. His counterstrike was wordless—green light that hissed like a struck serpent, knocking Burke back three steps into the circle’s edge. Gasps rose, then stilled.

Burke snarled, sent a curse that splintered wood and scorched the wall. Harry stepped through it. His wand cut the air once, twice, and the spell he unleashed pinned Burke to the floor as though invisible talons held him down.

Burke writhed, choking. Harry didn’t look away. He didn’t release the pressure until the older boy’s eyes bulged, until the silence stretched taut as a bowstring.

Then he lifted the spell, casual as dropping a pebble.

Burke coughed, dragging himself upright, face mottled red. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The circle had seen enough.

Harry lowered his wand. “Anyone else?” he asked softly.

No one answered.

Tom’s eyes gleamed, worship bright and unhidden. He stepped half a pace closer to Harry, as if aligning himself with the center of gravity in the room.

Rosier exhaled, slow. His gaze lingered on Harry, measuring again, but with something new in it now.

“Very well,” he said. “You’ll do.”

The meeting dissolved. Names whispered. Glances weighed. Harry and Tom returned to their compartment, the air around them changed.

Tom’s voice shook with restrained excitement. “You broke him.”

“No,” Harry said. His green eyes gleamed in the lanternlight. “I showed him what breaking feels like.”

Tom sat down, close, too close, not caring. His voice was breathless, reverent. “Slytherin won’t know what to do with us.”

Harry leaned back against the seat, wand still loose in his hand. “They’ll learn.”

Lanterns swung low in the boats, their flames mirrored in the black water. The castle loomed against the sky, towers cutting the stars into jagged pieces. Tom leaned forward as if the sight might bite him. Harry watched the stone instead of the lights—old wards thrummed through the mortar, power steeped into the bones of the place.

The boats scraped against the bank. The first-years climbed the stone steps, voices hushed, awe mingling with nerves. Harry walked at the front, Tom at his side, as though the rest followed by instinct.

The doors to the Great Hall opened. Hundreds of candles floated above, light dancing across the enchanted ceiling, clouds whispering in the rafters. The four long tables glittered with silver and gold.

Whispers started almost immediately. The older students craned their necks. Two new names had already traveled ahead of the train, carried by mouths eager for scandal.

The Sorting Hat sat crooked on its stool. Professor Dippet, old and thin as parchment, stood beside it. His eyes were gentle, unfocused, already wandering toward Harry too long before blinking back.

“Riddle, Tom.”

Tom strode forward, jaw set. He placed the Hat on his head and the brim fell over his eyes.

*Ahh,* a voice murmured inside. *Another ambitious one. Clever, hungry, self-serving. A fine Slytherin indeed.*

*Yes,* Tom thought fiercely. *Slytherin. Power. Give it to me.*

The Hat chuckled. *You’re sharp enough for Ravenclaw, too, but… oh, yes, Slytherin will have you. It’s waiting.*

“SLYTHERIN!” the Hat shouted.

The table burst into cheers. Tom yanked the Hat off, eyes bright, and strode to the green-and-silver table where Cassiopeia Black smirked and shifted to make space.

“Potter, Harry.”

The Hall stilled.

Harry walked with deliberate calm, every step a blade of silence. He set the Hat on his head.

*Well now,* the Hat purred. *You don’t belong here. Not at all. You’re… strange. Old magic coils inside you. Too much power, too much will. You could be anything. Gryffindor would—*

*No.* Harry’s thought sliced sharp. *Slytherin. That’s where Tom is. That’s where I’ll build.*

*You’re dangerous,* the Hat whispered. *You could bring ruin.*

*I will,* Harry said. *Now put me where I told you.*

The Hat hesitated, then laughed, uneasy. *Oh, very well. You’ll make history, one way or another.*

“SLYTHERIN!”

The Hall exploded again, though the cheer this time was laced with whispers, suspicion. Harry lifted the Hat from his head and met Dumbledore’s eyes across the room. The professor’s smile held, but the knuckles on his wand hand whitened.

Harry slid into place beside Tom. Tom’s grin was feral.

“You told it,” Tom whispered.

“I always do,” Harry replied.

---

The feast was a blur of voices, clinking goblets, roasted meats steaming on silver platters. Tom ate sparingly, eyes darting everywhere. Harry cut his meat neatly, watching the other Slytherins instead of the food.

Abraxas Malfoy sat across from them, eyes narrowed. Cassiopeia Black leaned her chin on her hand, studying Harry as if weighing a puzzle box. Burke nursed a sore wrist from the duel and didn’t meet his gaze.

When the feast ended, prefects herded the first-years down winding staircases into the dungeons. The Slytherin common room sprawled like a cavern under the lake, green light rippling across the ceiling. Black leather sofas, carved tables, a fire that hissed as though water whispered in it.

The prefect cleared his throat. “Welcome to Slytherin. You’ll find—”

Harry rose, wand loose in his hand. “I’ll speak.”

The room stilled. Even the older students turned.

“You think bloodlines matter,” Harry said softly, his voice carrying to the corners. “You think family names will keep you safe. They won’t. Power does. Cunning does. Loyalty to the right hand does.” He gestured to Tom. “You’ll learn that soon enough.”

A murmur rippled through the room. Abraxas stood, jaw tight. “You’re bold for a nobody.”

Harry flicked his wand. Malfoy’s collar tightened, choking him. He clawed at his throat, face reddening.

“Bold,” Harry said, “and true.” He released the spell just before Malfoy collapsed.

The room was silent but for the hiss of the fire.

Tom leaned back in his chair, eyes gleaming, a prince enthroned. “Any other doubts?” he asked. His eleven-year-old voice carried the weight of a king’s herald.

No one spoke.

The Slytherins had been claimed.

--

Morning came gray and clean as a blade. The lake pressed its green palm against the common-room windows; shadows of fish slid like thoughts across stone. Tom woke before the prefect’s knock. Harry was already dressed, cufflinks precise, tie spare and neat. He looked older than every boy in the dormitory and wore it the way some men wear crowns—like a thing that fits the skull.

They moved through the corridors as if the castle had learned their steps overnight. Stone remembered their tread. Torches breathed brighter as they passed.

Transfiguration first.

Dumbledore’s classroom smelled of chalk and honeyed wood. Sun climbed the high windows, teasing sparks out of floating dust. On each desk: a matchstick and a needle under a clear charm dome. A family of mice slept in a glass cage on the back counter, twitching as if dreaming of escape through holes too small to keep hope.

“Good morning,” Dumbledore said pleasantly, and the word laid a warm cloth over knives. “Our aim today is modest—order from similarity. Wood to metal, grain to gleam.”

His eyes touched Tom, then Harry, then the class as a whole. “Transfiguration,” he went on, “is the discipline of intent. You must imagine the target so completely that the thing you hold yields politely to become it.”

He lifted his wand. The matchstick on his desk softened, gleamed, drew itself into a needle’s perfect line and point. “Simple,” he said, smiling, “with practice.”

Whispers traveled the benches. Abraxas Malfoy set his jaw, unfurled a polished wand, and produced a very long splinter with a mean-looking sliver at one end. Burke made a stub of nail. Cassiopeia Black’s match shed bark like a snake skin and became a tapered hairpin that flashed like starlight.

“Excellent control, Miss Black,” Dumbledore said, genuine pleasure in it.

Tom’s wrist flexed. His matchstick quivered, shrank, smoothed. The needle he produced was exact, silvery, sharp enough that when he touched the point, blood freckled his finger. He smiled, eyes bright, and didn’t suck the bead away. He liked how the room felt when it saw his blood and realized it didn’t frighten him.

Dumbledore glanced up, approval tempered by thought. “Very good, Mr. Riddle.”

Harry had not moved.

“Mr. Potter?” Dumbledore asked, gentle.

Harry rolled the matchstick between finger and thumb and gave the smallest possible nod—as if acknowledging an opponent worth his time. He did not speak. His wand flicked once, almost lazy. The matchstick became a needle—and then the needle became a key, iron black, teeth crisp, head a disc engraved with three interlaced lines like a crest scraped into stone.

The class went quiet. Keys have meanings in castles.

Dumbledore’s smile didn’t change. His knuckles did. “A creative leap,” he said. “But let’s remain with the exercise for today.”

Harry looked at the key, at the light crawling over it. “Of course,” he said amiably, and turned it back into a needle that glittered like a threat left on a pillow.

Tom watched with a hunger so sharp it might have bled if you touched it. He wanted to know how Harry found the extra turn in a spell, the angle that made obedience become dominion. He wanted that angle under his tongue.

Dumbledore passed among the desks, correcting grips, suggesting smaller movements, making jokes soft as wool. When he neared Harry, the air between them changed temperature by a degree. “Most students,” he said quietly, “choose their transfiguration goals. You seem, Harry, to have yours choose you.”

Harry tilted his head. “Perhaps I just know what locks look like.”

Their eyes held for a breath. Dumbledore’s were clear, calm, old. Harry’s were young and bright and had the patience of cliffs.

Class ended with needles arrayed like a surgeon’s tray. Dumbledore assigned three pages on transformation matrices and dismissed them with a pleasant, “Remember: compassion is a discipline too.”

Outside, the corridor swallowed the class in echoes. Tom walked close, his shoulder almost brushing Harry’s. “You made a key,” he said, reverent. “To what?”

Harry’s mouth tilted. “To everything.”

Potions next. The dungeon classroom was snug and misanthropic, all stone and shelves and liquids the color of unpleasant promises. Horace Slughorn bobbed at the front like a well-fed firefly, mustache gleaming, waistcoat straining, voice warm with affection for ingredients and the talented children who made them sing.

“Welcome, my dears,” he boomed, hands spread. “We begin with a simple draught—Boil-Cure. Not glamorous, but foundational. Like onion soup. Everything good starts there.”

He clapped. Cauldrons hissed into readiness. The board listed ingredients in a neat hand; Slughorn talked as he wrote, anecdotes about wart-plagued cousins and the proper way to bribe goblins (with food, not flattery).

Abraxas set up like a duelist, every tool aligned, every motion practiced. Cassiopeia worked fast and elegant, the steam from her cauldron curling in pretty shapes. Burke sweat into his; it hissed and smelled of iron.

Tom leaned over rosemary and horned slugs like a monk over scripture. Harry let the instructions sit in his head, then ignored them when ignoring them would be better.

Halfway through, Slughorn wandered near, nostrils flaring with delight. “Mr. Riddle! That color is exactly what I like to see at this stage—pea green, not pond. Mr. Potter…” He peered. Harry’s potion had gone a shade deeper than the board suggested, surface tight as glass. “Experimental, are we?”

“Correct,” Harry said, and added a single clockwise stir that made the surface shiver like a dream remembering itself. The smell turned clean, bright, medicinal. The brew cleared from pea to mint to rainwater.

Slughorn’s face did complicated things. “Well now,” he murmured, delighted and wary. “You’re a pair, aren’t you? I’ll have to keep an eye on you.” He beamed at Tom, then at Harry, longer. “You two must come to tea. A few of my favorites. We’ll talk… futures.”

Tom preened. Harry nodded once, affably, the way a king accepts tribute.

They bottled their results. Tom’s vial shone the exact color of a healing ward. Harry’s was clear as truth.

At lunch, the Great Hall felt like an ocean with tides the size of gossip. Slytherin table shifted to accommodate them without being asked; space appears around knives. Abraxas said nothing. Cassiopeia watched Harry the way astronomers watch a new star and pretend they aren’t calculating impact.

Tom ate little, hungry for different food. “When do we start taking things?” he asked under his breath.

“We already have,” Harry said.

Defense Against the Dark Arts after lunch. The professor—Merriweather, brisk, beak-nosed, fond of rules—talked about posture, about clarity of intent, about the families who served the Ministry bravely (Abraxas sat taller at that), about the tragedies of reckless magic (Burke went stony). He called for pairs to practice Disarming. Wands clicked and flashed. Tom tried to pry a wand from Abraxas’s hand; Abraxas refused to be pried by anyone’s first try.

Harry stood across from Cassiopeia Black. She smiled like an oath. “Don’t hold back,” she said.

“I don’t,” Harry said.

“Expelliarmus,” she snapped. His wand shivered. He didn’t let go. He answered with nothing spoken—only a thought with edges. Her wand went to his hand like a bird recognizing the wrong sky and correcting itself.

She laughed, delighted and furious. “Do that again.”

“Later,” Harry said, and tossed her wand back with the easy disrespect that teaches devotion.

By dinner, the castle had learned their names the way bodies learn pain: inventively, in layers, with interest.

They returned to the common room to find a small audience waiting. Older students lounged like bored cats. Younger ones clustered near the fire, eager for warmth or stories or orders. A fourth-year with a prefect’s badge polished to a sermon stepped forward.

“House rules,” he said, perfunctory. “Curfew, passwords, Slughorn’s expectations—no public dueling; detention if you’re caught hexing Gryffindors in corridors; Quidditch trials next week. Keep the dormitories tidy. Respect your elders.”

Harry stood, one palm on the back of a chair. “Respect competence,” he said. “The rest is noise.”

The prefect flushed. “If you think—”

“I don’t,” Harry said. “I know.” His gaze went to Tom without being asked. “Sit.”

Tom sat. The sound it made wasn’t loud. It was decisive.

Cassiopeia’s mouth curved. “You do love theatrics,” she said. “We should bottle it.” She looked at Tom. “He teaches you?”

“He makes me,” Tom said simply.

Abraxas rose. “Enough,” he said, brittle. “Slytherin isn’t a stage for a Muggle orphan with a scar and delusions of grandeur.”

Harry turned his head slowly as if deciding where to put the knife. “You can kneel tonight,” he said softly, “or learn the hard way in the morning. I’m patient.”

“Are you.” Malfoy’s wand was in his hand, fast. Harry didn’t draw. He didn’t need to.

“~Down,~” Harry hissed—not to Malfoy. To the fire.

Green flame obeyed like a hound, guttering low until the common room fell into lake-dark. Gasps, a curse stifled; the water outside the windows gleamed like onyx. In the sudden shadow, Harry’s scar caught what little light there was and threw it back like a dangerous star.

“~Quiet,~” he whispered, and the room went still. Even breath heard the order and held itself neater.

Tom’s skin pebbled with awe. He understood it wasn’t the trick—it was the obedience of old wards to his voice. The castle had cocked its head at a new language and decided to listen.

Harry let the silence soak in, then lifted his hand. The fire rose again, obedient, no wood spent.

“Do you have a point?” Abraxas asked, voice a little tight now.

“Yes,” Harry said. “It’s mine.”

A thin laughter slid from the shadows; Rosier, pleased. “Let the boy plant his flag, Malfoy,” he said lazily. “It makes the territory more entertaining.”

Abraxas looked the room over—saw the stares, the weighting, the way even older students leaned a fraction toward Harry as toward a gravity. He sat down like a man agreeing to a temporary truce and planning an eternal war.

After curfew, the dungeons breathed cold. Harry walked the corridor alone, trailing his fingertips along stone. The wall’s pulse found his. Wards hummed hello in the throat of the house.

The snake in the glass by the stairwell had woken with night. Its body lay ribboned over a low ledge, tongue tasting the damp. Harry leaned an elbow on the rail, eyes level with the serpent.

“~Hungry?~” he asked.

The serpent’s head lifted. Its pupils narrowed to needles. “~Always,~” it said, the word drawn out like silk. “~The lake feeds poorly. Frogs, fish. Bones that fall from above only rarely.~”

“~I’ll teach the house to drop better bones,~” Harry said, amused.

A rustle in the dark—Tom, who had followed without sound. He hung back, not wanting to interrupt holy conversation.

“~You smell like old stone,~” the snake said, tasting air near Harry’s throat. "~And like a room with a door no one has opened in a long time.~”

Harry stroked the rail with a knuckle. “~We will open it soon.~”

Tom stepped closer, unable to stop himself. “You make it obey,” he whispered, not in ~, but with the reverence of someone who would learn any tongue required.

Harry glanced back. “Only things that matter,” he said. “Sleep.”

Tom should have bristled at being sent away like a pet. He breathed out instead, his spine smoothing under the word. “Yes.”

He went. Harry stayed, speaking to stone in a voice older than the school’s charter, and the house listened like a dog that had just remembered it was a wolf.

The week unfurled: classes and corridors and a dozen small wars. Harry taught Tom to thread cruelty through courtesy until the two were indistinguishable. Tom learned quickly. He excelled in runes; the old shapes recognized him as an heir of hunger. He devoured Defense, moving like a boy who had learned to dodge fists before he learned to write. He brewed with a precision that made Slughorn beam and write their names, discreetly, in a small book that would become a club.

Slughorn’s first “little gathering” happened on Friday after supper. An office stuffed with photographs of people whose names tasted like money; shelves of crystal decanters; a table crowded with crystalized pineapple and meats glazed to a lacquered shine. Slughorn’s hand landed on Tom’s shoulder like a benediction, then on Harry’s like an invitation to a conspiracy.

“Mr. Potter,” he burbled, “I do hope you’ll consider contributing to… well, to the future. You have such a… certain quality. And Mr. Riddle! Flawless work in class. Most promising. Most.”

Tom accepted the praise like sunlight. Harry accepted it like a tithe.

Between stories, Slughorn leaned in. “Which House did you say your family favored, Mr. Potter? I don’t recall your name in… well, in certain ledgers.”

“I don’t keep ledgers,” Harry said. “I keep accounts.”

Slughorn blinked, then decided to laugh. “Ha! Oh, very good. Very good indeed.” He moved away to flatter a Rosier aunt in a frame.

Cassiopeia drifted to them, a glass like a captured star in hand. “Will you take the Quidditch team too?” she asked Harry lightly, but it wasn’t a joke. “Or is that beneath your… reign?”

“I prefer war to sport,” Harry said. “But men need games to keep their teeth sharp. We’ll see.”

She considered him. “You’re not like anyone here.”

“I know,” he said.

Tom turned his head slightly, listening to how the room bent around Harry’s voice. He saw ambition like metal filings crawl toward a magnet. He memorized the pattern. He would become the pattern.

On Saturday, a pair of Gryffindor second-years tried to shoulder Tom into a wall outside the library. Harry took a step and the air pressed the boys flat with a sound like a book shut firmly. They gasped, eyes white at the edges.

“Say ‘sorry,’” Harry suggested.

“Sorry,” the braver one wheezed.

“For what.”

“For… for being stupid,” he managed.

“For being prey,” Harry corrected mildly, and let them go.

Tom watched their retreat, chest rising fast. “I want them to run from me like that,” he said.

“They already do,” Harry said. “They just don’t know it yet.”

Sunday night, the lake pushed small waves against the glass. Harry found Tom in the common room with parchment spread, ink a neat river along the quill. Tom had finished every assignment and started on next week’s. The neatness was weapon-bright.

“Come,” Harry said. “There’s a place you should see.”

They moved through corridors most students ignore—the ones that feel too narrow for no reason, the ones with a draft that tastes of deep water. Behind a tapestry, down steps where the counting goes wrong, through a door that didn’t exist until Harry touched it.

The room beyond was small, round, made of stone that remembered other hands. A dry fountain sat in the center, its basin carved with snakes whose eyes had once held gems. Empty sconces waited like open mouths along the walls.

“~Wake,~” Harry said to the sconces. Flame hissed up, green and soft. Shadows took their places like officials at a ceremony.

Tom turned slowly, drinking it in. “What is this?”

“A room that understands us,” Harry said. He knelt by the fountain, brushed dust from the carving, then pricked his thumb with a nail he sharpened by will alone. Two drops fell—dark, then bright as they found the old channel.

The snakes’ eyes glowed briefly, memory waking. In the silence, Harry heard other words—a susurrus behind the walls, a promise.

Tom knelt without being told, opposite Harry, hands on the lip of the basin. The green fire painted his face in paintbox colors—emerald, shadow, bone.

“Say it,” Harry murmured.

“My breath is yours,” Tom said, voice steady. “My blood is yours. My power is yours to command. Only yours.”

Harry put his bleeding thumb to Tom’s, pressed until red met red. The fire leaned; the room breathed in. Somewhere in the stone, something old and pleased moved one inch closer to the light.

“Good,” Harry said. He didn’t praise often. When he did, the word was a door opening. Tom’s eyes closed for a heartbeat as if sunlight had passed through him.

On their way back, they passed the stairwell serpent again. It lifted its head, tongue sampling their trail.

"~Soon, ~” Harry promised without slowing. “~We open what’s been shut.~”

“~I will be there,~” the snake said, satisfied to be included in a future.

In bed, Tom lay with his hands folded on his chest, the way people lie in effigies. He stared at the canopy and replayed the room, the fountain, the press of thumb to thumb. He was eleven. He knew it. He also knew it didn’t matter. He had been chosen to be made.

Across the room, Harry’s breathing was even, unhurried. The basilisk on his back slept with its mouth slightly open, as if tasting a dream.

Above them, the castle shifted, old stones easing, listening. The lake murmured. In a tower a long way off, a professor with silver hair wrote a letter he would not send, then folded it, then burned it, then watched the ash with eyes that were too calm to be anything but frightened.

Morning would bring more classes, more small wars. Night would bring corridors and passwords that learned new tongues. Somewhere under the tree that had eaten boys in London, a root stirred, sensing its master stretch.

Hogwarts had not yet knelt. But it had bowed its head to hear better.

--

The second week began with rain that streaked the high windows of the Great Hall, turning candlelight into rivers of gold. The air smelled of damp parchment and ambition. Whispers followed Harry and Tom through breakfast—about the duel on the train, about the fire that bowed to his hiss, about the way Malfoy had sat down when Harry told him to.

Tom drank it in like wine. Every glance was proof, every murmur a crown. He’d learned quickly that Slytherins respected victory more than lineage. Malfoy still strutted, but his strut was louder than his footing.

They were summoned to Slughorn’s office again on Monday evening. The man’s rooms glowed with lamplight, bottles of mead and butterbeer winking like jewels. A small fire crackled, and a tray of crystallized pineapple waited on a side table.

“Ah, my stars!” Slughorn clapped his hands, jowls shaking with delight. “Come in, come in. Sit, sit.”

The others were older: Rosier lounging with one boot hooked over his knee, Cassiopeia Black pouring herself a drink without asking, a Nott cousin fiddling with a gold quill. Malfoy sulked near the fireplace, his bandaged hand clenched tight.

Slughorn fussed. “My little favorites, gathered together! The best of our House. Our futures.” His eyes twinkled over the group, settling longest on Harry and Tom.

The evening was stories—Slughorn’s tales of Ministers and Magnates, of how connections could grease every wheel. Harry listened with a faint smile, cataloguing every name. Tom leaned forward like a supplicant, eyes bright, taking every syllable as scripture.

When the meeting ended, Rosier drew Harry aside. “You’ve made waves,” he said smoothly. “Waves can drown, or they can carry ships. I’d rather sail than sink.”

Harry’s smile was sharp. “Then sail with me.”

Rosier laughed softly, and though he didn’t kneel, something in his eyes had tilted.

---

Classes hardened into rhythm. In Charms, Flitwick squeaked encouragement, standing on a stack of books to demonstrate wand movements. Harry levitated his feather without a word, sending it to brush the ceiling beams. Tom’s feather darted in quick circles, fast enough to make Burke curse when it brushed his ear.

“Excellent!” Flitwick chirped, writing their names down with a flourish. “Mr. Potter, Mr. Riddle, you have real promise!”

In Herbology, Tom pressed his hands into the soil as if it might whisper secrets. In History of Magic, Harry leaned back in his chair, memorizing Binns’ droning lectures while half the class dozed.

But it was in Defense where they shone most. Professor Merriweather demonstrated Shield Charms, his stern voice echoing. “Control is paramount. A shield must be as strong as your intent.”

He flicked his wand; a shimmering barrier sprang up. “Like so. Pair off!”

Tom paired with Malfoy this time, sparks flying as curses and shields collided. Malfoy hissed when Tom’s hex seared close to his cheek.

Harry faced Cassiopeia again. She grinned. “Try not to steal my wand this time.”

“I’ll take what I want,” Harry said, and his shield flared emerald, stronger than Merriweather’s. Cassiopeia’s spell cracked against it, light scattering like glass. She laughed, delighted.

“Impressive, Mr. Potter,” Merriweather said, though unease tightened his mouth.

---

By the third week, Slytherin was no longer divided. It was bending. Harry had not dueled everyone—he hadn’t needed to. Tom whispered for him, and whispers were sharper than hexes. Cassiopeia shadowed them often now, amused and approving. Rosier offered advice as if already allied. Even the prefects hesitated before correcting them.

Malfoy resisted longest, but even he yielded ground. He snarled when Tom passed him in corridors, but his wand stayed holstered.

It was in the common room one late night that the final shift came. Tom sprawled on a sofa, parchment scattered, Harry beside him with a book on runes. Cassiopeia leaned against the mantel, humming.

Malfoy entered, flanked by Burke. His face was pale with fury.

“This isn’t yours,” he snapped. “Slytherin isn’t yours. You think you can waltz in, scar and all, and own what generations have built? You’re filth. Half-blood filth. And you—” he spat at Tom, “—are worse. You’re nothing.”

The room hushed.

Harry closed his book. He stood. “Kneel,” he said simply.

Malfoy laughed, brittle. “You—”

“~Kneel,~” Harry hissed, and the air shuddered. The lamps dimmed, the fire bent low, and every Slytherin in the room felt their knees weaken.

Malfoy collapsed with a strangled cry. His wand clattered from his hand. Burke staggered, gasping, barely managing to stay upright.

Harry stepped closer. His voice was soft, cold. “You will not insult him again. You will not question me again. You will remember who commands this House.”

Malfoy trembled, sweat slicking his face. “Y-yes.”

“Say it,” Harry ordered.

“You command,” Malfoy whispered.

Louder,” Harry said.

“You command!” Malfoy shouted, voice cracking.

The fire roared back to life, green light flooding the chamber.

Harry turned away, dismissing him like a servant. Malfoy stayed kneeling a moment longer before dragging himself up and fleeing, shame burning like fever.

The room exhaled. Tom’s eyes were wide, shining with devotion. Cassiopeia smiled like a blade.

Harry sat again, calmly opening his book. “Now we begin,” he said.

--

The castle smelled of rain and old iron. Stormlight crawled along the corridors in pale sheets. By Tuesday night, the lake pressed hard against the common-room glass, as if listening.

Harry left after curfew with Tom on his right, Cassiopeia trailing a few paces back because she understood how to follow without being told. They moved through a seam of corridor most students overlooked, the kind that made shoulders tighten though there was room enough to pass.

“Where?” Tom asked, quiet with urgency rather than fear.

“Down,” Harry said.

They passed the trophy room—dust polished by generations of pride—the unused classroom where chairs stacked themselves when no one watched, a narrow door that admitted only those who did not hurry. Stairs spiraled. The air cooled. Water spoke in the walls.

At a dead end of green-black stone, a battered sink crouched like an apology. Its taps were shaped like serpents whose mouths had long ago learned disuse.

Cassiopeia folded her arms, brow arched. “This is romantic.”

“Be silent,” Harry said without heat.

He stepped to the sink. Ran a hand over cold porcelain scratched by time and impatience. Then lowered his head, breath fogging once.

“~Open,~” he hissed.

Stone moved.

Not the dramatic parting of legend. A shiver first, then an obedient sigh; the sink slid aside, the floor drew breath, and a round throat of a chute opened—black, wet, hungry.

Tom’s eyes flared. He leaned forward as if a hand had taken his jaw and tilted it toward destiny.

“Together,” Harry said, and dropped.

They fell in clean spirals, water-slick stone turning body into arrow. Tom followed without a sound, Cassiopeia third, cursing in delight as her shoes found nothing to grip.

They spat into a tunnel where the air tasted like penny and age. The far wall wore a relief of coiled serpents whose eyes had once set jewels.

“Light,” Harry murmured. The wand answered. Tom’s followed. Cassiopeia’s came a beat later, green as lakewater.

They walked.

Bones lay in tidy drifts where rats had decided to keep house. Pipes the size of tree trunks hugged the ceiling, sweating. The tongue of the place was \~,\~ and the pulse of it too.

A door barred the end of the passage, carved with scales that had learned to be stone and were in no hurry to be anything else.

Harry set his palm to it.

“~Heir,~” he whispered—not a boast. A password.

The scales parted an inch, then two. Air that hadn’t been alive in centuries kissed their faces and decided to try again. The chamber beyond did not fully open—to do so would be to wake the old king outright—but a lip of threshold bared its teeth.

Tom exhaled like a prayer. “This is ours.”

“Ours,” Harry agreed, and did not step through. He was patient with doors he intended to own forever.

He circled instead, hand trailing, eyes counting patterns in the stone until a square no larger than a hymnbook looked back. He pressed. The square tilted; a shallow recess yawned. Inside lay a slate of dark rock, its surface carved in lines so fine they looked like veins.

“A book,” Cassiopeia breathed, shocked into reverence.

“Stone remembers better than paper,” Harry said. He lifted it free. The weight ran up his arms like a promise.

The script was not English. It wasn’t Latin either. It was the old tongue ~serpents whisper to rock when men have left them alone~. The first line curled under his thumb. It read him as he read it.

“Blood keys,” Harry said, eyes half-lidded. “Doors that hunger. Wards that want to be obeyed. Names that teach locks their manners.”

Tom edged nearer, pupils covering almost all the green. “Can you read all of it?”

“Enough,” Harry said. “More later.”

He set the book back into the recess with the care he gave blades. The door’s scales breathed, satisfied. He turned away before the place could decide to be jealous.

“~Close,~” he told the sink when they had climbed back to it sodden and grinning. Stone obeyed. The corridor returned to innocent.

Cassiopeia shook lakewater from her braid and considered Harry with a new math. “Fine. You’re mad, and I’m following you.”

“No,” Harry said. “You’re following him.” He jerked his chin at Tom.

Her gaze slid to the boy who was only eleven and already wearing hunger like regalia. She smiled slowly. “Then I’m following both.”

Tom stood taller for the words. He would have knelt if Harry had told him to. Harry didn’t. He let the choice burn a little longer.

—

Word traveled like smoke: Potter and Riddle haunted the place beneath the place. They walked where prefects did not. They spoke to glass and shadows. The lake watched them. Doors unlocked for them as if politely stepping aside in a hallway.

With rumor came friction. Some Houses hiss by habit when Slytherins pass; others lift their chins. A group of Hufflepuffs tried indifference as a tactic and learned it’s a kind of attention.

It happened on the stair by the greenhouses at dusk. The storm had left everything wet; moss breathed underfoot. A Hufflepuff fifth-year intercepted them midway up, flanked by two broad friends. Square face, square shoulders, a badge polished so clean it had ceased to be decoration and become belief.

“Potter,” he said. “Riddle. You don’t get to terrorize other students.”

Harry found his name without seeming to look. “Bones,” he said. “Edmund.”

The boy stiffened. “Prefect Bones,” he corrected, brave as a hammer.

Tom’s smile was small and knife-bright. “You’re in our way.”

“I’m in the school’s way,” Bones said. “Which is to say, I’m keeping it clear of you.”

Cassiopeia leaned against a pillar, amused. “How gallant.”

Bones colored but held. He’d come in good faith—blunt, decent, unbending. Harry respected steel when he saw it, even if he liked it better red.

“You want something,” Harry said.

Bones swallowed hard, then did the astonishing thing: he told the truth. “I want you to stop making people kneel.”

Tom’s laugh was soft and wicked. “Then stop us.”

A gathering drift of students paused on the steps above and below. Rain fell from leaves in patient drops. Somewhere, a toad considered a future without regrets.

Harry stepped down one step. Bones risked one up. They stood eye to eye now. Bones was taller; it didn’t matter.

“Let’s make a trade,” Harry said, and the whisper around the stair tensed in confusion.

Bones squared. “No.”

“You don’t know the price,” Harry said.

“I know I won’t pay it.”

Harry almost smiled. He liked him for it. “I take your oath,” he said. “Not to me. To truth. You’ll carry facts between Houses. You’ll bring me what I want to know, and I will make sure your Hufflepuffs are left alone by Slytherin. I bind my side in front of them.”

A murmur rippled; Cassiopeia’s brows rose; Tom’s chin tipped, interested.

Bones blinked hard. “I won’t spy for you.”

“You will witness,” Harry said. “You will say when the lions prowl and the ravens pick and the badgers are harried. You will not lie. You will not flatter. You will bring me what is.”

Bones stared. The rain made a dark line at his jaw. “And if I refuse?”

Harry flicked two fingers.

The moss gripped Bones’s shoes.

It was light at first—a lover’s hands—but when Bones tried to step back, the green tightened. His friends grabbed his elbows; the moss took them too, politely, ankle-deep.

Gasps rose. Wands shifted in pockets, unsure. The stairwell hissed a single syllable of ~inquiry~ as the old stone took interest.

Harry walked down one more step and reached out. He didn’t touch Bones. He held his hand an inch from the boy’s throat, feeling the hammer of it.

“I could make you kneel,” he said conversationally. “I could make you beg. I could make you swallow mud and apologize to it for being impolite.”

Bones’s face flushed, then paled. He looked over Harry’s shoulder and saw Tom watching him not like a human watches, but like a future does.

“Or,” Harry said softly, “you can be the first outside my House to make an oath that isn’t fear. And I will keep it. Every badger under your eye will pass through Slytherin halls unmolested. My hand on it.”

Silence held, steady as a held breath.

Bones closed his eyes once, long. When he opened them, they were clear. He lifted his chin.

“What’s the oath,” he asked hoarsely.

Harry turned his palm up. “Blood on honesty. Nothing else.”

Bones hesitated, then bit the pad of his thumb. A bright bead rose. Harry held out his own thumb, casual, as if exchange were an old habit.

Bones touched. Their blood met like two rivers discovering they wanted the same sea.

“Speak,” Harry said, voice so soft it barely moved air.

“I’ll carry truth between the Houses,” Bones said. “I won’t lie for you or for mine. I’ll bring you what is.”

“And I,” Harry said, “will keep Slytherin’s hands off your own. If they break that, they break me.”

The moss loosened. Bones staggered back one step, eyes wide with the weight of something that had not been here a moment ago and now was a law.

Tom inhaled as if he’d smelled cinnamon. “You made it with his permission.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “We don’t need everyone broken.”

“He’ll be loyal,” Tom said, less a question than a calculation.

“To truth,” Harry said. “To me, that’s enough.”

Bones wiped his thumb on his cloak. “I’ll hold you to it.”

“You won’t have to,” Harry said, and meant it.

As the students drifted away—whispering, indexing, revising maps of power—Bones hung back a beat.

“Potter,” he said awkwardly. “People are afraid. Of you.”

“Good,” Harry said.

Bones nodded once, grim. “Just… keep your word.”

Harry watched him go. “I always do.”

Cassiopeia snorted. “Badgers. Who knew.”

Tom stood taller. There was a new light in his face—learning on fire. “He chose it. I want more of that.”

“You’ll have it,” Harry said. “When it profits us.”

They walked back under dripping stone, the school adjusting itself around a new axis.

—

That week, letters arrived with seals that mattered to people who measured themselves in wax. Slughorn purred; Merriweather frowned. Dumbledore watched quietly over the rim of his spectacles, a calm that made the room feel watched by a lake rather than a man.

Transfiguration again. Today: matches to needles to hairpins to fishhooks. Dumbledore’s hands made small precise motions that looked like courtesy and were spells.

Harry ignored the match. He looked at the mouse in the cage at the back—the one that always twitched as if dreaming of a hole it would never find.

“Don’t,” Dumbledore said from across the room, voice mild but set. “Not that.”

Harry looked back at him, pleasant. “As you wish.”

He turned the match into a needle, the needle into a key, the key into a loop of thin chain he could have worn around his throat if he’d been sentimental. He wasn’t. He transfigured it back exactly when Dumbledore’s patience required.

After class, Tom lingered. Dumbledore had made that soft circle motion with his hand that means a word in private. Harry stayed anyway.

“Mr. Riddle,” Dumbledore said, pleasant as honey tea on a winter morning. “You are… gifted. I’d like to invite you to extra practice sessions. Several promising students attend. It would do you good to see what discipline and community can achieve.”

Tom’s mouth parted. Pride flared. Then he looked at Harry.

“I have a schedule,” Harry said before Tom could speak. “He keeps it.”

Dumbledore’s eyes crinkled. “Do you plan to set his every hour, Harry?”

“Yes,” Harry said.

A small silence, delicate as a glass animal. Dumbledore did not move to crush it. “It would be a kindness,” he said at last, and the word was heavier than it should have been, “to let him choose some things.”

Harry smiled in a way that showed good teeth and no mercy. “I am his choice.”

Tom’s breath hitched as if the sentence had a hand at the back of his neck. Dumbledore’s gaze flickered to Tom, measuring sorrow, anger, calculation, something else. Then he nodded, slow, retreat masked as courtesy.

“Very well,” he said. “My office remains open.” He looked at Tom alone. “To you.”

Tom said nothing. Harry touched his shoulder, and the conversation ended.

—

Rain turned to frost. Grass crisped white around the Quidditch pitch. Harry had no use for brooms; he had a use for crowd physics, and matches provided that. He stood with Tom at the highest tier while Slytherin tried formations. Abraxas flew like a man who assumed the air owed him passage. Rosier flew like a challenge. A fourth-year named Mulciber flew like he hated gravity.

“We could win,” Tom said, surprised to hear something as crude as sport acknowledged in Harry’s world.

“We will,” Harry said. “It pleases the House when its banner is loud.”

A Ravenclaw team passed beneath the stands, laughing too hard. One elbowed another, nodding up at Harry, the way men nod at weather they dislike. Harry filed faces.

After practice, a cluster of Gryffindors decided their numbers outran sense and met Tom outside the changing rooms. Their leader—broad shoulders, jaw like a threat—stepped into Tom’s way with a smirk he’d borrowed from an uncle.

“You the little snake who makes bigger snakes hiss?” he asked, and the cheer in his voice meant he wanted to entertain his friends.

Tom looked at his shoes, then at the boy’s hand on his chest. He did not look for Harry. He didn’t need to.

“~Move,~” he hissed.

The Gryffindor’s wrist turned in his own hand as if the bone suddenly remembered hinges. He yelped and let go. His friends grabbed wands, dull-red fear replacing red luck. The air tightened.

Harry arrived at a walk. He didn’t raise his wand.

“Apologize,” he said.

The leader spat. “To him?”

“Try dirt instead,” Harry said. “It tastes worse coming up.”

“Make me,” the boy said, because some people are tasked by history with being the example.

Harry nodded, as if thanking him for volunteering. He stepped close enough that their breaths traded.

“Your name,” he said, not a question.

“Prewett,” the boy said, defiant and doomed.

“Good,” Harry said. “This is a lesson for your line.”

He put his thumb against the boy’s sternum.

No light. No Latin. Just pressure and intent. Ribs learned a new shape around a held breath. Not breaking. Not yet. Enough to make the world narrow to the space between heartbeat and bone.

“Apologize,” Harry repeated, and the word had the gravity of a falling star.

“Sorry,” Prewett gasped. “Sorry!”

“For what,” Harry said, patient.

“For—” His face went the color of lakefog. “For… being stupid.”

Harry eased his thumb away. Bones remembered themselves.

Prewett’s friends were very quiet. They moved out of Tom’s path with the carefulness of men crossing fresh ice. Somewhere over the lake, a gull laughed.

Tom’s cheeks flushed with triumph that wasn’t childish. He looked at his own hand as if it had finally answered a question it had been asking since it learned to hold a fork.

“You did well,” Harry said, which, in his mouth, poured sunlight.

Tom stood taller. He would not sleep that night; he would lie still and replay, and in the morning the lesson would be part of his blood.

—

The castle’s lower arteries learned their footsteps. The antechamber with the dry fountain welcomed them like a chapel with a pew rubbed smooth by one pair of knees. Harry read more of the stone book. It read more of him. The scripts taught each other manners.

“Keys,” Tom said one night, tracing a line. “You keep making them.”

“Because locks keep flattering me,” Harry said dryly.

He pressed a finger to a line of serpents braided with runes, then cut his thumb again and let one drop fall to the text. The lines brightened, sank into stone like ink eager for paper.

“~Wake,~” he said to the room, and the green fire obeyed, flaring to cleanse and settle.

“Teach me,” Tom said. Not a whine. A demand that assumed its own fulfillment because Harry had trained it to.

Harry looked at him for a long moment.

“All right,” he said, and pointed to the carved rim of the fountain. “This word. ~Bind.~ Not to me; you are already that. To this room. So it knows your feet as it knows mine.”

Tom repeated the sound. The first try was wrong—too much tooth, not enough tongue. The second found the low note; the third lingered on the sibilant until the stone sighed.

“Again,” Harry said.

Tom said it again, and the fire leaned. When he stopped, the quiet was full of recognition.

“It knows you,” Harry said.

Tom’s eyes shone. Harry did not say *good boy.* He thought it. Tom felt it anyway and stood straighter.

They left the chamber and climbed back into the school proper.

At the corridor’s bend, a shadow peeled from stone. Abraxas. He kept his wand down. His pride had learned quiet recently.

“I came,” he said without preamble, “to say I don’t kneel to Gryffindors. Or Hufflepuffs. Or Ravenclaws.”

“You kneel to me,” Harry said, friendly as winter.

Abraxas’s mouth tightened. “I won’t betray Slytherin.”

“You already did, by losing,” Cassiopeia said from behind Harry, unimpressed. “Now you can be useful.”

Malfoy looked past Harry at Tom. He’d begun to understand that the boy wasn’t the shadow; he was the point of the knife.

“Fine,” Abraxas said through stiffness. “Tell me where to point the House.”

Harry inclined his head a fraction. “Against Dumbledore when he smiles,” he said. “Against any teacher who thinks detention is a leash. Against anyone who thinks Tom isn’t the center of this room.”

Abraxas swallowed it. Found it bitter. Found it sustaining anyway. “Done,” he said, and he meant it for this week if not forever. Harry allowed him that small self-deception. It would erode on schedule.

—

Sunday again. The weather cleared like a held breath finally exhaled. Sun licked the castle’s scars. Harry led Tom to the edge of the Forbidden Forest where shadows pooled even at noon.

A centaur watched from the trees, disdainful. The wind carried mushrooms and old leaf.

“Why here?” Tom asked.

Harry placed his palm on a boulder sunk half in moss. The stone was not part of Hogwarts; it had been here longer and intended to remain. He looked out across the grounds as if measuring them for a shroud.

“Because sometimes we practice where the school can’t see,” he said.

He drew his wand and traced a circle on the grass large enough to hold both their bodies like a rumor. He pricked his thumb, let three drops fall at equidistant points along the ring. The circle darkened, then brightened until it was not color at all but attention.

“Stand with me,” Harry said.

Tom stepped into the ring. The air changed pressure as it recognized him.

“Out there,” Harry said, chin toward the distant towers, “we use rules to turn the world. In here, we practice truth.”

Tom’s breath went taut. “What truth?”

“That you and I are the only laws that matter.”

He lifted his hand. Tom lifted his. Their thumbs touched. The circle’s edge shivered.

“Say it,” Harry murmured.

“My breath is yours,” Tom said, not for the thousandth time and not for the last. “My blood is yours. My power is yours to command. Only yours.”

The circle took the words and set them like fenceposts in soil. A gull cried. The wind approved.

Harry pressed their joined thumbs to Tom’s sternum. Tar-black sunlight ran under Tom’s skin for a heartbeat. Not pain. Recognition.

“Now,” Harry said softly, “tell me what you want.”

Tom swallowed. He’d wanted so many things and had never been allowed to say them without being punished for wanting.

“I want them all to kneel,” he said. “I want them to come to me for orders. I want to make them right when they’re wrong and wrong when I say so.” His chest rose. “I want you to be pleased with me.”

Harry’s eyes brightened like a smile might have but didn’t. “All granted,” he said.

The circle hummed, document signed in a language only hunger reads.

From the trees, something old and four-legged turned its head and decided to keep its counsel. The centaur snorted. The world went on being obedient to the most convincing voice.

They broke the circle with a word ~release~ that the grass liked. The line faded. Tom looked down at where it had been and then at his hand, which did not shake.

“When do we open the rest?” he asked, all the chambers Tom couldn’t yet see tucked in the corner of his mouth.

“Soon,” Harry said. He had not lied to Tom yet. He did not plan to.

As they walked back up the slope, a Hufflepuff boy—the younger brother of no one important—approached the path with a satchel and a face wrapped in courage like a too-big coat. He saw them and stopped, throat working. Then he stepped aside, head ducking.

Harry paused. “Name.”

“Matthew Abbott,” the boy said, voice high from not being done growing.

“You’re Bones’s man?” Harry asked.

The boy blinked fast. “He’s… my prefect.”

“Good,” Harry said. “Tell him I kept my word.”

Abbott looked puzzled. “He knows.”

“Tell him again,” Harry said. “Some men need to hear the truth twice to trust it.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said, and then looked bewildered by having said it.

Tom smiled, small and sharp. “You’re learning,” he told the world.

The world, being well-trained, did not answer back.

—

They ended the week in the chapel room with the dry fountain and green fire. The stone book lay open, lines of \~script\~ quietly exhaling old light.

Harry ran a knuckle over the carved rim. “The House will test us again,” he said. “It always does before it learns a new prayer.”

Tom nodded, ready like a blade before the whetstone.

“When it does,” Harry said, “you’ll stand at my right. You’ll speak when I tell you. You’ll think all the time.” He met Tom’s eyes. “You will be ruthless for me and affectionate to me. To no one else.”

“Yes,” Tom said, the word full to spilling.

“Say it,” Harry said softly, and though he hadn’t raised his voice at all, the fire straightened.

“My breath is yours,” Tom said, and the fountain listened. “My blood is yours. My power is yours to command. Only yours.”

Harry laid his palm over Tom’s hair. Held it there until stillness spread like heat. Then he said, simple as breathing:

“Hogwarts bows,” he said. “And Slytherin kneels.”

The flames made no sound. They only burned greener.

Outside, winter tested its teeth on the mountains. Inside, the boys wrote their names on the stone of the school where only serpents could read them. A prefect with the stubborn face of a decent man carried truth between tables like a priest with a relic. A professor with silver hair watched, calm as moons, and started counting how much time was left to prevent a future he didn’t yet understand.

The chapter that began with steam and names ended with a key in Harry’s pocket and a door remembering his hand.

Chapter Text

The staffroom smelled of coal smoke, chalk, and wet wool. Rain worried the leaded windows; the fire answered with a steady, domestic crackle that pretended the castle did not keep older, stranger flames beneath its skin. A long oak table ran the length of the room, scarred with the scratches of a century’s worth of quills. On it sat a brass hourglass for each House, thin streams of gemstones drifting from bulb to bulb with the patience of glaciers. Beside them: parchment stacks, ink as dark as old sins, biscuits no one touched.

Headmaster Armando Dippet presided from the table’s middle, shoulders narrow inside a robe that had once seen better dye. His smile, when it came, was kind and uncertain—like a man who never stopped being a teacher even after they gave him a keyring too heavy for his pockets.

Dumbledore sat two chairs down, hands folded with the fastidiousness of a man who kept order in his bones. He wore a soft, almost amused expression that did not reach the watchfulness beneath it. Opposite him, Horace Slughorn beamed, waistcoat straining, already edging the biscuit plate nearer his orbit by instinct. Defense Against the Dark Arts was represented by Professor Merriweather—hawkish nose, neat cuffs, a fondness for rules so clean you could shave with them. A thin, pale Charms master named Carrow cleared his throat at no one. A Herbology mistress from the old guard, Professor Beery, had brought cuttings in damp paper and left them, forgotten at her elbow.

Dippet tapped his wand against a pewter mug. The sound carried. “Thank you for attending, colleagues. Let’s make this brisk. We have two orders of business: house points and discipline. And,” he added with a small sigh that turned several heads, “one student in particular.”

Merriweather’s mouth thinned. Slughorn’s eyes warmed.

Dippet arranged the ledgers. “First: points.” He nudged the Slytherin hourglass, where emeralds trickled in a confident ribbon. “Slytherin has gained one-hundred-eighty points since the start of term. Gryffindor is at one-hundred-four. Ravenclaw, ninety-one. Hufflepuff, eighty-six.”

“Excellent news,” Slughorn said at once. “A very promising Slytherin cohort this year.” His eyes flickered—pleased and proprietary. “Riddle and Potter alone have added… what was it, forty-two in classwork this week? Thirty-six last?” He flourished fat fingers as if conjuring numbers from smoke.

“Forty-seven and thirty-three, actually,” Dippet said, blinking. “Professor Merriweather awarded both boys top marks for Shield and Disarming drills; Professor Dumbledore awarded… oh.” He peered. “A creative transfiguration beyond the exercise? Minus ten.”

Several heads turned. Dumbledore’s smile failed, politely. “I asked Mr. Potter to remain within the prompt,” he said mildly. “He prefers to demonstrate he’s memorized the whole book and its table of contents.”

Slughorn chuckled. “Ambition! We can hardly fault a boy for polish.”

“We can deduct points when polish violates instruction,” Merriweather said crisply. “And we can—and should—when that polish is weaponized at other students.” His gaze went to the Hufflepuff hourglass, which had hiccuped a few grains away since yesterday. “Incidents continue.”

Dippet hunched over the discipline ledger. “Let’s see. Monday evening: ‘verbal altercation on greenhouses stair, no hexes thrown, moss entanglement—’ Moss entanglement?” He looked up, bewildered.

“Transfiguration adjacent,” Merriweather said. “Potter caused the moss to cling to Prefect Edmund Bones and two Hufflepuff companions. No lasting harm. Significant humiliation.” His voice sharpened, hawk beak angled toward prey. “In front of a crowd.”

“A crowd who, notably, witnessed Mr. Bones make a pledge of non-aggression between Houses and has since reported fewer corridor altercations,” Dumbledore murmured. He inclined his head. “I spoke with Bones. He believes Potter will keep his word.”

Merriweather stared. “We are not bartering oaths with children on stairs.”

“We are teaching them the ministry’s doctrine of contracts,” Slughorn said cheerfully. “More useful than another essay on hinkypunks, if you ask me.”

“I did not,” Merriweather said tightly.

Dippet lifted both hands like a man calming brooms. “Please. We will note that Mr. Potter’s… negotiation had a pacifying effect and that it also—ah—violated no written rule.” He checked the page twice, reluctantly satisfied. “No hexes, no curses, no physical harm.” A pause. “However, ‘intimidation’ is not a value we wish to encourage.”

Slughorn spread his hands, rings winking. “We cannot police a boy’s aura, Armando.”

“We can instruct him toward compassion,” Dumbledore said. He did not place any particular warmth into the word.

“Mr. Potter’s grasp of compassion appears… selective,” Merriweather said. “As does Mr. Riddle’s, when he is encouraged.”

Slughorn harrumphed. “Riddle is a marvel. Precise, hungry—in the proper way. He will go far with guidance.” He beamed as if already writing letters.

Dippet rubbed his temple. “Which brings us neatly to the second order of business. Mr. Potter.” He looked around the table, a schoolmaster again, helpless and hopeful. “I would like to settle, publicly and cleanly for our records, the matter of his placement and conduct.”

Murmurs. Papers shifted. Slughorn leaned back like a man at the opera.

Dippet drew a sealed page from the bottom of the stack. The wax impressed on it was not the school’s. It was the Ministry’s, and the cord was the kind they use when they would prefer a thing not be opened at all.

“Per directive from the Board of Governors, upon recommendation from the Department of Magical Education,” Dippet read, “Mr. Harry Potter is to be admitted under a special writ of provisional placement due to ‘irregularities in prior magical instruction’ and ‘the removal of obstructive charms and compulsions recently discovered and lifted.’” He looked up. “He is to be seated with First Years, monitored for integration and remedial gaps, and evaluated at term’s end for accelerated coursework.”

Silence. Even the fire sat up taller.

Merriweather broke it first. “Obstructive charms,” he repeated. “Compulsions.”

“Language is regrettably vague,” Dumbledore said, studying clouds in the windowglass. “I’m told his upbringing kept him outside our society. Late start; unusual talent. It happens.” His tone said it did not happen like this.

“Unusual talent,” Merriweather said dryly. “He reads a room’s wards like other boys read posters. He asked one of my practice shields to be stronger and—well. It was. Not by spell but by tone.” He caught himself, scowled. “And Mr. Potter refuses extra sessions.”

Slughorn brightened. “He comes to mine.” Then, magnanimous: “Sometimes.”

Professor Beery looked up from her damp cuttings. “He knows how to handle devil’s snare,” she said, faintly astonished. “On sight. I hadn’t given the second-year lecture yet. He told the plant to mind its manners and it… did.” She glanced around the table, as if she’d dropped a frog and hoped someone else had seen. “Plants don’t mind anyone but me.”

“They mind old magic,” Dumbledore said softly.

Merriweather turned to him. “Explain.”

Dumbledore did not sigh. He did not blink. “Some students learn by study.” His eyes flicked to Slughorn, who pretended not to gloat. “Some by practice.” He looked to Merriweather, who approved. “A few,” and here his gaze lowered to the hourglasses, watching how sand learns patience, “remember. We assign them to First Year to ensure they catch what their remembering skips.”

The word hung, heavy as key iron.

“Remember,” Slughorn repeated, charmed. “Yes, quite.”

Merriweather’s jaw worked. “Remembering what?”

“Rules older than the handbook,” Dumbledore said. “He walks the castle as if it were a book he has read in another life and now wishes to annotate.” He folded his hands. “As to why: there are theories.” His eyes warmed by a single degree. “Bloodlines carry echoes. Stones keep notes. Those who speak to serpents often hear more than language.”

Beery’s eyes went round. “Ancestral intuition?”

“Ancestral resonance,” Dumbledore said. “Sometimes a child puts his hand on the right wall and the wall tells him where to push.”

Slughorn laughed, delighted. “That would explain Mr. Potter’s little knack for… shortcuts.”

“It would explain his disregard,” Merriweather said.

Dippet cleared his throat. “Regardless of cause, the Board insists Mr. Potter’s placement stands for this term. It is not a demotion. It is to ensure proper socialization and… guidance.” The word did a poor job of hiding supervision. “He is older, yes, but if there are ‘remedial gaps’—”

“—he should sit,” Merriweather finished, satisfied.

“—and if there are not,” Slughorn cut in smoothly, “he will rise faster than any of us can plan for.” His smile was all futures and dinner parties. “A star is a star wherever you hang it in the sky.”

Dippet looked relieved to have language that didn’t demand a policy. “Excellent. Then we are agreed. We treat Mr. Potter as a First Year—with the understanding that his… special writ gives him a wider margin in which to exercise independent study.” He coughed into his sleeve. “Chaperoned.”

“By whom,” Merriweather said at once.

Slughorn raised his hand—plump, ensnaring. “I volunteer.”

“Of course you do,” Merriweather muttered.

Dumbledore’s gaze drifted to the rain-dark glass. “He should be watched,” he said, almost absently. “Not to catch him; to understand him.”

Merriweather turned a page. “And Mr. Riddle?”

Slughorn all but clapped. “A prodigy. A once-in-a-decade mind. He listens when one speaks sense.” He did not discuss the boy’s silences, or the way they felt like someone laying out clean knives to choose between.

“Riddle’s devotion is the hinge,” Dumbledore said. His voice was mild and the words were not. “Whatever Mr. Potter is, he is more of it with that boy at his elbow. They have made an economy of loyalty. He spends it like coin.”

Dippet frowned, pained. “They are children.”

Dumbledore smiled, kind. “So am I, Headmaster, when I cannot sleep.”

Merriweather stabbed a note onto his parchment: separate for drills, observe individually. “We will disallow pairings in Defense for a fortnight,” he said. “Rotation only. Detentions for intimidation. Point deductions for stunts.” His quill paused. “And explicit commendations for excellence. We cannot reward only the lion’s courage and Ravenclaw’s diligence and neglect Slytherin’s cunning when it honors the work.”

Slughorn looked positively beatific. “Hear, hear.”

Beery cleared her throat. “There is… one more thing.” She fidgeted with the damp paper. “The snakes. In the glass tunnels near Slytherin. They’ve become… attentive.”

“Snakes are always attentive, Beery,” Merriweather said dryly.

“These are listening,” she said simply. “Someone is speaking the old tongue to them. Not tricks. Words with… lineage.” She looked down at her cuttings. “They like it.”

Dumbledore’s fingers tightened, just for a breath. “Then we will ensure it is used carefully.”

“Carefully,” Merriweather said, “and under supervision.”

“Supervision,” Slughorn echoed cheerfully, already planning a salon menu that would impress a Ministry undersecretary.

Dippet glanced at the hourglasses again, at Slytherin’s confident stream of green. He closed the discipline ledger. “Very well. We accept the Board’s writ. Potter remains with the First Years. We will intervene when necessary, encourage where wise, and keep all Houses safer than they were last term.” He set his wand down. “One last item. House points to be awarded or deducted for this week’s incidents?”

Merriweather was ready. “Minus ten to Slytherin for the moss—intimidation, public display. Minus five to Gryffindor for accosting Mr. Riddle outside the changing rooms; I believe the boy’s name was Prewett.” He flipped. “Plus ten to Slytherin for precise Shield work. Plus five to Hufflepuff for Prefect Bones’s… temperance.”

“Plus ten to Slytherin for excellence in Potions,” Slughorn said at once, generous when generosity flattered his taste. “Mr. Riddle and Mr. Potter both produced draughts fit for a healer’s tray.”

Dumbledore lifted a hand. “Plus five to Slytherin for creative transfiguration within bounds. Minus five when it strays beyond them. The lesson matters more than the number.”

Dippet recorded it, brow furrowed in the solemn way of a man counting someone else’s sins.

“Anything further?” he asked the room.

No one spoke. Rain eased its fingers away from the glass. The fire relaxed.

As chairs scraped and robes rustled, Dumbledore lingered, tapping one knuckle idly against the tabletop near the Slytherin hourglass. Slughorn paused beside him, genial.

“You worry,” Slughorn said softly, as if confiding a fondness.

“I prepare,” Dumbledore corrected, equally soft. He looked into the emerald trickle. “When a boy walks through our door with knowledge he has not yet earned, I ask who paid the price.” His eyes drifted to the window, to the rain-wet reflection of his own face. “And whether the invoice has truly been settled.”

Slughorn chuckled, all velvet. “Sometimes, my dear Albus, the bill is paid in brilliance.” He slapped Dumbledore’s shoulder with affectionate weight. “Come to supper. I have a pineapple you’ll want to taste.”

Dumbledore smiled; the expression didn’t reach the place where he kept his counting. “Another time.”

He left the staffroom alone, robes whispering over stone, thoughts a neat ledger against which he checked the castle’s breathing: the way torches lifted when a particular boy passed, the way the wards thrummed like strings struck by a note no one else could hear, the way Slytherin had stopped squabbling and started arranging itself.

Behind him, Dippet blew on his mug and missed his tea entirely, eyes far away. Merriweather underlined a name until the parchment almost bled. Slughorn hummed and planned invitations. Beery gathered her damp cuttings and clucked at them until they settled.

In the corridor, the hourglass figures of students slid past in currents: green, red, blue, yellow. A tiny Hufflepuff with a satchel too large for his shoulders—Abbott—hesitated, spotted Dumbledore, and bobbed a bow.

“Professor,” the boy blurted. “Sir. Prefect Bones says… to report that the Slytherins kept their truce this week.”

Dumbledore’s mouth softened. “Does he.”

“Yes, sir. He said to tell you twice. For trust.” The child flushed, as if he’d recited a thing he didn’t quite understand and found himself proud anyway.

“Thank you, Mr. Abbott,” Dumbledore said. “Tell him I heard you the first time.” He watched the boy scamper off and, despite himself, smiled.

He turned toward Transfiguration with the unhurried gait of a man late for nothing. As he passed a stretch of ancient wall whose stones stuffed secrets under their tongues like boys do sweets, he lifted a hand and pressed his palm to it. The old mortar warmed faintly, like a cat tolerating affection.

“What do you remember,” he asked the stone under his breath, as if humoring a patient.

It replied in the only language stone has ever learned: pressure, patience, the weight of doors.

Far below, beyond sinks and bones and the polite breath of carved scales, a chamber shivered and then stilled. It had recognized a hand. Another one.

Dumbledore let his palm fall. He did not quicken his pace. He only thought, very precisely, about keys.

In Slytherin, two boys walked side by side through lamp-green light. One had the patience of cliffs. The other had hunger like a crown. The castle, which had seen many pairs of feet, adjusted its echoes to fit them. And the emeralds, grain by grain, did what all sand does in an hourglass when someone who knows how to turn a table places their hand on it.

They kept falling, steady as a plan.

--

The dungeon air was a clean, wet cold that kept knives honest. Lamps along the hall swam with lake-green light; the stone’s pulse ticked behind everything like a hidden metronome. Harry moved through it as if the castle had been tuned to his stride and would prefer not to be sharpened again.

Tom matched him pace for pace, hands in his pockets, eyes bright as a cat’s in a coal bin. Cassiopeia trailed, silent and pleased to be there, the way some predators are pleased by moonlight.

“They met,” Harry said, conversational, as if remarking on weather. “They counted gems and worries.”

Tom’s mouth tilted. “Slughorn preened. Merriweather pruned.”

“And Dumbledore prepared,” Harry said. He brushed his fingers along the wall. The stone warmed a degree, then cooled. “He’ll separate us in Defense for a fortnight.”

Tom’s nostrils flared, affront pricking like static. “He can try.”

“He will,” Harry said, amused. “We will adapt.”

They turned the corner by the narrow door that admitted only those who did not hurry. Harry did not hurry. The stones made room.

In the common room, a pair of second-years flattened themselves to let them pass. One of them—Mulciber’s cousin—rallied enough courage to speak. “Prefect says there’s a meeting at nine,” he blurted. “Quidditch matters.”

“Then be there,” Harry said mildly, and the boy looked surprised that orders could be so simple.

They took the far stair that ducked behind a tapestry as if embarrassed to be seen working so hard. The air thinned. Pipes hummed above. When they reached the shallow arch with the hairline crack, the crack remembered them and became a door.

The round room welcomed them with a hush that felt like a wolf laying its head on a knee it had decided to trust. The dry fountain waited, carvings of snakes blinking slow as old saints. The stone book sat open, its veins of script dimly breathing.

Harry touched the rim and everything in the room woke a fraction—flame in the sconces flaring, then bowing; the carvings acquiring a slyer look. Tom watched, throat moving.

“You hear it, don’t you,” he said quietly.

“The house?” Harry said. “Yes.”

“It talks to you.”

“It reminds me,” Harry corrected, and the word was a key turned lazily. “Walls keep notes. Bones keep echoes. Some blood remembers its elders more faithfully than others.”

Cassiopeia shifted, the sound soft as silk. “And yours?”

“Mine is crowded,” Harry said, and for an instant his gaze went inward, flinty and distant, as if he were listening down a long corridor to people arguing about where to hang a portrait. “They aren’t ghosts. They’re… patterns. How a hand should turn, what a door would prefer, the page a spell likes to sleep on.” He glanced at Tom. “It isn’t charity. It’s inheritance.”

Tom drank the words like warm milk and decided it was wine. “How do I get it,” he asked, naked in hunger and not punished for it here.

“You already are.” Harry tapped the carved lip with a knuckle. “You learn like a flame learns: by whatever is too close.”

Cassiopeia came nearer to the book, craning to see without being told she could. “You’re seated with First Years on purpose,” she said, as if announcing the punchline to a joke she also admired. “To be where he is.”

Harry’s mouth crooked. “The Board likes its paperwork. ‘Remedial gaps. Compulsions lifted.’” He said the phrases with the practised boredom of someone who has read many lies and admired their penmanship without believing them. “It suits them to call me older and ignorant. It suits me to be underestimated at a smaller table.”

Tom’s chest rose. He had not needed the explanation, but he needed it said. “You were always going to be in my year.”

“I made sure of it,” Harry said. “If they think I sit with children to be softened, let them. I sit with you to make you hard.”

The room liked that. The fire leaned and then remembered itself.

Harry set his palm on the book. Script brightened, that not-light that old magic prefers—the colour of attention rather than flame. “Lesson,” he said, and Tom’s spine straightened like a drawn bow.

Cassiopeia took up a post by the door, one ear turned outward. She had stopped asking to be taught. She had started arranging herself to be present when it happened.

“~Name what you are binding,~” Harry said, eyes on the script.

“~My feet to the room,~” Tom answered, low and exact.

Harry’s eyebrow tipped: continue.

“~My tongue to the word that opens. My breath to yours.~”

Harry’s laughter was soft and knife-clean. “Good. But today we bind something else.” He touched a tiny sigil chiselled between two serpents, so small you could mistake it for a scratch. “Old wards are like old men. They hear the loud voices and ignore them. They obey the quiet ones that know their childhood names.”

Tom leaned in. “Teach me the name.”

Harry pricked his thumb with a fingernail. The blood welled obediently. He let a single drop fall to the sigil. The carved lines drank, brightened, went dark.

“~Listen,~” he hissed, but not to Tom.

The room listened.

“~You will attend to Tom when he speaks,~” Harry told the stone, ~“and you will not pretend to be asleep. When his breath shakes, you will steady. When his hand is too harsh, you will warn. He is mine.~”

The fire made a pleased, tiny sound, like a cat under a palm. Tom’s eyes had gone wide without his permission. He forced them narrow again and succeeded only halfway.

“Your turn,” Harry said. “Say it back. Not the words. The intent.”

Tom wet his lips. He looked at the sigil, then at Harry’s thumb, as if thinking that blood might be a language he was finally literate in.

“~I will speak and you will listen,~” he said to the room, careful as a surgeon. ~“When I push, you will open. When I falter, you will not. When I forget, you will remember for me. I am his.~”

The script under his breath brightened, then banked. Harry’s mouth showed teeth. “Again,” he said, not because it had failed but because repetition is the price of fluency.

Tom said it again. The room leaned into him this time, not much, but enough that even Cassiopeia’s shoulders ticked in the corner of her eye.

“Good,” Harry said. “Now… something more entertaining.”

He turned a page and the page didn’t so much move as decide it was already turned. A tight lattice of marks unfolded—runic bones under a serpent’s skin.

“The castle has many locks,” Harry said, voice easy. “Some are just doors asking to be told what they want. Some belong to men who think keys live only in pockets.” His finger came to rest on a spiral nested inside a square. “Headmaster’s study. The outer ward. You won’t use it. You will know it.”

Tom’s pupils swallowed colour. “Why won’t we use it.”

“Because we don’t need Dippet’s sherry yet,” Harry said, bored. “And because knowing the way to a place is sometimes more profitable than arriving.”

Tom nodded hard enough to make a lock somewhere consider opening out of respect.

“Trace,” Harry said, and laid Tom’s hand on the carved spiral. “Slow. See it with your fingers.”

Tom obeyed. His fingertip found the certainty of groove, the curl of intention caught in stone. Something behind his breastbone answered—not new power, not borrowed; something like a dog that had been waiting on the other side of a door and, hearing the handle turn, wagged exactly once.

The torches breathed. “Again,” Harry said, and Tom did, until the spiral was muscle, not thought.

A tap at the doorframe—twice, then once, the rhythm Cassiopeia had invented to mean *company on the way.* Harry closed the book and the room forgot to be interesting. Tom’s hand was already in his pocket when the arch admitted Abraxas, pale and composed and polite as an apology you don’t mean.

“Meeting at nine,” Abraxas said evenly. “Also: Merriweather’s posted a Defense rotation. You and Riddle will not be paired for two weeks.”

“Then we will demonstrate twice as much alone,” Harry said.

Abraxas’s eyes flicked to Tom. He’d started to understand that the smaller boy was the gravity, even if Harry provided the weather. “There’s talk upstairs,” he said. “Hufflepuffs say Bones brokered us peace. Gryffindors say you broke Prewett’s chest and called it a lesson. Ravenclaws say the lamps near the stairwell spent the afternoon dimming when you smiled.”

“And Slytherins?” Harry asked.

Abraxas’s mouth thinned. “Slytherins say you are ours, and that we are yours, and that anyone who dislikes it may dislike it from the floor.”

“Good,” Harry said. “Tell them to be clever in their loyalty. No open hexes in corridors. Detentions bore me.”

Abraxas hesitated. Pride tangled with necessity under his tongue. “You were right,” he said at last, as if confessing a sin. “About Dumbledore. He smiles before he asks for something. He smiled when he told me to give other boys room to breathe.”

Harry’s eyes warmed by a sliver. “Did you.”

“Enough,” Abraxas said, which meant *no* and also *I want you to see that I know I should have.* He straightened. “Nine o’clock.” He left with the relief of a man who has delivered a message and not been stabbed for bringing it.

Cassiopeia drifted back from the door. “You terrify him,” she told Harry like praise. “He hates it in the wrong ways and loves it in the right ones.”

“Then he’ll be useful,” Harry said. “Tom—”

“Yes,” Tom said, as if he’d been spoken to all his life and had only been waiting for a voice that was worth answering.

“We’ll go to the meeting,” Harry said. “We will be quiet until the moment quiet becomes a leash.”

Tom’s mouth sharpened with delight. “And then?”

“We’ll move,” Harry said.

—

By the time they reached the common room again, the place had organized itself: fourth-years claimed the hearth; third-years the table nearest Slughorn’s noticeboard; first-years kept to the shadowed benches. The prefect stood on the low dais under Slytherin’s crest, reciting times and names for trials as if reading a bill of sale.

Abraxas nodded to Harry without liking it. “Chasers at dawn tomorrow. Beaters Wednesday. Seekers Friday. Malfoy will oversee training. Rosier will advise. Potter—”

“Won’t try out,” Harry said, and the small hush that followed was mostly a collective exhale of relief. “Sport is for morale. I’ll support morale.”

A ripple of laughter, the kind that lets a group agree with a man without admitting they had been about to. Rosier’s grin flashed. “You can ride a broom, though?”

“I can make three-quarters of the stadium change its mind about who should win,” Harry said, and Rosier laughed properly this time.

The prefect went pink around the ears. “House points,” he said stiffly, shuffling his parchment as if paper could hold him together. “We are up. Don’t squander. Merriweather is deducting for ‘intimidation.’” He glanced up, found Harry, and looked down again, chastened by nothing but a gaze. “Be… discreet.”

“We are Slytherin,” Cassiopeia said lazily. “Discretion is our table prayer.”

After logistics, the room unraveled into knots of talk. Harry took the far chair with the clearest sightline to the door. Tom perched on the armrest like a hawk on a gauntlet. Cassiopeia commandeered the opposite chair and did needlework the way some people sharpened knives.

A pair of first-years—Nott’s small cousin and a Greengrass girl with mean, clever eyes—approached and hovered. Harry let them hover until it stopped being hesitation and started being disobedience. “Speak,” he said.

“Is it true Professor Merriweather will split us up in Defense,” the girl blurted, staring at Tom like peeking at a ritual.

“Yes,” Harry said. “He thinks it will weaken us.”

Nott’s cousin worried his sleeve. “Will it.”

“No,” Tom said, before Harry could. His voice was not loud and had no need to be. “It will make us two problems instead of one.”

Harry didn’t smile; he let approval glow off him like a stove. The children warmed their hands. “You’ll pair with who I tell you,” he said. “You’ll lose once to learn how losing feels. Then you’ll stop.”

Greengrass’s chin lifted. “Who do I lose to.”

Harry considered her for a heartbeat that stretched to two. “No one,” he said. “You’ll watch, not lose. That’s your talent.”

She looked as if he’d put a crown on her that no one else could see. Nott’s cousin deflated in envy; then, as envy always does here, he converted it into effort.

“Go,” Harry said gently, which meant *prove me right.* They scurried, happy to.

“Like pressing signet rings into wax,” Cassiopeia murmured without looking up. “We should start a coin mint.”

“We have,” Harry said.

—

Defense came in the morning with a rotation chart nailed like a proclamation to the door. Names in tidy columns, pairings forced, two-week schedule unspooling like a sentence to be served.

Merriweather stood at the front with his hands behind his back. He always looked faintly like he was about to pace a deck and shout at sailors to reef something. “Today: counters to stunners,” he said. “You will rotate after every three exchanges. You will not choose your partner.”

Harry read the chart once, folded it into a corner of his mind where he kept locks and debts. Cassiopeia caught his eye and lifted a shoulder—resignation, humor. Tom’s mouth quirked.

The first pairing put Tom opposite a Ravenclaw boy with ink on his fingers and terror in his eyes. The second put Harry across from a Hufflepuff girl who held her wand like she held a kitchen knife: competently, unwilling to use it.

“Begin,” Merriweather said.

Stunners snapped. Shields answered. The room filled with the sound of quick breath and slower pride.

Harry lifted a shield that held like a cliff and did not bother to raise it to its highest height. The girl’s spell struck, flared, died. He did not disarm her; he let her keep throwing, let her feel the way her magic met something older and sat down, confused, like a dog told to stay by a voice it couldn’t disobey.

“Again,” he said, and she did, until her arm ached and her jaw set and she realized he wasn’t humiliating her; he was teaching her how to spend herself without breaking.

“Rotate,” Merriweather commanded.

Partners spun. Abraxas faced a Gryffindor who grinned too easily and had a scar along his chin shaped like a map. Cassiopeia tangled with a Ravenclaw who liked footwork more than wands. Tom landed opposite a boy with Prewett hair and the same alarming mixture of courage and absentminded suicide.

“Stupefy,” the boy snapped. Tom’s shield came up like a thought he’d already had. “Stupefy!” Louder. Harder. The shield brightened, not from strain but from boredom.

“Your name,” Tom said, casual and deadly.

“Gideon Prewett,” the boy said, puffing, proud.

“Remember it,” Tom said, and let his disarm brush the boy’s wand hand like a spider—soft, precise, enough to drop without bruising. The boy blinked, then went scarlet with rage, then with that righteous shame Gryffindors hate most: being outplayed without drama.

“Rotate,” Merriweather said again, voice clipped.

Harry found himself opposite Dumbledore’s assistant—a graduate nearly finished with apprenticeship, there to “observe” and perhaps to be the adult who could stop a child if a child suddenly became history. The man smiled politely. Harry’s smile was warmer and meant less.

“On your count,” the assistant said.

“On yours,” Harry returned, and the man hesitated, realizing that he had just relinquished control.

Spells went. Harry did not so much block as suggest that the magic ought to rest. The assistant’s stunner landed like a finger tapped on a window that had already decided not to let the rain in.

“Very good,” the assistant said through a professional expression. “That’s a… nonstandard guard.”

“It’s a better one,” Harry said, and then, pleasantly, “thank you.”

By the time the rotation ended, Merriweather’s quill had taken notes in a hand that was not quite steady. “Dismissed,” he said. “Potter and Riddle, remain.”

The class thinned like smoke reluctant to leave the flask. Cassiopeia lingered just past the doorjamb, out of sight, in case knives needed to be named.

Merriweather laced his fingers. “You will refrain from *suggesting* to other students’ spells,” he said without looking up. “That includes shields.”

“I refrained from breaking anyone,” Harry said.

“See that you continue,” Merriweather said. “As for you, Mr. Riddle—” He turned. “We will be pairing you with different Houses for the next fortnight.”

Tom’s face didn’t move. His breath did: one fraction longer in and out. “Of course, Professor.”

Merriweather’s gaze searched for insolence where there was only obedience so complete it would have been insolent if he had recognized it. “Dismissed,” he said finally.

They left without hurry. In the corridor, Cassiopeia fell into step. “Well?” she asked.

“Dumbledore sent him an adult,” Harry said. “They’ll keep sending adults until they run out.”

“Then we’ll have to teach the children faster,” Tom said.

Harry’s hand brushed his. The touch was nothing and everything. “We already are.”

—

Between classes, Harry stopped at a wall no one else liked because it bulged slightly, as if the castle wore a tumour and had decided to style it. He placed his palm flat.

“~Well?~” he asked, quiet.

Pressure answered. A thread of cool ran from stone into skin, like a thought entering a vein. Images that were not pictures and not words arranged themselves: a narrow spiral; a brass knob that refused to tarnish; a scent like applewood and sherry; Dippet’s laugh, kindly and hollow.

“Headmaster’s study,” Tom murmured, watching his face without having to be told what he was seeing. “Outer ward.”

Harry’s mouth curved. “We do not need the key yet. But it’s polite to introduce oneself to doors in one’s house.”

A Ravenclaw prefect came around the corner, saw them with hands on unremarkable stone, and pivoted away so fast she nearly collided with her own dignity. Cassiopeia snorted. “They’ll give you points for ‘not hexing the walls’ at this rate.”

“They already have,” Harry said, and they had—plus five for “creative transfiguration within bounds,” the staffroom ledger a neat weight in his mind because he had set it there and insisted it stay.

They drifted toward lunch. The Great Hall received them like a stage manager anxious about an opening night and delighted by menace. Above Slytherin’s table, the emeralds in the great hourglass ticked their slow hymn. Nott’s cousin sat two places down, posture disciplined by hope. Greengrass’s clever head inclined a millimeter in respect and new appetite. Abraxas arrived late and did not sit until Harry nodded, which meant *you may keep your chair for now.* Rosier winked at Tom. Bones passed with a tray balanced like a law and did not look; he had learned that obedience sometimes meant not acknowledging a favour.

Halfway through a bowl of soup that tasted of bone and pepper, a tawny owl dropped like a blessing in front of Harry. The seal on the parchment was the Ministry’s. The cord was the kind they use when they would prefer a thing not be opened at all.

Cassiopeia’s eyebrows climbed. “Who loves you, then.”

Harry broke the seal with his thumb. The letter inside had almost no words and all of them were boring. *Provisional placement confirmed. Evaluation at term’s end. Access to independent study granted under supervision.* There was a line at the bottom Dippet had not read aloud in the staffroom: *Subject exhibits irregular retrieval of advanced magical matrices consistent with inherited cognitive schema; monitor for instability.*

“Do they find you unstable,” Tom asked, low.

“They find me inconvenient,” Harry said. He folded the letter back into nothing the way you fold a paper bird until it remembers it was a tree.

“Are they wrong,” Cassiopeia asked frankly.

“Yes,” Harry said.

Tom smiled with his teeth. “He is not unstable. He is inevitable.”

The soup had gone cool. Harry finished it anyway, because even inevitabilities mind their calories.

—

The week wore on. In Charms, Flitwick’s delight became caution. In Transfiguration, Dumbledore’s amusement developed cartilage. In Herbology, Beery watched Harry handle a venomous tendril as if it were a sullen child and decided to like him against her training. In Potions, Slughorn handed Tom a book not on the syllabus and Harry a look that meant *I know you know I know you know.*

When Merriweather’s rotation pushed Tom across from a sixth-year Slytherin who smelled of expensive hair oil and family arguments, the boy sneered, “You’re the little lordling’s shadow. What do you do when he’s not standing over you? Fall over?”

Tom lifted his wand with a serenity that would one day make grown men run. “\~Stand up straighter,\~” he hissed.

The boy did, against his will, back cracking, chin up, eyes wild.

“~Say thank you,~” Tom added.

“Th—thank you,” the sixth-year gurgled, and Merriweather’s chalk snapped in his fingers. “Enough,” the professor said, voice too calm. “Enough.”

“Of course,” Tom said, letting the command drain away. The boy sagged, grabbed his own throat, coughed. He would not soon forget the sensation of his body obeying someone else because it believed that someone else was correct.

After class, Merriweather’s assistant caught up. “That was an inappropriate application of Parseltongue,” he said stiffly.

Tom glanced at Harry.

“Don’t do it to professors,” Harry said. “It makes paperwork.”

The assistant blinked, at a loss for how to fit the advice into a rulebook. “Just—don’t.”

“We won’t,” Harry said pleasantly, and meant *we will when it matters, which is not when you are watching.* The assistant wandered away, clutching a list of concerns that would not help him sleep.

—

On Sunday evening, the chapel room with the dry fountain heard a new oath and decided to be happy about it. Harry had Bones stand at the threshold, not inside.

“~You will keep your honesty outside,~” Harry told the room, ~“and you will not follow him home.~”

The fire flickered assent. Bones swallowed. “I’m not coming in?”

“No,” Harry said. “You’re useful because you don’t belong to us.”

Bones nodded, something like gratitude loosening the ropes around his shoulders. “Thank you,” he said, and looked startled by the words.

“Report,” Harry said mildly.

“Fewer hexes in corridors,” Bones said. “Gryffindors angrier. Ravenclaws studying more loudly as protest. Hufflepuffs… relieved.” He wet his lips. “Thank you.”

“You already said that,” Harry said. “Try ‘you’re welcome.’”

“You’re welcome,” Bones said obediently, then frowned at himself and laughed under his breath. “You’re—” He stopped. “Good-night.”

“Good-night,” Harry returned.

When the boy had gone, Tom asked, almost idly, “Why do you care if badgers sleep easier.”

“I don’t,” Harry said, honest as a confession. “I care that we choose what wakes them.”

Tom’s smile was a private animal. “We do.”

“Yes,” Harry said.

They stood over the fountain a moment, the green fire making saints of their shadows on the walls. Harry set his hand on Tom’s nape, not tender, not cruel. Tom’s eyes closed on a breath that belonged to both of them.

“Tomorrow,” Harry said, “Dumbledore will ask you to tea.”

Tom’s eyes opened, hot with curiosity. “How do you—”

Harry’s grin flashed, feral and briefly young. “Because I asked the wall what he decided after the meeting, and it told me what his hand felt like against it.”

Cassiopeia made a soft, delighted noise. “You are intolerable.”

“I am precise,” Harry said.

Tom swallowed once, hard. “What do I say.”

“You ask for a lesson,” Harry replied. “You let him teach you something harmless and brilliant. You thank him on the exact breath that makes him forget to be afraid. Then you leave and come back to me.”

Tom nodded, face gone intent with the joy of a task. “Yes.”

Harry tilted his head. “Say it.”

“My breath is yours,” Tom said. “My blood is yours. My power is yours to command. Only yours.”

The room listened. The fire approved. Somewhere above them, a professor with silver hair stared at a saucer of cold tea and wondered why the stone outside his classroom door had felt warmer than the hearth.

Hogwarts shifted on its ancient haunches, a beast settling around the shape of two boys. The emeralds in the hourglass kept falling with stubborn grace. And the door that had been a question in a sink made its first small plan to open, not because someone commanded it, but because it had learned the sound of a voice and wanted to please.

--

Evening rain softened into mist along the castle’s towers. Candles guttered against drafts that seemed to come from nowhere, carrying with them the taste of cold stone and secrets too old for parchment.

When the summons came, it was quiet. A prefect delivered it on stiff legs, the parchment folded small as if afraid of itself. Tom read it once, twice, then looked at Harry.

Harry’s eyes were unreadable. “Go,” he said. “And remember what I told you.”

Tom tucked the note into his pocket. He was eleven, but he walked the spiral stair like someone ascending to a coronation.

---

Dumbledore’s office smelled of beeswax, old books, and something sharper hidden beneath—ozone, maybe, or the faint scorch of lightning remembered. The shelves held curiosities that tried not to twitch when stared at. A bowl of lemon drops gleamed on the desk like a trap that wanted to be mistaken for a kindness.

“Mr. Riddle,” Dumbledore said warmly. He rose, his robes a soft tide of blue. “Thank you for joining me. Please, sit.”

Tom sat. He did not perch like a child. He occupied the chair like a guest who expected the conversation to prove useful.

“Lemon drop?” Dumbledore offered, holding the dish out.

“Yes, thank you.” Tom took one. He did not bite into it. He rolled it once across his tongue, as Harry had told him: *accept what costs nothing, and make it look like gratitude.*

Dumbledore watched with a mild smile. “Your professors speak very highly of you. Precision, ambition, quick mastery. And yet,” he said softly, “they note you are often… in Mr. Potter’s company. Always, in fact.”

Tom lowered his eyes modestly. “He helps me. Explains things. He’s older.”

“Yes.” Dumbledore folded his hands, long fingers steepled. “Older, and unusual. You must realize, Tom, that his arrival at Hogwarts is not… ordinary. And he seems to have gathered you into his orbit very swiftly.”

Tom made his expression just shy of confused. “Shouldn’t friends keep together?”

“Of course,” Dumbledore said. His eyes, bright as caught sunlight, searched Tom’s face. “But friendship need not be obedience. You are gifted. I would not see you silenced by someone else’s will.”

Tom looked up, letting a little awe color his voice. “You mean… you’d help me? Like he does?”

“If you wish it.” Dumbledore’s smile softened, patient. “I’d like to give you a chance to grow as yourself, not only as Mr. Potter’s shadow. For instance, I hold private sessions for students of promise. We read beyond the curriculum. We ask harder questions. You might find it… freeing.”

Tom turned the words over like gems, feigning the calculation Harry had warned him to mimic. Then he nodded once, carefully. “That would be very kind, Professor. I’d be grateful.”

The smile that broke over Dumbledore’s face was real, and weary. “Excellent. We’ll begin next week. For now—tell me, Tom, what is it you want most from Hogwarts?”

The question was bait. Tom knew it. He heard Harry’s voice in memory: *Wanting is not shameful. But never tell a man of power exactly what you want. Show him something close enough to please him.*

So Tom said softly, “I want to learn how not to be powerless again.”

Dumbledore’s breath caught a fraction, so faint it might have been imagined. Then he inclined his head. “A worthy goal. But remember—power without compassion is a hollow wand.”

“Yes, sir,” Tom murmured, eyes shining with practiced sincerity.

Dumbledore pressed the lemon drop bowl closer. “Take another.”

Tom did. He even smiled.

---

He returned to the dungeons late, shoes damp, tie slightly loosened. Harry sat waiting in the common room, one hand draped over the back of a chair, eyes sharp as broken glass.

Tom dropped into the seat beside him. “He tried.”

“Of course he did.” Harry’s voice was calm, amused. “And you?”

“I gave him exactly what you told me to.” Tom’s smile was small, feral. “He thinks he’s winning.”

Harry reached out, brushed a knuckle along Tom’s jaw in a gesture that was not affection so much as acknowledgment. “Good.”

Warmth spread through Tom’s chest like a brand that had been pressed into place.

---

Dumbledore, alone in his office, tipped a lemon drop into his palm and turned it between his fingers. He did not eat it. He only stared at it until the sugar began to sweat. Something in his bones told him he had not offered sweetness, but swallowed it instead.

Down in Slytherin, Harry said quietly, “Every time he smiles at you, remember it’s because he doesn’t understand you belong to me.”

Tom closed his eyes. The words slid into him like iron into blood, permanent.

And the castle, old and listening, wrote the exchange into its stones.

--

The week thickened with rumor. News of Tom’s private summons spread through Slytherin like smoke—never confirmed, never denied, but always sweetened with speculation. Some whispered that Dumbledore had chosen him for favor; others that he meant to pry him away from Potter’s side. Either way, the conclusion was the same: Harry had not moved to stop it. And if Harry had not stopped it, then it must have suited him. That was how Slytherin learned to bend.

Abraxas Malfoy adjusted quickest, arriving early to meals and waiting for Harry’s nod before speaking. Rosier handled the rougher edges, making sure first-years sat where they were told, discouraging backtalk with a smile sharp enough to bleed. Cassiopeia Black perched at the edges of conversations, watching with a hunter’s patience, her eyes sliding over anyone whose loyalty wavered. The younger students found themselves cared for in subtle ways—textbooks appearing on desks, corrections slipped under pillows, bullies simply ceasing. It did not matter whether Harry or Tom had arranged it. The result was the same: Slytherin moved like one body, its muscles trained to answer a single mind.

Other Houses noticed. The Prewett boys in Gryffindor muttered openly that Potter was making a mockery of unity. In Ravenclaw, a sharp-minded fifth-year named Selwyn gathered small complaints into whispered essays that drifted from table to table. Hufflepuffs, loyal to Prefect Bones, held their tongues but traded wary glances that said they were keeping score. Something was coming, and the air in the corridors carried the tension of a rope stretched too tight.

Harry felt it not from whispers but from the stones themselves. Doorframes widened a fraction when he passed, wardlines hummed beneath his shadow, and names pressed against his mind—door-names, stair-names, old syllables carved by founders and left to gather dust. At night, lying still while the basilisk tattoo cooled along his spine, he whispered those names back into the walls, and the castle answered. Tom always noticed. He asked what the castle said, and Harry told him it did not speak but remembered. Keys and prices, Harry murmured, and closed the lesson. Tom swallowed the words like charms, storing them as spells he would one day master.

The clash came on a Thursday. A knot of Gryffindors waited outside the library, the Prewetts at their head, their voices sharpened with bravado. When Harry and Tom approached, the corridor tightened around the confrontation. The tallest of the Prewetts sneered and stepped forward.

“You think you own the place,” he said.

Harry tilted his head. “Observation or complaint?”

“Both. Time someone reminded you you’re not king here.”

The boy’s wand was already raised, but Harry did not draw his own. He only breathed a soft hiss: “~Down.~” The torches along the wall sputtered and guttered; shadows spilled across the flagstones like ink. Several Gryffindors flinched before they could stop themselves.

Harry stepped closer, unhurried. “Kneel.”

Their pride held them upright for a heartbeat. Then Harry flicked his fingers, no spell spoken, no visible force, and the lead Prewett’s wand slipped from his grasp as though the castle itself had decided not to hold it anymore. He stared at his empty hand, horrified.

“Kneel,” Harry said again.

This time, two of the younger Gryffindors folded, compelled less by magic than by inevitability. The rest pulled their leader back, muttering curses they didn’t dare cast. They retreated in a ragged knot, their pride leaking away with every step.

Harry bent, retrieved the fallen wand, and turned it in his fingers before offering it back, handle first. “Next time,” he said softly, “bring something worth taking.”

The Prewett snatched it and fled, red with rage. None of them lingered.

When silence settled again, Tom exhaled, his chest heaving with exhilaration. “You made them kneel.”

Harry’s smile curved like a blade. “Only those who knew they should.”

Tom wanted to laugh, to kneel himself, to give voice to the fire rising in him, but he only said, “Teach me.”

Harry placed a hand on his shoulder—brief, commanding, absolute. “I already am.”

The stones underfoot whispered their satisfaction. Far below, in pipes dark with age, scales shifted and waited.

--

Whispers spread faster than owl post. Gryffindors carried the humiliation like a badge of spite, passing it from common room to corridor in voices sharpened by anger. Ravenclaws dissected it like a riddle, some half-admiring, some calculating. Hufflepuffs listened with tight mouths, relieved the truce held but uneasy at the proof of Harry’s reach. By the next morning, half the school had heard some version of the story: that Potter had spoken a single word and boys had bent.

Harry walked among it without hurry, never confirming, never denying. Tom walked at his side, head higher than it had ever been, his smile sharper, his gaze hungrier. He carried the victory as if it were armor fitted to his bones.

Abraxas murmured about repercussions, Rosier about opportunities. Cassiopeia only smirked, eyes dark with calculation. Even the younger students, who usually trailed in cautious knots, moved more boldly now. Slytherin had tasted something intoxicating, and they wanted more.

The teachers, of course, noticed. Bones’s prefect report reached Merriweather before breakfast; Merriweather’s frown was sharp enough to draw blood. Slughorn dismissed it with a wave of his hand, praising cleverness when asked, though his eyes gleamed too knowingly. Dumbledore said nothing at all, but his silence carried weight heavier than reprimand.

That evening, as they slipped down to their hidden chamber, Harry pressed his hand to the carved fountain and listened. The stone book’s runes flared faintly, as though amused.

“They saw what I wanted them to see,” he told Tom. “Not fear of a hex. Not the sting of a duel. They saw inevitability.”

Tom leaned close, every word devoured like scripture. “It felt like they belonged to us. All of them.”

Harry’s mouth curved. “They do. They just don’t know it yet.”

The air in the chamber shifted, cool and thick, carrying the scent of something ancient roused from long sleep. The walls murmured in their old tongue, pressing at Harry’s mind with the weight of names too old to speak aloud. He closed his eyes, listening as one listens to the sea.

“What do they tell you?” Tom whispered.

“That every door has a price,” Harry said softly. “That when I open them, I spend something. Blood, memory, will. Nothing is free.”

Tom’s eyes burned with hunger, not fear. “Teach me to pay it.”

Harry turned to him, shadows cutting sharp across his face. “Not yet. First you learn to demand. Then you learn to endure. The cost comes after.”

He pressed his palm to Tom’s chest, steady and commanding. “Until then, you are mine. Ruthless for me. Affectionate only to me. Understand?”

“Yes,” Tom breathed, voice trembling with devotion that was anything but fragile.

The green fire flared at the fountain’s heart, as if the chamber itself approved. Above, in the castle’s higher corridors, a few students shivered without knowing why. Snakes shifted in their tunnels, listening.

And in his office, Dumbledore lifted his head from parchment, gaze turning toward the stones, as though the castle itself had just whispered Potter’s name.

--

Rain thinned to a chill that silvered the courtyard stones. By Saturday the school had talked itself into a corner and needed somewhere to spend its courage. It chose the covered cloister that ran from the library to the Charms corridor, a place that collected echoes and dared them to grow teeth.

Two fifth-years were already circling when Harry and Tom arrived with Slytherin flowing in their wake—Rosier loose-hipped with amusement, Abraxas crisp as starched linen, Cassiopeia a dark hinge at Harry’s left. One duelist wore Ravenclaw blue; the other Gryffindor red. Their wands shook in fists that wanted to be steel. Their friends arranged themselves behind them in nervous rows, a choir pretending not to want a solo.

“School rules,” Merriweather barked as he strode up, jaw set. “No formal duels without staff sanction. Wands down.”

No one put their wand down. They only lowered their chins and waited to see if a better gravity would arrive.

It did.

Harry walked into the open space and did nothing so vulgar as take the center. He stopped a half-step off, where the geometry of the cloister made a whisper carry. “Who began this,” he asked.

“Selwyn,” someone from Ravenclaw’s back line offered, pride and apology married in the name.

“Prewett,” someone from Gryffindor said, as if the surname were a sword.

Harry’s gaze moved from one boy to the other. “Spare me the essays and the family ghosts. Who made the first insult?”

Silence, shuffling, a cough swallowed whole.

Tom spoke, mild as tea. “The insult,” he said, “was being seen.” His eyes went to the Ravenclaw. “You wrote about us.” Then to the Gryffindor. “You promised to fix us.”

The Ravenclaw lifted his chin. “I wrote what’s true.”

“And I keep promises,” the Gryffindor said, which would have been brave if his voice hadn’t broken on the last word.

Merriweather stepped forward. “Enough. Five points from each House for—”

“Wait,” Harry said pleasantly, and the professor stopped the way a dog does when it remembers who trained it.

Harry didn’t look at Merriweather again. He looked at the boys. “You want a fight.” His tone made it uninteresting. “You want a verdict.” That made it worse. Then his mouth tilted. “You’ll get a lesson.”

He held out his hand without turning his head. Tom placed a small knife in it—plain hilt, clean blade, ritual’s minimal grammar. Harry held it up so the light could learn its edge and then drew the barest line across his thumb. No drama. No pain worth the name. A bright bead rose as if eager to be chosen.

“Step forward,” he told them.

They did, because some orders befriend the knees and then ask the brain if it would like to catch up.

“Selwyn,” Harry said to the Ravenclaw, “you love truth. You will bind yourself to it when you speak of me. No slander, no flattery. Only what is. If you lie, your tongue will taste iron and you will stop.” He offered his bleeding thumb. “Touch.”

The boy stared, appalled, fascinated. “That’s—”

“An oath,” Harry said. “Not to me. To what you already claim to serve. If it frightens you, let it teach you you’ve been borrowing courage.”

Selwyn swallowed, reached, touched. Blood touched skin and the air moved—just a hair tighter, like a belt taken in a notch. The Ravenclaw gasped, then steadied. His eyes had gone very clear.

“Prewett,” Harry said, turning. “You like promises. You will make one you can keep. You will not strike first outside sanctioned practice. You will defend, and you will be clever, and you will complain to no one when you lose. Touch.”

Prewett hesitated the way boys hesitate at cliff edges and then, reckless by nature, stepped off. Their thumbs met. The cloister heard, and so did the stone under it. The Gryffindor’s breath hitched like a door learning a new hinge; then he stood straighter, embarrassed by how good it felt to be told exactly where to stand.

Merriweather found his voice. “Potter,” he snapped, “you have no right to—”

Harry looked at him. “I bound them to virtue,” he said, almost bored. “Your classroom could use the help.”

A murmur rolled the length of the cloister and came back changed. Abraxas’s mouth twitched toward respect he didn’t want to feel. Rosier’s eyes shone like a man finding a new game. Cassiopeia’s needle paused in the air before completing its stitch. Tom watched everything, greedy and serene, the way a young monarch watches drought break.

Harry lifted the knife again. “Now the price,” he said, conversational. He turned his hand and let the last bead fall to the stones.

It sank without stain, as if the school had been thirsty and this a sip of something it remembered. The cloister’s pillars took a long, careful breath. Somewhere in the pipes, scales slid over stone with pleasure.

Selwyn stepped back, fingers at his mouth, stunned into honesty. Prewett blinked hard, jaw set. He looked at Harry as if trying to understand why obedience felt less like losing than like being put in armor.

“Go,” Harry said. “Learn something worth writing. Learn to aim.”

They went, not quite running and not slow either, each looking a little more like the House they wore.

“Detention,” Merriweather said at last, grasping the first tool he trusted. “For theatrics. Both of you. And for you, Potter—”

“You’ll write to the Board to complain that I taught a Ravenclaw to tell the truth and a Gryffindor to keep a promise?” Harry asked, kindly cruel. “Shall I lend you a quill?”

Rosier laughed outright. Abraxas looked away to hide a smile. Even a few Hufflepuffs betrayed teeth before remembering themselves.

Merriweather’s nostrils flared. “Ten points from Slytherin for arrogance.”

Harry shrugged, as if handing over coins from a purse he’d filled himself. “Spend them carefully.”

When the crowd spilled away in excited fragments, Bones lingered at the cloister’s edge. He didn’t approach. He only met Harry’s eyes and gave a single, unhappy nod: *I saw. I will carry it true.*

Harry tipped two fingers in acknowledgment and turned into the flow of Slytherins. Tom fell into step, electric with contained triumph.

“You burned the world and made it clap,” he said under his breath.

“I set two boys to rights and reminded the stone who pays the tithe,” Harry answered. “Clapping is their problem.”

He handed the knife back. Tom folded it away with the care of a man pocketing a prayer book. “Teach me the knot in that oath,” he said, already savoring the shape of it in his mouth.

“Later,” Harry said. “You’ll learn the name before you learn the cut.”

They moved through corridors that had begun to learn their names as routes rather than passengers. Lamps brightened a fraction as they passed. A portrait of a medieval matron frowned and then pinched her lips, deciding disapproval would be mistaken for petition and thus withheld.

In the common room, the water pressed heavy against the glass, curious. Abraxas was waiting with a ledger of nothing, the sort men hold when they want to look essential. “I can place our first-years with partners who suit them,” he said without preamble. “Greengrass with Cassiopeia for observation. Nott’s cousin with Rosier for nerve. The Mulciber boy with me.”

Harry considered and let him have it. “Do it,” he said. Abraxas stood an inch taller for the permission he pretended was his idea.

Rosier slouched into a chair opposite, hands tucked behind his head. “They’ll come for you harder now that you made a chapel of the cloister.”

“They’ll come regardless,” Harry said. “Now they’ll come tidier.”

Cassiopeia threaded her needle and didn’t look up. “He fed the school,” she murmured. “You all felt it. It purrs now.”

Tom rubbed the pad of his thumb against his palm as if the echo of the oath still lived there. “What did it cost you,” he asked Harry, low.

Harry’s gaze flicked to him, approving the question if not the worry. “Nothing I didn’t mean to spend.”

When the room had the shape he liked, when orders had been placed where they would stick, Harry rose. “Walk,” he said, and Tom was already moving.

They took the thin staircase that went down when every sensible stair went flat. A door remembered them and forgot to resist. The round room breathed. The green fire lifted its head.

Harry set his hand to the carved rim of the fountain. The stone book trembled—no more than a leaf deciding which way to face—and settled open to a page laced with tight spirals and the long, patient lines of a ward.

“Today,” he said, “you learn a door-name.”

Tom came to his shoulder, close enough that their sleeves touched. The script was not ink but intention, cut so fine even light was careful with it. Harry touched a sigil the size of a grain of rice.

“Say it after me. Not loud. ~Hsil,~” he whispered, the sound coiling like steam from a kettle.

Tom repeated, first wrong, then closer, then right. The room noticed him the way animals notice a boy the woods like.

“What is it,” he asked, hungry.

“Not what,” Harry said. “Who. The ninth stair that lies about how many it is. If you ask it by name, it stops lying.”

Tom laughed, delighted and sharp. “All this time and the castle has been cheating.”

“All this time,” Harry said, “and no one remembered how to be polite.”

He shifted his hand to the next mark. “And this. ~Serr.~ The latch behind the crest in Dippet’s study. You won’t use it.”

“I will know it,” Tom said, and Harry nodded once.

They worked like that until the air tasted of copper and old rain and Tom’s voice had the rasp of use. When Harry closed the book, the room let out a breath it had been holding since founders stopped visiting.

“You’re spending,” Tom said quietly, as they stood in the hush. “I can feel it. The more it listens, the more it asks.”

Harry’s mouth was a line that meant agreement. “Walls keep accounts. So do I.” His hand rose, paused over Tom’s hair, then settled. “When it asks for more than I wish to pay, you will pay.” Before Tom could flood with joy, Harry added, “Only what I tell you.”

“Yes,” Tom said, grateful as hunger.

They climbed back toward the school at an hour when most students found beds and a few found trouble. On the landing outside the library, a small knot of Hufflepuffs stood aside without being told, eyes big, backs straight. Bones was with them. He didn’t salute; he didn’t bow. He only met Harry’s eyes and said, evenly, “No one was hurt.”

“I know,” Harry said, which somehow worked as both acknowledgment and warning.

Bones held his ground. “If you’re going to bind my schoolmates, you tell me first.”

Harry considered the audacity and found it admirable. “No,” he said. “But I’ll tell you after.” He tipped his head at the Hufflepuffs. “Walk them back.”

Bones opened his mouth, shut it, nodded once. “Good night.”

Tom watched him go. “He’s learning to be useful.”

“He already is,” Harry said. “He just hasn’t learned to enjoy it.”

They reached the last turn before Slytherin when the castle’s breath changed—a draft that was not a draft, a quickening under lintel and flagstone. Harry stopped. Tom stopped because Harry had.

“What,” Tom whispered.

“Listen,” Harry said.

The wall to their right was older by a century than the bricks around it. Under Harry’s palm it warmed like a hand taking another hand. Names rose, crowding and courteous, making room for one more—something with equinox in its bones and smoke in its hair.

“~Soon,~” Harry murmured, and the name offered itself. Not a date, exactly, but a hinge: the night when remembering is easiest because the world can’t decide what it is. The school called it Halloween. The stone called it something else that made the torches flutter.

Tom shivered, not from cold. “Is it ours?”

“It will be,” Harry said. “Samhain is when walls are thinner and ledgers are checked. We’ll take something then that cannot be taken any other night.”

“What,” Tom breathed.

Harry’s smile was small and private. “You’ll know it when you feel it open.”

They walked on. Behind them, the wall cooled by degrees and kept the secret like a promise.

By the time they reached the common room, the lake had turned the windows to a single slow bruise. Cassiopeia had claimed the chair by the fire and was interrogating a map of the grounds with pins. Abraxas was distributing practice schedules that coincidentally aligned with Rosier’s preferences. Younger students looked up as Harry passed and found themselves sitting straighter, as if their spines were learning new grammar.

Harry let his palm brush the glass. Outside, a pale fish turned and showed its coin-bright side. Inside, Tom stood very still and felt the room lean towards them like a tide.

“Tomorrow,” Harry said softly.

Tom didn’t ask *what*—the word had stopped being a question in this house and become a vow.

He said, “Yes,” and meant it to the bone.

Above them, far away and perfectly close, Dumbledore set his quill down and listened to the walls listening. He thought of lemon drops he had not eaten and promises that did not belong to him. He thought of a boy who made the castle breathe deeper and another who had decided breathing was an act of worship.

The hourglasses kept counting. The emeralds dropped and dropped, each a quiet vote for an outcome no one would admit they felt coming. In the pipes, scales shifted. In the round room, the green fire smiled without changing its mouth. And in the corridor where the wall had named its night, the draft returned, tasting the stone as if testing a door with its tongue.

--

The castle changed the way beasts do when they sense weather. It wasn’t loud. Doors hung a fraction ajar where they normally clicked, staircases paused a heartbeat before committing to a landing, portraits watched without blinking as if blinking would miss the moment the world remembered its name. The hourglasses in the staffroom kept their patient trickle, but the sound of green against glass grew clearer, as though the sand had learned to announce itself.

Harry slept less and seemed to need it less. He moved through the days with the polish of a blade that has found the right whetstone. Tom matched him without being asked. Their schedules interlocked—classes, quiet corridors, the round room whose green fire knew their footsteps—until the rhythm itself felt like a ward.

On a night when fog pressed into the windows and the lake blurred its own edges, the serpents by the stairwell lifted their heads as Harry passed. Their tongues wrote thin silver lines in the damp.

“~You smell of doors,~” the larger said. “~The kind that open only when the year forgets itself.~”

“~Soon,~” Harry agreed. He didn’t slow. He didn’t need to. The snakes’ bodies relaxed back into their loops with the satisfied heaviness of creatures who know they have been heard by a proper master.

Later, in the common room, Slytherins parceled themselves by usefulness rather than age. Abraxas’s lists had become maps; Rosier’s grin had become a signal; Cassiopeia’s silence had begun to mean attention. Younger students watched Harry with the reverence boys give to storms viewed from safe doorways. No one called it worship where a professor might hear. They called it organization. They called it a plan.

Harry let the room organize itself around him and did nothing to hide how easily it did. Then, when the tide felt right, he stood. “Tom,” he said.

Tom was already moving.

They took the wrong staircase down and the right one up and a corridor that ended until it didn’t. The door that had learned to open for them remembered itself. The round room lifted its green gaze.

“The school will feed us at Samhain,” Harry said without preamble, lighting the sconces with a soft, pleased hiss. “Not with meat. With attention. The kind that makes old lines brighter.”

Tom came to his shoulder. “We take the Chamber outright?”

Harry’s mouth tilted—amusement, approval. “Not yet. You don’t storm old kings while the walls are listening for their names. You set table and chair. You pour the first cup and make them watch you drink.” He touched the stone book and it opened like a creature that trusts the hand that woke it.

“What do we drink?” Tom asked, hungry without apology.

“Authority,” Harry said. “The kind that doesn’t need a wand to be recognized.” His finger tapped a sigil with the weight of a signature. “This is the hall’s license to decide who may speak. We’ll move it.”

Tom blinked. “Move—”

“Only a hair,” Harry said. “Enough that when I speak, the room understands it has been given permission to hear me first.” He glanced over, not unkind. “Enough that when you speak after me, it recognizes you as my echo.”

Tom’s pride shone so clean it could have lit a corridor. “Tell me what to say.”

“You’ll say what I tell you when I tell you,” Harry answered, neither cold nor warm, and Tom breathed out like someone being set at last into a place made exactly to his shape.

They worked until the air inside the room forgot how to be cold. Harry spoke to stone in sounds that weren’t words until they were. Tom followed where he could and learned where he couldn’t, which is the correct order of those two things. When Harry finished, he stood very still, his hand a flat blessing on the carved rim. For a moment, nothing moved.

Then the fountain’s snakes glowed behind their stone eyes—a flare like the last breath before waking—and went dark again. The room felt taller by a thumb’s height, as if it had put on better posture.

Harry exhaled, slow. A thin line of blood had dried along the cut at his thumb and one at the edge of his nostril he had not bothered to wipe.

Tom saw both. His jaw set. “What did you spend?”

“Time,” Harry said. “A little of mine. A little of the school’s.” He finally took an handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his nose. “It prefers the trade to be fair.”

“I can—”

“You can watch and remember,” Harry said. “When it’s your turn, you won’t mistake generosity for duty.”

Tom folded the correction into himself without complaint. It felt like being trusted to hold a knife by the blade without being cut.

They left the chamber and walked a loop through the school that felt, for the first time, like their loop. A tapestry smoothed itself as they passed. A classroom door that usually stuck swung open a fraction and then closed again, as if acknowledging them the way a man nods at a king when he thinks no one is watching.

At the top of a quiet stair, a girl from their year—no one important, a Greengrass cousin with neat plaits and a mouth set to ‘careful’—paused to let them by. She didn’t look up, but she said, in the blank tone of someone reporting the weather, “Thank you for making Selwyn stop lying.”

“Tell him he did it himself,” Harry said.

“Yes,” the girl replied, then hesitated. “He says his tongue tastes like a penny when he forgets. He looks embarrassed by how often he forgets.”

“Good,” Harry said, already past her. “He’ll learn faster if it’s inconvenient.”

In the staffroom, the emeralds kept descending. Dippet watched them as if each grain were a thought he had not had in time. Merriweather wrote letters in a tidy, upright hand—requests for clarity, for sanction, for the Board to notice what the school had noticed and take it away again. Slughorn trimmed invitations with a small pair of silver scissors and hummed. Beery whispered to cuttings that shouldn’t have rooted and now had. Carrow practiced charms with no students in the room and found his wand hand steady only when he thought of Potter and the sudden discipline Potter’s presence had imposed on his own laziness.

Dumbledore, having written nothing and decided even less, set down his quill and stood at the long window. The rain had thinned to a moist light. The grounds looked like a memory of themselves.

He thought of Tom Riddle’s careful hands and of the way the boy had taken a lemon drop and rolled it across his tongue without biting. He thought of Harry’s eyes, which were patient in a way that made the word sound like a threat. He thought of Samhain—not as a feast, not even as a date, but as the night the school’s long ledger takes itself out and checks how names are written inside it.

He was not frightened. He was not calm. He was exact, which is another way of naming certain kinds of fear. He would have to decide what could be risked and what could not, and he would have to do it in a way that looked like kindness even if it wasn’t.

On his way out, his sleeve brushed the Slytherin hourglass. The green quickened as if pleased to be touched. Dumbledore paused, smiled at nothing, and said aloud—very gently, as if humoring an old habit—“Not yet.”

The glass kept falling as if to prove it had never needed permission.

Slytherin slept with one eye open. The younger ones dreamed of doors; the older ones dreamed of ledgers that balanced in their favor; a few dreamed of water pressing slow against unbreakable glass. Bones made a second round of corridors he had not been assigned and found them quiet in the way rooms are quiet after a sermon that did not use the word “God.” He told two Hufflepuffs to tuck in their shirts, told a Ravenclaw to put his quill down and go to bed, told himself he was doing well, then told himself again. Some men need to hear truth twice.

When dawn came, the lake had left a film on the windows that glittered like a thin frost. The Great Hall filled with steam and porridge and the smell of cheap ink. Owls winged low, scattering hair and calm alike. In the hum of morning, a little note with no seal and a cramped hand found Tom Riddle’s plate.

He lifted it. Read.

A single word: *Soon.*

Harry didn’t look at it. He didn’t have to. He reached for the marmalade and spread it with an even hand. “We’ll walk the grounds tonight,” he said.

Tom folded the scrap and tucked it away as if it were a coin and he had decided to be rich. “Yes.”

Across the hall, Dumbledore looked up from a cup he had not sweetened and met Harry’s eyes. Nothing moved in either face. They both smiled exactly the proper amount to be thought civilized by anyone who wasn’t paying attention.

The day slid forward. Classes were taught. Points were given and taken. A first-year dropped a jar of pickled rat spleens and cried, and Slughorn said “There there” with heroic conviction. A Ravenclaw wrote an essay that started by admiring Potter’s precision and ended by worrying about it, and his tongue tasted like iron only twice while drafting. A Gryffindor gripped his wand and did not strike first and felt his knuckles itch and did not scratch them and discovered that sometimes obeying yourself hurts less than obeying fury.

Night came early, as it does when the year tips toward the hinge. Harry and Tom walked the margins of the grounds where the Forest shadows huddle and the stones remember. The wind had the smell of mushrooms and something older. The boulder Harry touched lay half-sunk in moss, ice-cold under his palm.

“~Listen,~” he told it.

The ground under their feet tightened like a drum held in two large, careful hands. The sound that came back was not sound. It was ledger. It was a door rolling its shoulders before it swings. It was the school clearing its throat to speak its own name.

Tom’s breath ran faster. “Ours,” he said, and it wasn’t a question and it wasn’t a boast. It was a promise the earth made, repeated by a boy.

Harry lowered his hand. He looked at the castle—the windows like patient eyes, the roofs like folded wings—and then at Tom.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Be clean. Be sharp. Be hungry at the right moment and not before.”

Tom nodded once, the way a soldier nods when the battle plan is written into him so thoroughly he could recite it asleep. “What do I say?”

“What I tell you,” Harry said. “And when I touch your hand, you’ll know it.”

They went back in. The castle swallowed them the way a beast swallows food it intends to make muscle.

Somewhere above, in a room that smelled like beeswax and chalk, Dumbledore lit a single candle and set it on the sill. It was not a signal and it was not a ward. It was a habit of men who were boys once and learned to count nights by flame.

He watched it until the base made a ring of light on the stone. He didn’t touch the lemon drops. He did not write to the Board. He did not pace. He waited the way men do when they’ve decided waiting is the best kind of action left.

Down in the dark, a jet-black knife lay in Tom’s pocket, warm from his hand. In Harry’s, a key that had started life as a matchstick sat with an old coin and a new thread of hair. The hourglasses counted. The snakes listened. The wall with the borrowed name tasted the air and smiled.

Samhain would open. And when it did, the boys who had decided they would be the ones to write their names in the breath of the school would be standing where the door could not help but see them first.

Chapter Text

October draped itself heavy across the castle. The days shortened, shadows lengthened, and every breath indoors smelled faintly of smoke and wet stone. The kitchens worked longer hours to prepare the feast; rumors said the elves were roasting whole deer this year, and that the pumpkin pasties hissed with spice so strong they burned. Candles guttered against drafts older than any professor, and when they flared back to life, more than one student swore they saw shapes in the wax like faces listening.

Hogwarts kept its rituals. Samhain was the hinge of the year, when the walls remembered things they usually kept quiet. Portraits lingered in their frames longer, reluctant to move. Suits of armor muttered old drills under their breath. Even the staircases seemed to hesitate before shifting, as though debating whether this was the year they chose different paths entirely.

The students felt it. Gryffindors sharpened bravado into jokes too loud at supper. Ravenclaws whispered speculations about which wards would thin when the veil was lowest. Hufflepuffs clung to routine, bustling between classes, humming under their breath to keep fear orderly.

Slytherin was quiet. Not cowed, not nervous—quiet in the way predators get when they know the herd has already been steered. They took their cues from Harry without even noticing that they did: speaking less, watching more, eating as though mealtime were another kind of reconnaissance.

Tom walked at Harry’s side as if it were inevitable. Abraxas began to linger at their table, half-resentful, half-fascinated, providing commentary that always sounded like strategy disguised as complaint. Rosier’s smirk widened daily; he had started treating every hallway like a stage for Harry’s performance. Cassiopeia watched in silence, her eyes steady as an augury. The younger ones hovered, emboldened simply by proximity.

Harry ate little, sleeping even less. His presence had taken on the polish of inevitability: polished shoes, crisp tie, gaze like an iron key. If anyone asked him directly about the coming feast, he only smiled, the kind of smile that did not soothe but suggested answers already written.

The castle itself leaned toward him. Torches along the Slytherin corridor flared slightly higher as he passed. The stairwell serpents lifted their heads more often, tongues carving silver threads in damp air. A tapestry depicting the founding of Hogwarts twitched on its hooks when his hand brushed the wall beside it, as though it might unroll further if he commanded.

Dumbledore noticed. He said nothing, but more than once during lessons his eyes lingered on Harry longer than on the rest of the class combined. A kind smile here, a question there, always testing, never yielding. Tom saw it and filed it away. Harry only smirked as if it amused him to be weighed and found immeasurable.

By the final week of October, the Great Hall was a cathedral of shadows and flickering pumpkins. Silverware gleamed under candlelight, banners hung heavy, and the long tables bristled with anticipation. Samhain would come, and with it, the night when doors forgot to stay shut.

Harry pressed his palm against the stone wall outside the Hall and listened as the castle murmured back, too quiet for anyone else to hear. Tom leaned closer, hungry for the words, but Harry only gave him a sideways glance and said, “It’s listening for us.”

Tom smiled, sharp and certain. “Then we’ll give it something worth remembering.”

--

The Great Hall glowed with carved pumpkins lit from within by charms older than most of the teachers. Candles floated in their eternal drift, their flames holding steady against every draft, as though the night itself wanted to watch. Shadows gathered between the rafters, heavy and patient, and every whisper seemed to fall shorter than usual, as though the air had grown thick.

At the Gryffindor table, boys jostled loudly, trying to banish unease with laughter. Ravenclaws huddled closer to their books, whispering analyses of the decorations as if logic could explain why the stone walls seemed more awake than usual. Hufflepuffs clung to Bones’s calm, the prefect’s measured voice a steady tether amid the strangeness.

Slytherins were silent. Not cowed, not sulking—silent, the kind of silence that made teachers look twice. They ate slowly, deliberately, as though answering some unspoken order. The older students flanked the younger ones, a quiet guard. No one raised their voice; no one wasted motion. The table breathed in one rhythm, and in its center, Harry sat.

He barely touched his plate. A fork lifted, lowered, abandoned. His eyes slid over the Hall like a knife’s edge. When he did eat, it was without appetite, a predator tasting rather than consuming. Tom sat at his right, face schooled into something between pride and hunger, his every gesture tuned to Harry’s rhythm. Abraxas whispered maps of the House in his ear, Rosier scanned the Gryffindors with narrowed eyes, Cassiopeia watched everyone else. Even the youngest—children not yet grown into their robes—sat straighter, as though afraid of breaking formation.

Animals knew it best. The owls above shifted restlessly, wings rustling though no draft touched them. The cats under the tables hissed at shadows that moved wrong. Even the enchanted jack-o’-lanterns burned lower when Harry’s gaze lingered too long.

He spoke softly once, to Tom, a phrase in Parseltongue so faint it was barely a breath. Still, the nearest candles bent toward him as if listening. A ripple passed across the hall—nothing anyone could name, but enough that conversation stumbled, picked up again with forced brightness. Several portraits muttered in their frames and turned their faces toward the far wall rather than look at him.

Dumbledore, seated high at the staff table, set down his goblet slowly. His gaze slid past Harry as if he were only another boy in green robes, but his fingers drummed once, twice, against the table’s edge, and his eyes were sharper than his smile.

Harry leaned back, expression unreadable, and let the feast flow around him. The air thickened. The school listened.

--

When the feast broke, benches scraped and laughter spilled upward like sparks desperate to burn away the unease. Teachers rose, voices gathering the Houses, urging bed and propriety. Candles guttered and righted themselves, the Hall sighing as the weight of night pressed harder.

Harry stood without signal. Tom rose a heartbeat later, then Abraxas, Rosier, and Cassiopeia. Two younger boys followed—Mulciber and Nott, too eager for permission to hesitate. No one else at the Slytherin table asked where they were going; no one dared.

“Tradition,” Harry said, voice low enough that only his table heard. The word traveled down the benches like contraband. Some of the older Slytherins nodded faintly, half-remembering stories told by their fathers or whispered by portraits: that on Samhain, Slytherin blood walked the dungeons to remind the stones whose voice commanded them.

He moved through the dispersing crowd with Tom at his side. Students parted instinctively, as if his shadow were broader than his frame. Gryffindors muttered, Ravenclaws glanced away, Hufflepuffs kept their eyes on Bones, who said nothing.

The castle guided them: stairs that should have led to bed instead bent sideways, corridors stretching long, then folding short. A torch flared at Harry’s approach, then dimmed as he passed. At a dead end of stone, he spoke in the old tongue.

“~Open.~”

The wall answered with a low groan, folding back like a page turning itself. The air beyond smelled of wet earth and iron.

Rosier swallowed. Mulciber’s hand twitched toward his wand. Cassiopeia only smiled, eyes sharp in the half-dark.

Harry didn’t look back. “Walk with me,” he said, and stepped into the black.

The passage sloped downward, slick with moisture, lined with pipes as thick as tree trunks. Their footsteps echoed like a second procession keeping pace just out of sight. Tom’s breathing steadied, matching Harry’s stride exactly. The younger boys lagged, but fear pressed them forward.

At the chamber’s threshold, the carved serpents stirred, their eyes glinting with remembered jewels.

“~Heir,~” Harry whispered. The door pulled apart, scales grinding with slow obedience.

They crossed into the round chamber. Green fire leapt awake at once, licking up from the fountain as if it had been waiting. Shadows stretched long and eager.

Abraxas halted, lips parting. Rosier swore softly. Nott whimpered, smothering the sound with both hands.

Only Tom moved without pause, stepping to Harry’s right as though the place had been built for them.

“This is where we mark the night,” Harry said. His hand brushed the stone book, and its runes brightened like coals teased back to flame. The air thickened until breathing felt like kneeling.

The others looked at him—some with awe, some with terror. None moved to leave.

--

Harry laid his hand across the carved rim of the fountain, and the green fire leapt to greet him. Sparks hissed into the air, sharp as knives, and shadows climbed the walls with the eagerness of things long starved of movement. The chamber stirred as though Samhain itself had slipped beneath the stone and whispered: *Now.*

“Tonight,” Harry said, his voice low but edged, “you will see what it means to stand beneath my hand. And you will not forget.”

The younger boys flinched. Abraxas’s jaw was set tight, pale beneath his blond hair. Rosier’s eyes gleamed with something too close to hunger. Cassiopeia did not smirk this time; she watched with a stillness sharp as steel. Even Mulciber and Nott, half-hidden at the back, leaned forward despite themselves.

Harry drew his wand across his palm. Blood welled, thick and red. He let it fall into the fountain. The fire hissed, roared, and climbed high enough to lick the vaulted ceiling.

The serpents carved in the walls shuddered loose, sliding down as though they had been waiting for centuries for this one command. Silver tongues darted against the blaze, tasting the blood in the air.

Harry began to whisper in Parseltongue. The sound wasn’t only words—it was invocation, the sibilant cadence of old rites stitched into stone long before their time. “~On this night, when the veil is thinnest, when the walls remember, I bind those who stand before me. Their names are mine. Their strength is mine. Their oaths are mine.~”

The snakes writhed and coiled, shadows and fire twining until it was impossible to tell where stone ended and serpent began. The younger boys gasped as coils of green flame snaked around their wrists, tightening with a pressure that was neither heat nor cold but compulsion itself.

“~Kneel,~” Harry commanded.

The chamber itself seemed to echo the word.

Abraxas crumpled first, legs buckling as though the stone had pulled him down. Rosier snarled but fell to his knees, jaw clenched against the weight. Mulciber and Nott toppled outright, trembling under invisible coils. Cassiopeia fought longest, her smirk shattering into a gasp as one knee struck the floor with a crack.

Only Tom moved freely. He stepped forward, eyes blazing, and sank to his knees with deliberate reverence, pressing his forehead to the cold stone as though before an altar.

Harry let the silence stretch until every breath belonged to him. Then, softer, he spoke again. “~Rise.~”

The coils dissolved in a rush of smoke and fire. The Slytherins staggered upright, faces pale, some trembling, some flushed with exhilaration. Abraxas looked shaken but resolute. Rosier’s eyes glittered. Cassiopeia’s lips curved back into a smirk, but now it had the brittle edge of someone who had glimpsed the noose and chosen to wear it as jewelry.

Harry bled another drop into the fountain. The stone groaned, deep and grinding, as though the whole castle had shifted. The green blaze steadied, but the echo of it burned in their bones.

“This is not power,” Harry told them, voice calm and cutting. “This is its shadow. A taste. What you felt tonight is what others will feel when we choose. And you—” his gaze swept over each face, lingering just long enough to brand the truth into them, “—you will stand with me, or you will crawl. There is no middle ground.”

Rosier licked his lips. “It felt like… being remade.”

Cassiopeia’s smirk thinned. “So long as it’s you holding the reins, Potter, I’ll take the ride.”

Abraxas swallowed, voice steadier than his hands. “I’ll follow. Better you than anyone else.”

The younger boys said nothing, still trembling, but silence itself was a vow.

Tom remained kneeling, forehead still bowed to the stone. Devotion rolled off him like heat, raw and undeniable. When Harry finally allowed himself the ghost of a smile—not mercy, not kindness, but pure approval—Tom straightened, spine snapping taut as though crowned.

The serpents slithered back into their carvings, satisfied. The fire dimmed to an obedient glow. Harry bound his hand with a strip of cloth, turned without another word, and walked away.

They followed. Of course they followed.

--

The others drifted back to their dormitories with uneven steps, still whispering to themselves, still shaken by the compulsion that had dragged them to their knees. Harry said nothing as they went, only watched until the door swallowed them. When it was just him and Tom, the silence of the chamber deepened, heavy and knowing.

Tom turned to him at once. “You’re bleeding again.”

Harry glanced down at his palm, at the strip of cloth already darkened, and then to the thin smear beneath his nose. “It happens,” he said flatly. “The chamber always takes its price.”

Tom stepped closer, face tight with worry that twisted into anger. “What did it take this time?”

Harry’s eyes flickered, not with pain but with something sharper—loss he refused to name. A memory had slipped, clean as a page torn from a book. He could feel the absence, a blank space where once there had been warmth, laughter, something fragile and human. “It took what it always does,” he answered finally. “Pieces. I can afford them.”

Tom’s jaw clenched. “You shouldn’t have to pay like this.”

Harry looked at him then, really looked, and the faintest smile curled at his lips. “I won’t. Not forever.”

The carved fountain stirred, runes along its rim glowing faintly as if they, too, had overheard. Harry rested his uninjured hand upon the stone and closed his eyes. The whispers came—harsher this time, clearer, a language etched into the bones of the school.

Images unfolded behind his eyes: bone scored with sigils, skin inked with blood, runes written not in parchment but in flesh. Not sacrifice but permanence. Not theft but exchange.

When he opened his eyes, Tom was watching him, hungry for every word.

“There’s a way,” Harry murmured. “The chamber showed me. Runes carved in blood, etched into skin and bone. Anchors to hold the price in place. If I bear them, the cost won’t be stolen. It will be mine to command.”

Tom’s breath caught. “You’d carve them into yourself?”

“Yes.” Harry flexed his hand, the blood seeping through the cloth. “But not yet. Once etched, they can’t be removed. They’ll change me, root me deeper into this place, make me part of it as much as stone or serpent. I’ll wait until I’m certain which runes I want. Until then…” His eyes gleamed in the firelight. “I let the chamber take what it will. And I endure.”

Tom’s devotion sharpened into something like worship. “Tell me when. I’ll help carve them.”

Harry reached out, cupped the back of Tom’s neck, fingers firm, claiming. “You’ll watch. And you’ll learn. When the time comes, you’ll carry marks of your own. But until then, you’ll belong to me—untouched, unscarred, loyal.”

“Yes,” Tom whispered, eyes alight. “Always.”

The chamber exhaled around them, the snakes curling back into their stone beds, the fire dimming to embers. Harry let his hand fall from Tom’s neck, turned, and walked toward the door. Tom followed without hesitation, footsteps sure and steady, like a shadow bound by oath.

Above them, the castle whispered to itself. Somewhere, Dumbledore paused mid-step in a corridor, feeling the wards ripple. He thought of doors and knives, of children who paid prices older than their names. He kept walking, but the unease stayed like a thorn beneath his robes.

--

The castle did not sleep easily that night.

In the Gryffindor dormitories, boys tossed and muttered, their dreams tangled with hissing scales and green fire. A Prewett woke screaming, swearing something had coiled around his throat, only to find his bed curtains untouched. In Ravenclaw, two girls woke at the same moment with the taste of iron on their tongues, though neither had bitten themselves. Even in Hufflepuff, usually a sanctuary of quiet rest, Edmund Bones lay awake, unable to shake the echo of a single word: *kneel*.

The portraits whispered among themselves, uneasy in their gilded frames. A friar in an oil painting of an abbey cloister refused to leave his canvas all night, muttering prayers for warding that only made the air colder. The staircases turned sluggish, groaning as if their bones ached.

Down in the dungeons, the snakes were restless. Scales scraped stone, bodies shifted in coils, eyes gleamed in the dark. They hissed to one another in old syllables: *Master. Master has spoken. Master is here.*

Above it all, in his office, Dumbledore sat awake at his desk, candle guttering low. The letters he had written to the Board remained unsent, their wax seals cooling in silence. His quill lay abandoned, ink drying at the nib. He could feel the wards humming through the stone, not broken, not breached, but changed—altered by a hand that had known how to press in just the right place.

He thought of Potter’s calm face, of Riddle’s hungry eyes, of the way the hourglass sand had quickened at his sleeve. He thought of Samhain, and doors, and debts.

When dawn finally came, thin and grey, the castle exhaled. The dreams faded. The staircases shifted more easily. But the quiet that remained was not peace. It was the silence of a predator after feeding, patient and waiting for hunger to return.

And in Slytherin House, beneath green-draped beds, six students woke with the faintest memory of fire coiled around their wrists and the certainty that they would never be free of it.

Chapter Text

The morning after Samhain broke cold and blue against the lake. Mist pressed at the glass, blurring the world outside into shifting shadows. In their private dorm — a concession Slughorn had quietly arranged, though no one dared question it — Harry and Tom woke alone. No other boy breathed in the chamber, no coughs, no snores. Just the slow rhythm of two bodies that belonged entirely to themselves.

Harry sat up first. His hair was black against the white sheets, his scar a thin slash catching dawn’s light. He didn’t fumble for his glasses anymore; his green eyes cut through the dimness clear and cold. Tom stirred a moment later, lids heavy but spine already straightening, as though sleep were a weakness he’d punish himself for indulging in.

“You didn’t bleed much,” Tom murmured, voice still hoarse with night. He meant last night’s ritual, the fire and snakes, the kneeling. He hadn’t looked away once.

Harry flexed his palm. The cut was already closing, only a faint line remaining. “It takes less now.”

Tom’s eyes followed the movement with sharp attention. “But it still takes.”

Harry gave a small, humorless smile. “Everything worth keeping costs. I’ll decide when to pay more.”

Silence lay between them, comfortable only because it was theirs. No one else in the castle would ever be allowed to sit so close without being flayed by Harry’s indifference. For Tom, the silence was almost affection.

He shifted, sitting on the edge of the bed, feet flat against the cold stone floor. “They’ll be whispering,” he said. “About last night.”

“They should,” Harry replied. His tone was calm, as if stating a fact about the weather. “If they weren’t, it would mean they hadn’t understood.”

Tom’s lips curved faintly, pride and hunger mixing in the expression. “They understood.”

A knock at the outer door broke the moment. Not the heavy rap of a professor, but the nervous double-tap of another student. Tom glanced at Harry. Harry didn’t move.

“Come in,” he said, voice flat as ice.

The door opened a crack. A second-year boy — Nott — leaned inside, pale from more than just lack of sleep. “Breakfast,” he said quickly. “Slughorn says the House should come down together. He… he noticed.”

“Of course he did,” Harry said, rising. His movements were precise, measured, the kind of grace that makes people afraid. He buttoned his collar without looking in a mirror. Tom followed his lead, the echo he was meant to be, fastening his robes with equal care.

When they stepped into the corridor, the dungeons felt different. Torches flared brighter as if eager to see them; the air carried a faint hiss, like snakes sliding unseen through the walls. The rest of Slytherin was waiting in the common room, gathered in nervous knots. Abraxas stood stiff-backed with Rosier beside him, Cassiopeia lounged with false ease, younger students pressed together like reeds in a current.

The moment Harry and Tom appeared, conversation cut. Not quieted. Cut.

Harry let the silence breathe. Then: “Walk.”

And they did. Slytherin House poured into the hallways like a single body, green robes moving in one tide.

--

The Great Hall breathed with Samhain’s aftermath. Pumpkins still glowed in the rafters, their candlelight soft and lingering, and the scent of spice clung to the long tables as though the night refused to leave. The banners hung heavy, their colors deepened by enchantments that hadn’t quite faded.

Slytherin entered in a body, and the entire hall saw it. Not just a House arriving for breakfast, but a procession. Green robes moving as one, a tide with two boys at its prow. Harry and Tom walked side by side down the center of the aisle, eyes forward, steps measured. The scrape of benches faltered as conversations died mid-word.

The Gryffindors bristled immediately. One of the Prewett boys leaned forward, jaw tight, whispering something sharp to his tablemates. Further down, a young Potter cousin stared with a mixture of unease and something that might have been defiance, though it faltered under Harry’s glance.

Hufflepuff was quieter. Edmund Bones sat with his prefect badge shining, spoon idle in porridge. He caught Harry’s gaze and inclined his head once, stiff but deliberate. Harry returned nothing at all, which was answer enough. The truce still held.

Ravenclaw’s table murmured like scholars parsing prophecy. Some leaned forward with too much interest, quills scratching on scraps of parchment. Others sat back, lips thin, calculating distance.

Harry and Tom took their places at the center of the Slytherin table, and the rest of their House arranged itself accordingly. Abraxas and Rosier flanked like lieutenants; Cassiopeia settled across, her chin propped on her hand, smirk thin and watchful. The younger years clustered down the benches, tense but proud, as though belonging had suddenly become something real.

Harry poured tea with steady hands. The silver pot gleamed in the candlelight, steam curling like breath. He slid the cup to Tom first, a motion so small yet so absolute that every watching eye caught it. Tom drank, eyes burning, as though it were a coronation.

Food appeared: toast, porridge, sausages, the usual fare. Harry ate little, methodical, more predator than participant. Tom mirrored him, every movement deliberate. Around them, conversation picked up again, though quieter, strained.

At the staff table, eyes followed. Slughorn beamed, clapping his hands over a platter of ham, pretending not to gloat. Merriweather’s frown etched deeper lines into his hawkish face. Professor Beery paused mid-bite of bread, staring as though she’d seen a plant bloom out of season.

And Dumbledore. His gaze rested not on the House, not even on Tom. Only on Harry, watching the boy eat with the composure of a man twice his age, green eyes clear, scar stark in the light. His fingers tapped once against the table, a rhythm only he knew, then stilled.

Whispers spread, soft but certain: Slytherin had changed overnight.

Harry didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. The castle carried whispers to him like offerings. He only ate his toast in silence, letting the weight of inevitability settle into every corner of the hall.

--

At the staff table, the quiet was its own conversation.

Slughorn dabbed his lips with a napkin, eyes twinkling as if he’d been the architect of it all. He leaned toward Merriweather with a low chuckle. “A remarkable year, wouldn’t you say? Discipline and brilliance combined in one House. Why, I daresay Slytherin hasn’t looked this polished in a generation.”

Merriweather’s jaw set. “Polished is not the same as safe, Horace. They move like soldiers, not students.” His gaze flicked toward Harry and Tom, then narrowed. “One boy compels the other, and the rest fall in line. That is not cohesion. That is domination.”

Beery, who rarely spoke above the rustle of leaves, shifted uncomfortably. “But the plants,” she said, voice hushed. “Even the devil’s snare—when Potter speaks, it stills. Do you understand what that means? This is not ordinary magic.”

Carrow, the pale Charms master, cleared his throat. “Perhaps it is clever wandwork.”

Dumbledore turned his head slightly, amusement flickering like a candle behind glass. “If it were only wandwork, I would sleep better at night.”

Slughorn laughed, trying to brush off the tension. “They’re boys. Brilliant, yes, but still boys. A touch of guidance, and they’ll grow into pillars of our society.”

Merriweather muttered, “Or break it.”

Below them, at the Gryffindor table, one of the Prewetts—broad-shouldered, voice too loud—slammed his goblet down. “Oi, Potter!” he called, reckless, half-challenge and half-performance for the eyes around him. “Tell us, do snakes taste better kneeling or hissing?”

The hall hushed. Benches creaked as faces turned.

Harry didn’t look up. He buttered his toast with deliberate calm, the silver knife whispering against crust. Only when Tom shifted slightly, head tilting like a hawk catching movement in the grass, did Harry raise his eyes.

Green met red-gold across the hall. Harry’s gaze was steady, unblinking. His scar caught the candlelight like a scarlet thread stitched into pale skin.

The Prewett boy flinched. Not much, just a flicker, but enough. His grin faltered, the bravado cracking. A ripple of unease ran through the Gryffindor bench.

Harry smiled then—thin, cold, deliberate. He said nothing. The silence stretched until the boy sat back down, face hot, goblet forgotten.

Tom’s hand, resting near Harry’s on the table, tightened slightly in satisfaction. The entire Slytherin table shifted as one, posture straightening, the weight of victory shared without words.

At the staff table, Dumbledore’s eyes narrowed, though his expression remained pleasant. “Interesting,” he murmured.

Slughorn clapped his hands again, as though to break the tension. “Marvelous toast today! Just marvelous.”

But the Great Hall did not forget what it had seen.

--

The silence after Gryffindor’s failed challenge settled thick as fog. Then, slowly, the hum of the hall returned, though softer, altered.

At the Ravenclaw table, quills scratched furiously. A sharp-featured boy muttered, “He didn’t even cast. No wand, no word. Just—” He gestured helplessly, as though describing the weight of a storm. His companion shook her head, whispering, “That’s worse. A hex you can deflect. That… that you can’t.”

Further down, a girl leaned close to her friend. “It felt like… when the air changes before lightning.” They both shivered and bent their heads lower.

The Hufflepuffs were quieter still. Edmund Bones chewed deliberately, eyes on Harry. “Restraint,” he said finally, voice pitched low but certain. “He could’ve humiliated the boy. He didn’t.” His tablemates nodded, some relieved, others still tense. One muttered, “Restraint is scarier. It means he *chose* not to.”

At Gryffindor’s end, the Prewett boy tried to laugh it off, too loud, slapping his friend on the back. But the crack in his voice betrayed him. A Potter cousin, freckled and watchful, leaned across the bench. “Don’t push him again,” he warned under his breath. “There’s something wrong there. Something old.”

Slytherin, by contrast, glowed with dark satisfaction. Rosier smirked openly, the kind of grin that dared anyone to contest it. Abraxas sat stiff, but the pride in his posture betrayed approval. Cassiopeia tapped her nails against the table in slow rhythm, eyes fixed on Harry with the kind of interest reserved for dangerous works of art.

Tom shifted closer to Harry, his shoulder brushing his. Harry didn’t move away. It was the smallest of allowances, but in that charged space, it was as intimate as a declaration.

The meal stretched on. Plates emptied, owls swept low with their rattling post. Still, the ripple of whispers never stilled. The entire hall knew: the power in Slytherin had shifted, and the boy at its center no longer needed to raise a wand to command.

At the staff table, Dumbledore leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin. His eyes were fixed not on Tom, but on Harry, the scarred boy who smiled without warmth, who bent others without spell or hex. The pumpkin lanterns burned lower, and still Dumbledore watched, thoughtful, unsettled.

When the students rose, benches scraping, Slytherin moved again as one. Gryffindor bristled but did not interfere. Ravenclaw whispered, Hufflepuff observed. And at the heart of it, Harry and Tom walked side by side, the castle listening to their every step.

--

The following morning, the castle felt different. Not louder, not busier—simply more alert, as though the stone itself had decided to pay attention. Even in the Great Hall, the pumpkin lanterns from the feast still smoldered faintly, though no one had refreshed them. The magic lingered the way smoke lingers after a fire.

In Transfiguration, Professor Dumbledore’s voice was bright as ever, but his eyes weighed more than his words. He set the class the task of turning beetles into buttons, a simple exercise. Around the room, students muttered incantations, tapped with shaky precision. Buttons rolled, cracked, some sprouted legs and scuttled away.

Harry flicked his wand once. His beetle did not become a button. It became a row of buttons—black, polished, perfectly aligned along the grain of the desk, as though stitched there by invisible hands. He leaned back, gaze cool.

Dumbledore’s eyes flickered. He strolled closer, voice casual. “Neat work, Mr. Potter. Though the task asked for one.”

Harry did not rise to the rebuke. “One is easy,” he said. His tone was not boastful. It was flat, dismissive. “A row is useful.”

The class stilled. No one dared laugh, though a few eyes darted to Dumbledore. He smiled faintly, that unfathomable smile of his. “Be careful, Mr. Potter. Usefulness can be a sharp thing. It cuts both ways.”

Tom watched every word, every shift of Dumbledore’s expression. Later, in whispers too low for others to hear, he murmured, “He wants to see if you’ll bend.”

“I won’t,” Harry answered. His wand spun lazily in his fingers, not carelessly, but with purpose. “And neither will you.”

In Defense, Professor Merriweather paired them deliberately apart, thinking separation might dilute their influence. Tom faced a Gryffindor boy whose jaw clenched every time Harry’s name was mentioned. Harry was matched with a Ravenclaw who looked both eager and terrified.

“Disarm!” Merriweather barked. Wands clashed, spells cracked. The Ravenclaw stumbled back as Harry’s wand barely moved—his disarming charm so precise it stripped not just the boy’s wand, but the inkpen from his pocket and the ribbon from his hair.

Gasps followed. Merriweather’s mouth thinned. “Showy,” he said curtly. “Points to Ravenclaw for courage.”

But everyone in the room saw the truth: Harry had not even tried to win. He had tried to demonstrate inevitability again, the same way he had in the hall.

Tom, on his side, played subtler. His disarmament was clean, precise, nothing remarkable—until he stepped forward and returned the wand to his opponent with an incline of his head, as though granting favor. It was Harry’s lesson, perfectly applied: power does not end with victory; it ends with *acknowledgment.*

When the bell rang, students spilled into the corridors whispering, rattled, half-admiring, half-fearful. Even those who hadn’t been in class heard before lunch: Potter transfigured rows; Riddle gave back wands like a king handing out gifts.

By the time they reached Potions, Slughorn was already beaming, his voice oiled with delight. “Ah, my stars! My shining Slytherin pair!” He waddled to their desk with a grin. “Let’s see what wonders you’ll brew today. Something simple, but useful—Wiggenweld!”

The class bent to the task. Cauldrons steamed, ingredients sputtered. Harry’s potion thickened to perfect emerald clarity with almost insulting ease. Tom’s matched it shade for shade, but where Harry’s was cold precision, Tom’s carried the faintest curl of sweetness, a deliberate imitation of generosity.

Slughorn clapped, delighted. “Perfect, both of you. Perfect!” He waved a jeweled hand toward the rest of the class, voice carrying. “Do take notes, my dears. This is how brilliance looks at eleven years old.”

Harry allowed the praise without acknowledgment. Tom smiled, gracious and sharp. And around them, the students—Slytherin, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw—watched with a mixture of awe, envy, and dread.

When the class ended, Abraxas fell into step behind them. “You’ve set the bar too high,” he muttered, though the admiration in his voice outweighed the complaint.

Harry glanced over his shoulder, eyes cool. “Then climb.”

Tom smirked. “Or crawl.”

The corridor filled with laughter from other students, but for those who walked in Harry and Tom’s shadow, the words carried the weight of law.

--

That night, the dormitories were quieter than they had any right to be. Students who usually whispered across the stone corridors kept their doors shut, as though noise itself might provoke the two boys who had bent a day of lessons around their will.

In Slytherin’s dungeons, the lamps hissed with low green light. Harry and Tom’s room sat at the far end of the corridor, a chamber meant for two but, by silent arrangement, theirs alone. Other boys still shared bunks in the adjoining rooms, but Harry and Tom slept apart from them, walled off by old stone and thicker rules. It was a concession, quietly agreed upon, because no one wanted to test what might happen if those two were forced to share too closely.

Inside, the room breathed with privacy. The walls were lined with faint serpentine carvings, unnoticed by most but alive under Harry’s hand. Their trunks sat neatly beneath their beds, though Tom had already begun to copy Harry’s habit of keeping certain items—knives, coins, scraps of parchment—close to hand.

Harry sat at his desk, wand resting beside an open notebook. His palm bore the faint scar from the Samhain ritual, a line still too red, though he did not bind it. The ink he used was dark, almost black enough to pass for blood. He wasn’t writing homework; the quill scratched out unfamiliar marks, angular and old.

Tom lay stretched across his bed, watching with predator’s patience. “Runes,” he said quietly, not asking.

Harry didn’t look up. “Blood runes. They etch into skin and bone, not parchment. Words the body remembers when the mind fails.”

Tom sat up, hunger sharpening his face. “You’ve found a way to stop the cost.”

“A way to shift it,” Harry corrected. “The castle still takes. But the runes… they bargain. They teach the body to pay in smaller pieces, to bleed less deeply. It will hurt. And once carved, they cannot be undone.”

The silence that followed was deliberate, a weight between them. Tom’s eyes burned. “When?”

“Not yet.” Harry set the quill down, gaze finally lifting to Tom. His eyes were cold, patient. “Every door I’ve opened has taken something. A breath, a line of thought, a sliver of blood. It hasn’t been enough to cripple me—but it adds. The runes must be exact, or they’ll carve more than they save.”

Tom slid from the bed, crouched beside Harry’s chair, gaze locked upward like a disciple. “Then I’ll help you perfect them. I’ll remember what you forget. You’ll have my blood, if you need it.”

Harry’s hand lifted, fingers brushing Tom’s jaw with a rare touch that was almost gentle, almost possessive. “I only take what I choose. Your blood stays yours. For now.”

Tom leaned into the touch as though it crowned him. His voice was a whisper, raw and fervent. “Then command me. Keep me close until you’re ready.”

Harry’s mouth curved, the faintest ghost of approval. “I already do.”

The serpents carved into the walls seemed to shift in the lamplight, their shadows long and listening. The air tasted faintly of iron, as though the stones themselves had leaned closer to hear the promise whispered between master and student.

--

Night fell deep in the dungeons, the kind of darkness that swallowed sound. In their private chamber, the quiet was theirs alone.

Harry sat cross-legged on his bed, sleeves rolled back, his scarred palm resting on his knee. A candle guttered low on the desk, shadows stretching like claws across the stone. Tom had drawn his chair close, notebook in his lap, quill idle but ready. He never wrote unless Harry gave the word. Tonight, he only watched.

Harry murmured in Parseltongue, low phrases that slid like smoke. The carved serpents along the walls stirred faintly, heads tilting, as if listening. The sound was not meant for Tom, yet Tom leaned closer, letting the cadence wrap around him.

“~They ask for more,~” Harry said, switching back to English, voice flat. “The castle always does. It thinks if I bleed freely, it can take more than I notice.”

Tom’s quill scratched at last, his script neat, reverent. “Then you’ll bleed on your own terms.”

“Exactly.” Harry picked up the knife lying beside the candle, turning it over. Its edge was clean, polished. “When the runes are ready, I’ll carve them here—” he brushed his forearm, then his ribs, “—and deeper, in bone. They’ll lock the cost in place.”

Tom’s breath hitched, not in fear but hunger. “You’ll write power into yourself.”

Harry’s gaze lifted, cold and certain. “I already have. The runes will only fix it there.”

For a moment, the silence between them throbbed, heavy as a heartbeat. Then Tom rose, moved to Harry’s bed, and sat beside him without asking. He tilted his head, offering his wrist. “Use mine, if the castle asks for more.”

Harry’s hand closed around it, firm, commanding. “No. I told you—your blood is yours until I choose otherwise. And when I do, it won’t be for the castle. It will be for me.”

Tom’s lips curved into something fierce, almost reverent. “Then take it when you’re ready. I won’t resist.”

The candle guttered again, flame bending as if it too bowed. Harry let Tom’s wrist go and leaned back, expression unreadable. “Good. Then listen.”

He began to murmur again, not Parseltongue this time but words older than either boy had any right to know. Tom sat still, drinking them in. It was not a lesson, not exactly—it was ritual. Their ritual. Harry spoke; Tom remembered. Harry commanded; Tom obeyed. And somewhere in the stone, the serpents whispered approval.

When the candle finally died, both boys sat in the dark. Harry’s eyes gleamed faintly, catching the green glow that lived always in Slytherin’s bones. Tom’s smile was invisible, but it lingered in the silence like a vow.

--

Slytherin’s common room adjusted itself as if a new tide had come in and set all the furniture a few inches truer. The lamps along the walls burned steadier; the green of the lake outside the windows looked darker, more deliberate. Even the rug before the hearth lay flatter, like a thing that had finally chosen its direction.

Abraxas arrived first most evenings now, a ledger tucked under one arm, quill behind his ear as though a battlefield could be tidied with columns. He stood just inside the arch and watched the younger years funnel in, ticked names he didn’t say aloud, and sent them to tables with a flick of his fingers—homework here, wandwork there, silent reading where Harry liked the room to breathe. He never announced himself. He didn’t have to. The House had learned that lists don’t ask; they sort.

Rosier turned lounging into an instrument. He claimed the long back of the sofa nearest the fire and made it a stage. A tilt of his head meant “mind your tongue.” A slow smile meant “you’ll do.” He could make a second-year beam or blanch without moving anything but his mouth. He collected gossip like knives and passed them to Harry hilt-first.

Cassiopeia took the high-backed chair beneath the copper lamp that made her hair a dark spill of ink. She never raised her voice. She simply looked at people until they improved. When they didn’t, a comment—two words, three at most—cut and cleaned with surgeon’s care. She was not Harry. She did not command the room. She did something narrower and, in its way, just as necessary: she taught the room to be worthy of command.

Harry let it happen. That was the lesson. When the younger ones drifted toward him with eyes too wide and questions foolishly loud, he sent them to Abraxas. When a fourth-year laughed too brightly or a third-year tried to curry favor with eagerness instead of competence, Rosier’s grin sharpened and the error corrected itself. When a girl from a venerable line used a family name like a pass and expected doors to open, Cassiopeia said, “Do not be boring,” and the girl learned.

Tom did not lounge or list or sit in the copper light. He took the small table at Harry’s right and made it a gravity. He said little. He watched everything. When Harry lifted a finger, Tom was already there. When Harry looked once at a parchment, Tom had memorized the first paragraph. When a first-year hesitated near their orbit, Tom’s hand—two fingers only—sent him where he’d be most useful. The boy went, and later, when Harry said “good,” Tom stood taller as if the single word had lengthened his spine.

The night after their private ritual, Harry stood at the mantle and let the room see him be still. Silence is a tool; he used it. The younger years quieted by instinct. Quills slowed. Even the fire seemed to fold itself smaller to watch.

“Bring me your lies,” Harry said at last, voice even. “One each. Small ones. Practice.”

They glanced at one another, confused. Rosier’s mouth curved, pleased; Abraxas’s quill stopped; Cassiopeia leaned forward, hands steepled beneath her chin.

A second-year cleared his throat, face hot. “I—didn’t take Selwyn’s book,” he tried.

Harry nodded, as though grading an answer. “Bad. I can smell the fear. Try again.” He turned his head slightly. “You, Mulciber.”

Mulciber, who preferred bluntness to thought, frowned. “I—didn’t mean to hex him.”

Harry’s eyes flicked to Tom. “What do you hear?”

“Panic,” Tom said without hesitation. “And apology where he should’ve had intention.”

Harry nodded. “You tell the truth without meaning to and think you have lied. That’s sloppy. If you must lie, you will do it cleanly.” He let the sentence rest on the room. “But better to avoid needing to.”

He crossed from the hearth to the long table and placed his palm flat against its edge. “We will practice three things and call them all Discipline. First, silence that does not look like fear. Second, obedience that does not feel like defeat. Third, truth that can be carried safely by men like Bones.”

At the name, a couple of third-years glanced at each other, surprised he’d speak Hufflepuff aloud in the sanctity of their common room. Harry didn’t look over. “A House needs its enemies. It also needs the one decent man who believes in a rule and can be relied on to carry a message without dirtying it.”

Rosier’s laugh slid along the bricks. “He likes you.”

Harry ignored it. Tom didn’t.

They began. Twenty minutes of reading—eyes down, backs straight. Abraxas paced and tapped shoulders when posture flagged. Ten minutes of wandwork—no sparks, only stance. Cassiopeia corrected elbows with two fingers, more precise than any professor. Five minutes of speaking—not volume, not cleverness, merely the shape of a sentence that lands as intended. Harry listened with his head slightly bowed; Tom repeated phrases under his breath until they fit his tongue like a knife hilt.

When the hour turned, Harry dismissed the room with a glance, and bodies rose as one. The younger ones faded to dormitories with the relieved air of children released from church. The older ones lingered, drawn by the itch of wanting to be closer to the flame.

“Selwyn,” Harry said, and a thin boy with an aristocratic mouth twitched like a hare that’s learned to freeze instead of run. “Tell me why you lied about the ink on your cuff.”

Selwyn worked his jaw. “Because it was mine to waste.”

Harry looked bored. “No. Because you wanted to see if I would notice. I do not notice smudges. I notice meanings. Do not waste either where they are not expensive.”

Cassiopeia murmured, “Better,” and Selwyn’s shoulders sagged as though he’d been allowed to set a heavy bag down.

Abraxas approached with his ledger. “We’re close to overtaking Gryffindor,” he said without preamble. “If Merriweather keeps docking for ‘presentation’ and Slughorn keeps balancing, we’ll be level by end of month.”

“Noted,” Harry said.

“And the prefect patrols,” Abraxas added, cautious. “Bones has been… predictable. I can push our third-years’ rounds to align and avoid—”

“Let him see what he needs to,” Harry said. “Let him miss what he doesn’t.” He lifted his eyes. “We do not need to hide. We need to be inevitable and correct.”

Rosier’s grin. “And when we are neither?”

“Then we learn faster,” Harry said, and the line sank into the House like a hook.

They moved upstairs in twos and threes. In the corridor, the glass tank by the stairwell held two snakes in a lazy coil. Their tongues wrote thin letters in the dim.

“~Hungry?~” Harry asked without breaking stride.

“~For stories,~” the larger replied. “~Tonight the walls tasted vows.~”

“~They’ll taste more,~” Harry said, and Tom felt the promise slide along his skin like cool water under scales.

In their room, the air leaned closer. Tom set the latch; Harry ignored it with the assurance of a man who knows the corridor itself would keep interruption at bay. He removed his cufflinks and placed them on the desk with the quiet, attentive care he gave knives. The notebook with the angular marks lay open. The line he’d left half-drawn waited as if it had been holding its breath.

“Abraxas is becoming useful,” Tom said. It wasn’t a question.

“He’s a spine,” Harry said. “You put weight on spines until they either harden or snap.” He reached for the quill and paused. “He will harden.”

“And Rosier?” Tom asked, stepping closer, the space between them measured and owned.

“Charm with teeth,” Harry said. “You set it loose and check for blood. If it bites the wrong throat more than once, you muzzle it.”

Tom’s mouth curved. “Cassiopeia?”

“The mirror,” Harry said, looking down into the ink. “She shows the House what it looks like when it’s almost worthy.”

Tom stood very still. “And me?”

Harry lifted his gaze, slow, deliberate. “My hand.”

Tom’s breath left him in a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. He would have fallen to his knees for it. He didn’t. Harry hadn’t asked.

They moved back into the common room for the second hour, the one no professor could have criticized because it looked so much like studiousness that to question it would be to insult scholarship. Books opened. Quills scraped. A pair of second-years learned to sharpen nibs so they didn’t splay. Cassiopeia corrected a citation with the kind of disdain that makes men rewrite their names. Rosier taught a boy to smile without showing his desperation. Abraxas conducted a quiet war with the timetable and won by ten minutes.

Harry called Tom to the far alcove with nothing but a look. They stood under the curve of stone where the sound of the lake was loudest.

“Speak to the House,” Harry said.

Tom blinked once. “Now?”

“Now,” Harry said. “Two sentences. No more.”

Tom turned to the room that had learned to feel him as the echo of the voice it obeyed. He did not raise his chin. He did not clear his throat.

“This week,” Tom said, “you will be better than last week. Next week, you will be better than this one. If you are not, I will know why.”

Silence wrapped around the words like a ribbon. Eyes lifted. Quills stopped. Someone’s mouth opened and closed. Rosier’s grin went thoughtful. Abraxas’s quill tapped once, approving. Cassiopeia’s attention sharpened to a point.

Harry did not say good in public. He did not need to. Tom felt it laid against the back of his neck like a palm.

They dismissed the room late. Younger boys went to bed walking straighter. Older girls went with knives of satisfaction tucked behind their ribcages. The common room exhaled. The lamps dimmed. The lake slid its weight against the glass.

In the corridor, footsteps approached—measured, official. Bones. He paused at the threshold and said nothing. He looked. He had learned that with Slytherin, words sometimes made a thing less true.

Harry and Tom stopped three paces away, letting the last lamplight cut lines across their faces.

“Truce holds,” Bones said. The words sounded like he’d taken a bite of a fruit he disliked and found it nourishing anyway.

“It will,” Harry said.

Bones nodded. “If it breaks, I’ll come to you first.”

“You will,” Harry said. “And you’ll bring truth.”

Bones hesitated, then did the thing he’d learned to do around Harry when he wanted to keep his dignity—he asked a question with no ornament. “What did you do to Selwyn?”

“Made lying inconvenient,” Harry said.

Bones looked at him for a long second, then nodded again. “Some people only learn that way.” He turned to go, then glanced back at Tom. “You don’t have to—” He stopped. Adjusted. “No. That isn’t my business.”

“It isn’t,” Harry said, not unkindly.

Bones left. His back stayed straight all the way down the corridor.

After he’d gone, Tom said, “He wants to like us.”

“He wants the school to be decent,” Harry said. “That’s different.”

They slept later than usual, the kind of sleep knives enjoy in their drawer. When morning came, the common room woke itself neatly. A first-year had laid out parchment in even stacks. Someone had straightened the bookshelf so that the spines made an uncompromising line. The snakes in the glass watched the children move and flicked their tongues like scribes approving a copy.

At breakfast, Slytherin sat like a formation. The other tables noticed and pretended they hadn’t. Dumbledore watched and pretended that watching was enough. Merriweather counted the knives at the food table and told himself it was hygiene. Slughorn praised sausages and, between compliments, revised his guest list with mental ink.

In Charms, when Carrow asked for partners, a Ravenclaw boy—too curious for his own good—angled for the spot across from Tom. “I want to see how you do it,” he said with a bright, brave grin, and Tom, remembering Harry’s instruction about mirrors, tilted the grin back at him with a degree less warmth.

“I’ll show you what you can learn,” Tom said, and made the feather rise not with the flourish the boy had hoped for but with the economy Harry favored—one smooth lift, one small turn, a perfect landing. The boy’s smile faltered. He had wanted a trick. He had been given discipline. After class, he wrote hurried notes and did not realize he was beginning to write about Tom the way men write about weather.

At lunch, a minor confrontation collapsed before it could stand. A Gryffindor elbowed a Slytherin second-year hard enough to bruise, then looked up and found Tom already looking back. Not angry. Not even disappointed. Only present. The boy mumbled something that could be read as apology and fled. The second-year looked down at his sleeve, found it unwrinkled, and understood he had been done a favor he would not repay by being stupid.

By afternoon, the castle itself seemed to have adopted the new order. A staircase that liked to wander held still when Harry put his foot on it. A door that stuck slid open without scraping. A portrait of a forgotten alderman put two fingers to his hat as Tom passed and later could not explain why he had saluted a child.

That evening, Abraxas brought numbers; Rosier brought whispers; Cassiopeia brought a question she didn’t let anyone else hear: “How long can you spend before the bill comes?”

Harry looked at her and smiled with three-quarters of his mouth. “Long enough.”

She nodded once and sat back. She liked men who lied beautifully. She suspected he didn’t. She admired that more.

In their room, the quill bled its dark line a little farther down the page. Harry’s hand didn’t shake. Tom watched. When Harry paused, Tom said the rune aloud, not in \~, not in English, but in the narrow, old syllables that turned bone into script.

Harry closed the notebook. “Good,” he said.

Tom’s breath hitched like a man tasting the first sweet of a harvest he planted with his hands.

Outside, the lake pressed its palm to the glass and held it there, patient. The House slept like a creature that had finally found the right position. In a tower above, Dumbledore set his quill aside and looked toward the dungeons as though listening to a neighbor breathe through a wall.

The castle did not love Harry. It recognized him. That was worse. Recognition breeds obedience. Obedience breeds quiet. And in the quiet, boys like Harry and Tom become the shape of the room.

Slytherin had consolidated. Not with shouting. Not with a single grand gesture to set tongues wagging for a week. With a smaller, heavier thing: *arrangement.* The kind that lasts because it doesn’t need applause, only repetition.

By the end of the week, Bones reported no altercations. Merriweather reported “insufficient provocation to punish.” Slughorn reported excellence with a purr. Dippet reported confusion to his tea. And Dumbledore reported nothing to anyone at all.

Harry and Tom reported to each other. That was enough.

--

The clash began, as most things did, in the corridor outside the Great Hall. A pack of Gryffindors, older and louder, had cornered two Slytherin second-years. Voices carried—mocking, sharp. One of the Prewett boys had shoved a shoulder into the wall, laughter rising to cover the crack of fear in the younger boy’s breath.

Harry and Tom stepped into view together. The air shifted. Whispers hushed. A hush always followed them now, as though the stones themselves wanted to listen.

“What’s this?” Harry asked. His voice wasn’t raised. It didn’t need to be.

“Nothing,” the elder Prewett snapped. “Just reminding your little snakes where they belong.”

Harry’s gaze lingered, cold, unreadable. “And where is that?”

Prewett grinned, all bravado. “Not above us.”

The words hung. The corridor’s torches flared faintly, shadows bending toward Harry as if they too wanted to hear the answer.

Harry flicked his wand. Not with violence, not even with force. A lazy twist. The older boy’s wand leapt from his hand, clattered against the wall, then returned neatly—not to its owner, but to Harry’s waiting palm.

Silence. The Gryffindors shifted uneasily.

Harry examined the wand with detached interest, as though inspecting a tool he’d already outgrown. “Useless wood,” he murmured, before snapping his wrist. The wand shot back into Prewett’s hand so hard the boy stumbled.

“Try again,” Harry said. Still soft. Still inevitable.

The Gryffindor flushed red, wand shaking. “Expelliarmus!” he barked.

Harry didn’t move. His wand twitched once, almost lazily. The spell dissolved like smoke. The Gryffindor’s feet slid out from under him, not violently, not humiliatingly—merely as if the floor had decided to refuse him balance. He landed hard, staring up at Harry with shock that had no room for pain.

“Clumsy,” Harry said. “When you challenge inevitability, you should at least have grace.”

Tom stepped forward then, smooth as silk. He bent, picked up the Gryffindor’s dropped book, and handed it back with a bow that was almost courtly. “Courtesy matters,” Tom said. “Even in defeat.”

The younger Slytherins behind them stared with wide, reverent eyes. The Gryffindors didn’t speak again. They retreated in silence, their swagger dissolved into something bitter and brittle.

The whispers spread before the hour was out: Potter didn’t even duel; Riddle handed back books like a king.

That night, the staffroom bristled. Merriweather slammed a hand against the table. “It’s intimidation. Barely a flick and the boy was on the ground!”

Slughorn smiled indulgently. “Or perhaps it’s discipline. Controlled magic. We should be praising precision, not quashing it.”

Dippet rubbed his temples, weary. “But the effect—”

“The effect,” Dumbledore cut in, voice mild, “is that no student dares test them openly. Power held in reserve breeds more fear than power spent.” He folded his hands, eyes shadowed. “And fear breeds silence.”

The room fell quiet.

In the dungeons, Harry sat by the window of their private dorm. Moonlight slid across his scar, making it burn faintly, a reminder and a wound. His hand trembled once before he steadied it on the sill.

“The cost is rising,” he murmured.

Tom leaned against the bedpost, gaze sharp. “Then carve the runes.”

“Not yet.” Harry’s tone left no room for debate. “The bill is mine until I decide otherwise.”

Tom’s eyes gleamed. “When you do, I’ll be ready.”

The castle’s stones creaked softly, as if agreeing. A torch guttered in the corridor, then steadied.

Harry closed his eyes. The walls whispered—not just recognition this time, but expectation. It was as though Hogwarts itself was waiting for him to take the next step.

And Tom, sitting in the hush of the room, understood: inevitability was no longer whispered in the halls. It had become the air they breathed.

--

The next day the corridors handled them like a river handles stones it has decided to smooth. The waves of conversation parted and rejoined around their bodies. The story of the corridor confrontation refit itself in a dozen mouths. In one version, Harry had lifted the boy by his shadow. In another, he had never touched his wand at all, only looked. The consistent element was the ending: Prewett silent, dignity folded carefully like a shirt he didn’t know how to wear anymore; Tom handing something back that wasn’t just a book.

By lunch, even portraits were practicing discretion. The lady with the lace fan on the stair to Charms pretended to nap when Harry passed and then, unable to help herself, peeked between painted ribs. The torches along the green corridor burned cleaner. On the third-floor landing, the trick stair that swallowed ankles for sport steadied when Tom put his foot on it, decided against mischief, and held.

Gryffindor energy collected like stormlight. The older boys laughed too loudly. The younger ones learned to move in clusters. In Defense, a redhead with a jaw as stubborn as a door latch met Tom’s eye and looked away first. Merriweather marked it. He marked everything now and liked less of it every day.

After dinner, the staffroom filled with the friction of adults who knew how to smile at one another professionally and had forgotten how to mean it. The hourglasses slid their glitter. Slytherin’s was not overflowing; that would have been vulgar. It was steady.

Merriweather slapped down a report. “We cannot normalize this,” he said. “Corridor theater. Psychological leverage. These are first-years.”

Slughorn buttered a biscuit with grave attention. “These are scholars,” he corrected, smile padded and calm. “Surely we prefer restraint to brawling.”

“Restraint?” Merriweather’s nostrils went white. “Restraint would be walking past. Restraint would be telling a prefect.”

“A prefect,” Slughorn said mildly, “wasn’t present.”

“Bones seems to be present everywhere these days,” Merriweather snapped.

Beery sighed into her tea. “He’s a good boy.”

“He’s useful,” Dumbledore said, voice neutral. “Goodness isn’t always useful.” He set down his cup. “Horace is not wrong about restraint. But it is true that restraint used to humiliate is only a different shape of cruelty.” He glanced toward the Slytherin hourglass as if weighing grains in his palm. “And there is this: no one was hurt.”

“Not visibly,” Merriweather said.

“What’s your proposal?” Dippet asked, weary. He kept turning the same two sentences in his head: *children, not soldiers* and *the Board has eyes*. Neither helped.

“Sanctions,” Merriweather said. “Detentions for orchestrated intimidation. Docked points for ‘demonstrations’ in corridors. Explicit separation of Mr. Potter and Mr. Riddle in all Defense pairings and drills for the remainder of term.”

Slughorn spread his hands. “You would penalize a child for excellence in magic because his classmates feel… awkward?”

“I would penalize theater,” Merriweather said. “The corridor is not a stage.”

“Schools are stages,” Dumbledore murmured. “The question is what play we ask the children to perform, and who writes the script.”

Dippet rubbed his brow. “We will separate them in Defense for the fortnight. No ‘demonstrations’—by anyone—in corridors. House points to be deducted for provocations and for public humiliations. And—” he braced himself—“commendations where excellence is undeniable. We cannot pretend skill is a vice.”

Merriweather sat back, displeased but not surprised. Slughorn patted Dippet’s forearm as if congratulating him on a clever compromise at a dinner party. Dumbledore’s gaze went distant. Out beyond the window, the grounds had the flat, waiting look of an animal that hears its name in a voice it doesn’t trust.

News of the decision drifted down into student currents like a leaf that tells you which way the wind has chosen. Gryffindors found courage in the rule; Ravenclaws found an argument; Hufflepuffs found relief. Slytherins found something to practice resisting.

Harry read the room the way a doctor reads a pulse. “They’ll press,” he said to Tom later that night, the two of them under their dormitory lamp, the light draping the room in a narrow radius of gold. “We let them. We don’t budge.”

Tom leaned his shoulder against the stone. He had learned to use quiet like a blade sheath; it kept the edge clean. “They’ll try to make it public.”

“Let them,” Harry said. “Publicity is rehearsal. We perform inevitability until the audience stops asking what the end is.”

Tom smiled. “And Dumbledore?”

“Watches,” Harry said. “He counts. He prefers debts he can measure.”

Tom’s eyes flicked to Harry’s hand where the skin over the palm looked a fraction tighter than it had last week. “And you,” he said, very low. “How many debts?”

“Enough,” Harry said. He didn’t move his hand. He didn’t hide it either.

The next test came not in a corridor but in the long gallery where suits of armor pretended to be decoration and actually were witnesses. Four Gryffindors, two Hufflepuffs who had believed the rhetoric of fairness and wanted to believe it louder, and a Ravenclaw who had come to watch an experiment present itself as observation. They arranged themselves like a mouth around a sentence.

The sentence was a second-year Slytherin girl with her books clasped to her chest and too much lineage in her eyes. The elder Prewett spoke first out of habit. “Going somewhere, princess?”

She swallowed. She had been trained to keep her voice firm in public. It was, almost. “To the library.”

“Library’s the other way,” he said, lying.

“It isn’t,” she said, truthfully.

He reached out, not cruelly—thoughtless in the way some cruelties are. His hand never touched her.

“Don’t,” Tom said from three paces away.

Prewett’s hand hung in the air. His friends laughed, not easily. The Hufflepuffs stiffened in the hinge. The Ravenclaw’s eyes brightened, quill ready in his head.

Harry did not touch his wand. He looked at the girl. “Go to the library,” he said. It was not protection. It was instruction; a gift of a line to walk.

She went. She didn’t run. She would remember that more than anything else.

Harry turned back to the boys. “You’re going to try courage today,” he said, conversational. “Try it with me.”

Prewett’s face went that favorable Gryffindor color, the red men mistake for righteousness. “You want a duel? Name the rule. Name the seconds. Name the—”

“No,” Harry said.

He gestured to the suits of armor. They stood straighter, metal whispering. The Ravenclaw blinked. He would write later about the phenomenon of authority persuading objects.

“This is not sport,” Harry said. “This is a lesson in stopping time. Watch.”

He lifted one finger.

Every torch along the gallery thinned its flame to a needle. The air tightened—no wind, no magic circle. Just attention, pulled taut until even breath had to travel single file.

Prewett’s wand arm shook and then, without trembling, dropped to his side. The Hufflepuffs looked ill and proud. The Ravenclaw’s mouth fell open and stayed there like a door someone had forgotten to close.

Harry lowered his hand. The flames plumped back, modestly. Time, permitted to continue, did so with dignity.

“You think I enjoy it,” Harry said mildly. “I don’t. You think I need it. I don’t.” His gaze went over the group, not pausing out of kindness, but because he already knew where each boy would break and didn’t need to admire the line. “I use it.”

Tom stepped forward then and did the one generous thing that makes the crueler thing tolerable to onlookers. He bowed, slight, to the six. “If you want practice,” he said, “ask. We’ll give it.” He nodded toward the angle where the gallery met the north passage. “No crowds. No witnesses. Just learning.” His smile carried no teeth. “We’ll keep score for you until you can keep your own.”

The offer was obscene and perfect. It turned humiliation into pedagogy. It left the boys with a door to walk through that wouldn’t scrape their pride raw. One of the Hufflepuffs nodded once, eyes steady. The Ravenclaw swallowed like a man caught between contempt and fascination. Prewett said nothing at all.

They left. The suits of armor exhaled with a sound like dust remembering it was allowed to be air. The girl would return from the library in twenty minutes and decide, privately, to be useful to Harry in ways he wouldn’t have to discover the hard way.

Whispers did the rest. No one could agree on the mechanics—had Potter stopped a clock? Had the torches been charmed beforehand? Had the suits of armor moved? The common finding was simpler than any of that: it was worse than a hex because it looked like an idea.

At supper, Slytherin sat with knife-straight posture. Gryffindor thudded a little less. Hufflepuff chewed the way men do when they’re thinking how to make a promise hold. Ravenclaw took notes under the table, ink blotted where hands shook too much to pretend impartiality.

That night, Merriweather pushed again. “You see?” he said to Dippet, stabbing the air with his quill. “This is beyond ‘rivalry.’ It’s… it’s policy. They are writing policy with their hands.”

“Not policy,” Slughorn said. “Taste. Culture. Wonderful things to write.”

“Horace,” Merriweather said, tired now, “you like winners. I like rules.”

“I like children kept whole,” Beery said, unusually sharp. “And the Snakehouse isn’t my favorite, but none of them have so much as a bruise worth naming.”

Dumbledore’s silence weighed as much as anyone’s speech. When he did speak, it was to the window, where his reflection, older in rainlight, looked like a ghost he could almost recognize.

“Something is teaching Mr. Potter what the walls remember,” he said. “He is not only learning—it is *agreeing with him.* The school indulges many things. It does not often agree.”

“And Riddle?” Dippet asked, cautious.

“Learns faster than any child I have seen,” Dumbledore said. “And loves the speed.”

“Separate them longer,” Merriweather said. “If we cannot break the pattern, we can at least interrupt it. Interruptions save lives.”

Slughorn sighed as if mourning a vintage. “You’ll only salt the wound,” he said. “Boys like that don’t stop when you close a door. They make a key.”

“Then we should watch who they hand it to,” Dumbledore said.

Back in the dungeons, the common room had a hum like a hive that knew exactly where to lay wax. Abraxas’s ledger acquired a second column—Corridors/Conflicts—and then a third—Resolved/Sent to Bones/Not Worth the Ink. Rosier’s smile began to mean, by default, *we already planned for that.* Cassiopeia banned three words from polite Slytherin society—*please*, *sorry*, *anyway*—until those who used them could demonstrate they knew their proper weight.

Harry sat. Tom stood at his shoulder. Younger students discovered the joy of competence and the relief of not being prey. Older students discovered the ache of realizing they had not been kings after all, and decided it was better to be good captains than failed monarchs.

When the room emptied and the door to their private dorm clicked closed, the quiet felt earned rather than merely found. Harry washed his hands in a bowl of water that smelled faintly of metal. When he dried them, a thin seam along the lifeline showed paler than the rest of his skin, like a healed absence.

Tom saw it. He always did. “How much?”

“Less than last night,” Harry said. He sat on the bed, back straight, lamp making a clean halo on the wall. “More than I like.”

Tom came to stand in front of him. He did not kneel without the word. He had learned to wait for that, too. “Tell me the runes,” he said.

Harry looked at him for a long time, the way men look at maps of land they already own but haven’t had time to visit. “Not yet.”

Tom’s mouth twitched—not resentment; hunger bridled well. “Because you think I’ll take the cost for you.”

“Because I know you would,” Harry said. “And because I am not finished paying what is mine.”

“You told me once that generosity mistaken for duty becomes ugliness,” Tom said.

Harry’s eyes brightened, almost amused. “And you think you’re being generous?”

“I think,” Tom said, “that a knife is more useful in two hands than one.”

Harry’s lashes lowered. The lamp hummed. The lake nudged the window once, as if a creature had tested the glass with the side of its face.

“Two runes,” Harry said at last, and Tom’s breath hitched but his posture didn’t change. “One over bone—radius, left. One cut shallow into the palm so the blood knows the path. The first binds time to the body. The second teaches pain to pass on a schedule it didn’t choose. You etch them wrong and you make a leash. You etch them right and you make a ledger that balances while you sleep.”

Tom closed his eyes once. Opened them. “You’ll show me.”

“When I decide it is worth your bone,” Harry said.

Tom nodded. He wasn’t patient by nature. He was obedient by choice. It had become a joy.

They stood like that until the lamp ran a little lower and the window fogged at the corners. Then Harry lifted his hand and Tom went to his knees with relief that didn’t shake him. Harry set his palm against Tom’s hair as if checking a boy for fever.

“Ruthless for me,” Harry said.

“Only for you,” Tom said.

“Affectionate to me,” Harry said.

“To no one else,” Tom answered.

“Rise,” Harry said, and Tom did, taller by the height of a breath.

The next day tasted like decision. Gryffindor decided to be careful. Hufflepuff decided to patrol more and preach less. Ravenclaw decided to write things down in a way that could be defended at dinner. Slytherin decided hardly anything at all; the deciding had already been done.

Dumbledore tested the water with a teacup. After Transfiguration, he asked Harry to stay. He talked about nothing—an anecdote about a botched teapot, the merits of polished shoes, the problem with cheap chalk. He offered a lemon drop.

“I don’t take sugar,” Harry said, pleasant.

“It helps with bitterness,” Dumbledore said, equally pleasant.

“I don’t find this bitter,” Harry said.

“No,” Dumbledore said, and the word was soft enough to bruise. “You wouldn’t.”

As Harry left, he paused with his hand on the doorjamb. He did not turn back. “You should teach them to come to me first,” he said. “It saves time.”

Dumbledore’s hand tightened on the saucer, then let go. “One day,” he said, “you may have to return the favor.”

Harry did not say *I already have.* He went.

By week’s end, Merriweather had a pile of unsent letters to the Board and a thinner stack of detention slips with no names on them yet. Slughorn had a guest list and three small jars of candied pineapple hidden from students he secretly liked best. Beery had a devil’s snare in a pot that didn’t reach for anyone but Harry.

Bones walked his rounds like a man who had learned that faith required exercise. Twice, he found Slytherins he did not pity and chose not to trouble them anyway. Once, he found a second-year Gryffindor crying against a window and told him, without kindness or cruelty, to wash his face and go to bed. The boy did.

In the private dorm, Harry stood at the narrow window with the lamp off. The castle breathed against his skin the way old dogs breathe against the hand that feeds them. His scar prickled, not with pain but with memory, the way a healed wound reminds you of the blade that made it when the weather turns.

“\~Soon,\~” the stones whispered, not quite in any language and very nearly in all of them.

Tom came to stand at his shoulder. He did not touch the glass. He did not need to see his reflection to know what it looked like when he stood where he was supposed to be.

“We will own it,” he said, not to be reassured, not to boast, but to put the sentence where it belonged.

Harry’s mouth tilted. “Ownership is so small a word for what I want.”

“What word would you use?” Tom asked.

Harry watched the black shape of the lake, the thin line where the mountain met the sky. “Obedience,” he said. Then, after a beat, softer: “Recognition.”

The castle listened. It had been doing that for weeks. Tonight, it sounded like agreement.

Down the hall, in a room with beams rubbed by generations of tired teachers, Dumbledore sat with his palms resting on either side of a piece of blank parchment and did not write to anyone. He thought instead of keys, and of boys who learned to pick locks by listening to the tumblers talk. He thought of the word *inevitable*, turned it over, and found it had another side with another word: *avoidable*. He wondered which belonged to Harry, and which to himself.

The hourglasses ticked no faster for any of these thoughts. They fell at their appointed pace. Slytherin’s green did not gloat. It merely accumulated.

Before sleep, Harry set the notebook with the angular marks on the desk and did not open it. He placed his hand flat atop the cover. The skin of his palm felt whole. It would not always. He could end that. He hadn’t yet.

Tom blew out the lamp. In the second before dark, the cut of Harry’s profile looked like something carved into a coin meant to be used until the face wore smooth.

In bed, they did not speak. They did not need to. The castle, which had heard many promises and believed few, believed this: that when the next door opened, whatever stood on the threshold would not be surprised by what it saw inside.

Chapter Text

Snow muffled the castle until it felt as though the walls were wrapped in wool. The wind pressed itself against the high windows and sighed through the towers; the grounds blurred into white, trees vanishing into the drifts as though they had been erased. Hogwarts did not grow quiet with winter—it grew *alert,* as if every stone had leaned forward to listen.

Whispers still rippled from Samhain, but their edges dulled in the cold. Awe clung more tightly than fear. The youngest students crept from fire to fire with wide eyes, repeating stories about Potter and Riddle until no one could tell whether they had seen the truth or only heard it.

The week before Christmas, the air in the Great Hall shifted. Benches creaked with excitement, trunks snapped shut, owls dipped low with last-minute letters. Carriages rumbled toward the gates, waiting to carry children to the train. The leaving felt like a tide pulling back, and the hall shrank with it.

Harry sat among the Slytherins, the center of a table that emptied around him. He did not pack. He did not write letters home. He never even glanced toward the carriages. Tom mirrored him perfectly: still, calm, as if the very idea of leaving were beneath consideration.

Abraxas stayed too, of course; his family preferred him polished by Hogwarts rather than dulled by holiday gatherings. Rosier smirked that he would rather watch the castle snow than endure his grandfather’s lectures. Cassiopeia looked at Harry once and said only, “I’ll remain.” She didn’t need to explain further. A few younger boys, eager not to lose their place in the current, muttered the same.

By the time the carriages rolled away, Slytherin’s benches were thinner but sharper. Those who remained moved closer together, pulled not by friendship but by orbit.

The Great Hall retracted its long tables, drawing them shorter, cozier, like a hearth pulled close for winter. Fires roared in the high braziers, and fir trees glittered at the walls, heavy with charmed ornaments. Snow drifted from the ceiling in soft flakes that melted before they touched the plates.

Harry glanced upward once, not in wonder, but in calculation. The castle answered by making the flakes fall slower over his head, as if they paused to wait for his approval.

Tom saw it. His mouth curved, quiet and triumphant.

The castle was thinner with bodies, but heavier with meaning. Footsteps echoed more cleanly in the corridors. Portraits leaned forward when Harry passed, their painted eyes sharp. The staircases carried him smoothly, never stalling, never sending him astray.

It was not peace. It was anticipation.

In the staffroom, the change was felt just as keenly. With half the children gone, Merriweather’s complaints grew louder. Slughorn grew more indulgent, stuffing his chosen Slytherins with sugared plums and praise. Dippet smiled nervously and tried to enjoy the quiet. And Dumbledore—Dumbledore only watched. His eyes weighed the emptier halls as though he could hear the stones whispering names, and always he returned his gaze to Harry.

The first night of holidays, the common rooms crackled with firelight and the sounds of a castle exhaling. In Slytherin, the lake pressed dark against the glass, lit by drifting snow outside. Harry and Tom sat apart, in their private chamber that no other student had been invited to see.

“You notice,” Tom murmured, low and certain, “how the castle bends more quickly now.”

Harry traced his finger across the stone rim of the fountain. The green fire purred at his touch. “It listens better when there are fewer voices. And it remembers who spoke loudest at Samhain.”

Tom leaned forward, eyes bright as cut glass. “It remembers *you.*”

Harry did not smile. He didn’t need to. The silence that followed was agreement enough.

--

The staffroom was warmer than most of the castle, but tension had a way of chilling even thick fires. Snow rattled against the tall windows; a log shifted in the grate with a hollow crack, sending sparks drifting up like startled birds.

Headmaster Dippet perched in his chair at the center of the table, hands folded neatly as if posture alone might smooth over disagreements. His voice, when it came, was careful. “The quiet of the holiday should do us all good. Less mischief with fewer students in the halls.”

“Or less noise to cover the mischief that remains,” Merriweather said sharply, quill scratching across his ledger. “I’ll remind you, Headmaster, that the two boys at the center of every report this term have *stayed.*”

Slughorn gave a genial chuckle, puffing his chest as though he’d been complimented. “Stayed, yes—what loyalty! Shows their dedication to learning, don’t you think? Better to remain among books and potions than fritter away the season with trifles.”

“Dedication,” Merriweather repeated, voice flat. “I would call it consolidation. Fewer students mean fewer witnesses. Fewer interruptions.” His gaze cut toward Dumbledore. “And more opportunity to exert influence unchecked.”

Dumbledore had been quiet, a book open before him though he hadn’t turned the page in some minutes. He lifted his eyes now, calm but intent. “Influence is exerted whether we watch it or not. What matters is how it is shaped. Discipline, yes—but also direction.”

“Direction?” Merriweather scoffed. “I’ve seen Mr. Potter take a child’s wand and *the will* out of his hand with a single flick. That is not direction. That is domination.”

Slughorn’s hand flapped, jeweled rings flashing. “Discipline, domination—it’s the difference between words on parchment, my dear fellow. What I see are results. Riddle and Potter brew potions fit for a master’s tray. Their Transfiguration is years ahead. Defense? Exceptional. If a little flare accompanies brilliance, who are we to scold?”

“Who are we?” Merriweather snapped. “We are teachers, not courtiers.”

Dippet raised his palms. “Please, please. They are children. Exceptional, yes, but children nonetheless. We mustn’t lose sight of that.”

The silence that followed was heavy enough to suggest most of them had.

Professor Beery coughed delicately. “I’ve noticed the plants quiet around Mr. Potter. They don’t quiet for anyone else. Not even me.”

Carrow, the pale Charms master, rubbed his thumb along the stem of his mug. “And spells seem… sharper in his presence. Simpler ones, even. My second-years struggled all term with a levitation charm, but when Potter walked past, the feather rose as if it wanted to please him.”

Dippet frowned, troubled, as though the notes had slipped from a melody he thought he knew.

Dumbledore closed his book. “The castle leans toward those it recognizes. Mr. Potter is… recognized. That cannot be helped.”

Merriweather’s quill struck the page like a sword point. “Recognized by whom?”

Dumbledore did not look away. “By the stone itself.”

A log collapsed in the fire, sending a gust of sparks up the chimney. For a moment, the room was silent but for the hiss of sap boiling in the wood.

Slughorn broke the quiet with a jovial hum. “Recognition, legacy, brilliance—call it what you like. All I see is promise. Promise we ought to cultivate, not cage.”

“Promise,” Merriweather muttered, “has a way of turning into threat when we fail to draw the line.”

Dippet rubbed at his brow, his sigh lost beneath the crackle of the flames. “We’ll watch them. Closely. But we’ll not smother brilliance in its cradle. That has never been Hogwarts’s way.”

Dumbledore said nothing more, but as the firelight caught his face, his eyes seemed older than the rest of him, reflecting shadows of doors not yet opened.

--

Harry worked alone when he could. Not because Tom wasn’t capable, but because Tom’s hunger was too bright, too eager, and Harry knew that some knowledge demanded silence before it demanded sharing.

The chamber beneath the castle lent itself to secrecy. Shadows clung there longer, and the air had the taste of copper and damp stone, like blood swallowed by earth. On the fountain’s rim lay scraps of parchment, scorched and curling, each one inked with careful lines—runes drawn not for practice but for proof. Around them lay bones, rat femurs and sparrow wings, their surfaces etched with grooves where his knife had tested strokes.

The first rune was already claimed: the palm. The place of command, the seat of will. When carved, it would let him press his hand against ward or wall and bend it to attention. That one Tom would know about. He had already let the boy see the sketches, hear him murmur over the shapes.

The second rune was for the forearm, the channel of strength. Tom would know of that one too. He would see it one day soon, and Harry would let him believe it was enough.

But there were three others, and those Harry kept.

One etched over the heart, the rune of remembrance and authority, binding the self so the castle would never mistake him for a passerby. One hidden beneath the rib, where breath met bone, to anchor his voice in command so even walls would listen. And one traced along the hip, old and ugly, the mark of endurance, so that the blood price might bleed slower, stretched across years instead of burning all at once.

Tom must never know. Not yet. If Tom knew, he would ask—no, demand—to share the burden. And Harry, for all his cold, did not intend to see that fire snuffed by costs the boy wasn’t ready to pay.

The knife whispered over bone. Ink mixed with a bead of blood at the tip, sinking into the carved groove until the scrap of femur pulsed faintly like something alive. Harry leaned close, eyes catching the shimmer. The rune hummed against his skin, testing him, hungry. He pressed it flat against his chest, just over the heart, and felt the throb echo back.

It would take more than ink. It would take carving. Flesh, blood, permanence. He was not ready. Not yet.

Behind him, Tom’s voice cut into the dark. “You’re hiding something.”

Harry did not turn. “I’m preparing.”

Tom stepped closer, sharp as a blade unsheathed. “You don’t tell me all of it.”

Harry’s mouth curved faintly, eyes still on the rune burning against bone. “Because not all of it is yours to carry.”

For a long moment, Tom said nothing. Then he laughed, soft and low, a sound too sharp to be mirth. “Then I’ll take it anyway, when the time comes.”

Harry finally looked at him, green eyes cold, unwavering. “Only if I let you.”

The bone in his hand stilled, the hum fading. The silence between them deepened, not empty but charged, like air before lightning. Tom held his gaze, unwilling to kneel here, not yet—but the thought of it, the inevitability of it, shivered through the chamber all the same.

--

The chamber was patient, but patience was not the same as kindness. The walls seemed to hold their breath whenever Harry began his work, the silence taut, waiting.

On the stone rim lay five scraps of bone, each a different shade of pale, each cut with grooves fine enough to look like veins. Harry traced them one by one, his fingertip following the lines he had designed. They were not all the same. Each rune demanded a different shape, a different cost.

The palm rune was simple, blunt as a command: authority through contact, the right to force doors and wards to heed. Harry’s skin itched when he imagined it carved there, the mark of a master pressing the world into order with his hand.

The forearm rune ran longer, a channel for power, strength without exhaustion. He had tested the sketch on a length of parchment; it had burned through, unable to contain the weight of what it promised. Ink alone could not hold it.

The others were quieter. They lay on the bone like secrets.

The heart rune curved in a knot of protection and remembrance, so that his blood would never betray him, so that the castle would always know him by name. He traced it and felt a pull, not outward but inward, like something trying to root itself inside his chest.

The rib rune was trickier—voice bound to bone. A word etched there would ride his breath like a command the air itself could not refuse. He could already taste the copper of it on his tongue, though he had not yet dared carve it.

The last was the ugliest, carved into a fox’s hip bone. Not elegant, but enduring. It promised stamina, promised survival when the others demanded blood. It would slow the bleeding cost of the others, stretch the toll across years. Necessary—but cruel.

The bones hummed faintly as he touched them, as though recognizing him. Or testing him.

Harry pricked his finger and let a bead of blood sink into each rune in turn. The bones warmed, and the lines glowed faintly red before dimming to black. A shiver of approval passed through the chamber’s stone. The walls did not speak in words, but in pressure, in the slow certainty that these marks would *belong.*

He exhaled and closed his fist.

Behind him, Tom’s reflection shone faint in the green fire of the fountain. His eyes followed Harry’s movements with hunger. “You practice,” he said. His voice was soft, reverent. “But you don’t tell me everything.”

Harry did not look back. “Because not everything is yours to know. Not yet.”

Tom stepped closer. “But two of them—you’ve told me. Palm, forearm. Why hide the rest?”

Harry placed the bones into a pouch, one by one, careful as though handling blades. “Because knowledge given too early is wasted. You would want them now. And they are not ready. I am not ready.”

Tom’s mouth tightened. “You think I’m weak.”

“No.” Harry finally looked at him, eyes glinting in the green fire. “I think you’re mine. And I won’t waste what is mine by bleeding you on secrets before they’re worth it.”

Tom froze, the words striking deeper than any wound. He swallowed, and his eyes burned hotter. Slowly, deliberately, he bowed his head. Not kneeling, not yet, but close.

Harry turned away, satisfied. The chamber sighed around them, the stone echoing faintly with approval, like a teacher marking a lesson correct.

The bones in the pouch throbbed faintly against his palm, as though promising what was still to come.

--

The dungeons had always been colder than the rest of the castle, but lately the air held a different kind of chill. It wasn’t the damp stone or the drafts that slipped through cracks in the mortar. It was the weight of expectation, the way every Slytherin who passed through the common room seemed to watch for cues without admitting they were watching.

Harry sat in the high-backed chair nearest the fire, a place he hadn’t claimed but which had become his by the simple fact that no one else dared take it. Tom lounged at his feet, half on the hearthrug, his book open but forgotten. They weren’t alone—the room buzzed with voices, pages turning, quills scratching—but the space around them had become its own circle, inviolate.

Abraxas drifted near with his usual crisp precision, carrying a sheaf of notes that looked more like battle plans than homework. Rosier leaned against the wall, arms crossed, the curve of his mouth sharp as ever. Cassiopeia sat at the far end of the sofa, legs tucked neatly beneath her, eyes unreadable but fixed on Harry more often than the parchment in her lap. Even the younger ones—Mulciber, Nott, a Greengrass cousin—kept orbit, glancing over as though waiting for a signal.

Harry let the silence grow until the room felt stretched thin. Then he spoke, not loudly, but with enough weight that every head lifted.

“The feast was a beginning,” he said. His fingers tapped the arm of the chair, steady as a metronome. “You’ve had a taste of what it means to stand together. That was not power. That was demonstration.”

Abraxas tilted his chin. “A demonstration was enough. Gryffindor hasn’t dared step since.”

“Fear is brittle,” Harry countered. “Admiration lasts longer. But loyalty—true loyalty—must be forged. And forging costs.” His gaze flicked from face to face, cold, deliberate. “Are you willing to pay it?”

No one spoke at first. Then Rosier grinned, sharp and reckless. “If it means watching the others kneel again? I’d bleed for that.”

Cassiopeia’s smirk returned, thin but cutting. “I prefer not to bleed unnecessarily. But I’d wager on Potter before I wagered on the Headmaster, and I like my bets safe.”

The younger boys nodded, stiff and nervous, but the nods were there.

Tom closed his book at last, the snap of the cover loud in the quiet. “You already know the answer,” he said, voice low but certain. His eyes gleamed as they locked on Harry. “You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t.”

Harry leaned forward, shadows bending across his face. “Then prove it. Tomorrow, we begin.”

The words landed like a stone in still water. Ripples spread, unspoken promises and unease threading together. No one knew what “begin” meant, not exactly. But they all knew it would matter.

The fire cracked behind them. Outside the windows, snow pressed against the glass in a thick white curtain. The castle shifted around them, doors creaking faintly, as though listening in.

--

They followed because the alternative was unthinkable.

Harry rose from his chair by the fire without announcement, Tom already at his side. Abraxas, Rosier, Cassiopeia, Mulciber, Nott, and two younger boys hesitated only a heartbeat before trailing them. The corridors bent around their steps, torches guttering low, doors shifting as though unwilling to impede them.

The hidden door opened at Harry’s touch as if it had been waiting. The chamber greeted them with its low green fire, shadows climbing, serpents shifting faintly in their stone beds.

Harry stopped before the fountain. His voice was quiet, but it carried. “Samhain showed you inevitability. Tonight, you will learn cost.”

The others shifted uneasily, but Tom stood steady, eyes fixed on Harry as if nothing else existed.

Harry drew a small knife from his sleeve. Without hesitation, he cut the meat of his palm, dark blood dripping into the water. The fire flared. The carved snakes hissed awake, tongues flicking, the chamber filling with a copper taste that clung to the back of every throat.

From his pocket, Harry pulled a small vial of animal blood—pig’s, taken from the kitchens. He tipped it in. The liquid hissed, steam rising in shapes that almost looked like letters before breaking apart.

“Step forward,” he commanded.

Abraxas went first, jaw set. Harry dipped a finger into the burning water and drew a line down the boy’s wrist. The mark smoked, searing bright for an instant before fading into skin. Abraxas staggered, biting back a cry.

“Repeat after me,” Harry said, voice dropping into Parseltongue. “~I stand bound to the hand that commands.~”

Abraxas tried. The sounds twisted in his throat, clumsy, broken. But the chamber heard him. The green fire roared, and Abraxas collapsed to one knee, gasping as though the words had clawed something out of him.

One by one, they came forward. Rosier grinned even as the mark burned him, a laugh strangled in his throat. Cassiopeia did not flinch, but her smirk faltered, teeth clenched white. The younger boys cried out, eyes wide with terror, but not one dared refuse. Each repeated the broken hisses, each knelt when the compulsion took them.

Only Tom stepped forward with calm certainty. Harry’s blood traced his skin, and the chamber flared, but no compulsion forced him down. Tom knelt of his own will, head bowed, devotion raw and deliberate.

The others watched. They saw the difference.

Harry’s voice dropped lower, the words curling like smoke. “~Rise.~”

The fire sank, leaving the chamber dim but thrumming with satisfaction. The marks faded, invisible to the eye but alive beneath the skin, threads of compulsion woven into each heartbeat.

Harry bound his hand with a strip of cloth, his face unreadable. “This is not the whole. This is the beginning. You carry my mark now. Try to betray me, and the chamber will remember. Obey, and it will open.”

Rosier swallowed hard, exhilarated. Abraxas rubbed his wrist, pale but steady. Cassiopeia’s smirk returned, thin as a knife-edge. The younger boys looked half-broken, but their silence was a vow stronger than any words.

And Tom—Tom’s eyes burned, not with fear, not even with triumph, but with something deeper. He knew this was only a fragment, that Harry held more back. And he loved him for it.

The serpents slithered back into their stone beds, the fire dimmed to a steady glow, and the chamber exhaled like a beast fed well.

Harry turned without another word. They followed. Of course they followed.

--

The castle had grown hushed for the holiday. Corridors echoed longer, staircases moved less often, as though even the stone preferred to rest. For most students, the silence was comforting; for those left behind, it pressed like a hand on the throat.

In the Slytherin dormitory, the boys moved as though bound together by invisible cords. Mulciber sat at the edge of his bed, flexing his fingers again and again, as if testing whether they still answered to him. Nott hunched under blankets, whispering charms for warmth, though the fire in the grate burned steady. Abraxas wrote a letter home, his quill biting too hard into parchment. Rosier lounged as usual, but the tilt of his smile was sharper, thinner—like glass stretched to breaking.

Cassiopeia’s absence from their side of the dorm only made her presence stronger. Every glance, every pause in speech carried her memory: the way she’d looked at Harry in the chamber, not fearful but measuring, as though deciding which edge of the knife she preferred.

Harry and Tom shared the farthest corner, their beds curtained in green. They did not close the curtains. Privacy, for them, was not the shutting out of eyes but the assurance that no one dared intrude. Tom sat angled toward Harry, face half in shadow, hands still. Harry, his palm freshly bound, leaned back with the detachment of someone who had no need to prove himself further.

No one spoke to them. No one dared.

That night, when the candles guttered low and the castle’s silence pressed hardest, the whispers began. Not to Harry, never to Harry, but under covers and between breaths. *It burned. It moved. I couldn’t stop kneeling.* The words wound through the dormitory like smoke—thin, acrid, inescapable.

By morning, the fear had shifted. Mulciber walked taller, jaw tight, as though daring the world to notice his submission. Nott followed him with wide eyes and clenched fists, like a boy fastening himself to a mast. Abraxas carried himself with brittle precision, every gesture a defiance of weakness. Rosier smiled broader, sharper, the smile of someone who had tasted power and found it intoxicating.

When breakfast came, they filed into the Great Hall behind Harry and Tom in perfect order. Fewer students meant fewer witnesses, yet the impression was stronger for it. The five of them moved as though attached to the same string, Harry at the head, Tom a half-step behind, the others arrayed like shadows. Even among the scattered handful of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws left for the holiday, the effect was unmistakable.

Slytherin was no longer a collection of students. It was becoming a court. And Harry Potter was its crown.

--

The Great Hall had never looked smaller. With most of the students gone home, the benches felt like they had been carved wider, though it was only the emptiness between clusters of children that made them so. Fir trees lined the walls, their needles frosted and glittering with baubles that pulsed faintly with enchantments. Snow fell from the ceiling in delicate veils, melting before it reached the floor, and the air smelled of roasting meat, clove-stuck oranges, and warm bread.

At the Slytherin table, the arrangement looked less like a House of scattered students and more like a court. Abraxas and Rosier flanked one side, Cassiopeia a few seats farther down, her gaze sharp as glass. Even the younger boys sat straighter, polished by the memory of the chamber. But at the center—unmistakably—sat Harry and Tom.

Harry leaned back with a quiet self-possession that drew eyes without effort. His scar caught the candlelight and threw it sideways, pale against the shadowed hollows of his expression. Tom sat to his right, closer than custom demanded, his posture precise, his every glance following Harry’s with a loyalty that was both unnerving and magnetic.

Conversations in the hall bent around them like reeds in water. Students looked, whispered, looked again. A few Gryffindors muttered too loudly, words of challenge floating across the benches like sparks from a fire. Harry didn’t so much as tilt his head. Tom caught the whispers, filed them away, and smiled with thin satisfaction, as though he already knew how the evening would end.

Dumbledore, at the staff table, lifted his goblet slowly, his eyes hooded over its rim. He watched the two boys across the candles, the way the House gathered itself to them, the way silence seemed to expand wherever they sat. His smile was gentle, but his fingers tapped once, twice, against the stem of the cup.

The feast went on—platters of turkey steaming, puddings crowned with flame, laughter puncturing the silence in bursts—but the air around the Slytherin table was taut. When Harry finally spoke, it was only to murmur something low into Tom’s ear. Tom laughed—not loudly, not cruelly, but enough that the younger boys caught it and repeated it with nervous devotion.

Even with the school half-empty, the balance of power was unmistakable. What remained of Slytherin had become a throne room. And its throne had two chairs, side by side.

Across the hall, Merriweather scowled into his plate. Slughorn beamed as though he’d bred prodigies with his own two hands. And Dumbledore, with that quiet patience of his, simply kept watching—waiting for the moment when the candle flames themselves would choose whom they belonged to.

--

The feast ended in a haze of candle smoke and roasted spice. The smaller groups of students drifted toward their dormitories, laughter brittle with exhaustion. Harry and Tom walked together down a quiet corridor, the soles of their shoes whispering against stone. The torches guttered low, throwing shadows that stretched long and thin along the walls.

It was here—secluded, beyond the hum of the Great Hall—that the ambush came.

Three Gryffindors stepped out from an alcove: broad-shouldered boys, restless with anger and envy. Their wands were already in their hands, faces flushed with a courage that bordered on desperation.

“Potter. Riddle.” The leader spat the names like curses. “Think you own the place, don’t you?”

Harry didn’t stop walking. He only tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly, and Tom matched his pace as if nothing at all had changed.

“Stop,” one of the Gryffindors barked, voice trembling. “You’ll duel us. Here. Now.”

The torches dimmed, as though the castle itself leaned closer. Harry finally stopped. He looked at them, one by one, with the same cold indifference he gave to insects that scuttled too near his food.

Tom spoke first, tone smooth as oil. “Dueling is for equals. You’ll forgive us if we don’t waste time.”

“Cowards,” one hissed, lifting his wand.

Harry’s voice cut through the corridor, low, almost lazy. “No. Predictable.”

The Gryffindor shouted a spell. The wand jerked—and froze mid-air. The boy’s hand locked, tendons straining, as if invisible claws had clenched around his wrist. His wand clattered to the floor, and with it, his voice faltered.

Harry stepped forward, every movement unhurried. Shadows bent with him. “Do you know what inevitability feels like?” His words curled soft, but something in the air made them heavy, thick, undeniable. “It feels like this.”

The other two Gryffindors raised their wands. Tom flicked his own in a single motion. Both boys staggered back, their shoes fused to the floor, stuck fast. He smiled, not kindly, and let them struggle.

Harry crouched before the first boy, whose wrist still trembled against the invisible pressure. He leaned close enough that his breath ghosted against the boy’s ear. “I don’t need spells to break you,” he whispered. “I only need for you to believe I already have.”

The boy’s eyes widened, terror blooming where fury had been.

Then Harry released him. The boy stumbled back, clutching his wrist.

Tom stepped closer, the picture of grace beside Harry’s violence. He bent down and picked up the dropped wand, turning it once in his fingers before offering it back with mock ceremony. “Be grateful,” he said smoothly. “Tonight we’re merciful.”

The Gryffindors didn’t thank them. They fled, tripping over each other, the echo of their footsteps thin and panicked.

Silence returned.

Tom turned, eyes sharp with something close to awe. He had seen Harry’s ruthlessness before, but this—this was colder. More exact. Not rage, not even discipline. A darkness so precise it needed no flourish.

Harry straightened, brushing his hand against his robes as though wiping away something dirty. His face was still, unreadable.

“You frightened them more than any curse could,” Tom murmured. His voice was half-admiration, half-hunger.

Harry’s gaze flicked to him, unreadable still. “Fear is clean. It leaves no marks a professor can count.”

For the first time, Tom wondered—not in doubt, but in recognition—just how far Harry was willing to go when no eyes watched. And the realization thrilled him.

The torches brightened again, as though the corridor exhaled. The boys walked on, side by side, their footsteps unbroken, the air around them taut with the weight of what had just been revealed.

--

The dormitory was quiet in the way only empty stone could be, silence hanging like drapery across the walls. Harry sat at the desk, his palm resting against the grain, a knife glinting faintly beside him. He looked as though the earlier ambush had cost him nothing at all. Tom watched from his bed, the green light from the fire making sharp hollows of his face.

Sleep wouldn’t come. It never came easily, but tonight it was impossible. His mind refused to loosen its grip.

He thought of the Gryffindors’ faces, twisted with bravado that soured into panic when Harry pressed them down with nothing but will. Tom remembered the way Harry crouched close, whispering inevitability like scripture, and the boy’s eyes breaking under it. No spell had done that. No curse. Just Harry.

Tom had bent quickly—always did. On his knees in the Chamber, on his knees before Harry in quiet moments. Sometimes he wondered if others saw weakness in it, but tonight he admitted the truth: it wasn’t weakness. It was recognition. He *wanted* to kneel. Wanted to belong to the one person who understood what belonging truly meant.

Because Tom wasn’t kind. He never pretended otherwise, not even in the deepest corners of his mind. He hungered. He schemed. He would claw the world apart if it meant shaping it into something that obeyed him. But Harry—Harry was worse, or better, depending on the angle. Harry could wear a mask. In front of Dumbledore or Slughorn, he tilted his voice into civility, feigned patience, even managed a smile. Tom couldn’t. His hunger sat too close to the surface. He saw the difference, and he admired it. Resented it, too, in ways he never said aloud.

Harry was fourteen. Tom, eleven. Three years. That gap stretched like a chasm at night, whispering that Harry would outpace him, leave him behind the way adults always had. Tom clenched his fists in the dark, furious at the thought. Without Harry, the world would tilt off its axis.

But then he remembered.

Harry shielding him in the orphanage, stepping between him and a bully’s fist. Harry leaning close in their first whispered lessons, telling him \~power isn’t given, it’s taken.\~ Harry saying, in that terrible calm voice, that Tom was his. Not Bones, not Slughorn, not even the castle itself—Tom.

Harry had chosen him. Not anyone else. Him.

The thought steadied Tom, and the fury bled into resolve. He would match Harry step for step, shadow for shadow, hunger for hunger. His devotion wasn’t submission; it was partnership, sharpened into something unbreakable. He belonged to Harry, and Harry belonged to him.

When the clock in the corridor tolled midnight, Harry rose. He crossed to Tom’s bed, silent as a shadow, and extended a hand. “Come.”

Tom followed without question. They slipped through corridors that bent for them, torches burning steady in their wake. Snow pressed against the windows, muting the outside world until the castle felt like a sealed vessel, holding only them.

In the Chamber’s green-lit round, Harry drew a knife across his palm, blood beading dark. Tom didn’t flinch. He held out his own hand when Harry gestured, and the knife bit clean. Their blood dripped into the fountain, hissing as it touched the fire.

Harry dipped a finger into his palm and drew a rune across Tom’s wrist. The lines burned hot, not with pain but with recognition. Then he pressed Tom’s cut to his own, sealing them with a clasp.

“~Kneel,~” Harry whispered.

This time there was no compulsion. No command threading into Tom’s bones. He knelt because he *wanted* to. Because it was right.

Harry’s hand rested on his head, warm, firm, approving. “Mine,” he said softly. Not cruel, not gentle—inevitable.

Tom bowed lower, blood binding his skin to Harry’s, devotion blazing in his chest. “Yours,” he whispered.

The fire in the fountain roared as though the Chamber itself had heard and approved. For Tom, it was more than a birthday, more than a ritual. It was belonging, sealed in blood, recognized by stone.

Better than family. Better than any gift. He had Harry—and Harry had him.

--

The blood on their palms dried to a dark sheen, sticky under the binding cloth Harry wound tight. Neither spoke as the fountain’s green fire dimmed, shrinking to a steady pulse like a heartbeat echoing through stone. The chamber seemed satisfied, its approval folded into silence.

They walked back through the castle slowly, footsteps muffled by snow pressing against the walls. Torches bent with them, flames leaning as though curious. No one crossed their path; the corridors belonged to them alone.

In their dormitory, Harry set the knife aside on the desk and sat as though nothing extraordinary had been done. Tom climbed into his bed but did not lie down. He sat upright, watching Harry’s profile catch the glow of the dying fire.

The cloth around his wrist throbbed faintly with warmth, as if the rune drawn there was still breathing. Tom lifted it once, carefully, and the sight of the dried blood sent a rush of pride through him. He hadn’t been given a toy or a trinket. He had been marked. Chosen.

Harry leaned back in the chair, eyes half-closed, but Tom knew he wasn’t sleeping. He was always listening, even in stillness. That, too, was a mask—the difference between Harry and everyone else. Adults wore masks to conceal their weakness. Harry wore his to sharpen his strength.

“Why me?” Tom asked suddenly, the words low, almost unwilling to leave his mouth.

Harry opened one eye. “Because you didn’t need to be told twice.”

Tom absorbed the answer, weighty as it was simple. He let it settle into the marrow of him, felt the blood binding at his wrist pulse again, as though the castle itself agreed.

He lay back at last, staring at the canopy above. Sleep still refused him, but it didn’t matter. The silence was no longer empty. It was full—with blood, with promise, with inevitability.

When he finally drifted, his last thought was not fear that Harry might one day leave. It was certainty that, whatever happened, Harry would never choose another. Tom was his, and Harry—whether he admitted it aloud or not—was his in return.

--

The night pressed heavy on the castle, muffling sound, swallowing breath. Harry slept lightly in the chair, head tilted back, one hand resting on the edge of the desk. Tom drifted at last, blood still drying warm beneath the cloth around his wrist.

Sleep carried Harry downward, deeper than he meant to go. The walls of the dormitory seemed to peel away, replaced by black stone humming with carved sigils. He knew them—not because he had studied them, but because they remembered *him.* Lines of fire traced themselves across skin: palm, forearm, chest, rib, hip. Five doors. Five demands.

Each burned when it settled, heat sinking bone-deep. His breath caught, but he didn’t cry out. The pain wasn’t punishment—it was recognition. Payment. The runes promised power, yes, but whispered the cost with every flare: memory shaved thin, blood leeched drop by drop, time borrowed and never returned in full.

The castle’s voice rumbled like shifting earth: *Not blood alone next time. Permanence. Ink and blade. Carve yourself into us, or be forgotten.*

Harry’s fists clenched in the dream, nails biting into his palm. He would carve. He would endure.

When he stirred awake, the dorm was still dark, the fire low. Tom slept fitfully, breath shallow, as though his own dreams had followed Harry’s downward. He twitched once, then stilled, a faint murmur leaving his lips: “…whatever it takes…”

Harry studied him in silence, eyes narrowed. He didn’t wake him.

The words lingered in the room anyway, twining themselves with the memory of burning lines. A promise spoken in sleep was still a promise, and Harry accepted it.

By morning, snow had sealed the windows with frost. The Great Hall buzzed faintly with leftover holiday chatter, but beneath it the castle waited, patient, measuring. Doors stood closed in places only Harry could feel, and each one pulsed like a heartbeat he hadn’t yet matched.

Soon, the stones whispered. Soon.

Chapter Text

The return from the Christmas break was never loud, but this year it felt muted in a different way. With fewer students trudging back from the train, the castle seemed to notice the gaps in the crowd. The air itself was sharper, the walls listening harder. Even the staircases hesitated before swinging, as if trying to calculate who was worthy of being carried upward.

Harry walked beside Tom through the entrance hall. They didn’t rush, didn’t jostle with the others. They didn’t need to. The younger Slytherins who had stayed over the holidays fell in behind them, a little procession without anyone saying a word.

The Great Hall gleamed, stripped of holiday garlands but still humming with a memory of enchantments. House tables were thinner, smaller voices bouncing in the vaulted ceiling. Slytherin felt more like a dais than a bench: whoever sat at its center drew eyes from every other table. Harry and Tom sat at the axis without speaking about it. Abraxas and Rosier slid in close, Cassiopeia opposite, younger ones further down. Even the absence of noise carried weight, a silence that others noticed.

Gryffindors tried to be rowdy, Hufflepuffs clustered tighter, Ravenclaws whispered more. None of it reached the quiet orbit of Potter and Riddle.

Above them, the staff watched.

Dippet sat straight-backed at the center, his smile polite, his hands folded. He looked at the hall as though order could be pressed into existence if only he projected enough gentleness. Merriweather scowled beside him, quill already poised to make notes about punishments not yet assigned. Beery rubbed a bit of earth from under his nails, distracted. Carrow twirled his wand, trying to look competent. Slughorn clapped his hands over a platter of sausages, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction every time they darted toward Harry and Tom.

And Dumbledore—Dumbledore did not eat at all. He drank from a simple cup, eyes flickering between the tables. He was not watching children. He was watching balances, weights, ledgers of power shifting across benches and across years. When Harry’s gaze brushed his, for the briefest moment, it was like two hands pressing on the same door from opposite sides.

The meal passed. Points were granted for “holiday essays returned in good order.” Points were taken from a Gryffindor boy who dropped his pumpkin juice. The emeralds in Slytherin’s hourglass thickened, the trickle louder than it had any right to be.

Later, in the staffroom, that sound still seemed to follow them.

The fire hissed in the grate, snow tapping faintly at the tall windows. Dippet cleared his throat. “The quiet of winter term should steady things. The castle breathes differently in January. Let us guide it gently.”

“Guide?” Merriweather’s voice snapped like a quill splitting. “What you mean is tolerate. Potter and Riddle walked into this hall as if they owned it, and not one of you blinked.”

Slughorn gave a genial puff. “Well, perhaps they do. At least in spirit. Leadership shows itself early in some boys.”

“Leadership?” Merriweather’s hand slammed down flat, rattling the inkpots. “It’s domination. Ask Bones—ask the prefects. They move like generals with a private army. I’ve seen it. Haven’t you?”

No one answered at once. Carrow shifted uncomfortably. Beery mumbled something about how quiet the greenhouses had been.

Dumbledore finally turned a page in the book before him, though he hadn’t been reading. His voice was calm, almost kind. “Influence comes in many shapes, Merriweather. Domination is one. So is loyalty freely given. What matters is whether the balance tips toward creation or destruction.”

“And when it tips?” Merriweather challenged.

“Then,” Dumbledore said softly, “we must decide how to answer without breaking what we mean to guide.”

Dippet raised his palms in appeal. “Enough. We’ll watch closely. No rash actions.”

But the emeralds kept falling in the hourglass, each grain ringing louder than the one before.

--

The chamber had grown used to their footsteps, the way a hound grows used to its master’s hand. The door unlatched before Harry touched it; the green fire flared at the scent of his skin. Tom entered just behind, eyes fixed not on the fountain or the carvings, but on Harry himself.

On the stone floor, parchment scraps lay scattered in deliberate disarray. Each bore a sketch of a rune—some sharp as knives, others flowing like water. The ink bled faintly into the fibers, as though unwilling to stay contained. Bones rested beside them: fox, hare, crow, goat.

Harry crouched, tracing one sigil with his fingertip. “The castle speaks in pressure. Doors, walls, bones—it pushes until I answer. It’s louder now. Samhain was only the opening breath.”

Tom knelt beside him, gaze hungry. “These are the runes. The ones you’ve spoken of.”

“Some of them,” Harry allowed. He tapped the drawing of the palm rune, the simplest, then slid to the forearm rune, longer, more intricate. “Each is a door. Each has a cost. Together they form a chain. Carved correctly, they will hold the castle’s demand without breaking me.”

Tom’s breath caught, but not in fear. “When?”

“Soon.” Harry’s tone was level, but his hand lingered on the rib rune, the one that promised voice bound to bone. “The stone doesn’t ask permission. It demands.”

Tom leaned closer, voice lower. “You’ll let me watch.”

“You’ll do more than watch.” Harry’s gaze flicked to him, sharp and assessing. “The blood must be marked in witness. If I bleed alone, the castle takes what it likes. If you stand with me, it binds the taking.”

The words thrummed between them like a vow already half-made.

Tom’s fingers brushed one of the bone tokens. It pulsed faintly under his skin, warm as breath. “And the others?”

Harry didn’t answer. His silence was deliberate, heavy, its edges a boundary Tom could feel pressing against him.

But Tom didn’t flinch. His lips curved, faint and certain. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready. And I’ll be there.”

Harry’s expression barely shifted, but his hand closed over Tom’s wrist, steady and commanding. “Yes. You will.”

The chamber seemed to approve. The snakes carved along the fountain’s rim stirred, their stone tongues flicking, green fire swelling higher before settling back. The walls exhaled.

And Harry—Harry felt the weight of inevitability settle heavier on his shoulders. The runes would not remain sketches for long.

--

Tom’s lips curved, faint and certain, but the silence Harry left behind pressed against him like a weight. He had grown used to Harry’s restraint—the way the older boy spoke little but meant everything. And yet, tonight it cut sharper, a boundary he could not cross.

He glanced down at the scattered runes, each line bristling with danger. Palm, forearm, heart, rib, hip—five doors Harry would open, five marks carved into flesh. Tom knew only some of them, and already they made his blood race. What kind of boy, fourteen years old, chose to bleed his power into permanence? What kind of boy etched inevitability into his skin?

Not a kind one. Not a gentle one. Tom saw himself in that choice.

Still, the thought wormed through him: he was twelve. A child beside Harry’s sharp patience, Harry’s cold authority. If Harry left—if Harry grew tired of him, if Harry moved on—what would remain? An orphan with clever hands and a cleverer tongue, but no shadow to walk within.

The fear stung, quick and mean.

But then came the memories, rushing in like a tide:

Harry in the orphanage dormitory, smiling like a wolf, whispering *I can teach you.*

Harry at Samhain, voice in Parseltongue, driving older boys to their knees while Tom chose to kneel on his own.

Harry binding him with touch and words, promising nothing except the one thing Tom had always wanted: belonging.

Of all the students in this school, Harry had chosen him. Not Abraxas, not Rosier, not Cassiopeia—*him.*

And Tom knew himself. He was not good. He was not merciful. He wanted power the way other children wanted sweets, hoarded devotion the way others hoarded toys. Harry was the only one who saw that truth and did not flinch.

Kneeling for Harry was not weakness. It was recognition.

His chest burned with the knowledge, devotion coiling hot and heavy inside him. He would bleed for Harry, starve for him, kill for him. He would echo Harry’s voice until he was strong enough to stand beside it, and even then, he would never stop being *his.*

Harry turned, as though feeling the weight of Tom’s thoughts.

“When the time comes,” he said softly, “you’ll be there.”

Tom’s answer was steady, certain. “I will.”

The bones on the floor seemed to hum in approval, faint warmth pulsing against their skins.

That night, Harry began gathering what he would need: a silver knife, its edge honed until it gleamed like water; strips of clean linen; bowls carved from dark wood. He handed them to Tom, letting him carry the weight, a silent vow that this work would not be done alone.

--

The castle stirred before the knife ever touched skin.

It was not a noise, not even a whisper—more like the heaviness of weather, a storm felt in the bones before a cloud appears. The stones underfoot seemed to lean toward them, archways curving subtly inward, as though the castle itself meant to herd them deeper.

Harry paused in the stairwell, hand brushing the cold wall. It thrummed faintly beneath his palm, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.

“It’s calling,” he murmured.

Tom tilted his head, eyes narrowed. He couldn’t hear it—not the way Harry could—but he could *feel* the change. The air was too thick, the silence too deliberate. The castle was waiting.

“What does it want?” Tom asked.

Harry’s eyes gleamed in the torchlight, bright as flint struck. “Completion. The sketches, the practice—they’re no longer enough. It won’t wait.”

The descent into the hidden chamber felt different this time. Doors opened too quickly, staircases aligned without pause. Even the serpents carved along the walls seemed to shift their heads as they passed, tongues flicking the air in recognition.

When they reached the fountain, the fire inside it flared to life on its own. No wand. No command. Just green flame leaping high, painting their shadows long across the carved floor.

Tom shivered—not from fear, but from the strange exultation that always came in Harry’s wake. The chamber felt alive, ancient and ravenous, and it looked at Harry as if he were its rightful heir.

Harry stepped forward, silver knife in hand. His voice, when it came, was steady and low, a sound that seemed to belong to the stones themselves.

“The doors must open. Tonight.”

The snakes carved into the rim hissed in Parseltongue, answering with a sound that slithered through the marrow. Tom didn’t catch every word, but he understood enough: *Blood. Etching. Binding.*

He looked at Harry then, and for the first time, he saw not just inevitability—but cost. Harry’s shoulders carried the weight of a decision that had already been made, and Tom knew he would stand beside him for every cut, every mark, every door opened.

Harry glanced over his shoulder, meeting Tom’s gaze. “All of them. No more hiding.”

Tom’s breath caught, sharp as a blade. He nodded once. “Then let me hold the bowl.”

Harry’s mouth curved faintly—not kindness, not comfort, but approval. He pressed the wooden vessel into Tom’s hands, its weight suddenly monumental.

The chamber hushed. The fire leaned closer. The castle itself seemed to bend around them, waiting for the first drop of blood.

--

The chamber was quiet enough to hear the lick of green fire inside the fountain. Tom’s hands were steady on the wooden bowl, but only because he forced them to be. The air smelled of damp stone and something sharper, like copper waiting to be spilled.

Harry laid out the knife. Its silver edge caught the firelight, throwing slivers of green across his skin. He stripped his shirt down to the waist, leaving pale flesh bare in the flickering glow. The scars of training already marked him faintly, but nothing like what was about to be written.

“Five,” Harry said. His voice was low, certain. “Palm. Forearm. Heart. Rib. Hip. No more hiding.”

Tom swallowed. His throat felt raw. “And when it’s done?”

Harry’s eyes, flint and fire, locked on his. “Then I will belong to the castle—and it will belong to me.”

He set the tip of the knife against his left palm.

---

The first cut split him open like parchment torn across the grain. Blood welled, dark and heavy, and dripped into the bowl Tom held out beneath. The rune Harry carved was sharp, angular, the shape of command itself. His teeth clenched, but he didn’t make a sound as he dragged the blade across flesh, weaving lines until the mark closed into a sigil.

Authority through touch. The right to force doors, to bend wards, to make the world heed the weight of his hand.

The blood hissed when it struck the stone rim of the fountain. Fire flared high, and the wound knit shut, not smooth but blackened—lines thick as ink, stark against pale skin. A tattoo born of agony.

Harry flexed his hand once. The mark shone faintly before dulling to matte black.

“First,” he murmured.

---

He pressed the knife lower, just beneath the crook of his arm. This one was longer, a channel. Tom held the bowl tighter as blood poured, more than before, streaming down in rivulets that spattered against wood.

The lines of the rune spiraled upward, jagged notches catching the light. Power through channeling, strength without exhaustion. Harry’s breathing turned ragged as he cut, sweat dripping down his brow.

Tom stepped closer, free hand pressing against Harry’s shoulder to keep him steady. He wanted to tell him to stop, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Harry’s will was absolute.

The rune closed, fire roared, and the skin sealed in thick black bars, coiling up his arm like shackles turned into weapons.

Harry exhaled hard, jaw tight.

“Second.”

---

This one hurt differently. Harry set the blade just over his chest, above the left side where his heartbeat thudded heavy. He did not hesitate. The knife sank in shallow but brutal, and blood welled instantly, sliding down his ribs in scarlet streaks.

The shape here was knotted, looping back on itself—protection, remembrance, anchoring. The castle would never forget him. His blood would never betray him.

Harry’s hand trembled as he carved. His breath hitched, ragged, close to breaking. Tom dropped the bowl and caught him, arms wrapping around him to hold him upright.

“You’re bleeding too much,” Tom hissed. His voice shook with fury—at the knife, at the castle, at the world for demanding this.

Harry’s lips twisted, cold even through the pallor. “It takes what it’s owed.”

When the rune sealed, it pulsed black and heavy, thicker than the others, like armor hammered straight into flesh. The blood vanished into the mark itself, leaving Harry’s chest slick but no longer open.

“Third,” Harry rasped.

---

Harry turned the blade sideways, tracing a cruel line down his ribs. Tom flinched when the knife broke skin—it was deep, too deep—but Harry did not falter.

This mark curled in jagged loops, like words spoken through bone. Voice bound to breath, command that air itself could not refuse.

When the final line closed, Harry whispered a single word in Parseltongue.

“~Kneel.~”

The sound struck Tom like a blow to the spine. His knees buckled before his mind caught up, before he realized Harry hadn’t meant to compel him. He gasped, shuddering, and forced himself upright.

Harry’s blackened mark glowed, then dulled, sealing into place. His mouth curved in the faintest smile. “Fourth.”

---

The last was the ugliest. Harry pushed his trousers down just enough to bare his hipbone. The knife bit deep, and blood spilled fast. Tom hissed, hands trembling as he caught it in the bowl.

The lines of this rune were blunt, cruel, less graceful than the others. Endurance. Stamina. Survival. It spread wide, thick bands carved into flesh. Harry gritted his teeth so hard his jaw ached, the sound of knife scraping bone filling the chamber like a scream without words.

When the rune sealed, it left a heavy, blackened brand over his hip, thick as rope, final as a chain.

Harry staggered. Tom lunged, catching him before he could fall.

---

The chamber hummed with approval, stone thrumming underfoot. The green fire rose high, then steadied, as though bowing. The serpents hissed, their tongues weaving in unison: *Bound. Marked. Claimed.*

Harry’s skin was streaked with sweat and blood, but where the knife had cut, the runes now gleamed black, thick and permanent, tattooed into him by magic itself. Palm, forearm, chest, rib, hip—five marks of ownership, five doors carved into a single body.

Tom pressed the linen against Harry’s skin, his own hands shaking. “You’re mad,” he whispered, but his voice was raw with awe.

Harry’s eyes opened, heavy-lidded, cold and steady. “I’m inevitable.”

Tom held him, blood soaking into his fingers, and knew with absolute certainty that this was no mask. This was Harry stripped bare, remade by pain and choice, and he—Tom Riddle, twelve years old, greedy and hungry—was the only one allowed to witness it.

--

The chamber was alive with the sound of silence—the kind that comes after storms, heavy and absolute. The green fire lowered to a steady pulse, casting shadows across the carved floor. The serpents along the fountain rim hissed in unison, their voices weaving a wordless song of recognition: *bound, marked, claimed.*

Harry’s skin steamed faintly where the runes had sealed. Five thick, blackened marks stood out against the pale of his body—palm, forearm, chest, ribs, hip. They looked less like tattoos and more like brands, scars burned into permanence by the castle itself.

Tom lowered the bowl of blood, setting it carefully on the stone as if it were holy. His hands shook despite himself, knuckles smeared red. He pressed cloth to Harry’s chest, not to stop bleeding—the wound had already sealed—but to wipe away the residue, the thick, sticky sheen of sacrifice.

Harry’s breath was shallow, each inhale edged with a rasp, but his eyes opened, cold and steady. “Done.”

Tom swallowed, the word catching in his throat. He had thought himself ready for this—for the knife, for the blood, for the permanence—but seeing Harry carved open again and again, refusing to falter, refusing to yield, had carved *him* too.

“You should rest,” Tom said, voice low. It wasn’t an order. It wasn’t even a plea. It was something closer to reverence.

Harry’s lips curved faintly, though it was not a smile anyone else would ever see. “Rest is for the weak.”

Tom’s jaw tightened. “Then let me hold you.”

He slid closer, arms steadying Harry as he leaned back against the fountain. The fire behind them reflected in Harry’s eyes, making them seem almost inhuman—something older, sharper, inevitable.

For a long while, neither spoke. Tom pressed the cloths against skin still warm with pain, tracing the edges of each rune. Thick lines. Black. Permanent. He thought of how no one else in the world would ever know, not even Dumbledore, not even Slughorn. These marks belonged to Harry—and to him, because he alone had borne witness.

At last, Harry broke the silence. “You understand now why I never told the others.”

Tom’s chest ached. “Because they’d think you fragile.”

“Because they’d try to use it,” Harry corrected. His gaze pinned Tom in place. “You’re the only one I trust not to.”

The words sank into Tom like chains he would never escape—and never wanted to. His fingers brushed the rune over Harry’s heart, where the skin still glowed faintly. “I won’t. I’ll protect what you’ve carved.”

Harry’s hand closed over his, firm despite exhaustion. “Not protect. Guard. There’s a difference.”

Tom nodded once. His devotion was already iron, already absolute.

The chamber exhaled with them, stone easing as though satisfied. Above, the castle shifted in its sleep, staircases turning, portraits blinking awake as if some great ledger had just been amended.

But in the hidden dark, there were only two boys: one remade in blood, the other sworn by it.

--

The fire in the fountain had gone quiet, green coals banked low, the chamber itself sighing as though satisfied with the price Harry had paid.

Harry sat back against the stone, bare chest still streaked faintly where the runes had closed into black ink. The air around him felt heavier, charged; every breath tasted of copper and ash. Tom hovered close, too taut with awe to sit. His eyes drank in the new marks—not scars, not wounds, but permanence—until Harry caught his stare and tilted his head.

“Stare later,” Harry murmured, voice rough with exhaustion. “Listen now.”

The silence of the chamber was not silence at all. Beneath it ran a sound like distant water over stone, a hollow resonance that had not been there before. The walls themselves seemed to lean inward, pulling the boys’ attention toward the fountain.

Stone grated. A seam split open behind the far wall, as if the carving of the runes had been a key turned in a lock older than language. Dust sloughed from the cracks, the air rolling out damp and cold with the smell of things buried too long.

Tom stiffened. His hand twitched toward Harry’s arm but stopped short. He remembered the ritual, the way Harry had bled without flinching, the weight of inevitability that had bent his knees before command. Touch felt almost presumptuous now.

Harry pushed himself upright. “It’s open.” His voice had steadied again, though his face was pale, shadows sharp beneath his eyes. “We’re being called.”

The seam widened into an archway, black beyond, its edges slick as if the stone itself still remembered being molten. Harry stepped forward without hesitation, and Tom followed, pulse quickening at the thought that no one else—not Dumbledore, not the headmaster, not a single founder—had walked here alive.

The passage swallowed them in damp air. The sound of dripping water echoed, rhythmic, like a second heartbeat. Their footsteps left no echo, as if the stone absorbed the sound jealously. On either side, the walls bore faint carvings—sigils, serpentine figures, fragments of runes so old even Harry’s sharp gaze could not read them all.

Tom finally spoke, low, reverent. “It feels like walking into a mouth.”

Harry’s lips curved faintly. “Then we’ll see if it means to bite.”

The passage sloped downward, narrow and unbending, until it spilled them into a chamber vast enough that their torchlight only skimmed its edges. The ceiling arched into darkness. In the center, half-buried in dust and fallen stone, lay another fountain—but this one dry, its basin cracked, the carved serpents blind.

Harry’s hand lifted, almost unconsciously tracing the line over his heart where the rune had sealed. The new tattoos prickled in answer, the ink alive beneath his skin. The chamber stirred as if recognizing the mark, a faint breath of wind circling like a whisper with no mouth.

Tom stood still, every sense alert, his thoughts racing. He wanted to ask what this place was, but he already knew the answer: it was theirs now. Whatever had slept here, whatever had waited—it had been waiting for Harry.

Harry looked across the dead fountain, his voice steady. “We’ve opened the first of its doors. Now we find out what it kept locked.”

--

The dry fountain loomed in the middle of the cavern like a corpse that had once been a king. Its basin was cracked, the serpents blind, mouths frozen in silent screams. Dust lay thick across the floor, undisturbed for centuries, and yet the air had weight, as though the room were holding its breath for them.

Harry approached first, his bare feet silent on the stone. The black runes inked into his skin prickled hot against the cold air, glowing faintly with each step. When he reached the fountain, the marks over his palm and heart burned brightest, answering the chamber’s silence with their own pulse.

Tom hung back a pace, eyes sharp, his thoughts racing. He had never seen Harry hesitate before—not once. But here, the other boy paused, laying a hand against the broken stone as though listening to its pulse.

The basin shifted. A groan reverberated through the floor, low and guttural, like something old waking from a long, reluctant sleep. Hairline cracks spread outward, glowing faint green before dying back. Dust fell like ash around them.

Tom’s breath caught. “What is it?”

Harry’s voice came low, distant. “Not a fountain. A seal.”

Even as he said it, the chamber stirred. Carvings that had looked like meaningless scrawls flared with sudden clarity: serpents coiling into circles, runes etched so deep the stone itself seemed to bleed light. At the base of the fountain, half-hidden under rubble, lay an altar of black rock. Upon it, bound in iron bands, rested a single relic: a dagger, its blade so dark it seemed to swallow the torchlight.

The castle’s whisper rolled through the walls—low, insistent, in Parseltongue. /~Take it. Feed it. Claim it.~/

Harry’s hand twitched, but he did not move. The runes along his ribs burned hotter, warning, weighing. He turned his head, eyes cutting to Tom, and in that glance was choice: not command, not inevitability—choice.

Tom’s lips parted, breath shallow. This was no ordinary relic. He could feel it, as though his bones hummed in recognition. Whatever lay sleeping here had been waiting, not just for Harry, but for them together.

He stepped forward until he stood shoulder to shoulder with Harry. “If you take it,” Tom whispered, “we both take it.”

Harry’s eyes softened, just a fraction. Then he reached out. Together, their hands closed on the iron bands. The dagger trembled as though alive, and the chamber exhaled, dust falling in curtains from the ceiling.

--

The iron bands groaned under their fingers as they pulled, rust flaking into the cracks of the altar. The stone trembled faintly, as though something beneath it recognized what was coming. Harry’s runes burned so hot now that Tom could see them through the thin fabric of his shirt, black lines pulsing as if alive.

The dagger pulsed once in return. It was not a weapon so much as a memory—centuries of blood, obedience, and hunger caught in a single edge.

The chamber whispered all around them. \~Feed me. Wake me.\~

Harry didn’t hesitate. He dragged his thumb down the blade. The cut was instant, sharp as thought, blood spilling thick and dark onto the stone. The dagger drank greedily, the carved serpents along the basin twitching as though they remembered how to move.

Tom pressed his hand over Harry’s, forcing the blade against his own palm until their blood mingled. It dripped together down the steel, and the air split apart with a soundless crack, pressure hammering through the room.

The dagger flared—not with light, but with something darker, swallowing the torch glow until only the molten shine of Harry’s runes lit the chamber. When he lifted it, it was weightless, an extension of his arm, as if his bones themselves had grown into steel.

Tom’s chest rose and fell quickly, eyes fixed on the blade. “It’s ours now.”

Harry turned the dagger slowly, the marks on his palm answering, burning with black fire. “No. It’s mine. But because you chose me, it will never turn on you.”

The altar cracked. The fountain split like a chest opening under a knife. Behind it, stone spiraled down into a dark so deep it seemed more like a mouth than a passage.

Harry’s gaze cut to Tom. “This is what it was waiting for.”

Tom’s lips curved, fierce and reverent. “Then let’s not keep it waiting.”

Harry took the first step down, dagger in hand, blood drying thick against his fingers. Tom followed close, his eyes burning with devotion and hunger.

The chamber sealed behind them, locking away the air of the old room. Ahead, in the depth of the stairwell, something older stirred awake.

--

The stairwell swallowed them whole. Each step echoed not like stone, but like the pulse of something alive. The air thickened, colder than winter, and the green fire they carried guttered as if reluctant to follow them into the dark.

The dagger hummed in Harry’s hand, drinking the silence. The runes on his skin still smoldered, black and raised as though inked into his veins. Tom stayed close enough that his sleeve brushed Harry’s, his eyes devouring every line of shadow that formed and broke against the walls.

The descent twisted downward for what felt like hours. The walls wept with moisture, whispering in low tones that could not be mistaken for water alone. Words pressed at the edge of hearing, ancient, insistent. Harry slowed once, head cocked, and Tom caught the faint hiss of Parseltongue woven into the drip of stone.

“\~Deeper,\~” it said. “\~Deeper, child of serpents. The root waits.\~”

At the bottom, the stairs ended abruptly in a vast cavern. The ceiling arched high, lost in shadow, studded with pale crystals that glimmered faintly as though lit from within. A black pool stretched across the center, so still it mirrored their faces with cruel precision. Around its rim, carvings of serpents coiled endlessly, mouths open, fangs bared.

Harry stepped forward, the dagger lifting of its own accord. The pool stirred at its presence, ripples fanning outward though no wind touched it. The serpents’ eyes along the wall glowed faintly green, blinking awake after centuries of sleep.

Tom exhaled, slow, reverent. “It’s not just a chamber. It’s a root.”

Harry’s gaze stayed on the water. “A root that feeds the castle. A place older than Hogwarts itself.”

The pool brightened from within, light rising like a drowned star. For a moment it was blinding, and then it revealed what lay beneath: bones—mountains of them—human and animal twisted together, their shadows reaching upward like grasping hands.

The dagger flared in Harry’s grip, hungry. His runes throbbed in answer, and he felt the cost pressing closer, whispering of blood, of permanence.

Tom’s hand found his wrist, grounding, loyal. “Whatever it asks,” he said, his voice low, trembling with devotion, “I’ll bleed with you.”

Harry’s lips curved, cold and approving. “I know.”

The pool’s light swelled, beckoning. The chamber wanted more than blood. It wanted choice, will, intent. It wanted them both.

Harry raised the dagger over the water, and the serpents on the walls leaned as though to watch.

--

The chamber was no longer waiting. It had *taken,* and now it settled with the satisfaction of a beast curling around its prize. The black pool gleamed faintly, runes shimmering on its surface like stars drowned just beneath the waterline. Every stone in the room leaned toward Harry as if he were gravity itself.

Harry’s hand flexed. The thick black line etched across his palm pulsed once, and the pool rippled in answer. He did not smile. His face was pale, remote, but steady, as though the chamber’s heartbeat had been laid over his own.

Tom stood close enough to see everything: the ink-dark bands on Harry’s forearm, the knot over his chest, the curling mark beneath his ribs, the brutal line at his hip. They were not wounds now. They were brands, alive, breathing.

A part of Tom wanted to recoil—no, not recoil, *kneel.* To kneel because what he saw was not boy or peer but a force wrapped in skin. He held still instead, because Harry had not commanded it. Devotion is not disobedience when it waits for permission.

“You see them,” Harry murmured, voice low, threaded with exhaustion. “Not scars. Not lies. Permanence.”

Tom’s throat tightened. “They’re crowns,” he whispered. “And chains. And weapons.”

Harry’s gaze flicked sideways, faint approval in it. “They’re mine. Which means they’re yours too, so long as you keep pace.”

The words burned more deeply than any rune. Tom thought of choices—how quickly he had bent, how easily he had knelt at eleven years old. But here, seeing permanence written into Harry’s flesh, he understood: he had bent because Harry was the one thing worth bending to. The mask Harry wore for adults, the coldness he showed to the rest of the school—none of it belonged here. Here, in this chamber, Harry was unmasked, terrible, and Tom alone was allowed to see.

Harry swayed once, hand pressing to the stone rim of the pool. Tom caught him, an instinct sharper than thought. He felt the heat of the tattoo at Harry’s rib against his palm, pulsing like a second life. For one wild instant he thought the chamber might take Harry whole, fold him into stone and water and keep him. He tightened his grip, defiant.

“Mine,” Tom breathed fiercely, not to Harry but to the chamber itself. “He’s mine.”

The walls did not argue. The pool quieted. And when Harry straightened again, steadier though paler, the marks on his body glowed once—acknowledging not just their master, but the bond between the two boys who had descended here together.

They left the chamber without speaking further, the silence between them thick and alive. Above, the castle shifted, staircases turning in their sleep, portraits pausing mid-gossip, as if all of Hogwarts now knew that something had changed beneath its roots.

--

When they emerged from the chamber, the air of the castle clung to them like cloth damp from storm. The corridors were silent, emptied for winter, but Harry felt the walls watching, listening, memorizing. Each rune under his skin pulsed with faint warmth, not pain, but reminder.

Tom walked half a step behind, his eyes fixed on Harry’s shoulders. The silence between them was not absence; it was weight, the kind that gathers when vows have been spoken without words.

They passed a tapestry that usually hung crooked. Tonight it straightened as they approached. The sconces along the stairwell flickered in unison, flames bending toward Harry’s path. The castle had recognized him.

At the landing, Harry paused, fingers brushing the railing. His expression was unreadable—cold to anyone else, but Tom saw the flicker beneath: exhaustion carefully hidden, satisfaction carefully caged.

“Does it hurt?” Tom asked quietly.

Harry’s lips curved, not a smile but a baring of teeth. “Everything worth keeping does.”

Tom swallowed, the echo of the ritual still raw in his mind. He thought of blood on stone, black marks thick as chains, the way the pool itself had bowed. He thought of how Harry had swayed, and how he alone had steadied him. That was what mattered.

At the door to their dormitory, Harry pressed his hand flat against the wood. The rune on his palm glowed faintly, and the lock unlatched with a click that sounded almost like obedience.

Inside, the room was dark and private. Two beds, two trunks, one secret. Tom lingered in the doorway, eyes adjusting, breath catching at the thought of the rest of the school dreaming in ignorance.

“They don’t know,” Tom said softly. It was not a question.

“They won’t,” Harry answered. His tone was iron. “This is ours.”

Tom crossed the room and sat at the edge of Harry’s bed, watching as Harry stripped off his robe. The black marks gleamed in the firelight from the small hearth. They looked permanent, eternal.

Tom’s chest tightened. He thought of crowns again, and chains, and weapons. But most of all, he thought of belonging.

“Then I’ll guard it,” Tom said. “Even from them. Especially from them.”

Harry looked at him, eyes colder than the winter night, and nodded once. Approval, trust, command—all in one.

The castle shifted above them, staircases creaking, portraits whispering in their sleep. Snow pressed against the windows, muffling the world. And in the quiet heart of Slytherin, two boys lay down in a room the school itself had bent to protect.

Not master and servant. Not yet. But inevitability had begun to write its name in black ink across their skin, and neither of them had any wish to erase it.

Chapter Text

Spring crept into the castle, but it did not soften it. The thaw dripped from gutters and pooled in the courtyards, and still the stones felt taut, as if they remembered the winter’s silence too clearly to let go. The students felt it as well. Conversations broke off when Harry entered a corridor; even laughter seemed to drop in pitch when Tom followed half a step behind him.

Harry carried the runes like another layer of skin. They no longer bled or burned, but pulsed faintly, especially when the castle shifted around him. A locked door would sometimes click open when he walked past. Staircases leaned into the path he chose, as though eager to be useful. He never explained these things to anyone, not even Tom, but Tom noticed every flicker, every tilt of the stone in his favor.

The Slytherins noticed too. They had stopped whispering about *if* Potter and Riddle were the heart of the House. Now they whispered about *how* to keep pace with them. Abraxas kept tidy lists of favors owed and favors given; Rosier turned every errand into a chance to spread their influence; Cassiopeia sat like a sentinel, her silence louder than words. Even the younger students carried themselves differently, as if the shadow of inevitability had already settled over them.

The other Houses bristled. Gryffindors grew reckless, prowling corridors in packs, daring each other to confront Slytherins with hexes ready in their sleeves. Ravenclaws whispered theories, half in awe, half in fear, as if they were trying to solve the riddle of Harry himself. Hufflepuffs clung to Bones’s truce, but even they looked uneasy when Potter’s name came up, as though the word itself could bend a conversation off course.

The staff had begun to move differently around him as well. Merriweather’s eyes tracked Harry through every lesson, his quill scratching sharp notes at the slightest provocation. Slughorn beamed and fluttered, but his cheer had grown edged, like a man trying to tame a storm by pretending to host it. Dippet smiled more often, but the smile was tired, the smile of a headmaster who knew he was being outpaced. And Dumbledore—always Dumbledore—watched with eyes that weighed rather than measured.

Tom felt it most keenly in the Great Hall. When they entered, side by side, conversations dropped as if a hand had pressed on the room. The Slytherin table leaned toward them, a single body with many heads. Across the hall, Gryffindors stiffened, and Ravenclaws went quiet. Hufflepuffs looked relieved only when the boys sat down, as if distance itself offered safety.

It was power. Not the noisy kind, not the obvious kind. It was the kind that threaded itself into silence, into posture, into inevitability. Harry wore it like a second robe, and Tom, at his shoulder, felt the world narrowing until the two of them stood at the center.

--

Quidditch had been Slytherin’s season from the very first match. By winter’s end, the tally spoke for itself: Gryffindor trounced, Hufflepuff routed, Ravenclaw left gasping. Each victory had been precise, ruthless, and inevitable.

Harry never played, of course. He didn’t need to. It was enough that he stood at the edge of the pitch with Tom, watching as their House executed maneuvers they had drilled in the common room and whispered through late-night meetings. Abraxas called the plays with the sharp authority of a general. Rosier turned feints into art. The beaters hit not just with strength but with calculation, and every goal the chasers scored carried the stamp of discipline Potter had pressed into their bones.

By the time April melted into May, no one doubted where the Cup would go. Slytherin swept the pitch like a storm tide. Even when Gryffindor tried to claw back pride with a desperate midseason strike, the serpents shut them down with brutal precision. Hufflepuff never stood a chance—their loyalty and effort admirable, but useless against Slytherin’s machine. Ravenclaw, clever as they were, found their strategies anticipated before they even mounted their brooms.

The last match, against Gryffindor again, was more spectacle than sport. The stands roared, banners snapped in the wind, but the outcome was certain before the Quaffle even left the referee’s hand. The Slytherin seeker—pale, sharp-eyed, trained mercilessly under Harry’s quiet instruction—snatched the Snitch before the lions even had a chance to rally. The emerald section of the stands erupted, their cheers less joy than triumph.

For Harry, seated high in the stands with Tom at his side, it was less about the game than the atmosphere it created. The House sang his name afterward—not always aloud, but in the way they looked at him, in the way they reached for him as they filed back into the castle.

Tom basked in it too, though differently. He smiled, returned the congratulations with regal grace, every movement echoing Harry’s lessons. If Harry was inevitability, Tom was inheritance—the clear line of command that followed without hesitation.

By the time the scores were tallied, the result was undeniable: Slytherin held the Quidditch Cup. The green and silver banners draped higher than ever before, their sheen catching the torchlight like blades.

The victory didn’t just crown their team. It crowned the House entire.

And when Harry and Tom walked the corridors that evening, the castle itself seemed to bow: staircases settled just as they approached, torches flared higher in their wake, portraits leaned in to watch with knowing silence.

The Cup was theirs. And soon, the year itself would be.

--

Exams pressed in like a slow tide, parchment and ink staining every table in the library. Students bent over books, muttering incantations under their breath, quills scratching until fingers cramped. The castle smelled of parchment dust, ink, and nervous sweat. Yet Slytherin carried itself differently. Victors. Certain.

The Quidditch Cup gleamed in the common room, set high on the mantle above the green fire. Its polished surface reflected the House banners, casting serpentine shadows that seemed to move on their own. Every time a student passed, they glanced at it—not with idle pride, but with hunger, as though victory itself was nourishment.

Harry and Tom sat apart, but never alone. Their table in the library became a center of gravity. Abraxas managed schedules, doling out study slots like rations. Rosier prowled between desks, needling rivals with casual remarks that drew points from Gryffindor tempers. Cassiopeia observed in silence, intervening only when a younger Slytherin faltered, a quiet hand steadying them before they could be mocked.

It was not friendship. It was discipline.

The other Houses felt it like a stone in the gut. Gryffindors, restless and bruised, sought duels in hidden corridors, only to find Slytherins waiting with calm precision. Ravenclaws whispered theories of runes and rituals behind their ink-stained hands, but none dared voice them where teachers might overhear. Even the Hufflepuffs kept wary distance, muttering of truces already stretched too thin.

Points shifted daily, an hourglass war. Gryffindors clawed for ground, only to lose more when tempers broke. Ravenclaws gained and lost with essays, their brilliance unable to outweigh missteps. Hufflepuffs held steady, but never surged. And always, emeralds trickled down in the staffroom hourglass, faster, heavier, as though even the castle wanted Slytherin to win.

Harry moved through it all with deliberate calm, every gesture precise, every word weighted. Professors who docked points found excuses to return them days later; professors who praised him did so cautiously, as though aware of how the words might echo. Tom mirrored him—less obvious, more pliant in public—but his deference made their power more terrifying. One commanded; the other confirmed.

By mid-June, the outcome was inevitable. Whispers in the corridors no longer asked who would win the House Cup. They asked what it meant that Slytherin had already won.

And above it all, Dumbledore watched, his quill stilled over parchment, his eyes calculating as if trying to solve an equation whose numbers refused to stay still.

--

The last week of June arrived with the weight of inevitability. Exams ended, quills put away, ink-stained fingers scrubbed clean only to be replaced by restless tapping on tables. The castle itself seemed to sigh with relief, the air warmer, lazier, though beneath it pulsed a sharp tension: everyone waited for the Feast.

In the Great Hall, enchanted banners already hung high, neutral for now but poised to shift with the tally. Slytherins passed beneath them with smug certainty, their steps light, their laughter low and confident. Gryffindors muttered bitterly, whispers thick with resentment. Ravenclaws, restless, traded theories about “late surges” in points, though none sounded convinced. Hufflepuffs stayed quiet, resigned, clinging to scraps of peace.

The Feast preparations filled the air with spice and roasting meats, the scents so rich they seemed to climb the walls and nest in the rafters. Fir garlands still lingered, faded but fragrant, remnants of winter charms that the staff had not yet bothered to take down. The hall glowed with anticipation—every candle’s flame steady, watchful, as though the castle itself wanted to see who would claim victory.

At the Slytherin table, Harry and Tom sat side by side, the still point around which their House revolved. Abraxas leaned in close, murmuring about how many points Gryffindor had bled this week alone. Rosier lounged back with his usual smirk, eyes glittering, already toasting victories not yet spoken aloud. Cassiopeia’s hands were folded in front of her, serene, but her gaze flicked like a hawk to any student foolish enough to meet it.

It no longer felt like a House table. It felt like a throne room.

Whispers chased themselves around the hall: that perhaps the staff would intervene, that points would be “balanced,” as had happened in years past. But each whisper died when eyes strayed toward Harry, his face carved in calm authority, or Tom, his gaze burning with devotion sharp enough to scorch. Together, they made inevitability visible.

Up at the staff table, Dumbledore’s gaze lingered across the candles. His expression was pleasant, as ever—but his eyes never left the two boys at the heart of Slytherin’s quiet empire.

--

The End-of-Year Feast shimmered with a brilliance that even the enchanted ceiling could not outmatch. Above, stars glowed against velvet sky, though outside the castle the night was still young. Plates gleamed, goblets filled themselves with jeweled wine and pumpkin juice, and the smells of roast meats and sugared puddings curled through the air like spells of comfort.

Headmaster Dippet rose first, his thin hands pressing the air for calm. “Another year complete,” he said warmly. “Exams endured, triumphs celebrated, lessons—learned, I hope. And now, the time has come to award the House Cup.”

The hall held its breath.

“Fourth place,” Dippet announced, “to Ravenclaw, with two hundred and seventy-eight points.” A smattering of polite applause; Ravenclaws shifted uncomfortably, already calculating their failures.

“Third place, Hufflepuff, with three hundred and forty-nine points.” A louder cheer from their own table, loyal to the end.

“Second place…” Dippet hesitated just long enough for Gryffindors to stiffen, “Gryffindor, with four hundred and twelve points.”

The Gryffindor table erupted with groans and protests, fists slamming against wood. “Impossible!” someone shouted. “We earned more!” But the words died as Dippet’s gaze swept them—kind, apologetic, yet immovable.

“And so,” he finished, voice carrying over the din, “the House Cup goes to Slytherin, with four hundred and sixty-eight points.”

Emerald banners unfurled instantly, snakes rippling in gold thread. The Slytherin table roared—not with chaos, but with triumph drilled into discipline. Abraxas raised his goblet high, Rosier whooped, Cassiopeia’s smirk deepened. The younger students clapped until their hands stung, some even standing on the benches.

Harry sat still, calm as carved stone, the barest curve of satisfaction at his mouth. Tom leaned close, eyes gleaming. “Ours,” he murmured, soft enough for no one else to hear.

“Ours,” Harry agreed.

At the staff table, Slughorn applauded until his rings rattled, delighted to bask in reflected glory. Merriweather looked sour enough to curdle milk. Dumbledore clapped with the rest, but his eyes stayed fixed on the two boys who had turned Slytherin’s victory into inevitability.

The castle itself seemed to hum with approval.

--

The feast wound down in a haze of laughter and wine, though not all of it was merry. Gryffindors sulked in clusters, their anger spilling out in whispers sharp enough to cut. Hufflepuffs retreated to comfort one another, quiet in their solidarity. Ravenclaws scribbled on scraps of parchment, tallying numbers that refused to change no matter how they twisted them.

Slytherin, though, gleamed like polished stone. Their table was loud but not disorderly, each cheer measured, each smile sharpened. It wasn’t celebration so much as confirmation. Victory had not surprised them; it had only arrived on schedule.

When the last of the puddings vanished and the candles guttered low, Dippet rose again to dismiss them. His voice carried warmth, pride, and the faintest weariness of age. “Rest well, my students. Another year awaits you after the summer. May you meet it with wisdom and courage.”

The benches scraped, the hall erupted in motion. Robes swished, voices clashed, footsteps echoed off high stone. But through the noise, Harry and Tom rose without hurry. The Slytherins nearest them followed, not commanded, but instinctively—like shadows chasing a flame.

As they reached the doors, Harry paused. His gaze swept the hall one last time: the defeated slump of Gryffindors, the restless scratching of Ravenclaws, the resigned solidarity of Hufflepuffs. Then his eyes met Dumbledore’s across the candles.

Neither boy nor man smiled.

The weight of it lingered as Harry and Tom stepped into the corridor, the castle’s breath settling around them. Behind them, emerald banners swayed gently, snakes rippling as though alive.

Slytherin had won the Cup. But more than that—the school itself had bent.

--

The last trunks snapped shut in the Slytherin dorms, leather groaning against metal clasps. The room looked bare without books and robes scattered across the floor. Tom stood at the window, watching owls sweep past the lake. Harry tugged his cloak into place with calm efficiency, every fold sharp, deliberate.

“Ready?” Tom asked. His voice carried more weight than the word deserved, as though the question was about more than luggage.

Harry’s answer was simple: “Always.”

The train ride felt different this time. Not the awkward scramble of September, but something measured, claimed. Their compartment filled quickly—Abraxas, Rosier, Cassiopeia, others orbiting like lesser stars. Conversation hummed: jokes, boasts, plans for the summer. But in the corner, Harry and Tom sat pressed close, sharing quiet words that stilled the noise around them.

Every so often, someone glanced at them with awe or fear, as if expecting even the rhythm of the train to follow their lead. And in a way, it did—the iron wheels clattered with the steadiness of inevitability, carrying them toward a future already bending.

The sky darkened as the train slowed. Steam hissed, brakes screamed, and the platform unfolded in smoke and shouts. Children flung themselves into parents’ arms; trunks banged against stone. But Harry and Tom stepped down with no one waiting.

They walked side by side through the thinning crowd, their silence louder than the farewells around them. At the edge of the platform, a carriage rattled them back to the city. The ride was long, gray streets giving way to darker alleys, until at last the carriage left them at Wool’s Orphanage.

The gates stood iron-black against the night. Paint peeled, hinges rusted, the building beyond looming with windows like blind eyes.

Tom stopped first. Harry beside him. Neither moved to enter.

The air smelled of damp and neglect. Inside, beds and whispers waited. But outside—outside was choice.

Harry’s gaze lingered on the gates, then on Tom. His scar caught the weak light, sharp against his pale skin.

Tom’s hand tightened at his side. He felt the weight of the key in Harry’s pocket, the memory of runes carved in blood, the promise of power shared only between them.

They did not step forward. Not yet.

The night leaned close, waiting.