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Entry tags:
Liminality: Chapter 3 [HP]
Title: Liminality
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/Characters: Tomarry, brief!Harry/Ginny, Harry & Ginny, Ginny & Tom, Harry & Hermione & Ron, Hermione/Ron, Severus Snape & Harry
Rating: M
Chapter Word Count: 4,713
Chapter Count: 3 / 6 | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
Summary: AU: EWE; MoD!Harry. Harry Potter, saviour of magical Britain, has proved himself to be great at dying and coming back again. He’s just not as good at the bits in between coming back and dying again.
Notes: Hermione knows everything ever.
Harry’s not sure what sort of picture they make as they walk into the pub on either side of Ginny like a pair of escorts, but the effect is enough to cause a collective jaw drop as Ginny pulls them up to the table that Ron, Hermione, and a few other have already staked out.
“Ginny?” asks Ron severely. “Who’s your new… friend?” He nods his head at Tom, but his eyes are on Harry, as though Harry might not have noticed that on the other side of his supposed girlfriend stands a rival who is completely out of Harry’s Quidditch league.
“Thomas Mort,” says Tom, smiling and extending a hand for a round of shakes. “Please, call me Tom. I hope I’m not in the way. Ginerva knows that I’ve been at loose ends since landing in Britain, and she was kind enough to invite me along.”
There is really no way to respond to a statement like that other than polite, welcoming greetings, though Ron looks sour, Hermione suspicious, and everyone else curious.
Tom ends up squeezed in by Rolf and Luna, who both give him vague smiles.
“You’re really very beautiful,” says Luna, blinking her huge eyes at Tom. “Could you be part thestral? What do you think, Rolf?”
Hermione looks ready to brain herself on the table, which isn’t much of a surprise, given that she’s seated on Luna’s other side. Her drink is already much lower than it usually is at the beginning of an evening out, and Harry winces internally.
“Merlin,” breathes Rolf. “What an incredible idea!”
Tom clears his throat. “I’m not really sure how to take that,” he says.
“You don’t take it,” says Hermione. “You really, really don’t.” She takes a gulp of her drink. “So how did you meet Ginny, Tom?”
“We’ve been corresponding for work over a number of years,” says Tom, effortlessly displaying his phenomenal lying ability. “But it is wonderful to finally meet in person. And, of course, to have the opportunity to meet Ginerva’s wonderful friends, about whom I’ve heard so much.” His eyes swivel to Harry, and the heat in them makes Harry’s whole face turn red.
Hermione stares at Harry incredulously.
“I’ll go grab us some drinks, shall I?” Harry jumps up from the booth. “Any requests?”
Most of the table seems to have just gotten their drinks, and Hermione wisely seems to be holding off on her next, so they shake their heads, their eyes a little wide as they look back and forth among the newcomers.
“Whatever you’re having,” says Tom, and Harry carefully does not look at him as he nods in agreement.
“Firewhiskey, neat,” says Ginny. “Are you sure, Tom? I’m sure I’ve mentioned, but Harry always goes for butterbeer.”
Tom shrugs easily. “I like sweet things,” is all he says, and Harry feels his eyes burning into his back all the way up to the bar.
Empty mind, calm heart, Harry tries to tell himself as he waits for their drinks, but as improved as his occlumency is, he doubts it’s up to blocking Tom’s legilimency.
The party has expanded again when he returns with the drinks. “Oh, shall I get you something while I’m up?” asks Harry, sliding a butterbeer and a firewhiskey over to Tom and Ginny.
“Oh, no, don’t be silly,” says Ginny, grinning. “You’ll spend the whole night at the bar at this rate. Why don’t I grab the next round, and you can shove in by Tom?”
Screw occlumency. Harry wants Ginny to read his mind so that she knows how awful he thinks she is.
“Nonsense, we’ll get our own drinks,” says Angelina. She turns to George. “And by ‘we,’ I really mean ‘you.’”
George makes a face, but he obligingly stands.
Seeing no other option, Harry sits.
Hermione and Tom are in an enthusiastic debate over which spells are affected by the reclassification guidelines just passed. Seeing that Rolf is looking twitchy at being stuck between them, Harry leans over across Ginny. “Did you decide about the likelihood of thestral ancestry?” he asks, nodding his head at Tom.
Tom hears him, of course, but he’s too embroiled in his argument to be able to spare Harry more than a quick roll of his eyes.
“Probably not very likely, I’m afraid,” says Rolf sadly. “Which does make the resemblance all the more startling.”
Tom’s eyes flash, and Harry grins. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he says sweetly, just to watch Tom twitch.
Luna blinks at him languidly. “Do you really, Harry?”
Harry pushes off his first instinct, which is to dismiss her question off-hand for its obvious absurdity. Luna rarely has any interest in the obvious. Instead, Harry thinks of the encounters he’s had with thestrals, and he gets stuck on the memory of visiting the Hogwarts herd in the Forbidden Forest with Luna all those years ago. The memory carries with it a strange, weighty peace, one that he didn’t recognise properly until he held the Resurrection Stone in his hand. The thestrals looked at him with eyes that saw both sides of the Veil.
Harry studies Tom for a moment. “Yes,” he says again. “Yeah, I do see it.”
Luna and Rolf both smile at him, and Tom pauses his debate long enough to frown at Harry.
“Okay, this is ridiculous,” says Ginny. “You, out.” She gives Harry a little shove. “We’re reordering ourselves.”
When they slide back into place, Tom is seated by Hermione, Harry is seated by Tom, and Luna and Rolf are lined up on Harry’s other side. Ginny has swung around to the other side of the horse-shoe booth to join Ron, Neville, George, and Angelina. She smirks at Harry when she catches his scowl.
Harry turns back to Luna and Rolf, trying to ignore the way his entire right-hand side is burning against Tom. “I don’t think I thanked you for that special issue of the Quibbler, Luna. I haven’t finished it, yet, but it’s rather brilliant. Do you really think Horned Fillibrights are the reason our mooncalf farms are failing?”
Harry is aware that for most of their friends, the Quibbler flows seamlessly from Luna’s owl to the rubbish bin. Harry always makes a point to read every issue, though, and he alone of their friends is a subscriber. At first, he did this out of loyalty to Luna and gratitude to the Quibbler for its willingness to publish his own stories undoctored. Eventually, he began to find genuine enjoyment in reading the magazine, absurd and light-hearted as it was. And then one day, viewing the world through potion-tinted spectacles, he realised that a common class-three Headache Hex, when made visible, looks very nearly identical to illustrations of the Woolly Mandicurst, a magical, hair-pulling creature that, as far as most magizoologists are concerned, exists only in the pages of the Quibbler and other conspiracy tabloids.
And so, years after he’d come to know and love Luna, it finally occurred to him to wonder exactly what her vague, unfocussed eyes can see, and how many of her insane-sounding speculations are due to translation errors.
“Oh, yes,” says Rolf, his eyes bright. “We’re quite sure.”
Luna adds, “They’re all over the pastures. Rolf needs a special potion to see them, though.”
“I’ll bet he does,” mutters Hermione into her drink. Her argument with Tom faded in the reshuffle.
“I do, too,” Harry confesses with a smile. “I use Snorrisson’s Hyggja At formula.”
Hermione and Tom stare at him in surprise.
Rolf is nearly vibrating with excitement. “I’ve heard of that, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on it. It’s supposed to be very finicky to brew.”
“It is a bit,” says Harry. “What do you use?”
“Iriran Oje, mostly,” says Rolf. “It works splendidly, but since it’s taken orally, it’s easy to build up a resistance to it. Not like the Hyggja At, which is applied to an external receptacle. Your glasses?”
“Yeah. So what exactly are the Horned Fillibrights doing to the soil that’s affecting the mooncalves so badly?”
Luna and Rolf’s gentle enthusiasm as they describe their work does a great deal to calm Harry’s high-strung nerves, and he finds himself relaxing back into Tom. When Harry isn’t focussed on the alarming knowledge that Tom Marvolo Riddle is alive and well beside him, Tom’s presence is soothing and familiar, as though Harry has leaned into him hundreds of times before.
Harry frowns when he reaches for his butterbeer and realises that it’s somehow already empty. Tom huffs a laugh and switches Harry’s empty pint with his half-full one. “No need to pout, love,” he says into Harry’s ear, sotto voce.
When Harry looks over to thank him, he catches sight of Hermione’s raised eyebrows and winces.
That’s not a conversation he’s looking forward to having any time soon.
He takes a sip of Tom’s butterbeer meekly and tries to avoid meeting Hermione’s eyes as he turns back to Luna and Rolf.
Luna smiles. “It’s nice to see you two back together again.”
Harry tries not to think too hard about what she might mean by that.
---
“Okay,” says Harry, closing the door to Grimmauld Place and turning to Tom and Ginny. “Now will you tell me about those books?”
“Aren’t we allowed to sit down?” asks Tom.
“Maybe not. It’s past Kreacher’s hours, so there’s no one around to force me to be decent.” Nevertheless, Harry leads them to the sitting room and waves at them to sit.
Ginny laughs. “Oh, we don’t mind a little indecency, do we, Tom?”
Tom smirks, but at Harry’s scowl, he sighs and says, “Straight to business, are we? Very well.”
“I’ve been waiting all night,” snaps Harry. “How is that ‘straight to business’?”
Tom ignores him. “One piece of the collection we’d amassed is a very rare edition of an otherwise mundane necromancy manual. The original of Raising the Dead has been tragically lost to time. What instead fills the shelves of our less-than-scrupulous bookstores is a translation of a translation of a translation, and so on. As I’m sure you can imagine, much of the original content has been lost or rendered incomprehensible in the process, so that the rituals are described in theoretical rather than practical terms.”
“Okay,” says Harry slowly. “That makes sense. And the copy you found was a more accurate translation?”
Tom exchanges a smug smile with Ginny. “A very accurate translation, yes. We believe it to be only one translation removed from the original.”
“And aren’t the rituals described anywhere else? In some other books?”
“See, Harry,” says Ginny, “when the whole of necromancy was classified as Dark about two centuries ago, most of the practical manuals were destroyed. There are books on necromancy floating around in creepy shops catering to the Dark Arts, yes, but those tend to be theoretical, like Tom said. It’s actually very difficult to find a proper How To guide anywhere.”
“Which leads to a lot of people conducting the rituals incorrectly,” Harry muses, “which in turn leads to rampant destruction when the ritual goes wrong, which in turn leads to more evidence that necromancy is purely evil.”
Ginny blinks at him. Tom smiles, his eyes half-lidded.
Harry shakes his head to clear it. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what specific ritual might have attracted any prospective thieves?”
“The book was a treasure trove,” Ginny replies, shrugging. “It could have been any ritual.”
“But it couldn’t have been any thief,” says Tom. He’s leaning back on Harry’s couch, looking comfortable and beautiful and not at all like this was the first time he’d been sat there.
“No,” says Harry. “I already knew that from the lockboxes, but this just adds more wood to the pyre. There’s no way to tell that it’s an unusual translation from the book’s cover, right? So only someone who’d studied the contents of the book in detail would realise that it’s anything other than your standard mistranslation.”
“Mmm, yes,” agreeds Tom.
Ginny frowns. “What do you mean about the lockboxes?”
Harry drums his fingers against the arm of his chair, staring into the flickering flames in his hearth. “It’s not really a secret, I suppose, though it’s not common knowledge even among aurors. And the junior aurors, well, they’re still working out how to levitate kneazles out of trees, so they wouldn’t know. I asked the other senior aurors and Kingsley to keep mum about it for now, given the circumstances.”
“Harry?”
“The different types of lockboxes all have unique charms and runes intended for different purposes. All of them, no matter the type, are extremely difficult to circumvent; it would take an world-class expert weeks to break them all, and even then, there would still be signs of forced entry in the spell.”
Tom raises an eyebrow. “I assume there were no such signs?”
Harry nods absently.
“And so, since the lockboxes were all properly unlocked, the thief must have known the key spell.” Tom’s eyes are heavy on Harry. “Your thief is an auror.”
Harry laughs. “I’m afraid we can whittle it down a little more than that. See, these were a specific type of lockbox. We almost never use them, because they’re so irritating when working in teams or exchanging evidence, and they’re a nightmare when aurors transfer to different departments. Priority 1 lockboxes can only be unlocked by the person who locks them.”
“So you know it was a member of the investigation team.” Tom looks delighted.
Harry quirks a smile. “Yeah. I do.”
---
“I’m not quite sure I follow, darling,” says Lily, the corners of her lips turned up in a smile.
Harry takes a bite of his toast. “You know,” he says. “Some kind of spell that only works when your victim has been… er… seduced.”
James looks like he’s trying not to laugh.
Lily bites her bottom lip. “Harry, my love, have you considered that maybe he simply likes you?”
“Lily, honestly!” says Sirius. “The man is evil! And more importantly, he’s all snakey and gross!”
“No, not anymore,” Harry says, shaking his head. “He’s come back all fit. He could be in one of your old calendars.”
“Ignore what I just said,” says Sirius. “Get it, get it!”
It wouldn’t be like this if they were alive, Harry knows. There would be horror, and anger, and terror. But death brings with it a peace so profound that the fears and pains of life are washed away until all that remains is a person’s most primal self, the pared-down truth of their being.
And so where Harry might have expected yelling and arguments from a living family, his family of shades simply teases him, as though he’s discussing the romantic overtures of a bloke from work rather than the Dark Lord who devastated the nation and brought about all of their deaths.
Dealing with the dead can be so pleasant when compared to dealing with the living.
Harry mock scowls at Sirius, then turns back to Lily. “It’s just, if he’s genuine about this flirting, then why me? He’s rather… well. He could do a lot better than me, I mean. So why me?”
“Oh, Harry,” says Lily. “It’s always been about you. Why would that change after twenty-three years?”
Another conversation with his parents, another statement he doesn’t want to have to examine.
“...Right,” he says, and Lily and James smile at him patiently. Time has no meaning for them, now. They’re happy to wait as long as they need to for him to find his epiphany. “Remus, I’m going to be seeing Teddy today. Shall I pass anything on?”
“Just my love, and his mum’s,” says Remus quietly.
“Alright. Until next time, then.”
With his family gone, Harry rests his hand in his hands and sighs. He thought he had committed himself to trusting Ginny’s judgement when he told her about the aurors’ discovery of the flat, and again when he went to her about the stolen books, but here he is, doubting his decision again. Maybe if he knew why she brought Tom back, and why she was sticking close to him, and why she was encouraging Tom to flirt with Harry… Maybe then, he’d feel less uncertain about everything.
He stands and marches to the door, knowing better than to touch his dishes.
“Kreacher! I’m heading out!”
“And good riddance,” Kreacher shrieks back.
Harry grins.
He’s not grinning when he gets to his office and sees the stack of paperwork that’s piled up overnight, though.
There are summaries upon summaries of interviews with former Death Eaters, and even a list of some relevant reading material offered up. None of the books that have been copied and brought to the ministry are Raising the Dead of any edition.
Well, Harry didn’t entirely expect them to find anything useful, but it’s still a little irritating.
In addition to the summaries, there are magically sealed notes from Senior Auror Bermann.
x -16:00 - No sign of break in routine. Suspect unalarmed.
18:47 - Suspect enters Most Potente Plants.
19:03 - Suspect exits Most Potente Plants with purchase.
19:15 - Suspect enters home.
Not very exciting. According to the appended note, all that was purchased at Most Potente Plants was a Pepper Up Potion.
Harry sighs. Maybe they should have gone with veritaserum. The problem with using truth-extracting potions, though, was that with the sort of training aurors went through, most of the overshare elements induced by the potions could be circumvented. And so, without knowing the precise details needed for yes-no questions, they might very well be unable to learn their suspect’s motivation for the crime, or even who, if anyone, the suspect is working with.
Of course, given the givens, it’s always possible that the suspect had simply wanted a rare book for their collection and has no intention of using it.
Harry turns to his personal correspondence.
Mate, drinks later? - RW
Dear Harry, I hope you’re doing well. Teddy’s been terribly excited to spend the afternoon with his godfather. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but he’s going through a phase in which all his food has to be strawberry-flavoured or he refuses to eat it; fortunately, I was able to convince him that all pink food is made of strawberries, so with a quick colour-changing charm, you should be fine. I’ll see you this evening. - AT
Harry: Appended is the recipe for Iriran Oje. I think you’ll find that the images are much sharper than you’re used to, and the effects last longer. Feel free to come visit the mooncalves. - RS
Love, I’ve started making a list of the more interesting rites I remember from the book we discussed. Ginerva plans to revisit some of the bookstores we patronised in the hopes of finding an inferior translation to use as reference. She’d like to know if you’re free for dinner tonight. - TM
Harry, meet me for lunch at Rushdie’s. Don’t even try to squirm out of it; I know you’re not picking up Teddy until 15:30. - HG
It’s a sad life when an auror’s work mail is less concerning than his personal mail.
---
Snape stares at him in horror. “For your sake, Potter, I hope that I misheard you.”
Harry scowls. “It’s not that weird of a question, is it?” He finishes crushing the lacewings and adds them to the simmering cauldron. He stirs anti-clockwise for three rotations, and then reduces the heat.
“You believe that speculation as to the Dark Lord’s love life is a common interest?”
Harry considers this as he scourifies the mortar and pestle and begins to crush the asp eyes. “Well…” he says. “I mean, yeah, probably. There’re probably medical journals wondering if his failed love life is what prompted him to be evil. Or, if the reverse, that his over-active sex drive is what prompted him to be evil. And that’s not even bringing up the Witch Weekly articles, which I suspect have completely exhausted every possible avenue of speculation on the topic.”
“If this is truly the case,” Snape sneers. “Then I suggest you turn to those sources for your answers.”
“But I don’t want to know what people think, I want to know the truth!” Harry protests.
Snape rolls his eyes. “I can hardly provide you with that, Potter. To my knowledge, the Dark Lord had no romantic liaisons when I first served him. On his return, there were… clues that he may have been involved physically with Bellatrix, though I can’t say for certain.”
“Ew,” says Harry.
“Yes, quite,” says Snape. “And I have no idea what relationships he may or may not have had before I left Hogwarts.”
Harry hums and adds the asp eyes to the potion.
“Unbelievable as it may be, you seem to have that potion under control,” Snape comments. “Why have you called me here?”
Harry blinks at him, surprised. “Oh, I didn’t need your help with the potion. It’s plenty easy enough even for me. I just wanted the company.”
Snape sighs, but Harry thinks he maybe looks a little pleased, too.
“If you must,” is all his old professor says, which is really as good as permission to call him whenever Harry feels like it.
“I must,” Harry agrees cheerfully.
---
When lunch time comes around, Harry marches off to Rushdie’s with the air of someone heading toward their execution.
He wanders through the buffet and settles in a quiet corner. The food grows more appetising the longer he looks at it, and he’s just contemplating starting alone when Hermione arrives.
“Harry,” she says, setting down her tray and plopping down in the seat across from him. With a flick of her wand, a subtle silencing charm springs to life around them. “It seems we have a lot to catch up on.”
Harry scowls. “Before you start in on me, the whole Tom thing is new to me, too.”
“Oh? And how new is the Resurrection Stone thing?”
Harry freezes.
Hermione sighs and shakes her head. “I know it’s different for you, that the chance to reunite with our lost family and friends is much deeper for you than it is for me. But Harry, don’t you see that that only makes it that much more dangerous for you? Cadmus Peverell—”
“I’m not Cadmus,” Harry interrupts. “It’s completely fine. I’m completely fine.”
“Harry, you’re obviously not! You’ve become so withdrawn!” Hermione protests. “You never seem to talk to us anymore, and you seem to have a great deal going on that you haven’t been mentioning.”
Harry clenches his fists. “Like what, exactly?”
“Well, Ron mentioned that you’re apparently an expert on necromancy now.”
“And you don’t think that’s related to the fact that I have access to one of the most powerful tools of necromancy ever created?” Harry rolls his eyes. “Besides, ‘expert’ is going a little far. And I’m surprised that you would chastise me for pursuing an academic interest, Hermione.”
Hermione stares him down. “I’m not chastising you over your interest, Harry. I agree that it’s a fascinating topic.”
Harry relaxes slightly. “So?”
“It just seems strange that you wouldn’t ever bring it up around us, since your interest has gone so far.” She eyes him. “And how academic is it really? I can’t help but notice that Voldemort seems to be back again. Though I admit this one is much more tolerable so far, not that it’s a high bar to cross.”
“Ah,” Harry winces. “Well, that wasn’t anything to do with me. And as I said, I just found out about him, too.”
It’s rather offensive how disbelieving Hermione looks.
“It wasn’t me!”
“Well, it will be if he starts trying to take over the world again, anyway,” says Hermione mercilessly. “But that’s just another piece of extremely dangerous information that you seem to have been hiding from us. It’s one thing to turn to the dead for support in moments of extreme need, but it’s getting to the point where you’re refusing to have any living confidant, even to just let us know to be on our guard about the returning doom!”
Harry looks away, unable to hold her gaze any longer.
Hermione takes a shaky breath. “And I know, maybe things are different now that we’re older—maybe it seems… uncomfortable to confide in Ron and me now that we’re a couple. But you’ve been growing apart from Ginny, too. Don’t you think she deserves to know that her ‘friend’ is the Dark Lord reborn?”
Harry barks out a laugh. “Oh, she knows, believe me.”
“She does?”
Finally, something Hermione hasn’t figured out yet!
“Oh, yeah. She’s the one who brought him back, not me.”
Hermione seems stunned. “But that’s…”
“Oh yeah. No, before you ask: I still have no idea why. But I trust her, even not knowing her reasons. I trust that whoever it is that she’s brought back, he’s not the same person as the one I killed.” Harry finally turns to his food. “And us growing apart has nothing to do with the Stone, by the way. We were fine for years after I reclaimed the Stone. It’s only recently that Ginny and I started having… problems, I guess you’d say.”
“Years? You’ve had the Stone for that long?” Hermione frowns. “I honestly thought you’d only gotten it in the past few months, or a half year at most. That’s when I noticed you had started… I don’t know. Fading.”
Harry grins. “No, I picked it up four years ago,” he admits.
“And Ginny? When did that start?”
“I’m not really sure,” Harry shrugs. “We were both so distracted by work that we weren’t really seeing one another, and then it felt like when we did see one another, we were really just friends. It was like that for… two, three months? And then a week or two ago, we ended it officially.”
Hermione seems troubled. “You’ve been having trouble for that long? Does that mean… I mean, is it really, properly over? You won’t be getting together again?”
“Yes, we’re really, properly over. We’re not really looking for the same things, it turns out.” Harry gulps down his tea, which has gone tepid while he was distracted with the conversation. He tries not to think about how he’d been thinking of proposing to Ginny as recently as the afternoon before they broke up, not because he wanted to marry her, exactly, but because he wanted to be married, and she seemed like the best candidate at the time.
“I see,” she says. “And when did you find out about ‘Tom’?”
“Just after our official breakup. I only met him yesterday, though.”
Hermione leans back in her chair, scowling at nothing. “It’s not just me, right? None of this makes any sense. Why would Ginny bring him back? Why would he bother trying to form new connections with muggleborns, half bloods, and blood traitors when he could start riling up the old crowd again? What’s the goal, here?”
“I haven’t been able to figure it out, either,” says Harry. “Ginny doesn’t seem to be under the influence of any spells or potions that I’ve been able to see. For some reason, she decided, while in full possession of her mental faculties, that this was a good course of action. I figured I’d at least give her the benefit of the doubt.”
Hermione bites her lip and nods hesitantly. “Alright. I’m not happy about this, but I’ll wait for more information before I do anything. Just one more question for now, then.”
Harry huffs. “Are you sure you’ll be able to contain yourself?”
Hermione makes a face at him and asks, “‘Thomas Mort’? Really? Is he trying to get caught?”
“Right?” Harry laughs. “It’s insane!”
Harry doesn’t know why he thought this would go poorly. Once there was a time when he’d known Hermione to be as solid as a pillar, as dependable as the sun. And here she is, proving herself unchanged in that way.
So the difference was him.
When had he lost that confidence in her, and why? Was it really due to over-reliance on the Resurrection Stone? Or had his self-distancing been born earlier, back when he was curled in on himself, hiding away in a muggle flat, only feeling safe when no one around him knew his name? He had left the flat behind, but perhaps not as completely as he’d believed.
“‘Mione,” he says. “You’re maybe right. Maybe I’ve been turtling a little too much, and I didn’t even notice. I’ve seen Ginny more often in the past two weeks than I had in months, and it’s been lovely. And talking to you now… I…”
Hermione reaches over to take his hand. “I know how that feels. Thank you for letting me pull you out.”
Harry squeezes her hand gently, feeling his heart swell. “Not really sure I had a choice,” he shrugs, “but no worries, I suppose.”
Hermione shoves him, laughing.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/Characters: Tomarry, brief!Harry/Ginny, Harry & Ginny, Ginny & Tom, Harry & Hermione & Ron, Hermione/Ron, Severus Snape & Harry
Rating: M
Chapter Word Count: 4,713
Chapter Count: 3 / 6 | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
Summary: AU: EWE; MoD!Harry. Harry Potter, saviour of magical Britain, has proved himself to be great at dying and coming back again. He’s just not as good at the bits in between coming back and dying again.
Notes: Hermione knows everything ever.
Harry’s not sure what sort of picture they make as they walk into the pub on either side of Ginny like a pair of escorts, but the effect is enough to cause a collective jaw drop as Ginny pulls them up to the table that Ron, Hermione, and a few other have already staked out.
“Ginny?” asks Ron severely. “Who’s your new… friend?” He nods his head at Tom, but his eyes are on Harry, as though Harry might not have noticed that on the other side of his supposed girlfriend stands a rival who is completely out of Harry’s Quidditch league.
“Thomas Mort,” says Tom, smiling and extending a hand for a round of shakes. “Please, call me Tom. I hope I’m not in the way. Ginerva knows that I’ve been at loose ends since landing in Britain, and she was kind enough to invite me along.”
There is really no way to respond to a statement like that other than polite, welcoming greetings, though Ron looks sour, Hermione suspicious, and everyone else curious.
Tom ends up squeezed in by Rolf and Luna, who both give him vague smiles.
“You’re really very beautiful,” says Luna, blinking her huge eyes at Tom. “Could you be part thestral? What do you think, Rolf?”
Hermione looks ready to brain herself on the table, which isn’t much of a surprise, given that she’s seated on Luna’s other side. Her drink is already much lower than it usually is at the beginning of an evening out, and Harry winces internally.
“Merlin,” breathes Rolf. “What an incredible idea!”
Tom clears his throat. “I’m not really sure how to take that,” he says.
“You don’t take it,” says Hermione. “You really, really don’t.” She takes a gulp of her drink. “So how did you meet Ginny, Tom?”
“We’ve been corresponding for work over a number of years,” says Tom, effortlessly displaying his phenomenal lying ability. “But it is wonderful to finally meet in person. And, of course, to have the opportunity to meet Ginerva’s wonderful friends, about whom I’ve heard so much.” His eyes swivel to Harry, and the heat in them makes Harry’s whole face turn red.
Hermione stares at Harry incredulously.
“I’ll go grab us some drinks, shall I?” Harry jumps up from the booth. “Any requests?”
Most of the table seems to have just gotten their drinks, and Hermione wisely seems to be holding off on her next, so they shake their heads, their eyes a little wide as they look back and forth among the newcomers.
“Whatever you’re having,” says Tom, and Harry carefully does not look at him as he nods in agreement.
“Firewhiskey, neat,” says Ginny. “Are you sure, Tom? I’m sure I’ve mentioned, but Harry always goes for butterbeer.”
Tom shrugs easily. “I like sweet things,” is all he says, and Harry feels his eyes burning into his back all the way up to the bar.
Empty mind, calm heart, Harry tries to tell himself as he waits for their drinks, but as improved as his occlumency is, he doubts it’s up to blocking Tom’s legilimency.
The party has expanded again when he returns with the drinks. “Oh, shall I get you something while I’m up?” asks Harry, sliding a butterbeer and a firewhiskey over to Tom and Ginny.
“Oh, no, don’t be silly,” says Ginny, grinning. “You’ll spend the whole night at the bar at this rate. Why don’t I grab the next round, and you can shove in by Tom?”
Screw occlumency. Harry wants Ginny to read his mind so that she knows how awful he thinks she is.
“Nonsense, we’ll get our own drinks,” says Angelina. She turns to George. “And by ‘we,’ I really mean ‘you.’”
George makes a face, but he obligingly stands.
Seeing no other option, Harry sits.
Hermione and Tom are in an enthusiastic debate over which spells are affected by the reclassification guidelines just passed. Seeing that Rolf is looking twitchy at being stuck between them, Harry leans over across Ginny. “Did you decide about the likelihood of thestral ancestry?” he asks, nodding his head at Tom.
Tom hears him, of course, but he’s too embroiled in his argument to be able to spare Harry more than a quick roll of his eyes.
“Probably not very likely, I’m afraid,” says Rolf sadly. “Which does make the resemblance all the more startling.”
Tom’s eyes flash, and Harry grins. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he says sweetly, just to watch Tom twitch.
Luna blinks at him languidly. “Do you really, Harry?”
Harry pushes off his first instinct, which is to dismiss her question off-hand for its obvious absurdity. Luna rarely has any interest in the obvious. Instead, Harry thinks of the encounters he’s had with thestrals, and he gets stuck on the memory of visiting the Hogwarts herd in the Forbidden Forest with Luna all those years ago. The memory carries with it a strange, weighty peace, one that he didn’t recognise properly until he held the Resurrection Stone in his hand. The thestrals looked at him with eyes that saw both sides of the Veil.
Harry studies Tom for a moment. “Yes,” he says again. “Yeah, I do see it.”
Luna and Rolf both smile at him, and Tom pauses his debate long enough to frown at Harry.
“Okay, this is ridiculous,” says Ginny. “You, out.” She gives Harry a little shove. “We’re reordering ourselves.”
When they slide back into place, Tom is seated by Hermione, Harry is seated by Tom, and Luna and Rolf are lined up on Harry’s other side. Ginny has swung around to the other side of the horse-shoe booth to join Ron, Neville, George, and Angelina. She smirks at Harry when she catches his scowl.
Harry turns back to Luna and Rolf, trying to ignore the way his entire right-hand side is burning against Tom. “I don’t think I thanked you for that special issue of the Quibbler, Luna. I haven’t finished it, yet, but it’s rather brilliant. Do you really think Horned Fillibrights are the reason our mooncalf farms are failing?”
Harry is aware that for most of their friends, the Quibbler flows seamlessly from Luna’s owl to the rubbish bin. Harry always makes a point to read every issue, though, and he alone of their friends is a subscriber. At first, he did this out of loyalty to Luna and gratitude to the Quibbler for its willingness to publish his own stories undoctored. Eventually, he began to find genuine enjoyment in reading the magazine, absurd and light-hearted as it was. And then one day, viewing the world through potion-tinted spectacles, he realised that a common class-three Headache Hex, when made visible, looks very nearly identical to illustrations of the Woolly Mandicurst, a magical, hair-pulling creature that, as far as most magizoologists are concerned, exists only in the pages of the Quibbler and other conspiracy tabloids.
And so, years after he’d come to know and love Luna, it finally occurred to him to wonder exactly what her vague, unfocussed eyes can see, and how many of her insane-sounding speculations are due to translation errors.
“Oh, yes,” says Rolf, his eyes bright. “We’re quite sure.”
Luna adds, “They’re all over the pastures. Rolf needs a special potion to see them, though.”
“I’ll bet he does,” mutters Hermione into her drink. Her argument with Tom faded in the reshuffle.
“I do, too,” Harry confesses with a smile. “I use Snorrisson’s Hyggja At formula.”
Hermione and Tom stare at him in surprise.
Rolf is nearly vibrating with excitement. “I’ve heard of that, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on it. It’s supposed to be very finicky to brew.”
“It is a bit,” says Harry. “What do you use?”
“Iriran Oje, mostly,” says Rolf. “It works splendidly, but since it’s taken orally, it’s easy to build up a resistance to it. Not like the Hyggja At, which is applied to an external receptacle. Your glasses?”
“Yeah. So what exactly are the Horned Fillibrights doing to the soil that’s affecting the mooncalves so badly?”
Luna and Rolf’s gentle enthusiasm as they describe their work does a great deal to calm Harry’s high-strung nerves, and he finds himself relaxing back into Tom. When Harry isn’t focussed on the alarming knowledge that Tom Marvolo Riddle is alive and well beside him, Tom’s presence is soothing and familiar, as though Harry has leaned into him hundreds of times before.
Harry frowns when he reaches for his butterbeer and realises that it’s somehow already empty. Tom huffs a laugh and switches Harry’s empty pint with his half-full one. “No need to pout, love,” he says into Harry’s ear, sotto voce.
When Harry looks over to thank him, he catches sight of Hermione’s raised eyebrows and winces.
That’s not a conversation he’s looking forward to having any time soon.
He takes a sip of Tom’s butterbeer meekly and tries to avoid meeting Hermione’s eyes as he turns back to Luna and Rolf.
Luna smiles. “It’s nice to see you two back together again.”
Harry tries not to think too hard about what she might mean by that.
“Okay,” says Harry, closing the door to Grimmauld Place and turning to Tom and Ginny. “Now will you tell me about those books?”
“Aren’t we allowed to sit down?” asks Tom.
“Maybe not. It’s past Kreacher’s hours, so there’s no one around to force me to be decent.” Nevertheless, Harry leads them to the sitting room and waves at them to sit.
Ginny laughs. “Oh, we don’t mind a little indecency, do we, Tom?”
Tom smirks, but at Harry’s scowl, he sighs and says, “Straight to business, are we? Very well.”
“I’ve been waiting all night,” snaps Harry. “How is that ‘straight to business’?”
Tom ignores him. “One piece of the collection we’d amassed is a very rare edition of an otherwise mundane necromancy manual. The original of Raising the Dead has been tragically lost to time. What instead fills the shelves of our less-than-scrupulous bookstores is a translation of a translation of a translation, and so on. As I’m sure you can imagine, much of the original content has been lost or rendered incomprehensible in the process, so that the rituals are described in theoretical rather than practical terms.”
“Okay,” says Harry slowly. “That makes sense. And the copy you found was a more accurate translation?”
Tom exchanges a smug smile with Ginny. “A very accurate translation, yes. We believe it to be only one translation removed from the original.”
“And aren’t the rituals described anywhere else? In some other books?”
“See, Harry,” says Ginny, “when the whole of necromancy was classified as Dark about two centuries ago, most of the practical manuals were destroyed. There are books on necromancy floating around in creepy shops catering to the Dark Arts, yes, but those tend to be theoretical, like Tom said. It’s actually very difficult to find a proper How To guide anywhere.”
“Which leads to a lot of people conducting the rituals incorrectly,” Harry muses, “which in turn leads to rampant destruction when the ritual goes wrong, which in turn leads to more evidence that necromancy is purely evil.”
Ginny blinks at him. Tom smiles, his eyes half-lidded.
Harry shakes his head to clear it. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what specific ritual might have attracted any prospective thieves?”
“The book was a treasure trove,” Ginny replies, shrugging. “It could have been any ritual.”
“But it couldn’t have been any thief,” says Tom. He’s leaning back on Harry’s couch, looking comfortable and beautiful and not at all like this was the first time he’d been sat there.
“No,” says Harry. “I already knew that from the lockboxes, but this just adds more wood to the pyre. There’s no way to tell that it’s an unusual translation from the book’s cover, right? So only someone who’d studied the contents of the book in detail would realise that it’s anything other than your standard mistranslation.”
“Mmm, yes,” agreeds Tom.
Ginny frowns. “What do you mean about the lockboxes?”
Harry drums his fingers against the arm of his chair, staring into the flickering flames in his hearth. “It’s not really a secret, I suppose, though it’s not common knowledge even among aurors. And the junior aurors, well, they’re still working out how to levitate kneazles out of trees, so they wouldn’t know. I asked the other senior aurors and Kingsley to keep mum about it for now, given the circumstances.”
“Harry?”
“The different types of lockboxes all have unique charms and runes intended for different purposes. All of them, no matter the type, are extremely difficult to circumvent; it would take an world-class expert weeks to break them all, and even then, there would still be signs of forced entry in the spell.”
Tom raises an eyebrow. “I assume there were no such signs?”
Harry nods absently.
“And so, since the lockboxes were all properly unlocked, the thief must have known the key spell.” Tom’s eyes are heavy on Harry. “Your thief is an auror.”
Harry laughs. “I’m afraid we can whittle it down a little more than that. See, these were a specific type of lockbox. We almost never use them, because they’re so irritating when working in teams or exchanging evidence, and they’re a nightmare when aurors transfer to different departments. Priority 1 lockboxes can only be unlocked by the person who locks them.”
“So you know it was a member of the investigation team.” Tom looks delighted.
Harry quirks a smile. “Yeah. I do.”
“I’m not quite sure I follow, darling,” says Lily, the corners of her lips turned up in a smile.
Harry takes a bite of his toast. “You know,” he says. “Some kind of spell that only works when your victim has been… er… seduced.”
James looks like he’s trying not to laugh.
Lily bites her bottom lip. “Harry, my love, have you considered that maybe he simply likes you?”
“Lily, honestly!” says Sirius. “The man is evil! And more importantly, he’s all snakey and gross!”
“No, not anymore,” Harry says, shaking his head. “He’s come back all fit. He could be in one of your old calendars.”
“Ignore what I just said,” says Sirius. “Get it, get it!”
It wouldn’t be like this if they were alive, Harry knows. There would be horror, and anger, and terror. But death brings with it a peace so profound that the fears and pains of life are washed away until all that remains is a person’s most primal self, the pared-down truth of their being.
And so where Harry might have expected yelling and arguments from a living family, his family of shades simply teases him, as though he’s discussing the romantic overtures of a bloke from work rather than the Dark Lord who devastated the nation and brought about all of their deaths.
Dealing with the dead can be so pleasant when compared to dealing with the living.
Harry mock scowls at Sirius, then turns back to Lily. “It’s just, if he’s genuine about this flirting, then why me? He’s rather… well. He could do a lot better than me, I mean. So why me?”
“Oh, Harry,” says Lily. “It’s always been about you. Why would that change after twenty-three years?”
Another conversation with his parents, another statement he doesn’t want to have to examine.
“...Right,” he says, and Lily and James smile at him patiently. Time has no meaning for them, now. They’re happy to wait as long as they need to for him to find his epiphany. “Remus, I’m going to be seeing Teddy today. Shall I pass anything on?”
“Just my love, and his mum’s,” says Remus quietly.
“Alright. Until next time, then.”
With his family gone, Harry rests his hand in his hands and sighs. He thought he had committed himself to trusting Ginny’s judgement when he told her about the aurors’ discovery of the flat, and again when he went to her about the stolen books, but here he is, doubting his decision again. Maybe if he knew why she brought Tom back, and why she was sticking close to him, and why she was encouraging Tom to flirt with Harry… Maybe then, he’d feel less uncertain about everything.
He stands and marches to the door, knowing better than to touch his dishes.
“Kreacher! I’m heading out!”
“And good riddance,” Kreacher shrieks back.
Harry grins.
He’s not grinning when he gets to his office and sees the stack of paperwork that’s piled up overnight, though.
There are summaries upon summaries of interviews with former Death Eaters, and even a list of some relevant reading material offered up. None of the books that have been copied and brought to the ministry are Raising the Dead of any edition.
Well, Harry didn’t entirely expect them to find anything useful, but it’s still a little irritating.
In addition to the summaries, there are magically sealed notes from Senior Auror Bermann.
x -16:00 - No sign of break in routine. Suspect unalarmed.
18:47 - Suspect enters Most Potente Plants.
19:03 - Suspect exits Most Potente Plants with purchase.
19:15 - Suspect enters home.
Not very exciting. According to the appended note, all that was purchased at Most Potente Plants was a Pepper Up Potion.
Harry sighs. Maybe they should have gone with veritaserum. The problem with using truth-extracting potions, though, was that with the sort of training aurors went through, most of the overshare elements induced by the potions could be circumvented. And so, without knowing the precise details needed for yes-no questions, they might very well be unable to learn their suspect’s motivation for the crime, or even who, if anyone, the suspect is working with.
Of course, given the givens, it’s always possible that the suspect had simply wanted a rare book for their collection and has no intention of using it.
Harry turns to his personal correspondence.
Mate, drinks later? - RW
Dear Harry, I hope you’re doing well. Teddy’s been terribly excited to spend the afternoon with his godfather. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but he’s going through a phase in which all his food has to be strawberry-flavoured or he refuses to eat it; fortunately, I was able to convince him that all pink food is made of strawberries, so with a quick colour-changing charm, you should be fine. I’ll see you this evening. - AT
Harry: Appended is the recipe for Iriran Oje. I think you’ll find that the images are much sharper than you’re used to, and the effects last longer. Feel free to come visit the mooncalves. - RS
Love, I’ve started making a list of the more interesting rites I remember from the book we discussed. Ginerva plans to revisit some of the bookstores we patronised in the hopes of finding an inferior translation to use as reference. She’d like to know if you’re free for dinner tonight. - TM
Harry, meet me for lunch at Rushdie’s. Don’t even try to squirm out of it; I know you’re not picking up Teddy until 15:30. - HG
It’s a sad life when an auror’s work mail is less concerning than his personal mail.
Snape stares at him in horror. “For your sake, Potter, I hope that I misheard you.”
Harry scowls. “It’s not that weird of a question, is it?” He finishes crushing the lacewings and adds them to the simmering cauldron. He stirs anti-clockwise for three rotations, and then reduces the heat.
“You believe that speculation as to the Dark Lord’s love life is a common interest?”
Harry considers this as he scourifies the mortar and pestle and begins to crush the asp eyes. “Well…” he says. “I mean, yeah, probably. There’re probably medical journals wondering if his failed love life is what prompted him to be evil. Or, if the reverse, that his over-active sex drive is what prompted him to be evil. And that’s not even bringing up the Witch Weekly articles, which I suspect have completely exhausted every possible avenue of speculation on the topic.”
“If this is truly the case,” Snape sneers. “Then I suggest you turn to those sources for your answers.”
“But I don’t want to know what people think, I want to know the truth!” Harry protests.
Snape rolls his eyes. “I can hardly provide you with that, Potter. To my knowledge, the Dark Lord had no romantic liaisons when I first served him. On his return, there were… clues that he may have been involved physically with Bellatrix, though I can’t say for certain.”
“Ew,” says Harry.
“Yes, quite,” says Snape. “And I have no idea what relationships he may or may not have had before I left Hogwarts.”
Harry hums and adds the asp eyes to the potion.
“Unbelievable as it may be, you seem to have that potion under control,” Snape comments. “Why have you called me here?”
Harry blinks at him, surprised. “Oh, I didn’t need your help with the potion. It’s plenty easy enough even for me. I just wanted the company.”
Snape sighs, but Harry thinks he maybe looks a little pleased, too.
“If you must,” is all his old professor says, which is really as good as permission to call him whenever Harry feels like it.
“I must,” Harry agrees cheerfully.
When lunch time comes around, Harry marches off to Rushdie’s with the air of someone heading toward their execution.
He wanders through the buffet and settles in a quiet corner. The food grows more appetising the longer he looks at it, and he’s just contemplating starting alone when Hermione arrives.
“Harry,” she says, setting down her tray and plopping down in the seat across from him. With a flick of her wand, a subtle silencing charm springs to life around them. “It seems we have a lot to catch up on.”
Harry scowls. “Before you start in on me, the whole Tom thing is new to me, too.”
“Oh? And how new is the Resurrection Stone thing?”
Harry freezes.
Hermione sighs and shakes her head. “I know it’s different for you, that the chance to reunite with our lost family and friends is much deeper for you than it is for me. But Harry, don’t you see that that only makes it that much more dangerous for you? Cadmus Peverell—”
“I’m not Cadmus,” Harry interrupts. “It’s completely fine. I’m completely fine.”
“Harry, you’re obviously not! You’ve become so withdrawn!” Hermione protests. “You never seem to talk to us anymore, and you seem to have a great deal going on that you haven’t been mentioning.”
Harry clenches his fists. “Like what, exactly?”
“Well, Ron mentioned that you’re apparently an expert on necromancy now.”
“And you don’t think that’s related to the fact that I have access to one of the most powerful tools of necromancy ever created?” Harry rolls his eyes. “Besides, ‘expert’ is going a little far. And I’m surprised that you would chastise me for pursuing an academic interest, Hermione.”
Hermione stares him down. “I’m not chastising you over your interest, Harry. I agree that it’s a fascinating topic.”
Harry relaxes slightly. “So?”
“It just seems strange that you wouldn’t ever bring it up around us, since your interest has gone so far.” She eyes him. “And how academic is it really? I can’t help but notice that Voldemort seems to be back again. Though I admit this one is much more tolerable so far, not that it’s a high bar to cross.”
“Ah,” Harry winces. “Well, that wasn’t anything to do with me. And as I said, I just found out about him, too.”
It’s rather offensive how disbelieving Hermione looks.
“It wasn’t me!”
“Well, it will be if he starts trying to take over the world again, anyway,” says Hermione mercilessly. “But that’s just another piece of extremely dangerous information that you seem to have been hiding from us. It’s one thing to turn to the dead for support in moments of extreme need, but it’s getting to the point where you’re refusing to have any living confidant, even to just let us know to be on our guard about the returning doom!”
Harry looks away, unable to hold her gaze any longer.
Hermione takes a shaky breath. “And I know, maybe things are different now that we’re older—maybe it seems… uncomfortable to confide in Ron and me now that we’re a couple. But you’ve been growing apart from Ginny, too. Don’t you think she deserves to know that her ‘friend’ is the Dark Lord reborn?”
Harry barks out a laugh. “Oh, she knows, believe me.”
“She does?”
Finally, something Hermione hasn’t figured out yet!
“Oh, yeah. She’s the one who brought him back, not me.”
Hermione seems stunned. “But that’s…”
“Oh yeah. No, before you ask: I still have no idea why. But I trust her, even not knowing her reasons. I trust that whoever it is that she’s brought back, he’s not the same person as the one I killed.” Harry finally turns to his food. “And us growing apart has nothing to do with the Stone, by the way. We were fine for years after I reclaimed the Stone. It’s only recently that Ginny and I started having… problems, I guess you’d say.”
“Years? You’ve had the Stone for that long?” Hermione frowns. “I honestly thought you’d only gotten it in the past few months, or a half year at most. That’s when I noticed you had started… I don’t know. Fading.”
Harry grins. “No, I picked it up four years ago,” he admits.
“And Ginny? When did that start?”
“I’m not really sure,” Harry shrugs. “We were both so distracted by work that we weren’t really seeing one another, and then it felt like when we did see one another, we were really just friends. It was like that for… two, three months? And then a week or two ago, we ended it officially.”
Hermione seems troubled. “You’ve been having trouble for that long? Does that mean… I mean, is it really, properly over? You won’t be getting together again?”
“Yes, we’re really, properly over. We’re not really looking for the same things, it turns out.” Harry gulps down his tea, which has gone tepid while he was distracted with the conversation. He tries not to think about how he’d been thinking of proposing to Ginny as recently as the afternoon before they broke up, not because he wanted to marry her, exactly, but because he wanted to be married, and she seemed like the best candidate at the time.
“I see,” she says. “And when did you find out about ‘Tom’?”
“Just after our official breakup. I only met him yesterday, though.”
Hermione leans back in her chair, scowling at nothing. “It’s not just me, right? None of this makes any sense. Why would Ginny bring him back? Why would he bother trying to form new connections with muggleborns, half bloods, and blood traitors when he could start riling up the old crowd again? What’s the goal, here?”
“I haven’t been able to figure it out, either,” says Harry. “Ginny doesn’t seem to be under the influence of any spells or potions that I’ve been able to see. For some reason, she decided, while in full possession of her mental faculties, that this was a good course of action. I figured I’d at least give her the benefit of the doubt.”
Hermione bites her lip and nods hesitantly. “Alright. I’m not happy about this, but I’ll wait for more information before I do anything. Just one more question for now, then.”
Harry huffs. “Are you sure you’ll be able to contain yourself?”
Hermione makes a face at him and asks, “‘Thomas Mort’? Really? Is he trying to get caught?”
“Right?” Harry laughs. “It’s insane!”
Harry doesn’t know why he thought this would go poorly. Once there was a time when he’d known Hermione to be as solid as a pillar, as dependable as the sun. And here she is, proving herself unchanged in that way.
So the difference was him.
When had he lost that confidence in her, and why? Was it really due to over-reliance on the Resurrection Stone? Or had his self-distancing been born earlier, back when he was curled in on himself, hiding away in a muggle flat, only feeling safe when no one around him knew his name? He had left the flat behind, but perhaps not as completely as he’d believed.
“‘Mione,” he says. “You’re maybe right. Maybe I’ve been turtling a little too much, and I didn’t even notice. I’ve seen Ginny more often in the past two weeks than I had in months, and it’s been lovely. And talking to you now… I…”
Hermione reaches over to take his hand. “I know how that feels. Thank you for letting me pull you out.”
Harry squeezes her hand gently, feeling his heart swell. “Not really sure I had a choice,” he shrugs, “but no worries, I suppose.”
Hermione shoves him, laughing.