─┼─╫─┼─╫─┼─ MUSIC FROM A FARTHER ROOM ─┼─╫─┼─╫─┼─
"For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?"
"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
— Two excerpts from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot
Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling. I do not own any rights to Harry Potter, but nor am I making any money off this. If anything I'm actually losing money.
Sequel Warning: THIS IS A SEQUEL! Since I have developed an alternate history for this series, nothing is going to make a lick of sense unless you have read "Without Thorn the Rose". Also, I will be referring liberally to events from the last story without necessarily reminding you of what is being referred to, so you might want to refresh yourself even if you have read it.
Slash Warning: This is primarily a drama, mystery, fantasy, and adventure story, but my intention is to have romance between Harry and young Tom Riddle be a portion of the story in future sequels. It will NOT happen in this story because Harry is eleven to twelve. There might be some minor slash involving other characters in this story.
More notes at the bottom.
1. THE HUNTER
"Not that one," Harry said gruffly, seizing the arm of the boy next to him without looking up from the rare Bestiary that he was poring over.
They were in the back room of Obscurus Books, a used bookstore that Harry favoured because the owner was too busy to scrutinize closely the books that he acquired. Harry had been studiously ignoring the other boy, whilst secretly keeping watch over him from the corner of his eye. This was a skill that Harry was practicing, and presently he had seen the boy slip a slim volume down the back of his trousers.
Turning to look at the other boy in the face for the first time, Harry explained, "You don't want to nick that one, it's got—"
Harry broke off with a slight widening of his eyes as he saw the other boy's face. The sight before him was so mesmerizing that for some moments he was deaf to the other's words. If Harry had been in the midst of some enchanted garden, he might have been prepared to meet such an ethereal creature. Finding this individual in the back room of a grubby little shop at the cut-rate end of Diagon Alley was—unexpected, to say the least. Distantly, he perceived that the boy was struggling to free his arm from Harry's magically enhanced grip.
"Sorry," Harry muttered, releasing the boy, who backed away defensively and rubbed his arm. "You're just so…" He could not finish this miserable sentence.
Beautiful. Harry put the word to it, in his own thoughts, at least. The other boy was extraordinarily beautiful. His features might have been porcelain, so fine and well-shaped were they, and so smooth and pale was his skin. His lips were full and pink as blossoms, and his eyes as grey as pewter. His hair was so blonde it was nearly white, and it fell to his shoulders. Here, the impression of perfection ended abruptly, for the boy's hair was tangled and dirty.
Harry's eyes drifted downward, drinking in the whole picture. The boy wore a short, open robe of the sort that the wizarding youth favoured in those days, but though the cut of it was ordinary, not unlike a muggle jacket, the material was bizarre. It appeared to have been crocheted out of yarn by someone whose eyesight was failing, for there were various mistakes scattered throughout the pattern, and the bottom half was bright fuchsia, while the top half was mauve. Underneath this, the boy wore a muggle t-shirt which had once sported some sort of logo, now unintelligible, and a pair of muggle jeans with rips over the knees and mud splatters on the shins.
At the boy's feet was another startling contrast, as if to bookend the peculiarity. The boy's shoes, although they were very nearly obscured with a layer of dried mud, appeared to Harry's keen eyes to be made of dragon leather, making them worth their weight in gold. Were it not for that observation, Harry would have supposed the boy to be rather impoverished. With it, he did not know what to make of the boy.
"Stop staring, you wanker!" the boy snapped, blushing colourfully, and raking his dirty hair over the side of his face as if attempting to hide it.
Harry was not unsympathetic to the impulse, as he conducted his examination from behind the shade of his own deliberately overgrown fringe, which he had, as usual, glued to his forehead, so that it would hide his scar even if a wind disturbed it.
The boy seemed to grow more and more anxious the longer Harry simply looked at him, and shortly began edge around Harry towards the front room and the exit. Abruptly, Harry remembered why he had stopped the other in the first place.
"Just wait a minute, I want to talk," Harry said, moving sideways to block the exit. The boy reared back as though Harry were some species of poisonous snake, and Harry wondered a bit guiltily if this boy wasn't rather accustomed to being harassed in the back rooms of shops.
The boy's lovely grey eyes darkened like storm clouds moving across the sun. "Talk? I'll talk. If you show me your hands," he demanded, in a tone that betrayed both anger and fear.
Harry raised his empty hands in a placating gesture. He even smiled. "See? No wand."
The blonde's eyes flashed. "Take off your gloves, then."
Harry's face froze, and his heart hitched a little in his chest.
"Leave the bandage on," James had said, as they left the hospital, and Harry had understood the need to cover his hand without any need of explanation. He understood, perfectly, why someone in James' position couldn't be seen to let his son possess any instrument for breaking the law by doing magic outside of school. So there was no need to say anything about the pair of grey wool gloves that Harry found on the foot of his bed the next day. And yet James did.
"I just don't want any ugly rumours getting started," James continued uneasily. "You know how people talk. Doing wandless magic is one thing, but doing it with something like that… They'll think you're turning dark."
The curly-haired man lowered his head with a sigh, as if he could hide his disgust and fear, or the fact that he obviously agreed with the very ideas he wanted to prevent.
"It's not illegal," Harry muttered in a half-hearted protest.
"Oh, no," James snapped back sarcastically. "Not to have it. Only to get it and to use it." The man raked his fingers through his wild and curly brown hair, calming himself. "So I want you to always cover it up in public, okay? In fact, you may as well cover it in private, too, just to get in the habit."
Harry clenched his coral-pierced hand. The hard substance, so intimately entwined with his flesh, gave him an odd sensation, like a memory of pain.
"All right, Harry?" James asked quietly.
Harry's gaze lifted, a magnet being sluggishly drawn into line against its will, and fixed on James' face. In his father's eyes, Harry saw an echo of his own vulnerability, of his own longing, and he both loved and hated the man for that.
"I need you to do this, for both our sakes," James urged, sitting down on the bed next to Harry and placing his large, warm, and calloused hand on the boy's thin, bony shoulder.
At his touch, something convulsed in Harry's heart, and he had to look down to hide the trembling of his lower lip.
"Yeah, all right," Harry muttered, refusing to look at the man again. "But I can't wear them all the time. They'll get in the way of writing and stuff."
"Here," James said, with a flash of his old, easy confidence, and took the gloves. With his wand, he cast ten quick severing charms, removing the fingers. "You can start a new fashion. Wizards are always hiding their scars, so if anyone asks, just say you have a scar from the attack."
James tugged the now fingerless gloves onto Harry's hands one at a time, as gently as if he were handling a kitten. Harry's heart throbbed painfully again.
"After all," James continued with a bright smile, "even I assumed that's where you got that bloody thing. And I should have known better." He glanced into Harry's pale celadon-coloured eyes with his own chocolate brown ones, and registered the wound he had scored. His smile fizzled out like an ember in the rain, leaving behind a silent plea for understanding.
What Harry's face must have looked like, he couldn't know, for inside him warred anger, contempt, shame, hatred, sadness, and, despite all that, love. He nodded, stiffly, and that was the end of the matter. They never spoke of the coral or the gloves again.
Back on Azkaban, Harry had never feared his coral or his magic being discovered by anyone but James, who had a legitimate reason to disapprove, being Harry's father and responsible for his safety. Like Bjorn, Harry was proud of his hard-won magic, the more so for its being wild and free of rule by law. But, somehow, the very act of hiding seemed to have made him afraid of discovery. And so the blonde boy's curt request for him to remove his gloves set his heart pounding.
"What do you mean?" he demanded sharply.
The other boy eyed Harry with a mixture of curiosity and caution. He was on the verge of speaking when a board creaked in the next room, and both boys spied the owner of the shop bearing down on them with a vein pulsing ominously in his forehead. The man must have heard raised voices and come to investigate.
Turning back to the blonde, Harry had just enough time to see the lovely boy smirk nastily, and then Harry was being shoved out of the way, into a teetering tower of books that collapsed with a hail of thuds, bringing several neighbouring stacks down with it in a cascade of disorder. As Harry flailed amidst the heap of dusty tomes, the blonde darted nimbly around the riled shopkeeper and pelted straight for the door of the shop.
There was a moment, as Harry lay covered in books, when he could have simply shrugged and disowned the matter. There was certainly no gain in it for Harry, to extricate the boy from his trouble. He was never sure, afterward, what made him follow the boy. Perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps sympathy. Whatever the case, something in Harry urged him to give chase.
"Stop!" Harry called. With a burst of half-formed magic, he flung the pile of books that hampered his movements across the room and sprang to his feet. The shopkeeper's meaty arms flailed for purchase on Harry's cloak, but the dark-haired boy ducked them and dashed after the blonde.
He was too late. The blonde burst through the door of the shop, and, as Harry had known they would, the chain of runes engraved around the doorjamb flashed gold and emitted a high-pitched squeal.
"Damn," Harry cursed. "Please don't!" he called to the shopkeeper, but the man merely smiled contemptuously at him.
"Too late," he informed Harry with a deep swell of satisfaction. The spell to inform Aurors on the blonde was already sailing through the air from the man's wand.
If the shopkeeper said anything else, Harry wasn't there to hear it; he was already racing out the door. In the street, he shielded his eyes from the sun, which was lowering over the horizon and casting long shadows. Painted in the orange hues of sunset, the Alley might have been some lonesome Western canyon. The high heat of summer was still palpable in the air, and Harry burst out in sweat immediately.
The blonde was nowhere to be seen, but Harry spied his soul a little way down the Alley. Rather than moving towards the upscale end of Diagon, where he would have been more or less safe, the boy seemed to be making for Knockturn Alley. That was bad for the boy, but it suited the plan that was gathering in Harry's mind.
Harry ducked into the gap between two buildings, and, once hidden in the shadows, rendered himself invisible and climbed the wall, lizard style, with sticking charms. He had become rather good at this style of climbing on the treacherous cliffs and fortress walls of Azkaban. In less than a minute, he was leaping from rooftop to rooftop, using magic to springboard his jumps and to cushion his landings.
Five hops put him directly above the blonde, who had turned into Knockturn, just as Harry had supposed he would. The boy seemed to be looking for someone. He peered into the shop windows and the alleys, but stopped short of actually entering any. This was the first modicum of good sense Harry had seen in the boy, for Harry knew too well what sort of fate sometimes awaited children in the darkened byways of Knockturn. He had been both the victim and the perpetrator of murder there.
Unfortunately, it would have been better for Harry's plan had the boy acted more foolishly and turned off the main street. Nevertheless, Harry awaited his chance, prowling from one rooftop to the next, as the boy crept ever deeper into the Alley.
Harry saw the pursuers first, or, rather, saw the souls within them, which were quiescent and colourless in death. The blonde felt them soon after, shuddering and wrapping his robe tighter about himself as the shop windows at the end of the street began to frost over. Within moments, the few persons loitering about the street had scurried into the shops or into the shadows, and Harry heard more than one lock clunking. The blonde boy tried the door of the nearest shop, but when he found it barred, he simply collapsed there, and drew himself into a shivering ball in the nook of the doorway.
Harry had been hoping that the blonde would flee into an area where he—and the dementors—would be out of sight of prying eyes, but that no longer seemed likely. The last thing Harry wanted to do was reveal himself, but apparently that could no longer be avoided, unless he either abandoned the boy to be captured, or slaughtered the dementors in the middle of the street. There was a moment of strained indecision during which Harry weighed his options, but then his eyes fell onto that lovely face, wrought with terror, and his reckless anger at the loathsome creatures sparked anew. He would not abandon the boy.
Strengthened by his conviction, Harry leapt down from the roof, landing without a sound. Fortunately, it had been chilly on Azkaban when Harry left the island that morning, and he was still carrying a cloak in his knapsack. Harry threw the cloak over himself, with the hood up, and covered his upper face with a swirl of shadow to disguise himself. Then he removed his invisibility and approached the crouching blonde.
"Come on, we've got to run!" Harry called, grabbing the boy by the hand and pulling.
The blonde, however, seemed locked into his huddled position. Harry, who had never been bothered by the aura of despair and terror that dementors exuded, hadn't counted on being unable to budge him. With a curse under his breath, he summoned his dove patronus, Pax, and sent the ghostly silver creature to light on the blonde's shoulder.
The blonde's paralysis of terror dissipated then, and he lifted his head to look tearfully at his rescuer. Far from being grateful and ready to follow Harry, however, the boy became panicked anew at being manhandled by a stranger whose face was hidden.
"What do you want?!" he cried. "Leave me alone!"
"Idiot," Harry growled, "they're after you!"
"Who's after me? Aurors?" The whites showed all around the blonde's irises.
Harry rolled his eyes at the boy's naiveté. "As if Aurors would waste their time on chasing shoplifters! No, them!" He stepped aside and indicated the pair of approaching dementors, who were still a hundred yards or so away.
The boy's eyes became riveted to the tattered and fluttering black robes that shrouded the fiends that glided with majestic sloth down the deserted Alley. He made no sound, but his already pale skin turned as white as snow.
"Come on!" Harry insisted impatiently. "Follow me."
This time, the blonde went willingly—anywhere, even with a stranger, if it took him away from the nightmarish creatures bearing down on him. Harry steered them into the nearest unoccupied alley, right to the back, where the walls of three buildings met in a jumbled heap of trash and detritus: food wrappers, broken bottles, half-rotted crates, and the desiccated corpse of a rat.
"We're trapped!" the blonde cried.
"Not us," Harry said with grim pleasure in his voice. "Them."
He turned on the two dementors, who were only now drifting into the alley, borne aloft by their ragged black cloaks, which flapped in some unearthly wind, exhaled, perhaps, from the mouth of Tartarus itself. Their hands were skeletal claws with only ragged strips of putrefied flesh clinging to the bones, which they extended outward with a hungry, grasping motion, as they loomed over the two boys.
As they approached Harry closer, however, the creatures stopped. The green-eyed boy peered up into the eyeless faces half-hidden by their hoods, wondering, briefly, whose bodies these had been, before the souls inside had been swallowed by their new brethren.
"You know me?" he asked them. He relaxed instinctively into a battle-ready crouch—feet planted wide, knees slightly bent, left hand raised in their direction.
"Ha-a-alf so-o-oul," one of them rasped, with the sound of a death rattle.
"Hu-u-unter of the hu-u-ungry ones," the other croaked. "You are no-o-ot our qua-a-arry."
"But you are mine," Harry answered with a twisted grin, and, without warning, unleashed a Patronus-infused jet of white and silver flames that engulfed the exposed faces and hands of the undead creatures.
What transpired then would surely have turned the stomach of anyone less accustomed to gore. The dementors shrieked in agony as the flames raced greedily over their bodies, attacking not only their flesh, but also the dark magic which bound them to this world. Their struggles were frenzied, but Harry held them in place with a magical grip of iron, urging the fire to burn ever hotter and faster, to consume the flesh to which those stubborn shreds of soul still clung like hateful leeches.
The heat was intense, but it did not bother Harry. With his instinctive, inborn ability to freeze anything, including himself, his body cooled itself automatically. He was careful to shield the surrounding area, however, from the blazing heat and light of the fire. It would not do to leave any evidence. To any onlookers, it must have appeared as though Harry were standing in a bubble of warring shadow and flame.
It was not only anger that drove Harry to fan the flames ever higher, but also his disgust for the scene. The dementors collapsed into ever-shrinking mounds of melting, sizzling, smoking flesh, their bones popping and cracking like green wood. The smell was vile, but rather than fanning it away, Harry just intensified the fire, until the last shred of them was consumed.
Not even soot or ashes remained; all that was left were their cloaks, still flapping unnaturally from time to time like a muscle twitching after hard use. Harry picked up the garments with a distasteful expression, despite their having been scoured clean in the furnace of his fire, and stuffed them into his knapsack. Then, checking that his face was still hidden, he turned around to see how the blonde was.
No one was there.
Harry searched the area for several minutes, seeking any sight of the blonde's soul, or any trace of how he had left the blocked end of the alley without slipping past Harry, but he found nothing. The boy was simply gone.
