Chapter 10

We're Eating What?

Thankfully, Nagini had decided not to eat him overnight. For once Harry actually had the opportunity to wake up naturally. He enjoyed it and spent a while just lying there before actually moving. It felt almost like the weekends at Hogwarts when there was no quiddich practice and everyone was still lounging around in the second year boy's dormitory.

The lights seemed brighter now, Harry took this as a sign that it was probably daytime and he might as well get up. A quick search around the room showed him that Nagini had left sometime. That meant that either Tom had come back and taken down the wards, or he hadn't actually set them up in the first place. The options were equally possible.

Harry showered first and remade the bed. He wasn't sure what to do with the old robe that was covered in ink so he rinsed it out again (it really didn't do it any favours) and left it dripping into the sink.

From the top of the staircase, he could hear noises in the kitchen and he could see that the door to the greenhouse-come-potions lab was open as well, which was odd because usually it was warded shut. Passing that door he could see Nagini basking in the light from the sun spell. He supposed it was pretty cold in the rest of the house.

Tom was in the kitchen of course. Harry was glad to see him again, even if it only meant he wasn't going to Nagini's next meal. Harry sat down at the table and watched Tom attempting to cook.

"You should try going to a muggle supermarket sometime. They sell food already made so that all you have to do is heat it up. You could eat just about anything they made if you had a microwave. But there's probably a spell for that, you'd have to make sure that nothing freaky happens to it when you use the magic though."

"Do you normally talk this much or did you miss me being here?" Tom smirked over his pan of simmering tomatoes. "I have been to a muggle market before. The muggles are not that advanced, even if their tinned food is enviable, preservation in that manner is easily accomplished with magic and has been for hundreds of years."

"You've obviously never heated up a ready meal then." Harry smiled, "But I suppose you are about 70 years old so that's probably after your time too."

The older boy ignored that and added more ingredients to his pan, some onion and peppers and things.

"Where are you getting all this food from if you don't use muggle shops? There's not exactly any grocery shops in Diagon Alley. And you aren't growing onions in the potions room."

"I have some contacts outside," Tom said, "I collected these from a drop off point on my way back this morning."

Harry nodded, picking at the peeling varnish on the kitchen table. "How did all that go, did your spell work?"

Tom spent a while concentrating on stirring the bizarre concoction in the pot. He added some ingredients Harry had never seen before and the boy hoped that Tom was cooking, and not just brewing a potion in the kitchen. He pulled a face as tom chopped sweetbread into large chunks and added it. "It was successful, I am now confident that I will be able to find all of the objects. It will however take quite some time to find all of them."

"So you're going to go out and get them, then what? Are you going to re-assimilate them where they are or will you bring them back here first?"

"I think I will bring them here. Then they will be safest. There are others who will have worked out by now that I have created my Horcruxes and they will also be seeking them. At the moment they are unaware of my return and will not expect me to remove them from their places of safekeeping."

Tom smiled at that and Harry thought he looked more like a cat that was pleased with itself than his usually snakelike self. Harry grimaced, he was probably imagining leaving little surprises for the others on the trail. He hoped Dumbledore or whoever it was had enough sense to be careful even if they thought Voldemort was gone.

Tom sighed, "You are still projecting your thoughts out to the world. For the sake of my sanity could you try to avoid such banal nonsense?"

Harry had to forcibly prevent himself from rolling his eyes. It wasn't his fault if Tom plucked random sentences from his head. If the boy wasn't going to teach him that Occludo-thingumy then he had no place to complain.

Tom put the lid on his pan and sat down, cracking his knuckles.

"You said I can't get rid of that Horcrux, right?" Tom nodded and Harry felt the familiar surge of nausea. "Is it going to do anything strange? You aren't going to try to possess me or anything?"

Tom considered for a minute, "It shouldn't," he offered unconvincingly. "If you had imbued the same quantity of soul as I have then I believe you would have been overpowered, especially as a baby. As it is I expect you will always have more control than the fragment, unless you run into an unfriendly dementor (is there any other type?). Other things though, you might get a bit of an explosive temper in a few years, more so than most teenagers- your brain re-wires itself and the Horcrux might have something to say about that. We already know you're a parselmouth and that you also get a few sneak peeks into the life of the Dark Lord."

Harry felt relieved. He could cope with being a parselmouth as long as nobody wanted him to write it down and the visions were ok when his scar didn't burn too badly. He hoped he wouldn't be too moody as a teenager. The older members of the quiddich team were bad enough and they were the friendly ones. But what on earth was a dementor?

Tom was freezing the flame under the pan and pouring the mix into a casserole dish. He opened the oven and placed it on a shelf, instantly heating the oven to the right temperature. Harry tried hard to keep the look of disgust off his face as Tom settled back into his seat.

Apparently he failed.

"If you look at it like that then you do not need to eat it. I don't care if you go hungry."

Harry forced his lip to not curl in disgust. "Isn't sweetbread pancreas? That is really gross."

Tom was surprised that he had never tried it before and changed his stance, insisting that Harry would eat some this time, even if he didn't want to. "After all you have to experience some things before you die."

Harry couldn't prevent himself from rolling his eyes this time and was hit by instant queasiness as Tom cast some hex which caused his eyes to roll uncontrollably in their sockets. He cringed away, covering his eyes with his hands until Tom lifted it a minute later.

"I told you this before, I do not tolerate poor manners or childish behaviour at my table."

Blinking furiously, Harry tried to force his eyes into focus again. Tom wouldn't actually accept that kind of behaviour anywhere. Harry fantasised for a moment about releasing a pack of Cornish Pixies into the house for Tom to deal with.

"You wouldn't dare, I would turn you into one and feed the whole lot of you to Nagini."

Eye rolling would be dangerous here so Harry avoided it, it was a close call though.

Tom made Harry fetch his work from upstairs. He was actually quite impressed with the progress the twelve year old had made with the parselscript. Slightly suspicious too, but there was no way Nagini could have written it and there was nowhere else for the boy to obtain the shapes. He was however quite impressed the child had learned the word 'blade'. It wasn't a word most snakes knew.

Even if the boy was improving, it still took him a ridiculously long time to work his way through anything. When given something to transcribe or read out, it was excruciating to listen to him sound everything out bit by bit. Tom thought it was like listening to a five year old learning his first words, he never had much patience for that either.

The mystery meal announced its readiness with a loud ringing noise, not unlike the bell from Harry's old primary school. Tom jumped up, excited and levitated the dish out of the oven and onto a pot stand. Tom plated up a huge portion for himself and a smaller one for Harry. "No point wasting good food on uncultured children."

If this was what cultured children had to eat then Harry was glad that Dudley and he didn't count. It was probably safe to eat, Harry thought grudgingly, but he didn't think he would ever be as happy about it as Tom seemed to be. Given the choice he would pick the squid over this, and that was saying something!

Outwardly though, Harry appeared quite content with the meal. He didn't want Tom to decide he was making a fuss and not give him anything. Or it could be worse than that and Tom would decide he needed to try more higher class foods. He hoped the older boy would keep to the less exotic cuts of meat- he didn't fancy trying brain anytime soon and he knew that was pretty common back when Tom grew up.

"So when are you going out again?" Harry asked casually.

"In a couple of days. I want this done as soon as possible."

"Are you getting them all at once?"

Tom snickered, "I cannot get all of them at the same time, foolish boy. If I were to try that then I could be gone for weeks. I told you before that I do not know where to look. That triangulation spell only works within a few miles of the objects."

"But you said you knew where most of them are!"

"I said I knew where I might hide them. Even if I was certain, it would be foolish to attempt collecting all of them at once. No, I shall be using this as a base and go out from here when I have a better idea of where to go."

"And you'll leave me here all that time?"

Tom smiled, "I will leave you here most of the time. Until your blessed departing of course."

Harry glared at him. He was fairly certain that Tom wasn't going to kill him unless he had a good reason to. "Why don't you just send me back to school? Then you wouldn't have to put up with me anymore, you could make whatever you like without me whingeing. And you could get a proper night's sleep without me waking you up."

"Why would I send you back to the Headmaster with all of the information he would need to kill me? And if you screaming at night bothered me then I could just cast a silencing charm on you." Riddle gestured with his wand.

"You could use a memory charm," Harry was serious, "Lockhart was going to do that to me and Ron. It would stop me talking and you could go back to making sure Voldemort can't return. Then everyone's happy!"

"Wouldn't work Potter" Tom said, "Even the strongest memory charms can be broken. Dumbledore would think it as significant enough to the 'greater good' to crack open your mind to find the answers."

That wasn't the first time Harry had heard the phrase 'the greater good' used in reference to Dumbledore. He didn't understand why but those who disliked the professor tended to say it a lot. Harry thought the headmaster cared for him more than that but the old wizard might not think his welfare was worth as much as that of the entire wizarding world. He could even imagine the sad and disappointed look on the man's face as he cast the charm.

"I could trick him then," Harry offered desperately. "Just give me another story and I'll convince him with that, I promise! I just want to go back to my friends. I need to know they're alright. Hermione's probably still petrified and I don't even know what's happening with Ginny. I need to go back, Hogwarts is my home!"

Tom's eyes flashed with anger. He stood up and Harry cringed back into his seat.

"Hogwarts is nobody's home. It is just a school, nothing more than that. Your home was supposed to be with your relatives and even they did not want you. The filthy muggles called us freaks!" The boy walked around the table to stand imposingly in front of Harry.

"You have nowhere to go Harry Potter. Nobody wanted you when you were a child and nobody wants you now. What do you think they will all think of you? You are not a hero to them. When they arrived there they found a dead basilisk inside the collapsed Chamber of Salazar the Great. Your best friend was lying there unconscious, your professor insensible and your friend's innocent little sister totally unresponsive. There is no Harry Potter and no diary for them to find. What do you suppose they will assume?"

Harry gulped. He knew what he would think if he came across all of that and it didn't look good for him. Dumbledore wasn't even at the school to defend him.

"Dumbledore would still help me, and McGonagall."

"Would they protect the next Dark Lord? If anyone were to scan you for dark magic then my littlest Horcrux would flare up like a small beacon. There is no way to detect whether you were the caster or recipient of the magic. All of the spells were performed with your wand. Then they would cart you off on a one way boat to Azkaban, and leave you to rot. "

"What's Azkaban?" Harry asked. His voice was small and shook more than he would have liked.

"The British ministry's prison. It is a barren island in the North Sea. It is guarded by dementors, which you probably haven't heard of either, they feed on the despair and souls of the inhabitants. It is where they sent that oaf friend of yours when they took him away from the school." He tutted, "Your education is sorely lacking."

Harry sat, trying to fend away the hopelessness that was starting to creep into his stomach, settling there like a solid mass (He didn't think it was just the odd meal anyway).

"They would take me back," He said, desperate, "I could explain it all to them. Someone would believe me! You said Dumbledore could break into my mind- if he did that, he'd know the truth!"

Tom sneered, "Do you really think so? If so you are more foolish than I had thought. Nevertheless, it is no matter, you will not be leaving here to make any foolish attempts at reconciliation." His mouth curled in disdain. "I am bored of your company. You may retire. I will call you when I require your presence again."

Harry fled.