Year Six: Chapter Seventeen

By the time Tom got back to his dorm, Hermione and Ginny were awake and dressed. Tom hesitated, then mentally shook himself and continued walking over to them. "Good morning," he said.

Hermione's face was red, but she smiled and said, "Morning Tom."

Ginny grinned. "Morning. What got you up so early?"

Tom sighed. "Neville needed help with…" He shook his head, suddenly feeling exhausted. "It's a long story." While it was true he'd probably have an argument on his hands if he explained everything, it was more the sheer effort that he wanted to avoid. Even he didn't entirely understand Neville, and he knew Hermione would make him dissect every interaction until she'd either understood or decided the boy was beyond understanding. She wasn't the sort who could just leave a topic before she'd finished with it. To be fair, neither was he, but he was old enough to have learned that it was sometimes a necessity.

"About last night," Hemione started, then yelped as Ginny stomped on her foot. She glared at the other girl. "I just wanted to ask, you know, are you okay with, um, well how Ginny and I…" She trailed off. Even Gryffindors had their limits.

It was nonetheless a valid question, and though he thought it should have been asked beforehand, he might not have even considered it had she not, so there wasn't really any need to punish them. In that case, all that remained was to consider the question itself. He blinked, realizing it barely warranted any thought at all. "Of course. You both belong to me. Why should I care what you do together?" Especially if it let him wait even longer before facing the particularly high hurdle of sex. If it put that off, he encouraged it.

"Then what about Snape?" Ginny asked impishly.

Flames tore through his chest. Even though, logically, that should be fine as well. "Naturally," he said, though he had to force the word out of his mouth. Jealousy. He knew that emotion well, but had it ever applied to people before? It had to be fine, because otherwise this jealousy… He'd become fond of them, but that was all. They were still nothing more than his possessions. And there was no reason for him to keep his possessions separate from each other so long as they remained his.

As he followed after them out of the tower though, he remembered the night before. He'd been a willing participant this time. There was no denying it. Physically, at least, he was apparently attracted to Hermione. He frowned. That was… theoretically good, he supposed.

The thought remained with him through breakfast and all the way back to Grimmauld Place. There was nothing actually wrong with enjoying that sort of activity. In fact, even if he'd never been particularly interested before Myrtle, it was still something he probably would have done eventually, if not for that incident. If it was enjoyable, he might have done it often, depending on how the balance between pleasure and effort fell.

Was the effort worth it now?

No.

Tom set his trunk down in his room. He'd determined that before, when he'd actually been a teenager, through masturbation. Even orgasm, the supposed pinnacle of pleasure, was far from worth the effort. It required time and effort on his part and gave back nothing but a fleeting pleasure.

On the other hand, a relationship was fundamentally an equation that had to take others into account, wasn't it? If Hermione decided she would be better off with someone else… He grimaced. Also, Ginny of course would expect to be included in some way. And Luna had expressed that same interest. If he weighed the effort on his part against losing the effort they might put in, the balance altered. Perhaps not enough to definitively say it was worth doing, but enough that he couldn't write off the possibility.

And if he considered that it was a relationship he would one day need to accept anyway, for the sake of heirs

He wondered, were children worth it? For himself, for the role he needed to play in society, the answer was yes, but it required very little of him after all. Beyond the initial few minutes of time and effort, it was all just monetary expenditures.

However, that was only on his side of things. It was an equation each woman he intended to ask to bear his children would need to answer for herself. He'd read about it, and he couldn't determine how a woman was even meant to solve that. For some women, pregnancy and labor were easy (or relatively so, is what he assumed the books meant to say) while for others it was a long, excruciating and sometimes fatal ordeal. The other side was no less variable. One woman might end up with a beautiful, intelligent child, while another might end up with an ugly dullard, and yet another might end up with, well, him, a child who'd murdered five people before the age of majority, and hundreds more after.

A knock at the door tore him from his thoughts. Sirius poked his head in. "Hey kiddo, you okay up here?"

Tom nodded absently. "Just thinking."

Sirius opened the door more fully and cocked his head. "About?"

Tom glanced at the man, but mentally shrugged. Asking another their opinion was always a valid, if not often terribly efficient method of considering equations. "How mothers decide it's worth it to have a child."

The dog animagus looked briefly startled before he came in, sat down, and said slowly, "Well, not every woman decides it is. Of those that do, I think some decide that based on others' expectations. That's certainly why my mother had me and Reg. Never met a woman who hated children more than dear old mom." Sirius smiled wryly. "But then there's your mum. Lily agonized over the decision. She hadn't meant to become pregnant, you see. She felt it was irresponsible, given the war and her role fighting in it."

Tom frowned. He'd never considered that before. Or rather, he had, but had thought that the filthy humans around him simply couldn't repress their baser instincts nor possessed enough sense to consider some form of contraception when the timing proved unsuitable. It'd never occurred to him that they might have actually actively decided to have children during a war. "Why did she then?"

"Well… Lily was brilliant, don't get me wrong, but she could be absent-minded. Like 'get so caught up in her research she lost track of what day she was on' level absent-mindedness. And so she forgot to cast the spell, or take the potion, or whatever it was they were using, because I definitely never asked about that, and got pregnant." Sirius's smile turned sad. "She always said she didn't like babies, and if she got pregnant before she was darn well ready, she'd just terminate the pregnancy, but when she found out about you, she just… She couldn't give you up. She fell in love with you right from the start. Drove us nuts talking about you and what kind of kid you'd be. She loved the unlimited potential of you most, before you were born, and then, after, watching how that potential began to play out."

Sirius shook his head. "But back to your original question, for your mother it was a matter of love. It's not a rational emotion, and you can't assign certain values to it and come to a universal conclusion."

In other words, it was useless to try to figure it out. Tom mentally sighed.

"What brought this up?" Sirius asked.

"...Nothing important," Tom said with a small shrug. "What's for dinner?"

The beginning of the holidays passed easily. Tom resumed dueling with Sirius, who had evidently been practicing. Sometimes Tonks would drop by and join them, and Tom was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was a difficult opponent. (Provided his goal was to avoid killing her, at least. He'd determined that she would fare much less well against Voldemort, but then most anyone would.)

Toward the end of the week, Susan and Hannah contacted him and Flooed over. Neville joined not long after with a Polyjuiced Bellatrix carrying a backpack. He claimed her as 'a mutual acquaintance,' which made Sirius raise an eyebrow, but after a moment, the man shrugged and left it at that, though Tom noted that his supposed guardian paid an unusual amount of attention to their activities. Because of that, Tom ended up spelling the man to sleep not long after dinner using a sing-song chant he'd learned from the Carrows. The moment Sirius was asleep, Bella Stunned both girls. "Hurry, hurry," she said, "Time waits not." She extracted a wand from her boots (was that Neville's wand?) and levitated the two unconscious girls toward the library.

Tom followed them.

"What do you need me to do?" Neville asked, glancing around the dim room.

Bella shuddered, a grimace crossing her face as the Polyjuice wore off. Once she was back in her own body, she left to retrieve her backpack. When she returned, she set it down and began pulling tools and ingredients out of it. This included a glass vial, which she handed to Tom, saying, "Your blood, if you would." Tom's eyes narrowed, but she didn't pay any more attention to him, so he filled the container for her and sat back to watch, piecing together what sort of effects the ritual should have based on what he was seeing. Several aspects reminded him of the setup for the ritual he'd performed to summon a deity, while others were more common in alchemy, used mostly for creation and alteration.

At last, Bella brought the two girls to lay within two triangles off-center in the larger circle. She had yet to use Tom's blood beyond combining it with a potion she'd brought pre-prepared. Bella set that container down in the center of the circle. She glanced first at Neville, then at Tom. "There is a story I was told as a child," she said. As she spoke, she began to move, and her voice took on a distant, echoing quality. "Once upon a time, my many times great-grandmother became fascinated by religion." Her movements became a dance, and Tom realized this was the ritual itself, though it was very different than any rituals he knew. "She saw how muggles worshiped their gods. How this worship shaped and changed them. She thought it interesting how the set values of a religion could be interpreted so differently, such that some might seek coexistence with those of other faiths, while others might seek annihilation." Bella smiled. "She had no small skill in the art of ritual casting, and so she devised a ritual, this ritual, to set herself as God for those below her."

Now Bella knelt, arms sweeping across the ground before her as she took the container of blood mixed with potion and raised it above her. She tilted it until a thin stream began to pour out, then resumed the dance. Rather than touch the ground, the crimson liquid fell slowly, like spider silk wrapping around the circle as she moved. "It worked. Her words were truth, her orders absolute. Those she'd ensnared were forever changed. Their souls were strung up, and they moved as her puppets with but a word from her lips. It was beautiful and horrible in equal measure, and those souls remained hers until the day she died."

Bell stepped out of the circle, to Tom. "You must pull the final thread," she murmured, handing him the ends of the strings she'd woven about the two girls with her ritual. As Tom raised his hand, the lines pulsed golden in time with his heart. Neville made a panicked move toward him. Tom glanced over, eyes glowing with reflected light. Neville lowered his hand and stared at him before nodding and backing away shakily. Tom snorted. He pulled his hand down in a sharp snap, and the lines tightened around the two girls. For a moment, it seemed as though they'd be cut to pieces, but then the liquid sunk in, and no sign of what had happened was left except the lines Bella had drawn on the ground.

The dark witch smiled at him. "They are yours now."

As she spoke, first Susan and then Hannah stirred. "Neville?" Susan asked, opening her eyes. She followed his line of sight toward first Tom, then… "What's - Bellatrix!" She drew her wand, scrambling to her feet to, presumably, attack.

"Stop!" Tom ordered. Both Susan and Hannah froze. Hannah frowned curiously at him. Tom glanced at Bella, wondering exactly how this worked. "Bellatrix belongs to Neville. You don't need to worry about her at all."

"Oh," Susan said, nodding. "Of course."

"Of course," Hannah echoed, then shot Bella an apologetic smile. "Sorry, I didn't realize." She glanced around. "It's kind of late though. How did we end up here?"

Tom tilted his head. "It's not that late. We only just finished dinner when you decided to come to the library. We just followed you."

Susan blushed. "Oh… Right. Well, I'm still tired. Come on, Hannah. Let's go to bed. I don't want Auntie to worry when I get home tomorrow." Her expression turned into a smirk. "I mean, what do you think she'd assume if I came back from a boy's house, totally exhausted?"

The two girls wandered off, talking as though everything were normal. Tom was impressed. Had it not been for the strange acceptance of everything he said, they'd have been acting completely normal. "Why haven't I heard of this ritual before?" he asked. It certainly would have made conquering the world easier, so he had to assume there were serious drawbacks associated with it.

Neville grimaced. "Well for one, that potion was pretty expensive. It's a good thing we had a fair number of the ingredients already between our vaults and the greenhouses, because my personal Vault wasn't going to cover it."

Bella waved that away. "I knew you would manage, Master. If it were only a matter of funds, it would be used more often." She smirked.

Tom narrowed his eyes. "What happened to your ancestor?"

The smirk widened into a grin. "Well…." Bella drawled, putting a finger to her lips. "It isn't that, though certainly she did, supposedly, say something that her followers interpreted to mean they should kill her." She twirled. "Ignore that though. The effects to those ensnared are more interesting. Enough conflicting information will break them. The same order can have different results with different people, because interpretation is everything. There is no way to undo it. Your death would break those girls," she said, a flash of irritation in the word. "They would go mad or kill themselves or become comatose… The possibilities for disaster are endless."

Neville nodded. "So you'll need to be careful about what you say to them." He smiled weakly. "That's why I decided it should be you, not me. You're more capable. Knowing me, I'd end up saying something that would destroy them. Besides, they're my friends. I don't want to control them."

Tom stared at the boy skeptically. He would be the first to admit his lack of experience with friendship, but this didn't seem to fit the bill. And honestly, this sounded more trouble than it was worth. Luckily, he didn't typically interact with the Hufflepuffs much. With a nod, he turned and left.

Bella came to him that night, in the early hours of morning just before he normally fell asleep. "My Lord," she said, kneeling at the foot of his bed.

Tom raised an eyebrow. "Bella."

"My master tells me you've been sleeping with those girls," the witch said, a sneer crossing her lips at the word once more. Then she shook herself. "But you've yet to bed them."

"Nor have I any intention of doing so any time soon," Tom said, irritated.

Bella smirked. "Of course, my Lord. But it occurs to me that you're sadly lacking in experience. Sex isn't something you can learn from books." She stood. "So my master has sent me to teach you."

Tom scowled at her. "That is unnecessary. Leave."

Bella hummed. "As you say, my Lord. I merely thought you'd prefer to be as skilled at this as you are in all else. Especially given the benefits." She stepped closer rather than leave. "I've had quite a good time corrupting your little lion, you know. I thought you would enjoy corrupting those girls even more." She leaned over him, giving him an easy view down her shirt that he ignored. "Imagine what the mudblood might do with the proper motivation. With enough pleasure, morals simply melt away… but I suppose you've changed more than I'd expected. My apologies for bothering you, my Lord." She turned toward the door.

"Wait." Tom grimaced.

Bella faced him again, a smile crossing her lips before she pasted on an innocently curious expression. "My Lord?"

Tom took a breath. She was correct - given their feelings, physical affection and sex in particular could drive them all the harder to please him, leading them to do things they might otherwise refuse. He remembered Hermione, and how at the suggestion she torture someone for him, she hadn't balked. She hadn't seemed like she'd do it, of course, but neither had she seemed repulsed. If simply kissing could do that much, how much more could he gain if he offered more? Could he really allow his own weakness to hold him back? He closed his eyes. "Neville is aware why you're here?"

Bella nodded. "It was his idea." She tilted her head and smirked. "Or, at least, he believes it was. Thank you for giving me him. He's ever so fun."

That was good, Tom supposed, though he'd been somewhat hoping for an excuse to decline. "Fine," he said, raising his Occlumency as much as he could. Learning was all well and good, but he doubted his girls would think of it that way. "Teach me."

Bella grinned. "Yes, my Lord."

AN: I don't know that the actual scene needs to be written. If I ever do, it'll be in its own chapter with full warnings so it can be easily skipped. But, well, congrats Bella, I guess?