AN: Several people have asked where I'm going with the story. I won't give everything away but will say this; the story will not contain excessive amounts of darkness or angst. In other words, there will be a happy ending.

A lot of this story seems to take place in the kitchen. I think that room has been in every chapter so far, minus the prologue. Oh well.

A couple of you called this one: any language that is not English, i.e. Latin and Parseltongue, "will look like this."


Harry stared, for a moment feeling nothing but complete shock. The frame corner slipped from his fingers, glass tinkling as it shattered to even smaller pieces under the dropped wood.

Cold intent settled over him. Harry stood, slowly, staring strait ahead out the living room windows to where the long shadow of the house stretched over the field outside.

Tom was upstairs.

How he knew this, Harry neither knew nor cared. He simply followed where his instincts lead him, going back up the way he'd just come down. The lingering stiffness and limp were all but forgotten in the face of this cold, calculating rage, so foreign to his usual fiery temper but all the same a perfect fit.

The door to Tom's room was closed. And locked. Neither was any hindrance. The door burst open and hit the wall, no doubt leaving a dent.

Tom was by his desk, standing with his weight resting on the back of his chair. A book was open on the desk, the breeze from the open window ruffling its pages.

Tom turned abruptly at the noisy intrusion. He took one look at Harry and lunged for his bed, upon which rested the only broom in the house. Harry's broom.

Harry's pictures.

Harry's family.

Halfway to his bed an invisible force abruptly arrested his forward momentum. Tom choked, grasping at his throat.

"Don't even think about it," Harry hissed. Tom made a strangled gasping noise, still clutching at his throat, eyes impossibly wide and mouth moving wordlessly.

Harry held up his other hand. A moment's concentration brought several items shooting from their places around the room on shelves and in drawers, coming to hover in front of him obediently. His broom followed. The book on the desk snapped shut and glowed briefly.

Harry dropped Tom and stepped back out of the doorway. "Come on," he commanded.

"You're a Parselmouth," Tom stammered back in the same language, coughing as he regained his feet. Harry snarled, feeling his magic spark. Tom came, darting nervous glances at the objects floating around Harry. Whether they were actually his or not Harry didn't particularly care; they were important to Tom and that was all that mattered at the moment.

"The library," he ordered in English, and down they went.

When they got there, Harry made sure Tom was watching as he levitated the first of the objects, a yo-yo, over to the library's only table. It glowed briefly in a fashion similar to the book upstairs.

"Living room."

He dropped a second object, this one a small Foe-Glass, in the middle of the coffee table. It, too, glowed briefly. Harry let his broom drop to the floor beside the couch.

"Kitchen." A familiar expression of obstinacy began to creep back onto Tom's face. "Kitchen. Now." It disappeared again.

Once the last object, a Remembrall, had been deposited on the kitchen table and the glow faded, Harry stalked to the back door and pulled it open. He could feel the rage-fueled magic crackling around him, not at all diminished by their little stroll through the house. The doorknob sizzled under his hand. Tom paled and edged by him, trepidation clear in every measured movement. Harry followed him out, letting the door slam. Tom jumped.

Despite the early hour, the air outside was already growing warm. Harry's slippers transfigured themselves into outdoor shoes with a wave of his hand.

Harry stopped them about a hundred meters away from the house. "You have your wand with you?" It took concentration to keep the words English.

Tom, apparently, had enough survival sense not to lie at this point. "Of course," he sneered, "I don—"

"Good." Harry used his own wand to conjure five practice dummies. "Don't get hit."

Tom jerked and took a step backwards. "What?"

Blue light erupted from the fake wand held by the nearest dummy. Tom ducked it just in time. He took several steps backwards, clearly intending to turn and run. Colored light hit the ground behind him, driving him forward, back towards the dummies, which were spreading out and circling to block him in.

Tom shot a glance at Harry, who stood behind the dummies with his arms crossed, pose completely nonchalant. The boy seemed to realize he wasn't going to be getting any help, because his posture straightened instantly. Expression melting from slightly panicked to completely unperturbed in the space of an instant, a trick Harry attributed only to Slytherins and practiced Occlumens, he returned his attention to the dummies. By this time they had him completely surrounded.

Tom dodged the next set of lights; a pair of beams the color of stunners, and began to fight back.

He didn't use any shielding spells, but his retaliatory curses became increasingly inventive as the dummies kept regaining their feet no matter how many times he disarmed, burnt, or cut into their limbs. They simply got back up and came back faster each time.

Of course, as Harry well knew, even with knowledge of more curses than children several years his elder had could not make up for lack of practical experience. It wasn't long before he was overwhelmed.

Three separate lights came at him all at once. He ducked one and dodged left to avoid the second, moving right into the path of the last one. The stinging hex hit his leg mid-lunge and Tom yelped, toppling to the ground. Light started to glow at the tips of all five wands.

"Protego!" Five separate beams of light hit the shield and were deflected. Harry stepped forward, reaching down to haul Tom to his feet with one hand and holding off the dummies with the other. "You're not done yet."

Now that there were two opponents, the dummies upped their speed and accuracy, shifting to compete at a level fitting their new opponent, as the spell had created them to. Handy spell, this was, though Harry had been less than pleased the first time Shacklebolt sprang it on him.

Then a spell whistled by his ear and Harry scolded himself for letting his attention stray.

Harry settled into the mock-fight, finally letting himself go. Frustration and anger that had been building up over the last few weeks was released in a fury of spells; some wordless, some wandless, some neither, but all of them powerful. Hair-trigger instincts awoke with glee, finesse thrown to the wind in favor of accuracy and power. It was the perfect channel to burn off the rage that had been slowly gathering with every slight from Tom he ignored. He should have done this ages ago.

Despite the near bliss of an intense magical workout, he didn't let Tom get away with not fighting, only protecting him when he couldn't do it himself. He saw the boy shooting him venomous glares, as if contemplating throwing a hex at Harry himself while his back was turned.

Harry let a dummy sneak up behind him and took off its hand at the last instant. The glares stopped.

In too short a time, Tom began to stumble. His wandwork became increasingly messy as he tired. When he looked as though he would collapse at any minute, Harry thought he'd made his point. In one last display of power, all the dummies spontaneously burst into flames. They were reduced to ash in instants.

They panted together for a moment, recovering their breath.

Harry felt much calmer now that he'd worked off his temper. Not likely to blow out any nearby glass, at any rate. He turned to the exhausted boy standing silently, warily, by him.

"I think it's time we got a few things straight."

Tom swallowed.


Tom stared, bewildered, at Harry's retreating back.

He was exhausted. Drained. Easily taken advantage of. Trapped.

And Harry was walking away.

It's time we got a few things straight. Didn't that imply, oh, talking? Threatening?

So why was Harry walking away?

Harry seemed to realize he wasn't being followed. He paused and turned back a bit. "Well come on, then. I'm starving."

Oh. Breakfast. Right.

Breakfast? Now?

Harry made an impatient sound that jump-started Tom's legs without his brains permission. As soon as he saw he was being obeyed, Harry turned and began walking again. Actually… he wasn't walking so much as limping. Heavily. Tom had only caught hints of it previously, but now it was awfully hard to miss.

As soon as they were inside, Harry sat down at the kitchen table. He lowered himself into his chair carefully, looking as though he was in pain and trying to hide it.

Tom hesitated. Harry didn't expect him to cook, did he? He flopped into his chair anyway. He was tired; if Harry wanted him to cook he'd have to say so.

Harry drew his wand and Tom stiffened. He needn't have worried; with a few swishes of the wand breakfast started making itself. Tom found himself staring again. Harry never made meals solely with magic.

Tom stayed very, very still as Harry focused on breakfast. There was a line between his eyes, but Tom couldn't tell if it was from pain or lingering anger. He found himself hesitating to so much as breathe for fear of drawing Harry's attention and forced himself to relax again.

It would appear he'd found the breaking point for Harry's temper. Well, he'd been looking for it, hadn't he? Testing the waters, learning the territory like any good Slytherin.

Only he hadn't expected the boiling point to come quite so suddenly, and with so much force.

At first Harry seemed to be a pushover. He left Tom alone to do what he liked, which suited him just fine. He called Harry by his first name and was never rebuked. So he pushed a little harder, and refused to do any chores, and was met with angry glares and no meals. But that was all right, Tom could deal with taking care of himself and his own things, as he'd always done.

Then he'd pushed a little more and Harry had gone and grown teeth, with a very sharp set of claws to match.

And now Tom was more than a little nervous.

He didn't want Harry to throw him out. Not just because he'd have to go back to that filthy Muggle orphanage, but to return to the orphanage now, especially after Dumbledore and Slughorn and therefore the entire Hogwarts staff knew he'd been adopted… Tom couldn't take that kind of humiliation. Wouldn't take it.

But it was more than even that. Harry had offered more than his home to Tom. He'd tied himself to Tom by name. By a Pureblood name with hundreds of years of history, no less. In the Magical world, such a thing was not offered lightly. To take it back, to reject Tom now, would be the ultimate slap in the face, far worse than that stupid Mudblood epithet.

Oh, how much work it had taken to stop those. The fact that Professor Slughorn was so enamored with him helped but could not completely cover the flaw that was his name. In Slytherin house, family and wealth equaled power. Tom had neither, until Harry showed up.

Harry, with his name and money and promises of knowledge and power and far too good to be true. He had to have some hidden motive. No one did something so drastic as to adopt a boy like Tom for no other reason than compassion. Not even wizards as highly looked upon as Dumbledore.

Tom glared at the Remembrall on the table. Technically it wasn't his. He'd never buy himself something so useless. It originally belonged to some idiot Gryffindor who'd ridiculed him in flying class and nearly made him fall off his broom.

He hadn't stopped getting revenge on people who slighted him just because Dumbledore found his old box of treasures. He'd just had to be a bit more… careful about it. So long as he was not caught, it didn't matter what the Transfiguration Professor suspected.

Tom knew, from the moment that nasty Professor told him of magic, that his father was a wizard, no doubt out there somewhere with no knowledge that a one night fling with a dirty Muggle had left him with a son. And someday Tom would find his father, and he'd be a rich king in some other country, with power and money and all the magical prowess in the world, and Tom would show him what a powerful wizard he was and he would take Tom and tutor him until it was Tom's turn to rule.

And with a few words, Harry undid Tom's dreams.

His father was a Muggle. A dirty, common, dead Muggle.

Tom was crushed. So he did what he always did when someone slighted him, challenged him. Billy had done it first, and Tom discovered the delight of using his power to hurt back, to get revenge, in a way far better than dunking Billy's head in a water barrel as Richard had done when Billy called his mother a whore. Hurting the enemy's pride was all well and good, but not nearly as satisfying as doing it to something tangible. The stupid rabbit, one of the only pets in the orphanage and a frequent subject of boasting, died. And everyone saw it.

It was what made those ugly children in the orphanage steer well away from him, what let him rise in the eyes of his Slytherin housemates despite the fact that no one had heard of the name Riddle.

No one got away with insulting Tom Riddle, and no one would get away with insulting Tom Riddle-Potter.

A plate of eggs and toast landed in front of him with a soft clatter. Across from him, Harry sighed and leaned forward, picking up his fork in one hand and running the other through his salt and pepper hair, briefly displaying an oddly shaped scar on his forehead before Harry smoothed his fringe back down in the same motion and the scar disappeared again.

Tom stared. How had he never noticed that before?

"Tom. Those pictures…"

Harry fidgeted, looking supremely uncomfortable. That was much easier to work with than blistering anger. Now if only Tom weren't feeling so rattled and unable to properly think to direct this conversation.

"I—look, Tom, I had to leave my previous home very, very suddenly." Harry paused, casting a somewhat hopeful look at Tom through his glasses.

Unfortunately, Tom had no idea what Harry was expecting him to say.

"Er, here," Harry sighed, "You saw my room, right?"

Well, yes, he had dashed across the hall to grab the broom as soon as he'd heard Harry head downstairs. He thought it would make a decent bargaining chip, and if things went extremely wrong, provide a means of escape.

Not that either plan worked. Quite the opposite, really. Tom wrinkled his nose. He did not like misjudging people to that extent. The pushover Harry that Tom had just begun to feel confident around had vanished within the space of twenty-four hours, starting with that Muggle woman at the grocery.

Harry leaned forward, both hands pressing to the table top. "What was in there?"

A messily made bed, the bare minimum of furniture, an open door to a bathroom Tom hadn't spared a second glance, the broom propped up in a corner next to the trunk of Quidditch gear Harry bought to go with it… a normal bedroom, really, if a little bare.

More than a little bare, now that he thought about it. Really, about the only personal thing in there had been the broom and some clothes lying about. There were no knickknacks whatsoever.

Oh.

"You didn't bring anything?" What kind of an idiot moved to a different country without bringing anything with them? He'd thought Harry just kept most of his more personal things in his room, like Tom did. Not that it would have changed Tom's actions. The fewer items a person had, the more they favored them after all, like that stupid rabbit that had been the prize pet of the orphanage until Tom's magic killed it.

Almost no one bothered him after that.

Harry shook his head.

"I was lucky I didn't have to pay for my stay in the Leaky Cauldron until I left, because I didn't even have enough money for my room until Gringotts gave me access to the vault."

And just when Tom was starting to think Harry might have suited Slytherin, he went and did something with rashness only befitting a Gryffindor.

"Why did you have to leave so fast you couldn't even pack?"

Harry tugged nervously on his fringe, flattening it down against his forehead. "It… had to do with the war," he said, "I can't really tell you details. The decision was out of my hands, anyway." He picked up his fork and stuffed another bite into his mouth, as though hoping that would be enough to change the subject.

But Tom wasn't going to let the issue go, not now that Harry was finally giving answers. He was tired of not knowing anything about his adoptive "brother." Learning about Harry through the usual means was all but impossible when no one here knew Harry, he wasn't in any of the books, and they never spent enough time together for Tom to learn anything but how to aggravate him. Which was also important to know, of course, but it still wasn't enough.

It had nothing to do with the fact that Harry never asked what kinds of food he liked, never asked if he would perhaps like to have a friend over, which he wouldn't because he didn't need friends and this place was a dump compared to the homes most of his housemates had. It had nothing to do with the fact that Harry all but ignored him, because he liked solitude, darn it, had worked and manipulated his way through the orphanage children to get them to leave him the bloody hell alone. It had absolutely nothing to do with any possible kind of desire for the approval of someone who mattered, nor the genuine happiness that the students displayed when they received letters from home.

Nope. Nothing to do with that at all. Those kinds of emotions were for blubbering Hufflepuffs and idealistic Gryffindors. They were nothing but a stupid weakness, an easy way for someone else to trap you.

And Tom Marvolo Riddle-Potter would Not. Be. Trapped. Not by anything. Ever.

"What did you do in the war?" Harry frowned. "Oh, come on," Tom wheedled, the promise of answers making him just a bit reckless, "I don't know a thing about you." And he really did need to know more if he was going to avoid any more confrontations like earlier.

An angry guardian was good only if they ignored you or grew just angry enough to be easily manipulated when they stopped thinking properly.

Harry laughed a bit shakily. "A little bit of everything, really. I spent most of last year tracking down certain items the other guys made for the war and destroying them."

Tom frowned. If Harry was not yet eighteen then… "How did you have time for school?"

"I didn't."

"What!"

Harry waved his hand negligently, as though lacking a full education was absolutely nothing to be concerned about. "We did school work when we could. Actually, we managed to almost keep up with what we would have been learning if we had gone to school, but there were other things that were more important."

Tom didn't ask about the sudden use of the word "we". He had a guess and it was lying in two pieces on the living room floor.

"I am going to finish Hogwarts." Harry blinked at the apparent non sequitur.

"Of course you are."

Tom sent him a skeptical look. Harry was an unemployed school drop out. How on earth did he plan to afford it? "If you never even took your OWL's how do you expect to get a good enough job? Unless there's more money in that vault than you said there was."

Harry rolled his eyes. "They're called scholarships, Tom. And I took my bloody OWL's! I just don't have proof of it, and I'm not really sure how it would compare to the tests here… anyway. I do have partial training as a ward specialist. I'll figure something out after the school year starts."

"Want to keep an eye on me, huh? Don't trust me alone in your house?"

"Yeah, that's right. It has everything to do with you and nothing to do with the fact that this place is a mess and it'll take the entire summer and then some to fix up."

"Like those cooling charms you still haven't managed to repair? The library's been getting awfully hot, you know."

To be fair, Harry had been doing a bunch lot of other things around the place. Tom had spotted him the other day, walking a wide circle around the house with a dagger in hand, cutting his palm every few steps, putting up blood wards. While not illegal, as the blood in such wards was willingly given by the caster, blood wards were also considered to be a tad excessive by most wizards. By the time Harry was done with it, Tom suspected the house would be a right magical fortress.

Harry's jaw clenched. "Yes. I know. I'm working on it."

Tom's mind was already on to his next question. "Where did you get that scar?" Harry shot him a look, smoothing his fringe down again, but he answered anyway.

"It's a leftover from the night my parents died." Tom ignored the clipped tone of his voice. It was only vaguely irritated. Now that he knew what truly angry sounded like, it was easier to judge how far he could push.

"It's a curse scar."

"More of a curse gone wrong scar, but yeah."

"What about your leg?"

"That one's pretty new," he said bluntly, not appearing to be overly surprised Tom was asking about it.

"Is it related to what made this?" Tom tugged at a lock of hair just above his ear.

"No," Harry scowled, brushing his hand over the clump of white hair, and did not explain further.

The answers were growing short. He'd best move on to the next subject now… "We're related, aren't we," he accused. "That's how youfound outabout me so fast."

Harry choked. "What makes you say that?" he gasped, coughing and reaching for his tea.

Tom sat up straight, setting his fork down harshly. "I'm not stupid," he hissed, "I've seen the resemblance, and Professor Slughorn mentioned it, and so did Dumbledore, I bet! We'd probably look even more alike if your hair was still black-"

"-It is still black-"

"-and you're a Parselmouth." The only Parselmouth Tom knew of aside from himself. And as most of them shared a common ancestor in Salazar Slytherin, it wasn't that much of a leap to think that they could also have a more recent relation.

Harry grimaced. "Wondered how long that one would take to come up," he muttered. He sighed and shifted back, as if settling in for a long discussion. "How far did you get in that book last night?"

"About fifteen pages," Tom lied.

"No you didn't," Harry disagreed. "If you had then we wouldn't be talking about this. The Potters and the Gaunts haven't intermarried for several hundred years."

Tom stiffened, angry. "But we look alike! And you're a Parselmouth!"

"I know, Tom,"

"Quit calling me that!"

He hated that name, especially now that he knew about his father. Everyone at school called him by his last name, and now they would call him by his new, wizard's last name, and he wouldn't have to hear that name Tom ever again if only Harry would stop calling him that.

Harry sighed and narrowed his eyes, as though irritated but too tired to do anything about it. He rubbed at his forehead, over his fringe so that his scar didn't come into view.

"My ability to speak that language doesn't come from my bloodline, unless it came in very, very far back. I got it magically, through an accident I was lucky to survive and which would be almost impossible to recreate and I will not be telling you anything more about it."

Fine. Fine. If Harry was going to be obstinate then there was little Tom could do about it right now, with Harry still on his guard.

"Then what do you want?" Harry looked at him as though he thought the question to be supremely odd. Tom didn't think it was.

"Why would I want anything?"

Because if they weren't related then Tom really couldn't think of any reason for Harry to adopt him. People didn't just do things like that without some other motivation. Tom was vicious and cruel and a difficult boy and he knew it. And Harry had to know it too. There was no way he couldn't, not if he'd been talking to Mrs. Cole. Therefore Harry had to have another agenda. And if Tom couldn't figure out what Harry wanted, then he might not be fulfilling it, and Harry might send him back.

"Tom," Harry said, very quietly, "why can you not accept that I adopted you because you need a family and I want one?"

"Because you're a liar!" Tom jumped out of his chair.

There was no such thing as family for the sake of family. Things like that just didn't happen.

Harry pushed his plate back and stood as well. He stumbled and hissed, grabbing the back of his chair in a white-knuckled grip. Tom watched silently.

Harry took a moment to regain his composure and straightened.

"C'mere, Tom," he gestured for Tom to follow him out of the kitchen.

"Right away, Mr. Potter."

Harry snorted and led the way back into the library, walking stiffly.

"I don't appreciate my things being destroyed, so you get to stare at these for the rest of the summer," Harry said, jabbing his finger at the yo-yo on the desk. "Feel free to try moving them." He didn't seem to think Tom would attempt anything, and he was right. Tom would wait until Harry wasn't standing there watching.

"You're Muggle-raised, like I was, so I guess I should have been expecting the occasional faux pas. But I did give you something to keep such embarrassing incidents to a minimum. Now, where was it? Oh, yes."

Tom stared. Was this about the pictures or that Muggle woman? Suddenly he wasn't so sure.

Harry plucked a book from one of the shelves and dropped in onto the table, right next to the yo-yo. It was that book Harry had shoved into his hands at the bookstore, the one he'd promptly ignored in favor of the much more interesting texts. Etiquette and Magical Customs for the British Witch and Wizard. Harry tapped it on the cover a few times, smiling disconcertingly at Tom.

"Since I'm sure you don't want something like this morning to happen again, you're going to read this cover to cover."

Oh, no he wasn't. If Harry thought he could actually make Tom-

"And until you do," Harry added with a certain vicious glee only Slytherins should be allowed to express, "you're not going to be able to open any of the other books in this house. That includes your school books, and the Pureblood History sitting on your desk upstairs, which will be staying here when you go back to school, by the way. So if you haven't finished your summer homework I suggest you get reading."

With that, Harry snatched Tom's hand and pressed it against the nearest bookshelf. He muttered a short incantation and a golden wave of light pulsed outward from where Tom's hand pressed into the wood, running through the books and the back of the shelves and, no doubt, over every book in the house.

That was the fourth time within two days that Harry had touched him, after a good few weeks of no contact whatsoever. Tom shoved at Harry, incensed. Harry stepped back easily, even though he had several years' worth of muscle over Tom's prepubescent body and shouldn't have been easily shoved. A second look made Tom think that Harry was barely managing to keep his feet, what with the way almost all his weight was resting on his right leg.

Harry brushed down his clothes, unperturbed.

"Happy reading," he smiled and left the room.

Tom scowled and kicked the bookcase. Since when did Harry threaten? It was delivered somewhat amateurishly, but the follow through more than made up for that.

"Reparo," Harry's voice came faintly from down the hall, and Tom heard the sound of glass flying back together. Harry was fixing the picture frames. Tom wondered if he would try to fix the pictures as well, if they even could be fixed.

Harry shuffled around in the other room a bit more before his footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Tom reached tentatively for a random book. It didn't move, no matter how hard he pulled. His hand dropped and clenched.

Harry may have made his point about the pictures, but Tom did not buy any of his excuses. He would wait, and keep looking for a chance to get his answers.

At least it didn't look like he was going to be sent back.


End Chapter

Poor confused Tom. -Pats him on the head- There, there, it'll be alright.

Nice long chapter to make up for the wait. Hopefully it didn't disappoint.

Realized I spelled 'vials' as 'viles' in the last chapter (please, if you spot anything else like that, tell me so it can get fixed!), so went back and changed that as well as several other things through the rest of the story. Nothing major to the story, just little things I didn't think read very well.

In other news, I've been looking forward to writing this next chapter for some time. -rubs hands together, then casts a glance at the story notes- It better not be jinxed now…