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Chapter Twelve—Confronting the Order

Tom's hand shot out and pressed against Harry's chest as they were about to leave Gringotts. Harry gave him an exasperated glance, but then the diadem pulsed on his forehead and he felt the odd sensation of taking wing.

For a moment, he seemed to be a hawk, swooping above the bank and around in a circle. His eyes locked on the threat, the prey. There were several wizards and witches with a phoenix brand on their cheeks moving down Diagon Alley. Ordinary wizards avoided them and averted their eyes.

"Dumbledore's people coming," Harry murmured, opening his own eyes.

Tom stared at him.

"The diadem let me see them from above," Harry said. He didn't know for sure how that worked, and it wasn't a specific power that the diadem had mentioned. As much as he could, he glared at his own forehead. Was he always going to have something there that would give him weird, unexpected powers?

After a moment, Tom nodded slowly. "Very well. I sensed their magic, but I couldn't tell where they were coming from or how many there are."

"Six," Harry said quietly. "Moving openly. But then again, you said they were Dumbledore's Aurors. Everyone else in Diagon Alley is desperately trying to pretend they didn't see them."

Tom tilted his head. "I didn't want to declare myself openly yet. I wanted to spread more rumors to discredit Dumbledore and keep my own name out of it," he murmured, drawing his wand.

"But you intend to declare yourself now?"

Tom kept his head tilted. "It depends on what else we can do. Can you think of any way out of this? The goblins aren't going to help us, and announcing that you have that diadem isn't going to save us trouble."

Harry closed his eyes and forced his whirling mind to slow down and think, not bolt through different scenarios like a runaway horse. The diadem could help, but Tom was right; then everyone would probably know that someone was opposing the Order. Tom didn't have any Knights here and couldn't fight back. A battle would damage Diagon Alley too much anyway. Retreating inside Gringotts was out of the question—

Harry opened his eyes. "The rumors we spread about Dumbledore are our way out of this," he said, with more conviction than he really felt, walking down the steps of Gringotts rapidly and towards the Order members. The diadem was tracking them with faint thrums, pulses that Harry understood without knowing how he did it. There were seven pulses, so a seventh wizard had probably joined the ones on their way. "We need to do this in public and keep the focus as much on Dumbledore as possible. You did this for the good of the wizarding world, right?"

Tom caught on. "Keep them from making us martyrs, but play the martyr?"

Harry grinned. He wouldn't have phrased it that way, but that was one reason he liked being with someone who could. "Exactly."

Tom's eyes narrowed, cold and precise, but his face was already taking on an expression of deep shock and sorrow. Harry wondered for a second if he had ever seen the real Tom, the one who hid behind all the masks and expressed what he really felt.

Then Tom glanced sideways at him with the shadow of a grin, and Harry firmed up his resolve. Yes, he thought he had. He might be proven wrong someday, but that was always a possibility with every relationship. He reached out a hand. Tom took it.

"Ready to play a part for the good of the wizarding world?" Harry whispered.

"You have no idea how ready, or how much good," Tom said with another tilt of his head.

Tom recognized two of the Order members marching at them down Diagon Alley when he and Harry stepped around the corner. Justin Wrenthorpe was a prominent pure-blood who'd followed Dumbledore since before he went up against Grindelwald. High cheekbones, aquiline nose, stern grey eyes, curling grey hair, he looked as if he was made of stone, and the phoenix brand on his face stood out in equally sharp relief.

The woman who followed him, Helga Gravel, looked nothing like her name. She had warm brown eyes and one of the sweetest smiles that Tom had ever seen. She usually smiled like that in the photographs in newspaper articles when she was explaining why pure-bloods should keep the rights they already had. She wasn't smiling now.

Wrenthorpe crashed to a halt in front of Tom. His attention was entirely focused on him, while Gravel was the one studying Harry. "What do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Gaunt?"

"On the matter of what?" Tom asked calmly. Harry was right; keeping it to words, and making the Order resort to spells if they were going to, was the better course. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gravel frowning, and knew it was probably at the diadem encircling Harry's brow.

"On the matter of the rumors you are spreading about our leader." Wrenthorpe's hand was tight around his wand, but he knew better than to draw it. Although some of the people who had been in Diagon Alley when Tom arrived with Harry were now out of sight, they had plenty of curious, staring onlookers.

"They aren't rumors, they're the truth," Tom said, and shook his head a little when Wrenthorpe actually drew his wand. "Can you deny that Dumbledore has more pure-bloods than Muggleborns and half-bloods in his service? You yourself are two of them."

"You didn't say anything nearly so innocuous!" Gravel commented, switching her attention from Harry to Tom.

"Is it innocuous, though?" Tom continued, lowering his voice a little. "Can you really think that? Supposedly, we need to protect the Muggles and we need to keep wizards and Muggles separate for their sakes. But Dumbledore also surrounds himself with pure-bloods and keeps Muggleborns from achieving high positions in the Ministry—"

"He punishes people who break the Statute of Secrecy!"

"Does it really seem right that the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot should concern himself with every case that arises, though?" Harry asked, his voice exactly the right mixture of thoughtful and cool. "I thought the Aurors handled that kind of thing. Doesn't the Chief Warlock have more important things to focus on?"

Tom wanted to cackle. He hadn't taken as much time as he should have to instruct Harry in the political realities of his dimension, given that they seemed to have been dashing from one crisis to another since they'd come here, and it would have been easy for Harry to make a mistake. But he hadn't.

"Of course he needs to look after us!" Gravel was frowning at the diadem on Harry's head again, and sounded a little distracted. "It matters that he concerns himself with all the aspects of our society!"

"That just sounds like someone who's desperate to cling to power, sorry," Harry said, and he did manage to sound sorry. "And what does not promoting Muggleborns in the Ministry have to do with the Statute of Secrecy?"

"Because they're the ones most likely to break it because they want to show off magic to their Muggle family and friends." Wrenthorpe was a little more controlled than Gravel had sounded, but even he was frowning. "There's no reason to allow them access to information like that in the Department of Mysteries that would do genuine harm if they spilled it."

"Because of something they might do, they're facing prejudice?" Harry's face was setting itself into harsh lines.

"I wouldn't advise speaking about it to them," Tom told Harry in a whisper from behind his hand. "They're both pure-bloods. They see nothing wrong with what Dumbledore is doing."

"We take enough of a risk letting Muggleborns into our world as it is." Gravel had decided to live up to her name, her eyes colder than Tom had ever seen them and her wand openly drawn. The other Order members were fanning out behind her, a few meters from battle formation. "And you're spreading vicious gossip about the one man we can count on to keep our world safe."

"It's not vicious gossip. It's the truth. And given his stated positions on Muggleborns, I don't know why it's so hard for you to believe that he once believed in Muggle domination."

"I wasn't talking about that! I was talking about the supposed truth that he had an affair with Gellert Grindelwald!"

Tom's eyes widened a little. Gravel must have thought she'd scored a point, because she smiled. But Tom had glimpsed a much greater opportunity.

"Did you see that?" he asked, glancing around at the crowd that had drifted closer when no one had started flinging spells right away. "Dumbledore's branded followers care more about his love life than they do his stance on Muggles and Muggleborns. Well, that goes right along with the belief in blood purity, doesn't it?"

Wrenthorpe launched an abrupt curse at him.

Tom stepped smartly back and to the side. Harry had already lifted a shield to catch the curse, something Tom had known would happen without questioning it. His heart was bounding and stuttering with the passage of offensive magic so near his face, but he was safe. He had lived through this. And he would make the Order live through worse by the time he was done.

"I know you saw that," he said over his shoulder to the gaping crowd. "Let it be known that the Order of the Phoenix drew their wands first."

Harry, meanwhile, was lifting other shields, casting with a force and assurance that Tom hadn't seen from him since they came to this world. The diadem's blue gem glowed softly. The shields shimmered from the ground like curtains of mist, and surrounded both the crowd and the Order. Harry was going to protect random bystanders from getting hit first, naturally.

Tom tilted an eyebrow at him, and Harry gave him a thin smile in response. Well, Tom hadn't expected the diadem to increase his self-preservation. That would take a bloody miracle, not just a magical artifact.

Gravel had her wand in a tight-knuckled grip, and was glaring at Harry as if the shields offended her personally. "Remove them, or I remove your head," she announced.

"Such a shocking threat," Harry said. "A death threat, no less, when I've cast nothing but defensive magic. Is depriving of your ability to hit someone else with offensive magic really worth all that much outrage, madam?"

Gravel hissed a spell that Tom had never heard before, although he knew from the way her mouth moved that it wasn't Parseltongue. The ground at her feet split abruptly, a gaping pit that spilled under the shields Harry had cast and towards Tom.

Tom had never seen it before, but it was still similar to a prank spell that some of the older Slytherins had used on the younger years at Hogwarts, and he responded to this one as he had to that one. He gestured sharply with his wand, and a smooth bridge of stone bore him into the air above the hole.

Gravel stared at him. Tom raised his eyebrows slowly in response. If she was a blood purist, she would wonder how someone with a Muggle father could cast such impressive magic.

"You are breaking the law," Wrenthorpe said in a voice shriller than Tom would have advised any of his Knights to use in this situation. "I demand that you put down your wands at once."

"Do I have your word that you won't cast offensive spells on the crowd of witnesses if we do?"

Tom turned abruptly to Harry, letting the bridge dissolve beneath him and place him back on solid ground. Harry only hitched a shoulder when Tom attempted to catch his eye. His posture was relaxed even though his face looked serious, however, which made Tom relax, too. Harry had a plan other than mindless pacifism.

"We were attempting to arrest two criminals," Gravel said. "Not hurt anyone else."

"Ah. Well, that reassures me a little, but not as much as you might believe, given that it does imply that you intended to hurt us."

One of the other Order members abruptly stepped forwards and spoke through lips flecked with what Tom thought was foam. "Why are we standing here arguing with them? The law is on our side! Arrest them! We're to bring them before the Wizengamot in an hour's time!"

And he threw a spell that Harry's shield deflected into the cobblestones. Most of the crowd scattered, screaming. The other Order members at once began to dismantle Harry's shields.

Harry flung himself at Gravel. Tom was a second behind him, hissing in exasperation. Even if the diadem did give Harry the power to control someone else's wand or magic when he was touching them, he was still an incredibly annoying fighter to have in one's train.

Harry didn't particularly care about killing the Order members, but he did want to take them down. Which meant acting as fast as he could to either disable or knock them unconscious. Now.

He grasped the woman's arm, and felt the diadem pulse on his head. At the same time, blood seemed to rush into his body. Harry gasped. The transfusion of magic was so powerful that he nearly stood there like an idiot and let the man who had been arguing with Tom hit him with a curse.

But in the end, Harry spun around, and the woman traveled with him, her body stiff in protest but still moving. Harry bowed his head and whispered into her ear, "Stun him and bind him."

She leaped away from him and cast a Stunner that crashed into the man, who went down like a tree. Then she conjured ropes that tied his arms to his side and—

And the sensation of her magic drained from Harry like blood pouring from a wound, and he staggered. Obviously the power the diadem could lend him only lasted a short time after he no longer had contact with that person's body or wand.

Still, the woman was staggering, so Harry Stunned her in the back and then turned to trace Tom's path. Tom had already broken the arm of the man who had tried to curse him, and the legs of another Order member, who was groaning on the ground. But the last three Order members had formed a defensive triangle, and their wands flickered in a precise way that said they were used to working together.

Tom had already acquired a cut along his face, and limped slightly from what looked like a wound in his right hip.

Harry narrowed his eyes and snapped his magic forwards through his wand. He couldn't create as intense an effect as he could have before he used his power to stabilize the portal into Tom's world, but he could control it much better than he could have even a few hours ago.

The ground beneath the triangle's feet trembled. The one woman in it went off-balance and screamed in surprise as she suddenly sank to her chest in mud. The other two Order members leaped away from her on instinct.

Harry had pit-traps waiting for them, too. They sank in up to their shoulders, and then Harry sealed the earth around them with another flick. They immediately began to snarl at him like rabid Crups.

Harry turned. Tom had Stunned the two wizards whose limbs he'd broken, and he was looking at Harry with a heat in his eyes that Harry knew all too well.

"Not in public," Harry muttered, jerking his head at the few witches and wizards who'd either crept back to observe the fight or never left.

"Oh, I didn't mean to do that in public," Tom said, with just enough emphasis on the word "that" to leave Harry to wonder what he had intended. "I am simply glad to see that you've recovered your fighting spirit."

Harry nodded and faced the crowd. "Can someone tell me who would be the proper people to call to arrest these Order members?" he asked. "Since some of the Aurors probably serve Dumbledore themselves and might not want to do it."

The crowd exchanged looks and made Harry want to roll his eyes, although he controlled it for the sake of diplomatic relations. It seemed that things in this dimension were the same as the ones in his first one in one important respect. There were still too few wizards or witches who wanted to stand up to a bully.

Finally, one of the women coughed and muttered, "I don't think I've heard of anyone having trials for Order members at all. You aren't supposed to fight back against them." She paused as if waiting for Harry to fill in the silence.

Harry sighed and glanced at Tom. He was blank-faced, though, which Harry thought meant he hadn't known that, either.

"Fine." Harry folded his arms and let his gaze drift from one witness to another. Some of them snapped to attention. Others just cowered. "Then you might as well consider telling the people who'll talk to you this. We don't want a leader in charge who's prejudiced against Muggleborns and who tries to hide his own shameful past behind a veil of rumors and threats. We're going to fight against him."

"Who's 'we', though?" someone asked.

"The Knights of Walpurgis." Tom placed a light hand on Harry's shoulder, and Harry started. He hadn't forgotten Tom was there, not really, but he had shifted his perception away from him to concentrate on the potential enemies around them.

"Why that name?"

"Because we actually care about honor," Tom said. He paused, and Harry watched a few people lean forwards to listen. He held back a chuckle. Tom had charisma when he wanted to use it, a side of himself that Harry never saw when he was interacting with, say, Jonquil.

Then again, he probably doesn't want to use it with her.

"And we honor, in our name, the night that blackens the sky for everyone, Muggleborn and Muggle and half-blood and pure-blood alike," Tom finished, his voice lowering. "But remember, it's only in the darkness that one can see the stars."

He let the staring ramp up enough that Harry was sure he was going to make another speech, and then he curled an arm around Harry's shoulders and Apparated them away.