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Chapter Fourteen—Going Home

Harry finally leaned back in his chair and gave Tom a look. They'd been at breakfast for half an hour, and an owl had flown in twenty minutes ago. Tom had sat there for those twenty minutes, holding the open letter and staring down at it. His breathing was shallow. He looked as if he might expire at any second.

"Tell me."

Tom started and looked up at him. His mouth immediately became a flat, grim line. He tucked the letter into his pocket. "It's nothing you need to worry about, Harry. A note from someone who's concerned about the progress of the war."

Harry cast a silent spell. Tom tried to stand from his chair a second later, and found himself stuck there. He turned a quiet glare on Harry. Harry had already taken his wand, so he wasn't concerned. Besides, now he that he control over his magic again, Tom wasn't powerful enough with wandless spells to break his Sticking Charm.

"You wouldn't have allowed me to get away with saying just that and nothing else. What makes you think that I would let you?"

"There are times I hate that diadem."

Harry smiled. That wasn't another refusal. But Tom did move his eyes from Harry's face to the kitchen doorway. "Cast another spell so that we can make sure no one is listening in. This is—not knowledge that I'm trying to hide from my Knights, but something that I don't want them interrupting."

Harry closed his eyes and let the diadem whisper and pulse to him the way that it had in Diagon Alley when it was tracking the Order members. "No one's right here. In fact, no one's in this wing of the Manor."

Tom nodded, but still spent a moment studying his fingers before he tried to keep his promise. When he finally looked up, Harry was a little stunned at how raw his expression was.

"It's from my mother," Tom whispered. "You told me that one of the differences between your world and mine is that my mother didn't survive to raise me in yours. Well, here she did. And she sent me a letter warning me not to come into the open and cause conflict with Dumbledore."

"Is she that afraid of him?" Harry asked quietly. He racked his mind for memories of Merope Gaunt. Except for what little he had seen in the Pensieve in his own world, there was truly nothing. She had been poor, nearly a Squib, a Parselmouth, in love with the handsome Tom Riddle, and the mother of Voldemort. He had no idea what she would be like here as a living woman, a—a loving mother? He thought so. Tom knew a lot more about love than Voldemort in his world had ever learned.

Tom curled his fingers around the edge of the table. "She has never agreed with my plans to step forwards and claim a high place."

"Ah," Harry offered, to be able to say something.

"She thinks that we have a place, we Gaunts, and that the purity of our blood speaks for itself." Tom lifted the edge of his lip. "And she's afraid of what will happen once people become widely conscious that there are still Parselmouths and descendants of Salazar Slytherin in the world."

"She thinks people who favor Muggleborns will come after you?"

"Not so much that as people who want our supposedly mysterious magic." Tom's lip went back down, and he spoke, perfectly neutral, now. "They'll want our artifacts—which is one locket and one ring, approximately—and our Parseltongue talent—which I didn't believe, even as a child, they could take from us. My mother is proud of me, but I believe she also rather regrets marrying a Muggle."

"Not a pure-blood?" was the only thing Harry could guess. Once again, he was working with no knowledge of this Merope. In fact, it was probable his knowledge was going to baffle him dangerously. He was already baffled at the idea that Merope had picked up Morfin's and Marvolo's beliefs.

"Yes." Tom sighed, a sharp sound. "You have to understand, Harry. My uncle and grandfather were at the same time proud that I was so powerful and upset that I had dirty blood. My mother was happy she had produced me, and…"

"Not proud that she had to use love potions to do it?"

"That was similar enough to your world for you to guess, then." Tom's hands flexed as if he was about to push himself back from the table, stand up, and pace. Harry was actually surprised he hadn't done that already. Then again, he supposed that this Tom had better control of himself, in every way, than the one Harry had known. "I was tossed back and forth between those attitudes all the time, Harry. They didn't physically abuse me. But they abused my mother. And she would pet me and encourage me one day, and then tell me with tears in her eyes the next day that she wanted me to hide and not draw attention to myself."

"Dumbledore's is the wrong sort of attention."

"Yes." Tom glanced at him. "She also had hopes that, somehow, I would meet and marry a suitable pure-blood bride. Just wandering around on the edges of Little Hangleton, I suppose." His words lashed out like acid.

Harry accepted the bitterness without moving, without blinking, just leaning forwards a little so that he could catch Tom's eye. "And she won't like it that you've chosen a man. Who's not even a pure-blood."

"I will not give you up."

Harry nodded, hearing the edges of hissing around those words. If he hadn't become so used to listening for it, he honestly wouldn't have known whether Tom had spoken in Parseltongue or English. "I know. I won't give you up, either. But I can't stand the look you had on your face when you sat there and stared at that letter. I want to meet your family."

Tom blinked heavily at him. Then he shook his head. "My uncle and grandfather would try to kill you the moment they saw you."

"They can tell half-bloods apart from pure-bloods that quickly?"

Tom spoke in Parseltongue. "They will never cease to threaten you once they know who you are. If they can't kill you then, they'll start hunting you down and they'll strike at your back when you least expect it."

"I know something about surviving unexpected enemies, Tom."

Tom responded with a wordless noise that had the echoes of Parseltongue words in it but nothing definite, and looked as if he might claw the wall next to them apart. "Are you even listening to me? It's not that they're as dangerous as some of the people you faced, it's that they'll never give up and they'll strike at any time!"

"I know that," Harry repeated calmly in English. "But that doesn't mean that I'm going to let them make you look like that, Tom. I am going to confront them and make them pay attention to you as someone who isn't their toy anymore."

Tom recoiled, but a second later, stopped the motion with a control that Harry had to admire. He stared at Harry without moving. "That's the way I come across to you when I talk about them?" he finally asked.

Harry nodded. "Frankly, I think that you've built them up in your mind into monsters—which they are, if they're abusing you and your mother. And you think they could deprive you of anything they wanted to deprive you of."

He stepped around the table and reached out to take Tom's hands. "But you're stronger than that. You have the loyalty of your Knights, and they aren't about to abandon you because some wreck of a pure-blood family says so. You have your own magical strength, which must be much greater than theirs."

He leaned to let his lips hover a centimeter away from Tom's. Tom's eyelids drooped as if in anticipation of a kiss. "You have me."

Tom paused as if he wanted to see what else Harry would say, and then he flung his arms around Harry's neck and kissed him with abandon, his tongue pushing so deeply into Harry's mouth that Harry felt his breath stutter.

But then he grinned smugly and hauled Tom against him. Yes, this was more like the Tom he knew. The Tom he was coming to care for, if "love" was too strong a word yet.

Tom stared ahead of him at the shack, and then sideways at Harry. Harry just raised his eyebrows and strode up to it, knocking on the door. Tom followed with a silent groan. He knew Harry had been in a version of this place before after seeing Harry's memories, and they'd disarmed the traps that normally prevented someone from getting close to the front.

It still couldn't shake Tom's conviction that something would go wrong in the next few seconds.

Harry knocked briskly on the door, to startled silence from the people within. Then the door flew open and the narrowed eyes of his grandfather met Harry's. Tom gripped his wand. His mother's letter had promised that she would be alone when they spoke.

It seemed that the wrong things were about to begin now.

"Who're yah? Eh?" Marvolo leaned forwards with his fingers twitching, even though it had been years since he lifted a wand. He preferred to brood on the Slytherin artifacts their family owned and disdain offensive magic as beneath a great Parselmouth. Then he turned his head and caught sight of Tom, and his face twisted. "What are you doing here, boy?"

"He came here because he needed to speak with his mother," Harry replied.

Tom had to admit, danger or not, he wanted to laugh aloud at the utter stupefaction on Marvolo's face when he heard someone not of their family speak Parseltongue.

Marvolo recovered quickly, though, jabbing a finger forwards and shuffling almost out of the house. "I don't know who you are, fancy boy, but you won't prance around here and tell the descendants of Slytherin what to do!"

"I'm a descendant of the Peverells myself," Harry said, his eyes as brilliant as the gem in the diadem again. To Tom, they all seemed to sparkle with disdain. "I have absolutely no desire to tell you to do anything but get the hell out of the way, so Tom can see his mother."

Marvolo reared back and then abruptly dived forwards. Tom yelled a warning. He'd seen that move before, when Marvolo decided that one of the Muggles from the village had wandered too close. He always had a wicked little blade dusted with venom clutched in his fist, which he called the Serpent's Tooth.

Harry stepped neatly to the side, hooked his ankle behind Marvolo's, and sent him sprawling to the ground. Then he stepped, hard, on Marvolo's hand. Tom heard bone crack. Harry bent down and retrieved Serpent's Tooth from the spasming fingers.

"I'll take that. Much safer for us all that way."

"Who're yah?"

Tom rolled his eyes as he watched Morfin appear in the door. His heart was still pounding like a tympani, but after the way he'd watched Harry handle his grandfather, his shock was running out in strong ripples. He was even starting to enjoy himself.

"What'd you do to Fa?" Morfin was moving over to where Marvolo lay swearing on the ground. Harry turned to keep him under observation, meanwhile flicking his wand and, Tom saw from the motion, getting rid of the poison on the edge of Serpent's Tooth.

"No more than he tried to do to me," Harry replied, and Morfin must not have heard the conversation from wherever he'd been in the house, either, given that he tried to leap a mile at the sound of Parseltongue.

"Who're yah?"

Tom stepped in then, because the repetition was becoming ridiculous. "His name is Harry Potter."

"Impossible," said his mother from her turn, apparently, in the doorway. "The Potter family died out centuries ago."

Tom felt a lick, a shiver of the strangeness she always evoked in him, as he turned to face her. "Mother."

Merope Gaunt would never be beautiful, and that fact had bothered Tom when he was a child, along with the fact that she allowed Morfin and Marvolo to push her around. Now he saw the strength that had always waited at the bottom of her eyes, steel that only showed up when someone outside the family was trying to abuse Tom, or she thought he was doing something dangerous. She kept her gaze fastened on him now, ignoring Harry. Then she beckoned to him and turned and walked inside.

Tom held out his hand to Harry, ignoring the way that Marvolo almost reflexively jeered. Harry looked into his eyes, nodded, and let Tom draw him inside.

The inside of the shack was larger than Harry remembered, with two more rooms that looked as if they had been added on to the body of the main building some time ago. He saw a bed through one open door, but Merope saw him looking and went over to shut it. Harry squinted at the underside of her sleeve, but didn't see a wand strapped to her arm.

She turned and saw him looking. "My son not enough for you?"

"Mother," Tom hissed, but Merope only kept watching Harry. Harry inclined his head slowly to her. She darted her gaze up to the diadem for one minute, but she seemed to have already decided his face was the dangerous part of him and kept her eyes there instead.

Harry only replied, "I would do anything for Tom. As for why I'm a Potter when the family died here, I'm from another world."

"So you were the one who filled Tom's head with the notion that he could fight Dumbledore and win?"

"I always wanted to do that." Tom was standing restlessly next to a chair missing one arm, drumming his fingers on the back of it. Harry saw him glance at the broken place and then away. As suddenly as if he had seen it in a vision, Harry knew that Tom had offered to repair the furniture in the past and it hadn't been accepted. "I always intended to take a position of power, and damn the man who thought only pure-bloods are powerful."

"It is more dangerous than you can possibly know," Merope said in English. "So you must be the man who Tom went in search of, the one who can be his weapon."

Harry said nothing, but shrugged. Tom was the one who took a long step forwards and then stopped as if he thought he might hit Merope if he kept going. "How did you know that, Mother? I never told you!"

Merope glanced at him and said only, "I have ways of finding these things out." She faced Harry again. "Do you understand the grudge that Dumbledore has against the Slytherin line?'

"How could I? I'm a stranger to this world."

Merope examined him as if she didn't think that Harry was telling the truth, then shrugged and continued in Parseltongue. "Dumbledore is convinced that our ancestor founded not only Slytherin House but the study of the Dark Arts in the British Isles. He thinks that they were pure and free of that magic until Slytherin came here."

"That's ridiculous."

Merope started a little, as if she had thought it a coincidence that Harry had answered in Parseltongue before this. But she kept talking. "It is, but that is what he thinks. And he is convinced that every Dark wizard who has ever lived in Britain is a descendant of Slytherin's legacy, even the ones who don't share his blood or his House. He's dedicated himself to the ending of that legacy. He would eliminate Tom if he knew for sure who he really is."

Harry blinked. "He doesn't? I thought the Gaunts being descendants of Slytherin was common knowledge, and Tom certainly carries your last name." He became aware of Morfin and Marvolo limping through the door behind him, but he didn't bother turning around. He would defeat them again if he had to. Until then, or until they touched Tom or said something to him, he would ignore them.

Merope tilted her head. "There are those who sometimes pop up claiming Slytherin's blood, and Dumbledore thinks our claim is as false as theirs. Even Tom's gift of Parseltongue is not unknown—and there are spells that can imitate it. Given that most people can't understand it, how would they know if someone was really speaking it or just using a spell to hiss nonsense?"

Harry glanced back at Tom. At the moment, he was even more impressed that Tom had managed to get the allegiance of the Slytherins who had once taunted him as a Mudblood. "All right. So that explains why this is dangerous, but not why you think that we shouldn't oppose Dumbledore at all."

"I don't want my son to die." Merope reached down and removed something from a pocket. Harry had time to think that it looked a little like a blackthorn wand before she whipped it abruptly towards him.

And then he ceased to be able to breathe, and suddenly he had more important things to think about than whether it was a wand or not.