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Chapter Twenty-Five—The Lost

"You don't understand me?"

Tom's face remained locked in a mask of concentration, but the comprehension Harry had hoped to see in his eyes failed to appear. Harry sat back with a long sigh and ran his hands through his hair. His fingers shook, and he lowered his hands to fold them on the table.

Tom let his hands rest on the table, too. "And this is what's wrong with Dumbledore's plan to take away all Dark knowledge," he said softly. "He's the one determining what's Dark and what isn't. In this case, Parseltongue."

Harry nodded, his mind turning in slow circles. Yes, he wanted to immediately find and confront Dumbledore, and ultimately make sure that the man didn't win the war. But he also wanted to find some solution to the problem of Tom lacking Parseltongue, and he wasn't sure, at the moment, what that should be.

He hadn't the slightest idea what the spell Dumbledore had used was. He had tried to raid the library in the old Potter house, but almost all the books here seemed to be ones about history, without a mention of Parseltongue that Harry could find when he'd cast a spell that would search the pages for that word.

There was, of course, an immediate solution. But Harry was hesitant to raise it in case it didn't work.

"Harry."

Harry started and looked up. Tom had leaned in so that his elbows were resting on the table, and his posture almost looked relaxed. This close, though, Harry could see how intense the desperation in his face was.

"I can feel you brooding over here. If you think you know something, if you can do something, tell me."

Harry swallowed. "I think I might be able to use wild magic to bring your Parseltongue back."

Tom paused. "I confess I hadn't thought of that," he said, in the tone he always used when he thought he'd been stupid. Harry hastily covered one hand with his, unable to listen to Tom scolding himself right now, but Tom was watching the far wall thoughtfully. "Why not? That might work. But there has to be a reason you didn't charge ahead and inform me the instant you thought of it."

"I don't understand the limitations of the wild magic very well," Harry admitted. "I don't know a lot about what makes sense to trees. The last few times I used it meant that I almost died. I don't know if I can even explain to the earth what Parseltongue really is or what they would give you if I managed. It might be nothing like the gift you were born with. I don't want you to be disappointed."

Tom was silent, staring at the table rather than their joined hands, and Harry found himself glad. As long as Tom was the one who considered this seriously and decided whether it was worth the risk or not, then Harry would follow his decision.

Tom looked up. "Let's do it."

"I mean—are you sure? I just explained that I didn't understand the limitations of the wild magic very well—"

"Yes, you did." Tom's eyes had hardened. "And I don't think you understand what losing my Parseltongue did to me. I feel naked, Harry. Stripped. As though someone has flayed away most of my skin and not bothered to cover the rest."

"What if the wild magic ritual makes you feel worse?"

"That's not possible."

Harry hesitated one more time. He thought it eminently possible. He could think of half a dozen things Tom wasn't considering right now, all of which might end up with him dead, or maimed, or disfigured, or—

Then he looked into Tom's eyes again and let his protests die away. Tom would regret the loss of even his sight less than his Parseltongue, Harry thought.

Harry stood up. "All right," he said quietly. "I want to make sure that we sleep first. Use a potion if you need to. We'll need to be as rested as possible when we confront the wild magic."

Tom didn't protest, which said more than anything about how much the loss of his Parseltongue had hit him. He only stood, leaned in to kiss Harry's cheek, and then turned and went down one of the corridors that was still mostly dark despite the torches Harry had attempted to light.

Harry sighed and went to fetch a Dreamless Sleep Draught from the potions that the elves had brought them from the Malfoy house. He didn't know if Tom would need one, but he absolutely did.

I only hope this works.

Tom opened his eyes and lay in silence, in the darkness. The potion had only granted him four or five hours of sleep, he thought, which was normal even when he took one before an event less momentous than this.

And nothing could quell the overpowering sense of loss that flooded down his nerves every time he made a movement or thought something.

He had never known how deeply embedded his Parseltongue was in his conception of himself. Yes, he had spoken it as a child before English, but he had never thought about the implications of that particular anecdote when his mother told it to him. He had even thought it likely that he would be the last generation with Parseltongue, as the Gaunts had no other children and there was no guarantee that it would pass on to any Potter children he or Harry adopted. It hadn't upset him.

To know that he might not have it anymore, though, while Harry could still speak to snakes…

It gave him an incredible itch under the skin. He loved Harry, he appreciated him, but he could not stand to be less than equal to him.

He glanced over at his husband, and found that Harry's eyes had already opened. Harry sighed and rolled over, clasping his arms around Tom. Tom lay quiet, staring into the darkness, not returning the hug.

Harry didn't seem upset about that, though. "Is there anything I can do to convince you to sleep?" he whispered.

"Hardly, since you're awake yourself."

Tom heard his voice come out, hard and disagreeable, and wanted to wince, but Harry only smiled into his shoulder. "All right," he said. "Then I suppose there's no point in lying around and waiting for dawn. The trees won't care one way or another, not with how slowly they live. We'll get up and do the ritual now."

Tom nodded and stood, flowing out of the bed. Harry followed him, not speaking now, small sparking blue lights dancing in the jewel on his diadem. Harry began breathing deeply and slowly as he reached for his clothes, which Tom supposed was part of readying himself for the ritual.

He didn't care. He couldn't care. Not when it felt as if the loss was eating him from the inside.

Harry walked in front of him out of the house and around the side of it, towards the grounds they had barely investigated after finding this place. Tom watched their shadows rippling along in a combination of the faint radiance of dawn and the Lumos Charm on Harry's wand. His mind was still.

The grounds opened up ahead of them, backlit by the fierce glow from the east. Harry swept his wand around in front of him and canceled the Lumos Charm. Tom watched for a moment as Harry oriented on a grove of trees in front of them, his frown hard to see.

"I think this one will do," Harry said in a low voice. He turned to Tom. "And you're sure that you don't want to make any more preparations or—"

He paused, although all Tom had done was look at him. Harry sighed, then, and let his hand rest for a second on Tom's forehead. "I'm sorry, love," he whispered, while his magic shook around him for a second as if it was still disordered. "I'll try."

Tom stepped back, his arms folded, while Harry walked towards the trees. He should be thinking something. He was almost certain of that. But all his mind did was give him back distorted reflections of ideas, and his chest heaved, and he felt how dead he was even though he was still alive.

He didn't want to ask this of Harry. He didn't want to demand this of Harry. He required this of Harry.

Harry knew something was wrong from the moment he reached out his mind to petition the trees.

The other times that he had entered into the communion of the wild magic, there had been a deep clarity about the whole process. Strangeness, yes, especially when he was trying to slow the chaotic pace of a human mind to match that of a tree, but he could see everything, and he understood some of the problems with trying to communicate with the earth right away.

This time, a shadow flickered around him and followed him down. Where there should have been clear golden threads of magic, Harry saw oily darkness. He hesitated, and a hook curled around him and snatched him further into the darkness.

Who are you?

The voices shouted at him from every direction, sounding as though they spoke through blood-choked lungs. Harry shivered, but that wasn't the answer the voices wanted, and they tore at him.

Say your name!

Even if Harry had wanted to keep things concealed, he couldn't, not with that command that thundered through him and touched something in him that ran deeper than love. His mouth opened, and the answer tumbled out. "Harry Potter."

The voices laughed.

We know the Potters. We know the prices they have demanded from us. The voices echoed around Harry, as hollow as the old trees themselves, but referencing human concepts they couldn't have had the slightest idea about, he thought, if they were only trees.

We know who you are. We are what they made us with constant calling upon our magic. And you are another one come to do such, not concerned about the price that we will pay.

"I thought I was the one who would pay the price," Harry said, unsure if he was speaking aloud or not. It maybe only sounded that way.

You are the one who will—now.

Darkness wrapped around Harry, and he abruptly couldn't breathe. He struggled to draw air into his lungs, to scream, to do something other than simply drown there. But he couldn't move. He wasn't sure he had a body anymore, or if he did, it was only ears, listening to the mocking laughter around him.

His last thought was of Tom.

Harry had gone quiet and still.

Tom frowned at him. He didn't want Harry to stop breathing or to stop his heart beating the way he had done in other communions with the trees. He had to remain conscious so that he could come back and give Tom his Parseltongue again.

Tom wandered closer and prodded Harry with one finger. There was no motion from him. Instead, Harry tilted slowly towards the ground and would have fallen if Tom hadn't caught his arm and managed to guide him to a gentler landing.

Frowning again, Tom knelt down in front of him. He didn't want to say anything, because there was always the chance that Harry was deeply involved in the communion and would be shocked out of it if he did, but he didn't like the silent scream that distorted Harry's features now that he looked, either.

Or the low flickering of the light in the gem on his forehead, for that matter.

"Harry?" Tom finally asked. "What are you doing?"

The diadem immediately began to glow with fierce blue light, but Harry didn't move and didn't open his eyes. Tom reached out and grasped his shoulder with a snarl.

The hollow laughter that echoed all around them a second later convinced him that that wasn't the smartest thing he could have done, but Tom was still a wizard, even if not as great a one as he could have been with Parseltongue. He drew his wand and moved around behind Harry, standing up without releasing his hold on his husband's shoulder.

Married? To a Potter? The voices reminded him of heavy knocks on a window, the kind he had had nightmares about when he was younger after listening to ghost stories that his mother had told. Then we will take you as well!

Tom braced himself as darkness surged up around him and dragged him further in and down. There was a low sound in front of him, and he met Harry's eyes. At least he wasn't kneeling there with staring eyes and distorted open mouth in this particular space, Tom thought clinically.

"Tom?" Harry reached out a trembling hand. "I'm sorry. I never meant to drag you into this."

Tom took Harry's hand, and frowned again at the cold, twisted nature of his fingers, as if he was holding a handful of roots. "What happened? Why do the trees seem hostile to you instead of happy to see a Potter?"

"I think my ancestors used them too often in wild magic," Harry whispered. "It drained and hurt them, and it also seems to have—"

He screamed in pain, and Tom felt power rising around them like water. It didn't seem able to touch him, and the drumbeat voices groaned in disappointment at that, but it could certainly touch Harry.

We cannot harm you, Potter by marriage. But we can make you watch!

Tom reached out a hand and had it batted back by some force. He narrowed his eyes. He had no Parseltongue, but he was bonded to Harry, and he had his magic, and no trees were going to make him simply back off.

"I claim him," he said.

The trees laughed again, and something crawled through the darkness in front of them towards Harry, who screamed aloud. Tom knew his tolerance for pain. This had to be hurting him something awful for that reaction to happen.

And rage broke loose in Tom at last, the kind of rage that his loss of Parseltongue had been too extreme to make him feel.

He held out his wand in front of him and barked, "Expulso!"

The magic rippled through the darkness in front of him, and there was a long, crowded moment when Tom thought he could hear multiple screams, one of which was Harry's. He lashed out again with the same spell, and this time it seemed to keep flowing from him in long streams after he had thought it would have acted or fallen still. The lashes barely let him keep his feet, and he choked as he fell to his knees, his arms wrapped around himself.

But he still reached out, and felt Harry kneeling in front of him, and gathered him close, his face buried in Harry's neck.

The darkness around them spent some more time splitting and shouting, like the taps of tree branches on windows. Tom ignored them. As long as Harry sheltered in his arms, it seemed the grove couldn't reach him. The cold voices gradually grew quieter, and then the darkness withdrew like a tide from around them.

Tom looked up and blinked in the brilliant sunlight. The clash seemed to have taken hours, which he supposed made sense given what trees' sense of time had been like in the other wild magic rituals Harry had performed.

"Tom?"

Tom sighed and gathered Harry close. At least he was sane and had his memory. And Tom had found the one thing he wouldn't sacrifice to get his Parseltongue back. Not that I should have been in any doubt.

"Are you all right?"

"What a question to ask of me," Tom muttered, and turned Harry's face so that he could look at him fully.

Harry was pale, and he had long striations of red across his face. Tom touched one of them, and winced at the same moment as Harry hissed. "They feel as if I've been sunburned," Harry said in a low tone, lifting his hand to touch one of them but stopping before he got there.

"The trees were angry with you because—"

"My ancestors used them hard," Harry said. He started to turn to look over his shoulder at the trees, but stopped that gesture in the same way that he'd stopped himself when he was about to touch one of the stripes. "I—I don't think this is the best way to get your Parseltongue back."

Tom laughed, for the first time since Dumbledore had cursed him, and his arms curled around Harry's shoulders. "It's fine. We'll try some other way, but not with the trees on Potter land, and not right away."

"Don't you want your Parseltongue back?"

"Of course," Tom snapped, and then took a deep breath, shaking his head a little. "Listen, Harry. I want it back. I value being able to communicate with snakes, and it was the way I knew I fit into the Gaunt family as a child, even though I was a half-blood. But I love you."

Harry held him back for a silent, fierce moment. Then he nodded. "That makes sense," he whispered. "I love you, too. I'm more than glad that you came for me in the darkness."

Tom kissed his temple, and they knelt there for a while in the soft grass, with the sunlight falling over them, ignoring the murmur of the trees.