Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of Lightning and War, and of the series. Thanks for reading all this way with me.
Chapter Thirty-Four—A Taking and a Giving
"We have to do it in public. That way, the other Order of the Phoenix members will know what awaits them if they come after us."
Harry had rolled his eyes, but Tom had been insistent. Then again, in all the worlds, he seemed to like spectacle and notoriety and fame more than Harry had ever done.
So now Harry was standing quietly in the middle of the grounds of the Potter house, which he'd warded several times over before revealing it to the public. Tom stood next to him, prouder than any pale peacock that Abraxas might have brought for the occasion. And around them stretched snapping flags and delicate white fences of glowing magic that had been Tom's idea. They were going to pretend that the fences were necessary to protect the spectators from Harry's magic.
Harry had been utterly incredulous at the idea. "You realize after this they'll fear me more and some people will seek to destroy me even more?"
"It does two things," Tom had said, ignoring the expression on Harry's face as he'd arranged the gleaming blue dress robes (trimmed with gold because of course they were) over Harry's shoulders. "It scares some people enough that they'll never attempt anything against us. And it warns the rest of them. They can't say that they weren't warned when it came to attacking you."
Harry had agreed because of the second reason, not the first. His experience with every wizarding world was that people feared and hated anything they didn't understand—from a second-year student with Parseltongue who might be Petrifying people to a wizard with magic stronger than any of theirs.
But taking magic from a marked follower of Dumbledore wasn't exactly legal. This set up a sort of loophole outside the law for taking care of the Order of the Phoenix members that the Wizengamot didn't manage to capture.
So they had this circus on the grounds of his house, and all kinds of people were pressing eagerly forwards against the white fences. They would probably put some distance between themselves and the fences right quick once the draining began, Harry thought, and snorted a little.
"Something amusing?" Tom asked into his ear. He stood next to Harry, of course.
That was one of course that Harry felt good about. He turned his head enough to rest his chin on Tom's shoulder. "Only that I think they're too close now, but they'll back off once I began showing them what they came here to see."
"Terrify them."
Harry pulled back and blinked at Tom. That was advice he wouldn't have expected. After all, Tom was the one who knew these people and the price of not getting along with them best.
Tom put his hands on Harry's shoulders and shook them a little. His gaze was so steady that Harry could imagine balancing on it for the rest of his life.
"I want them to fear us and respect us," Tom whispered. "And leave us alone. I don't want to collect followers the way Dumbledore did. I have my Knights, and that's enough." He gave Harry another slight shake. "Nor do I want to run for the position of Minister or a post in the Wizengamot until I have the years and the record of power for people to take me seriously."
Harry had to roll his eyes. That was a law of nature just like the way Tom would always support him. "Not until then."
"Yes, not until then." Tom didn't seem to find it funny, or to be inclined to ask why Harry did. His hands gentled, his fingers smoothing down Harry's shoulder blades. "I want them to back off instead of following you around the way people did in your first world, or asking us for favors the way people always did Dumbledore here. And to bring your second world into it, I don't want someone to fall in love with me and think they can win me the way Jonquil did. Hold them at a distance, husband mine."
Harry met Tom's eyes and swallowed. He would never find someone else who loved him this ferociously, he thought, as he reached up and let his thumb swipe along the skin beneath Tom's eye. Tom leaned on him.
"Yeah," Harry said. "I can do that." And he turned to face the motionless Order of the Phoenix member who lay on the ground in front of him, while the crowd stirred and hummed with anticipation.
Terrify them.
Tom had thought of pulling back on his own advice, not because he didn't believe it but because Harry would probably find it unnerving. But he was glad he'd been honest when he saw Harry raise his hand and gather magic around himself, a swirling trail of stormclouds that sprouted from his shoulders like wings.
The crowd shut up instantly.
"This man, Kevin Delaney," Harry said quietly, but with a building magical force to his voice that Tom wondered if most of the crowd even understood, "came to my home to murder me and my husband. Despite his lord being dead, despite the fact that his lord had been the one to nearly drain him of magic and nearly kill him. I thought of killing him, but that would only be permissible in a fair duel."
He glanced up at the crowd, and the stormclouds around him clapped together and formed a huge, hovering grey mass of power that made them be absolutely silent. Tom could see even the children among them craning their necks and clapping their hands over their mouths, as if they thought that making any sound would cause Harry to turn in their direction.
"And as you can see," Harry continued in a mild voice, "a fair duel is an obvious impossibility."
Tom kept from laughing, but it was really hard. He turned and glanced over the crowd as Harry began speaking again. There wasn't a face in sight that wasn't fascinated and fixated, his Knights included. Good.
"So. I will continue the draining of magic that he already agreed to once, given that he was an Order of the Phoenix member." Some people were beginning to gasp and shout and clutch their hands now, but Harry gave no sign that he had noticed them, even though Tom knew it was exactly this kind of reaction that had made him not want to do this in public. "He should be happy," Harry added, as the stormclouds struck out past him and for a second resembled enormous, inverted grey-white lightning bolts like the one on his forehead. "I'm fulfilling what his lord is no longer around to do."
Harry merely looked at Delaney, and the Draught of Living Death they'd been keeping him under abruptly drained out from his pores, a disgusting grey-green mess that stained the grass. Tom wrinkled his nose. He was glad that Delaney wouldn't be around to cause a mess much longer.
There was an obvious ripple of people backing away from the fences now. Tom thought he knew why. Harry could have gestured to remove the potion from Delaney. It would still have been wandless magic, impressive in its own way.
But instead, he hadn't made a move. He had made it obvious that the purging of the potion had happened simply in accordance with his will.
Yes, yes, it did, Tom thought, as he met pair after pair of frightened eyes. This is the one who will stand against you if you decide that you just have to have revenge.
He wondered idly, as he watched Delaney stagger to his feet, if something like this had caused the extinction of the Potters native to this world. Perhaps someone had got so sick of the fear that they'd destroyed them.
But, despite the diadem glowing on Harry's forehead, Tom didn't really think so. The power that was terrifying everyone came from Harry, not the gem.
"What are you doing?" Delaney spluttered, staring around as if he couldn't believe there wouldn't be a last-minute rescue mission charging in from somewhere.
"Kevin Delaney," Harry said, as solemnly as a judge reading a sentence, "I have decided that you will be a threat to me and my husband as long as you are alive. That means that, unless I want to kill you—"
"It would be an honor to die for Albus Dumbledore." Delaney straightened and turned a little. Tom thought he was trying to expose the phoenix brand on his cheek to the audience, in case there were any reporters in attendance.
Harry stared at him as if he didn't understand Delaney's interruption, and then continued. "You'll be a threat. But I don't want to kill you. I only want to complete the spell that you gave your consent for once before."
He did lift his hands this time, but only to cup his palms, as if he was cradling an imaginary lotus blossom. Delaney glared at him, only appearing to understand when a blue coil of light tore out of him and towards Harry. The light from the diadem grew brighter as if to welcome it. Harry sighed and shook his head as if Delaney's magic was a little abused animal he was going to protect.
And still everyone stared, silent again now and fascinated.
"No!" Delaney screamed.
"You'll be alive if you're a Squib," Harry said, while the draining went on, and more and more blue light spooled out of Delaney. Tom found himself thinking it was a good thing that the man hadn't died when Dumbledore drained him, as much as he hadn't expected to think that about any Order of the Phoenix member. If Dumbledore had taken all that magic, then he would have been more of a threat to Harry. "But not able to hurt us."
Delaney charged him.
Tom tensed, and knew without looking that Abraxas and Shara were doing the same thing. But Delaney abruptly stopped moving.
Harry shook his head and said, "I'm not going to keep your magic, Delaney, for what consolation that's worth. I'm going to release it back to the world and the wild." He turned his head slightly, and Tom followed the motion with his eyes.
Harry appeared to be looking at the copse of trees on the Potter grounds that had hurt them when Harry tried to win Parseltongue back for Tom. The trees that had apparently been hurt by the ancient Potters' use of wild magic.
Gryffindor justice, Tom thought, but he still smiled in approval. Both because he would never present less than a united front with Harry before such a hostile audience, and because it was like Harry. Tom might have loved the notion of the man who would keep Delaney's magic for himself, to add to his own power, but he loved the actual man, who would make this gift to the trees, more.
"Can he do that?" someone wondered from the crowd, near enough for Tom to hear.
"It's not technically illegal," Abraxas called, and Tom felt his lips twitch. That was right. There were rituals and potions that could drain someone of their magic, and they were all Dark and had been rendered illegal by the Ministry, as well as nearly impossible to perform or create due to restrictions on the ingredients, decades ago.
But no one had ever bothered to outlaw what Harry was doing—what Dumbledore had done—because no one had ever been able to do it before.
By the end, Delaney was slumped over, shivering, his lips nearly blue. The copse of trees that Harry had released the bastard's magic too was shivering in reaction, its leaves lifting and stirring. Tom watched it for a moment, wondering if a tree would show forgiveness.
But it was probably too quick for them, if they even understood what Harry had done. They remained silent.
Delaney fell. Harry nodded, and Shara moved forwards and knelt down to press her fingertips against his pulse. Tom gave Harry a quick kiss on the cheek for not moving in to do it himself when there was no reason to put his life at risk. Harry's lips turned up in a smile.
"He's alive," Shara said, not bothering to disguise the contempt in her voice.
Harry nodded and turned to face the crowd. More of them had started to come close again, but they all shrank back when they saw the expression on Harry's face. Tom sighed. Was he the only one who wanted to shag Harry harder when he looked like that?
I'll face less competition this way. There is that.
"Remember that if you come after us, there's no reason I wouldn't do this to you, too," Harry said so gently that Tom thought he would need to revise this memory in a Pensieve to fully grasp the words. "There's no reason I wouldn't drain your magic and leave you a Squib, never able to cast a single spell, if you decide that you need to kill a Potter. And you're going to suffer more than he did."
He turned his back and walked towards the house again, ignoring the shouts from behind him as some stupid people recovered from their daze and started demanding interviews or the answers to questions.
But not nearly as many as he would have thought, Tom noted, studying them. Not nearly as many as he was sure would have done in Harry's first world, where they'd thought of him as some kind of commodity.
Tom slashed them with his own glance, which shut some of them up, and followed Harry.
It's over. Or part of it is over.
Harry settled on the grass in the back part of the grounds, where he was sure that none of the people who had come to watch him "take care of" Delaney could see him. Besides, the Knights of Walpurgis would be escorting most of those people away from the house anyway.
He closed his eyes and let his head bow until his scar and the diadem touched his knees.
Soft footsteps crushed the grass behind him. Tom sat down behind him and said nothing, his hand resting firmly between Harry's shoulder blades.
"Are you worried that you did the wrong thing?" Tom asked, when a stretch of silence had passed filled with nothing but the creaking of bark and the rustling of leaves and the song of a particularly persistent bird from the top of the nearest copse.
"No," Harry said, and leaned against him. Tom accepted the weight more than willingly, his lips brushing the back of Harry's neck. "But for just a moment, I was tempted to keep Delaney's magic."
There was more silence, enough that Harry nearly lifted his head to look into Tom's eyes. But then Tom gave a soft chuckle and slid his hand up and down Harry's back in a motion that was probably meant to be soothing but just felt gleeful.
"What?" Harry demanded, and lifted his head.
Tom raised an eyebrow. "You can be tempted by power," he answered in Parseltongue. "You're not a perfect hero, not a god. It's good to be reminded that you're human."
Harry scowled at him. "Yes, I can be tempted by power. I was just never tempted by the kind that Dumbledore had or the kind that people in my first world thought I ought to want. But someone who was an enemy and who would have killed us…I felt as if I could have taken his magic and added it to my own and it would have been right."
"But you didn't," Tom said comfortably, switching back to English. "You gave it away and used it to repair a wound that your ancestors caused. That's like you. That's the man I fell in love with." He kissed Harry's temple. "And you're more than powerful enough on your own." This time, he touched the air the way he did when he wanted to caress Harry's magic.
It purred and vibrated, of course, the way it always would for Tom. Harry slumped closer to him and murmured, "And what do we do now?"
"I'm surprised at you asking that question."
"I'm asking it anyway."
"We're going to live." Tom's hand slid up and down his arm, then closed in a tight grip that Harry didn't want to get away from. "We're going to dabble in politics and learn more magic and practice the legacy of the Potters and defeat our enemies and do all the things that we never would have got a chance to do if Dumbledore had succeeded."
"Because fuck him, right?" Harry mumbled.
"No, thank you."
And Harry gave in, and laughed, and it seemed to him that the fluttering pulses of light from the jewel on the diadem hovered and danced in the air around him, laughing with him, and even the copse of trees he'd gifted Delaney's magic to, slow and sullen and hateful as they were, might have given the slightest flicker of their leaves in acknowledgment.
Live. And find a way to make a portal so that I can visit Ron and Hermione someday.
That they had a "someday" at all was more than Harry had thought they would have a week ago. He leaned harder on Tom, and Tom caressed his magic again, and the world glowed, brilliant as lightning, around them.
The End.