Good evening my wonderful readers. Thank you to all who have read & reviewed Chapter 27! I have had some lovely downtime today so I have the next chapter ready for you. Lion's Wing, thank you so much for your wonderful reviews from the previous 2 chapters! And I think I forgot to thank L'Archange, ucellina, Relatela, and juliaa as well. Your reviews are wonderful.
A couple of early reviewers were hoping for a tit-for-tat kind of power play between Hermione and Tom/Voldemort. At this point in the tale I don't find that to be realistic in the slightest. I would urge those who were hoping for a Wonder Woman-esque Hermione to prepare for the fact that power plays and power dynamics take all sorts of forms beyond the obvious, 'hit over the head' type of power play, and that is where I am playing quite gleefully. I just wanted to give a little reminder for those who have forgotten my author's note in the 1st chapter.
Thank you to all for the reviews and comments. I am very pleased to have so many of you enjoying the story and favoriting it. It makes me smile.
Remus Lupin tapped the parchment against his hand. The owl that had delivered it had been a ragged specimen, doubtless some disowned owl that Snape had coerced into delivering the missive. It would be untraceable, naturally. On its surface, the letter seemed to be just what it purported to be. Nonetheless, it made Remus uneasy.
"What is it, love?" Tonks slid her arms around him, peeking briefly at the waxing moon. "That time of the month?"
"No," Remus replied absentmindedly. "No more than usual. No, it's this which is bothering me at present."
He turned to look at his wife as she read the missive, her eyes flicking up to meet his. "What is he after?"
"That is precisely what I wish to know," Remus said. "Is Harry still up?"
"Yeah. Mum is keeping him from ripping Draco's throat out. They were arguing about blood purity again."
"That boy is more trouble than he's worth," Remus hissed under his breath. "A spoiled, selfish brat."
"Mum seems to be getting through to him. Give her a bit of credit."
Remus eyed Dora with skepticism. "So he no longer calls our child a mongrel. That is hardly challenging, as anyone can see how little he has been around charming infants."
"It is something, Remus," she said, and he patted her hand.
"A very small something, yes. I'll take Harry out for a bit. I want to see what he has to say about the sword of Godric Gryffindor."
A short time later Remus was walking with Harry along the edge of Quirinius Quirrell's abandoned home. It was one of the properties which the Order had appropriated for its own purposes, hiding beneath the very nose of the enemy, so to speak.
"So you found the sword beneath the ice, and Ron helped you retrieve it…and you don't know whose Patronus led you to it."
"No. I think it was my parents." Harry's voice was full of conviction, but Remus shook his head.
"Spectral memories can't move real objects, Harry. Someone put that sword in that pool for you to find, someone who had access to it. There are very few people who could have retrieved it, or substituted a copy for Bellatrix Lestrange which passed muster. Tell me, who can you think of that could have done so?"
Remus' hands were in his pockets, and he waited for Harry to think about that. "It would have had to be someone who could get into Hogwarts—Hagrid. He could have done it. He was a Gryffindor."
"Hagrid was at the Giant colonies at the time, Harry. No, it was someone you thought had betrayed the Order."
Harry quickly drew the correct conclusion and his eyes flashed. "There is no way Professor Snape would have taken such risks for me, Remus. He hates me. To him I am just my father's son, a nuisance—and I saw him kill Dumbledore with my own eyes! He made his choice then, quite clearly."
"Things aren't always what they appear to be, Harry," Remus said. "Recall that you thought you would die when you went to face You Know Who in the forest. Instead, you both lived, and the connection between you was broken. Here we must face again that life is not as simple as we perceive it. In this case, you must accept the possibility that other people's motives are more complex than we would wish them to be."
Harry stopped walking and faced Remus, impatience lacing his voice. "All right, say it was Snape. Why are you asking me about this now? Shouldn't we be finding out what happened to Neville and Hermione, and planning how to strike back against him before he captures and kills more people?"
Remus' face wore his familiar patient if tired expression. "Kingsley is working on that, as is Professor McGonagall. However, in the absence of anything else, I feel I must respond to this letter." He held it out for Harry to read, watching his eyes scan the parchment quickly by the light of his wand.
"I want to go with you." Harry's voice was urgent, but his grip on the parchment was tight, wrinkling it.
"No." Remus was firm. "Far too much has fallen on your shoulders, Harry, but this remnant from childhood bullying falls to me. Severus and I are hardly the best of friends, but considering how few of our contemporaries are left standing, it is my responsibility to determine if he is sincere about this."
Harry released the parchment and straightened up, visibly making an effort to set aside his feelings on the subject. Remus let him think, knowing that Harry would have to think about the circumstances surrounding the sword again later. Finally he raised his head again and looked at him.
"Sin-cere. From the Latin for 'without wax'. Hermione told me that. It originates from the practice some pottery merchants had of sealing cracks in their vessels with wax, which then melted in the hot sun, resulting in their contents spilling everywhere. Trouble was, you never knew if they were cracked until they were exposed to heat. That's the problem with Snape, Remus. You won't know for sure until the time finally comes for him to make a public choice, and by then it's too late to know if his promises are just slippery wax."
Remus grabbed Harry briefly on the shoulder and squeezed. "I am well aware of Severus Snape's tendencies, Harry, but I thank you for the caution."
He didn't mention that the meeting time and place was already set. It was better for Harry to think that the letter truly said more details would be forthcoming.
"You need someone with you. You can't trust that he is not setting you up—he knows that you are important to the Order."
"Severus' motives will not be easily discernible to you. I will remind you that Severus Snape is a master at Legilimency; and you, Harry, may be many things, but a decent Occlumens is not one of them. You would be a liability if you went with me to meet him. I am capable of defending myself and probing Snape's tale for its veracity. You will be better served biting your tongue around Draco and seeing what he might let slip about the Dark Lord's plans."
It was a distasteful plan, but Harry had no choice but to agree. Now that everything was out in the open, he wasn't required to be a solo crusader any longer. He had to trust the other members of the Order.
"Fine, but I've made my opinion clear. I don't trust him."
"Why do you fight your magic? Let it flow instead of trying to control it," Voldemort said. Anyone who didn't know him would think he was being impatient from his tone of voice, but Hermione knew better. This was him being patient—if he were impatient, he would have simply destroyed her and been done with the duel. The fact that he was offering instruction was a sign that he wanted her to learn.
"If I did that it would destroy half the room!" Hermione said with annoyance, shoving an escaping strand of hair out of her face. He had been at her like this for weeks, driving her to the point of exhaustion.
"So what if it does?" Voldemort retorted. "It can be fixed, and I can protect myself and you from whatever you unleash. You will not learn control until you discover just how much you unleash when you lack it."
Hermione huffed but began to cast again, Voldemort watching her with hawk-like eyes, his wand well prepared to rebuff whatever she did. She closed her eyes briefly, needing to block him out completely. Slowly he was refining her casting, but the real block lay in the way she cast. He was correct, she had to completely discard and relearn how to cast spells if she were to have a hope of dueling in the same fluid style that made him so deadly. She attempted a curse of Voldemort's own invention, a hail of acid drops, but it lacked power and did not make it across the room.
"Try Fiendfyre," he ordered, impatiently flicking the poorly cast curse away.
"No," Hermione said stubbornly. His eyes narrowed at that, and he was in front of her in a flash, her wand blocked by his hand.
"Why." It was a command to explain, and she defiantly shook her head, refusing to explain. This was one memory that had not changed appreciably, the horror of the flames gobbling everything in view in the Room of Requirement newly refreshed for her last night. The only thing that had changed was how the diadem's Horcrux had died, a strange sigh instead of the shriek and violent upheaval that had previously marked its demise. She had woken abruptly, but it had been early yet, before he came to bed.
"Wife." He had her face in his hand again, but he didn't force his way in. It would seem that her traitorous mind wanted him to understand, because it offered the memory up at the merest brush of his mind through Legilimency. "You are afraid."
His tone was flat, disappointed. Hermione grew angry at that. "Like hell I am! Prudence is not fear, and you should learn the difference!"
He shot across the room and cast at her again, but Hermione was ready, the spark in his eyes and the quick way he let her go sufficient warning now that she knew him better. He didn't hold back either, circumscribing her tightly with curses that were sufficiently vicious to mentally give her pause. She fired back quickly, what she had already absorbed from his lessons showing in the way she made him move to avoid the curses she sent with deadly precision. Still, she landed nothing while he continued to proscribe her motions, like a cat playing with a mouse in the corner.
"Sloppy!" he taunted, landing a Seco with precision across her shoulder, the shock of the pain registering on her face as he cruelly continued to cast, landing another, smaller cut on her cheek. Hermione realized that he wasn't going to stop, and she barely parried the next slicing hex before she instinctively, blindly cast, the magic spinning forth wildly with pure intent and the barest notice to the wand, which was oddly submissive to the wild wave of magic. Flames barreled forth, uncontrolled and wrathful wraiths that sought to devour everything in their path.
Voldemort shifted quickly, the Elder wand flashing, a jet of blue flames from his wand lassoing the first head of the chimeric flames as he pulled Hermione to his side with a nonverbal wandless incantation. The Fiendfyre was still breaking forth from the yew wand in her hand as Hermione tried to reassert control over it, but Voldemort knew it was beyond her at present.
He snapped the leash of blue flame, pulling the lion's head back with a roar as the serpent and goat's heads arced to the left and began to turn back toward them.
"Don't fight me," Voldemort instructed Hermione, shifting the Elder wand to his left hand held high over his head and placing his right over her wand hand, capably shifting the spell from her magic alone to their blended magics. Hermione was amazingly aware of how he divided his magic as soon as he made the connection between them, the Elder wand flashing again entirely in his own power as a second blue lasso snared the goat's head while he began to pull down with force through the yew wand via their combined magics. The serpent's head of the Fiendfyre hissed madly and reared up, prepared to strike at them.
"Fi takím hi psæ fú. Psā!*," he hissed in Parseltongue, causing the serpent to hiss angrily and yield before its fiery head crashed to the side of the pair of them, the flames dissolving as he drew down both wands and ceased casting. Hermione was breathless from the adrenaline, awed by the way he had contained and controlled the spell, and tired from what had been, for her, an incredible expenditure of energy. None of those things were what left her lips, however. He dropped her wand hand, letting her keep the yew wand, as she straightened to look at him and said,
"You used Parseltongue against the serpent of flame. I didn't know that was possible."
Voldemort, his magic still humming pleasantly from the challenge, raised his hand to touch the cut on her face. "Faes hi takēm kātha kastú…you could have controlled that, had you not been afraid of me."
Hermione was beginning to recognize the individual syllables in what Tom translated as "mate", but she refused to be drawn from the argument by his touch. "I wouldn't have been afraid of you if you weren't slicing me into pieces!"
"Ironic, isn't it? That fear is what pushed you to do what I asked of you." His tone was hard but his touch was pleasant, reassuring. She felt the caress as he healed the cut on her cheek, the press of his palm firm.
"I would think that fear is rather counterproductive, or are you not trying to lull me into a false level of intimacy with you?"
"Do you think our intimacy is false, Hermione?" he asked sinuously, healing the other wound on her shoulder with his wand, then sliding it away in his sleeve. "Let me ask you this: how do you benefit me? You say that I want this intimacy, but what do you imagine you would be to my enemies, once they realized exactly how we are bonded?"
"They would never use me as a tool the way you use people," Hermione replied, but her voice lacked conviction.
"I think we both know that is a lie," Voldemort hissed quietly, letting his hand tangle in her hair beneath her messy ponytail, his fingers sure. "Dumbledore may still be dead, but his legacy of using people as pawns lives on. At least I refrained from using children to do my dirty work."
"Like you refrained from using Draco," Hermione spat, but he refused to take her bait.
"We both know I fully expected Draco to fail," he explained patiently in her ear while he caressed her waist with his left hand. "Contrary to popular opinion, not all of my followers are killers. Draco has other talents, which is why he remains alive today. That was a valuable test for Severus and a wrenching punishment for Lucius."
"When will you stop testing me?" Hermione asked in reply, returning the favor by whispering it into his ear. She caught the upturn of the corner of his mouth as he pulled back, circling her once before closing in for the kill.
"You are doing so well…already your magic has grown, supporting this child and expanding to combat against mine, to challenge me…" He brought his left hand up her side in a lazy caress, bringing those fingers to the back of her head, tilting it, while his right hand drifted down, that familiar pulse of magic from his hand that confirmed again the tiny life in her womb, so close to having its own heartbeat now, its magic already a faint whisper. "But you lack conviction. You still doubt me…wonder what I will do with this child I've spawned in you. You ask yourself what purpose you serve now that we've made it past that messy business at Hogwarts and that inadvertent Horcrux I created out of Harry Potter…and you know that I could tell you, but the price remains unpaid, does it not? And you aren't quite willing to go there, not quite ready to say goodbye when your mind rationally accepts that your life is as cleaved in two as that fractured moment in time when your life diverged wildly from how you thought it would be."
"What you ask of me is my trust—the one thing you told me never to give anyone. You said those who trust were fools, prone to foolish games," Hermione replied strongly, even if it was against his lips.
"What have we been playing for weeks now, pet? How do you see this playing out? Do you imagine I shall let you go? Of course not, you are not stupid. You have done us both a favor by avoiding the tiresome melodrama of what I do in pursuit of my goals—things which you find…distasteful, shall we say? But that does not preclude me from appreciating your many talents, nor you from calculating the possibilities of your position. All we have done, my dear, is begin to hash out the terms. You are playing cleverly, pet, but do play to win. After all, you must live with yourself once I permit you freedom from your little cloister, and once again you find yourself facing the arrows slung by the wider world. I shan't defend you from the consequences of your own choices."
"But you will have to defend me, won't you? That tiresome little clause in our bonding vows still holds you, just as surely as my promise to respect you."
Her voice was barbed but it pleased him. She could tell from the glimmer in his eyes, the firming of his hand on her waist. "Oh, my petal, how you please me. Respect is of far greater value than trust. You rely on me, which is of greater coin. Trust would merely allow you to be comfortable in that reliance. So you see, you only deprive yourself of comfort when you fail to trust me. Either way I get what I want from you."
"Not everything." Her voice was low, but he bent his head and chuckled against her neck, then moved behind her and pulled her against him, his hand firmly clasping the yew wand and casting, an image appearing in a grey mist of the past pair of them intertwined, the glow from their mingled magics sparking with the movements of their hands, their bodies.
"Oh Hermione, I do love the way you bargain…begin, please. I am agog to hear your offer." He moved her hair to the side, pressing small kisses on her neck before raising his head to look at her as the image changed, partially mirroring the pair of them as they were today while the couple continued their sinuous dance in the frame.
"I want to spend time with people other than you, to study more than dueling and be able to move about the grounds and house, to be alone without Nagini sometimes. And I want my wand back."
He returned his attention to her neck, placing a kiss at the edge of her jaw before he looked at her again in the mirror. "Oh, my sweet, how pleasantly you ask me. But are you truly prepared to deal with my Death Eaters without all of your memories? How will you know if what they accuse you of is true? How will you live with yourself when you see your friends brought here, see what sort of a world I am recreating through fire and force?"
"I promised you my respect when I bound myself to you. But respect can turn to resentment if it is not earned. You said I gave myself too little credit for being able to influence you—are you afraid I will wield that influence in a manner you don't like once I actually see what you are doing?"
The challenge was bold, and Hermione felt the weight of it. But the gauntlet was thrown, and she couldn't take it back now. She could not live this half-life forever, waiting for memories that alternately puzzled and terrified her.
"You realize that I have some terms of my own," he said, smoothly circling around in front of her again, drawing the yew wand from her unresisting fingers and tapping it against his palm in thought. "I want you to become friendly with Nagini. She is tasked with protecting you, which would be far more enjoyable for both of you if you made an effort to befriend her. Second, you are not permitted to speak to just anyone. I will make it clear who is allowed the pleasure of your conversation and who is not. Third, you will assist me with research on various topics as I require it."
Hermione quickly interjected, "Only on things which are not for offensive purposes against the Order or my former friends."
"You are mistaken if you think I would share strategic information with you at this stage, therefore I can concede that readily enough. However, be aware that you might choose to eclipse that little condition yourself…and in a manner which might surprise you."
"I doubt that," Hermione said strongly, but he simply smirked.
"Lastly, you will consent to the resumption of intimacies between us at the time of my choosing," he said with a quirk of his brow. "I will save you the trouble of feeling obliged to feel guilty—we both know that you are unbearably attracted to my magical ability, and I will confess in turn that you have quite eclipsed my expectations of your abilities, which I find quite…stimulating. So let's cut through the crap and agree that, despite the lamentable lapse of control that it engenders, I intend to fuck you quite thoroughly, and quite often."
Hermione felt her face flush with blood at the frankness of his discussion, but she couldn't deny that he was correct. "What of the child?" she asked quickly, wanting to move beyond that topic.
"The child is not destined for some dark ritual, if that is what is concerning you. I can't say I particularly desire to experience fatherhood, but I expect I will take it seriously enough when it arrives. Does that satisfy you?"
"Well enough, for now," Hermione replied. He was far too agreeing, so she pushed one more time.
"I want to call you Tom."
That provoked him, as she knew it would. He had her on her knees so quickly she was sure they bruised. He was singularly unimaginative in some ways.
"Again you resort to violence, yet you claim to protect me," she said quietly.
"Is this respect?" he hissed, pulling her head back by the hair so he could see her face.
"It is respect, because it means I still see the humanity in you," Hermione replied, her expression honest. One of the greatest paradoxes of Tom's peculiar code of honor was that he respected honesty, if only for its ability to wound. Hermione was teaching him its ability to repair.
"Ah pet," he said softly, drawing her up before him. "You, only you, can disarm me so."
He folded her into his arms, her own wrapping around him in thanks for the permission—for that is what it was.
* From Parseltongue-inspired w-i-k-i. This phrase roughly translates as, "I am he who stops you. Stop!"