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Chapter Three—Horrors

"What's this?"

Harry couldn't help the way his voice rose and scratched at his throat, rather like his variant of Parseltongue did when he was speaking it. The sight of champagne and lobster on the table wasn't that unusual, but Patricia didn't have a recent Quidditch victory to celebrate, and it was no one's birthday or anniversary.

"In honor of you, of course!"

Mum came running forwards, light on her feet in a way that Harry hadn't seen her in years. She put her hands on Harry's shoulders and beamed at him. "In honor of finding your soulmate, dear one," she said, and she kissed him behind the ear.

Harry reeled without moving. "What—you know I sacrificed—"

"Yes, but with how intense he seemed, he isn't going to be satisfied giving that up," Patricia said, from her place at the head of the table. Michael, sitting next to her, smiled at Harry and lifted a glass of champagne to toast him. "And you know the Unspeakables have all sorts of ways to figure out magic's secrets. I wouldn't be surprised if he already has a research team on it finding a way to reverse the sacrifice.

If you knew. If you knew.

But Harry hadn't even told anyone in his family that he could speak a version of Parseltongue, so he forced a smile and said, "He might, at that."

"Congratulations, son." Dad came forwards to ruffle Harry's hair and hold him in his arms for a second. This close, Harry could feel how unsteady Dad's breathing and heartbeat were. "We told Sirius and Remus, but they were working a legal case for a former member of Greyback's pack and couldn't get away easily. They'll be around to celebrate tomorrow, though."

"Great."

Harry managed to hold his smile for the rest of the evening, and even enjoy the dinner and engage in light chatter. Michael was the one who watched him with the most thoughtfulness, and who cornered him when Harry said he needed to use the loo, just as an excuse to get out of the dining room.

"I know it can't be easy. Patricia said he was pretty angry."

Harry nodded and leaned against the wall for a moment, one hand rising to rub at the burn on his wrist. "Yeah."

"I never asked for what you did."

"Yeah, I know." Harry had heard that refrain before. No one had asked him. That didn't mean he was just going to leave Patricia and Michael to suffer. Now, he struggled not to snap at his brother-in-law, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. "Could you go away, please?"

"All right." Michael gave him a shoulder-squeeze. "I just wanted to tell you that we'll do whatever we can to help you heal the mark, if there's a way, or apologize to your soulmate, or whatever it is that he wants."

Everything. He wants everything. Revenge and my devotion and my death and my pain.

Harry couldn't say anything about that, though, so he nodded, and Michael stepped away with one more smile at him. It was probably a smile of pity. At this point, though, Harry wasn't sure that he cared.

"I'll tell them that you want to be by yourself."

Harry was able, just barely, to give Michael a second, choppy nod of thanks, and then he burst forth from the back door and ran straight across the garden. There was a sheltered alcove on the far side of it, surrounded by a hedge maze, that he had often gone to to brood when he was trying to figure out some way to wake Michael up, and they would know not to disturb him there.

Harry crashed to a halt when he was behind the shelter of one of the tangled rose hedges and cried out in a combination of English and his warped Parseltongue, "Come forth and stand in front of me!"

It was a cry he had given before, and it had the same result it always did. His magic rippled and tore out of his body. A dark, dense creature formed in front of him like a patch of living night. It took various shapes, but right now, it was a panther, which immediately crouched low to the ground, staring at Harry with glimmering golden eyes that reminded Harry of the fire in Riddle's gaze.

"Hunt me," Harry said, and then he turned and sprinted away through the maze.

Behind him came the soft sound of the panther's paws, and then nothing at all, it was running so quietly. Harry, however, ran with his heart so loud in his ears that it was painful, his breath tearing through his lungs.

If his magic caught up with him, it would hurt him. Maybe kill him. That had never happened, but it could.

Harry knew he would never be able to express to his family why he wanted to dance along this edge, why it was something that made him feel as alive as sitting down at the table and having a nice dinner with them—or his soulmate—didn't.

He made it just to the edge of the maze before his magic caught him. It crashed down on top of him and raked claws made of pure force down his back. Harry muffled his scream against his arm. The pain wouldn't leave physical marks behind unless he willed it to. It was more that it sent his guilt and rage and loss spiraling through him.

He had always been like this, he thought from somewhere inside the mass of reeling stars in his head. He had always been wild, part of him pushing and shoving at the boundaries that contained him. He wanted to perform illegal spells. He wanted to do risky things. He wanted to leap and kill and cast Unforgivables and balance on a broom with nothing but his own skill and magic between him and a plummeting death.

He knew why, now. The match to his soul was bloody Tom Riddle, Darkest Unspeakable of them all.

Harry lay there and contemplated a different sort of harm, commanding the panther's claws to dig more deeply and slip around his spine. He thought he could feel the sharp jolt that would consume him just before the panther ripped the bone out.

And then he sighed and called the magic home. The panther became a starless swirl of red and black and flowed into his body again. Harry sat up with his magic warming him from the inside and rested his forehead on his knees for a moment.

Well. As long as he felt this way, he thought he knew what he should get Riddle to begin "making up" for saving his brother-in-law's life.

"This made the wards around my office go off."

"It would."

Potter said nothing more than that, offering the black lacquer box on an open palm. Tom paused and then took it. He had to admit, he was curious to see how Potter would begin fulfilling his conditions.

The box was ornamented with yellow designs, and staring at them, Tom found that he couldn't say how they were made. That was unusual. They seemed to depict a great cat of some sort, a leopard perhaps, bounding along the sides. With a frown, Tom waved his hand over the box to check for poisoned needles under the lid and then flipped it open, ignoring Potter's snort.

Inside the box lay a short dagger, with a silver hilt and a blade made of nothing he had ever seen. It looked like congealed blood. Tom glanced at Potter, who had taken the chair across from his desk without asking permission. Potter smiled at him, but his eyes held no joy, and his body was tense for all that he was sitting with his legs crossed at the knee.

"What is this?"

"Strange that you have to ask."

Tom leaned forwards across the desk, ignoring his undeniable thrill. It had been years since someone had challenged him like this, and he wanted—he wanted—

Potter curled his lip and waved a hand in front of his face. "Control the stench of your lust, Riddle, please."

Tom sat back, feeling as though someone had shown him a sweet orange and then thrown it in his face. "Tell me what this is," he said, and if Potter's goal had been to drain the joy from Tom's first gift from his soulmate, he had succeeded.

Potter's eyes glittered for a long moment. They really were an extraordinary color, Tom thought. He had seen photos of Potter in the papers when it came to some cases or when he attended Quidditch games where his sister was playing, and of course Mrs. Potter was also sometimes pictured there for her latest Charms work. But it was nothing like seeing them in person.

And Tom suspected that Mrs. Potter's eyes had never been lit with this mixture of rage and hatred that made her son so attractive to him.

"That is some of my congealed magic," Potter said, and nodded to the red blade, then kept on talking while Tom's brain attempted to recover from its stumble. "You can stab me with it, and the wound will be, essentially, cursed. It'll bleed for a long time, and when it finally scars, it'll probably keep me from performing some magic and reacting fast enough during Auror cases.

"Of course, if you stab me in the heart or throat, you'll kill me. I advise you to go for the throat. No ribs for the blade to catch on, that way."

Tom licked his lips. He supposed he should say something about Potter's apparent desire to die rather than live with Tom as his soulmate. But his attention was on something else.

"You cannot congeal your magic."

"I've been doing it for years." A strange expression crossed Potter's face. "Why do you think someone can't?"

"It's impossible." Tom should know. He had worked for years on Unspeakable projects where someone had gathered the remains of a conjured or Transfigured object and they had attempted to use that to mimic the caster's signature. It would have been revolutionary as far as detecting crimes (and creating them), but they had never managed a spark of someone else's magic. Even wandless magic manifested as the object or action of the caster's will. To draw it forth from the body…

Potter raised his eyebrows and turned his hand over. A black spark grew in the middle of his palm, whirling. Helplessly drawn, Tom leaned forwards.

The speck formed into a box like the one that Tom already held. Golden light raced along its sides and sketched the image of, this time, a lunging snake. Potter dropped it onto Tom's desk with a faint clatter.

Tom reached out and gently prodded at it with one finger. Yes, it was solid, as solid as its landing on Tom's desk had proclaimed.

He couldn't get his breath. He glanced at the dagger in the first box, and then back at Potter, who had leaned back and crossed his arms across his chest. And he said the only thing that could, the only thing that made sense. "If you think I would kill you and then not kill your sister and her husband for being the reason that we do not have a bond, you are mad."

"Suspected it all along," said Potter lightly, but his eyes had gone stony. "You mean that."

"Of course I mean that."

Potter leaned forwards, his lip curling up so that he looked almost as if he was going to lunge across the desk and try to tear Tom's throat out with his teeth. Tom almost wished he would try. The duel he could have with his soulmate as a result would be delicious. "I would destroy you as you killed me."

"And yet, you made me a gift of this dagger."

"You said that I had three days to make up destroying the bond to you. I thought I'd offer you my life. That way, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you've destroyed someone you must think unworthy to stand beside you, and you wouldn't have any reason to go after my family."

"Your family influenced you to think a profound sacrifice was always the answer. Yes, I would go after them."

Potter's eyes widened. "They had nothing to do with the way I am!"

"Then whom would you blame?"

"You."

Potter's voice coiled around Tom, speaking that strange version of Parseltongue, so thick with hatred that Tom shivered. He placed his hands on the desk, ready to get out of the chair if Potter struck. "And why is that, my own? Because you are entirely wrong about me if you think that I make sacrifices myself. Entirely. Including sacrificing my soulmate when I have at last found him."

"We don't have a bond, you deluded wanker! We can't have a bond! I'm not your bloody soulmate!"

Tom looked at Potter, at the way his lips had just worked pronouncing the accented Parseltongue words, and laughed a little. "Of course we are. Of course we are."

"The mark is burned! It's gone. That means you can choose someone else. Someone who was disappointed in their own match or was widowed or—"

"I will not be second best."

Ice crept down the back of the chair that Potter was sitting in, and for a moment, he stared at Tom with wide eyes. Ice wasn't an uncommon manifestation of wandless magic, nothing like calling the magic forth from the body as Potter had managed, but it was uncommon to have any wandless magic at all.

Potter stood. "You won't use the knife."

"Of course I will not. You are a fool if you think—"

Potter inclined his head and held out one hand. The two lacquer boxes on Tom's desk dissolved into black mist, and so did the ruby-colored blade of the knife Potter had given him. They flew back into Potter, and he shivered as they engulfed him.

Tom watched with interest that he couldn't hide, trembling a little from the force of his desire.

"Then you won't need anything I gave you," Potter said, and tipped him one nod before he turned and walked out the office door.

Tom stared after him, fingers digging into the edge of the desk. Technically, Potter had tried to make it up to him. And it wasn't his fault that Tom had refused the gift. If Tom took his revenge on Patricia Potter and her husband…

Well. It didn't matter. Because that was what would happen. And Potter would learn that no one ignored Tom Riddle.

And that he was not second best. His soulmate would look at him with worship and devotion in his eyes. Tom would accept nothing less.

"I think I'll sleep down here tonight."

Mum gave Harry a single worried look, but nodded and squeezed his arm. She guessed something was wrong, he knew. After all, Harry hadn't brought his soulmate back to the house to meet the rest of his family, and he hadn't rejoiced or talked about him or requested other celebrations.

It didn't matter. Harry was going to handle the problem, and make sure that the berk who thought of himself as Harry's soulmate wouldn't hurt Harry's family again.

After his parents had gone up to bed—Patricia and Michael had disappeared upstairs to read together and snuggle together long since—Harry went to the gardens. He would be better able to feel Riddle's presence, when he came, with only one set of wards between him and that bastard's magic, not the second set of intent wards on the house.

Not long after midnight, Harry felt the Apparition just outside the wards. It was silent, but that didn't matter. Harry had had long enough around Riddle to attune himself to Riddle's magic. It was a talent that he had used more than once to track down criminals when he was an Auror.

He wrenched his magic out of his body, vaguely curious what shape it would take this time. It appeared next to him in the form of the panther again, staring up at him with flattened ears and ripping claws already shot. Harry raised his eyebrow, but he had more important things to worry about than his magic's shapeshifting ideas.

"Go," he said, and tilted his head towards the front of the house. "Make him suffer. Make him hurt."

The panther slipped away on paws as silent as danger. Harry followed, tethered to the panther by a sensation of pulling so strong it nearly overwhelmed his awareness of Riddle's magic.

But not completely. Maybe there was a sort of connection between them after, burned mark or no burned mark.

Riddle was manipulating the wards when Harry's beast arrived behind him. Harry nodded. That was the sort of vengeance he would have expected. Something subtle and needing a great deal of power. Subtler, too, than the kind of attack that had put Michael into a coma or a poisonous potion.

Harry knew exactly why Riddle was doing it this way, and it wasn't to avoid suspicion. It was to show off to Harry. See how strong I am. See why you should choose me.

Bloody bastard was practically prancing around and spreading his magic like a peacock's tail. Harry wondered idly if he had expected it to work.

Riddle either didn't have Harry's gift of sensing someone else's magic or couldn't feel it because Harry's power would be saturating the house like a cloud of perfume. Harry knew what was probably true, and that he wouldn't have the kind of advantage he did right now in any other place.

It was still funny as hell to watch the panther soar through the air, silently and accurately, and land on Riddle's back, pinning him to the ground. And, of course, to hear Riddle's shrieks as the panther's claws went to work on his back and shoulders.

Be a bit of a pain to replace those fancy robes, won't it?

Harry had set up a silencing ward, so Riddle's ringing shrieks didn't disturb the rest of his family. They deserved to get a good night's sleep. He started forwards jauntily after a few minutes of watching. Riddle was trying his best to strike back at his attacker, tendrils of black lashing out from him, but Harry's panther was made of pure magic, and it didn't work.

Riddle froze when Harry came to a halt behind him and laid his hand on the panther's head. The magical beast snarled once for good measure and flowed like silk to stand beside Harry, staring down at Riddle.

It was trembling with the desire to rip him to pieces, something Harry didn't feel himself when his magic was outside his body. Riddle turned and stared at him with dead eyes, then flinched and let out one more shriek despite himself when Harry pulled his power back inside his body and cast a healing spell.

It stopped the blood flowing from Riddle's back and sealed the cuts. It also ensured they would scar.

"You shouldn't have come here," Harry said.

"You were ready to have me kill you earlier today."

"And the offer would still stand, but you didn't want to take it."

"I will never cease trying to harm your family until you do what I want."

"I'm glad that you recognize it as trying. Because you won't succeed. And next time, I'll kill you."

Riddle froze. It was only for the tiniest moment, and then he was rolling to his feet and reaching for his wand, but Harry saw it and understood it. Rumors hadn't lied. Riddle was afraid of death in the bone-deep way that Harry was afraid of—

Well, he couldn't compare anything to it, honestly. He had never been afraid like that of anything.

"A soulmate can't kill their soulmate."

"Haven't you ever read the magical theory on that in detail? It says that one soulmate can't kill another before recognition of their mark or afterwards. It says nothing about what could happen once someone has burned the mark and neither condition applies."

Riddle was quiet, staring at him. Harry didn't recognize the expression on his face. Maybe there was no way to do so.

"Very well. From now on, you are my only target."

Riddle Apparated away before Harry could respond. Harry smiled into the darkness, and felt his magic stir inside him as if it were still in the form of the panther, longing to leap out and rip and tear.

That was all I wanted.