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Chapter Four—Maneuvering Mates

Tom hesitated for a long moment after he had stepped out of the shower. Then he turned sideways so that he could see the scars down his back in the mirror.

They were long, rippling, white, as if his neck had bled rivers of salt and they had calcified on his back. Tom touched one and hissed at the spark of pain that came when he fed magic into his fingers.

Harry had marked him, far more thoroughly than the soul-mark on his wrist ever could have.

Tom began to smile. He couldn't stop. He couldn't stop. He tried to get his mouth to bend into a more normal expression, to frown into the mirror, and instead he kept smiling until his cheeks ached and loud, cracked laughter burst forth from his lips.

Potter was Harry now. Harry was strong enough to mark him, sadistic enough to leave scars, and dedicated enough to the defense of his family not to back down the next time Tom tried to hurt them.

Tom looked forward to their next clash. He looked forward to it so much.

He wanted to see what kind of pain Harry would fling at him in response.

"Congratulations on the soulmate, kid!"

"Yes, congratulations, Harry."

Sirius, being Sirius, had seized Harry in a hug the minute he got through the front door, which meant that Harry couldn't look up in Remus's direction for a long minute. When he could, Harry managed a smile that he hoped appeared genuine.

It didn't work, but then, lying rarely worked with Remus. Remus's eyes narrowed, and he looked at Harry with startled concern. Harry looked down and went back to hugging Sirius. His godfather was simpler.

"Where is he?" Sirius asked, bouncing back and looking around as though he expected Riddle to be lurking beneath the kitchen table. "Your mum said she met him, and Patricia, but we deserve our chance to welcome him to the family, too!"

"Do you have Everlasting Itching Powder with you?"

"Yeah, why, you want some for his pillow?"

Harry rolled his eyes. Sirius didn't even look ashamed at having been caught with a prank that he'd planned to use on Riddle. "No, Sirius. It's not like that."

"He doesn't appreciate pranks? Are you sure that he's your soulmate, Harry?"

Harry's mouth crimped for a second. Sirius knew Harry had played "pranks" at school. He didn't know how far some of them had gone. As far as his godfather was concerned, the Marauders were still the undisputed champions. "Yeah, I'm sure. But there's a problem. He's bloody angry that I burned my mark to wake Michael up."

"Oh, but surely he would understand when you had a chance to explain it?" Remus asked. Remus was the gentlest person Harry knew, probably because he believed that he had to be to counteract the werewolf part of himself. "That you hadn't had a hint of your soulmate until then, that you couldn't stand to see Patricia suffer—"

"I explained it to him. He's a prick, so he doesn't care."

"Who exactly is your soulmate, Harry?"

"Tom Riddle."

Sirius burst into a torrent of swearing, the point of which seemed to be that fate was horrible for matching Harry with someone who didn't have a heart and possessed the political leanings of a Dark pureblood. Remus looked at Harry with wide eyes that held sorrow.

And something more.

Harry looked back at him evenly. Of them all, Remus might be the only one insightful enough to realize what it said about Harry if Riddle was his soulmate, why his soul might be the match for Riddle's. Even Patricia, who could feel when Harry was in trouble, hadn't sensed what his magic could do.

After a long moment, Remus simply inclined his head and moved over to calm Sirius down. Harry sighed and leaned back on the wall, just as glad that there wasn't going to be a dinner with Firewhisky filled with prank potions, or whatever Sirius had planned.

He wished his soulmate had never revealed himself.

Tom smiled a little when the door of his office shook under the pounding of an enraged fist. He leaned back and looked up at the silver clock that hung on the wall and displayed the movements of a number of important Wizengamot officials (not that it looked like that to anyone else). Tom had added Harry to the clock yesterday.

Right on time.

Tom flipped his hand and released the spells that held the door shut. Harry stalked in, eyes fastened on Tom and hands curled into claws.

Like the claws that had ravaged Tom's back the other day. Like the magic that he could manifest outside his body, still an impressive and astounding talent.

"What do you mean by encouraging the Wizengamot to argue that individuals can't have private security?" Harry snapped.

"Unspeakables don't present legislation to or encourage the Wizengamot to vote in any one particular way, darling. We're strictly neutral."

"Unless you're Unspeakable Tom Riddle."

"Even then, I don't know why you would assume I was behind any effort to encourage Hit Wizards and Aurors to do the jobs they were hired to do, instead of providing private security to individuals who are not even Ministry affiliated. Tsk," Tom said softly. "Tsk. Tsk."

Harry's body lit up with rippling white flames. Tom flipped his hand over again to relock the doors. He didn't want anyone else to report what Harry could do, but even more than that, he didn't want someone to intrude and ruin the moment.

"I know what you're trying to do."

"Do you?"

"Make it harder for Patricia and Michael to hire security. Make it easier for them to get hurt. Do you even understand how badly I would hurt you if you succeeded?"

"That could be seen as a goal of this proposal," Tom said, and frowned at the far wall. "On the other hand, taxes and other funds gathered by the Ministry are used to pay the salaries of Aurors and Hit Wizards. Don't you think that no matter how much they can afford them, your sister and her soulmate you're obsessed with—"

"I am not obsessed with him, you wanker—"

"The man you burned your soul-mark for—"

"You sound obsessed with him!"

"He must be important to you," Tom continued in the mildest voice he could, as he watched the flames around Harry turn incandescent, "to burn your soul-mark for him. Do you really think that he should be an exception to the rules, or that your sister should, no matter how much money they make?"

"It's not about money! It's about Patricia being so popular that people are obsessed with her and want to kill Michael!"

"She could always have chosen not to play Quidditch. A career no one forced her into."

Harry spoke in his twisted version of Parseltongue, making fireworks of exquisite pain burst inside Tom's head. "If you damage my sister's career, if you hurt her, if you hurt Michael, I'll kill you."

"You have resoundingly failed to do so so far. Even when you had me at your mercy last night. What is it, Harry? Do you like seeing me cry out in pain? Enough to keep me alive no matter what happens?"

Harry blew up Tom's desk.

Tom rolled, a shield coming up instantly and instinctively over his head. The shattered pieces of the desk cascaded over him and then rolled off. Tom heard the sharp ping as some of his ornaments hit the walls or floor, accompanied by flying wooden splinters, and his parchment soared crazily around him in a blizzard of paperwork.

There was silence after that. Tom forced his way back to his feet, knowing his eyes were wide, and stared at Harry for a moment. Harry looked blank, rather than pleased with himself as Tom would have expected.

Tom licked his lips and whispered, "Tsk, tsk, darling."

"You know how I feel."

"I know that you've tipped your hand more than you wanted to." Tom nodded in the direction of his office door, which was shaking from the pounding of several desperate people yelling his name.

Harry looked at him in silence and then turned around. The doors unlocked, and Harry immediately began to speak in such a bright, normal voice that Tom might not have believed he could ever speak in Parseltongue if he hadn't heard it himself. "Yes, Unspeakable Riddle is fine…I believe that it was the combination of an untried spell with an artifact he was investigating…"

Tom spent the moments before he had to dissipate the shield admiring the deft way Harry was handling the onlookers. How many times had he done this before? How often had he dissipated worry and concern over the arrests he had turned into murders?

Tom would enjoy whatever move Harry made next, but he also thought it was time to look into his past and get a better idea of what other people saw Auror Potter as.

And all the while, Harry would wind himself deeper and deeper into the dance between them instead of backing away.

I will enjoy this. How long will it take him to realize he's dancing with me?

"I heard something about Unspeakable Riddle's desk getting blown up."

Harry stared down at his hands and swallowed. "I—didn't mean to do that."

Patricia leaned over to put her hand on his, her eyes big and dark and concerned. "Harry, what did you mean to do? Do you think it'll make him back off if you do things like blow his desk up? Or were you trying to get his attention?"

Harry stared at her, feeling betrayed. "I wasn't trying to get his attention! I want nothing to do with him!"

"Because he didn't find you for so long?"

Because he's more like me than you'll ever know. Because I never want you to know exactly what I'm like.

Harry had known there was something wrong with him, at least compared to his family, from a very young age. He would get angry, and his accidental magic would move straight to blowing things up, tossing objects against the wall, and hurting people. He didn't know if his parents or Patricia remembered the moment when he'd broken his dad's fingers at three years old. Harry had wanted sweets that Dad was keeping away from him, and his magic had lashed out and done that.

They might not remember it, or they might just think that since Dad had been holding the sweets, Harry was trying to Summon the box and the broken fingers were a side-effect. But Harry remembered. The rage that had filled him, and how it had made his mouth taste like blood. How he had twisted the magic out of himself and thought Pain, pain, I want it, make him hurt—

"Harry?"

Harry snapped back to himself. He hadn't spent years shielding his family from what he was only to make it obvious now. They were so innocent, so pure, so gentle. Harry wasn't, so he would take care of them and stand as their shield against threats they didn't see coming.

"I'm okay," he said quietly. "Just embarrassed."

"And this legislation Riddle is encouraging the Wizengamot to pass?"

Harry sighed. "Riddle is upset because I burned my soul-mark to give Michael the chance to wake up. He's decided to take petty revenge on you because he's…" A monster, a bastard, the closest match to my soul that I'm likely to ever see. "A git. He thinks that taking revenge on you will make him feel better or something."

Patricia nodded slowly. She was frowning as if she thought there was something wrong with his words but didn't know what. "So you don't think that you'll be inviting Riddle into your life?"

Harry snorted. "No."

I'm going to make him regret this, though. I just wish I knew how—

Then Harry snapped upright, and Patricia, who had turned to leave the sitting room, turned back with a small frown. "Did you think of something that would make you willing to let him into your life after all?"

Harry stifled his flare of impatience. They didn't understand. It wasn't the same for them, with their fulfilled soulmate relationships. "Something that might make him understand how serious I am about protecting my family and make him give up his stupid, pretty revenge against you."

"If you say so. He strikes me as someone determined to keep going ahead at all costs."

Harry just smiled. Riddle wanted to hurt Harry, to make him worry that someone would attack either Patricia or Michael if they couldn't go out with Hit Wizard protection? Then he would discover the value of a soulmate who matched him in a desire to cause pain.

Tom knew he hadn't imagined it when Richard Yaxley, the Unspeakable who was liaising between the Muggle Retreat offices where Tom worked and the rest of the Department of Mysteries, gave him a sideways glance. Tom narrowed his eyes. "Speak your mind, Richard."

Richard hesitated for a long moment, then shrugged. "Just wondering how much of your—I mean, the bill that you encouraged the Wizengamot to put forth about Hit Wizards and Aurors. How much of it was affected."

"Affected by what?"

Tom's last words hovered on the edge of Parseltongue, but Richard wasn't troubled by that in the way that some non-Unspeakables would be. He considered Tom with cool brown eyes. "Affected by your childhood."

"What?"

"That's the latest rumor that's going around the Ministry. That you put forth that bill because you were deprived of family and affection during your childhood, and so you're jealous of your soulmate's family being close."

"That is not true."

"You look ready to explode, sir. Many people will take that reaction to mean the rumor is true."

Tom bit back the furious reply he wanted to give. "How did the rumor start to spread?" he asked. Many people were aware of Tom's childhood in a Muggle orphanage, but none had the details.

"As I understand, Auror Potter was talking to a few of his colleagues in a lift yesterday, and others overheard him say that he was your soulmate but felt that you were too possessive and attacking his family indirectly through the political process so that he would have to focus on you alone. He thought it might come from your loneliness as a boy."

Tom's hands clenched under the desk. In a way, it wasn't a disaster. Harry was still dancing that dance of his own free will, winding further into the waltz instead of trying to ignore Tom's maneuvering.

In another way, it was terrible. If he made Tom look weak and used that weapon against him well enough, Tom could lose connections he'd spent years building up.

"Well, you shouldn't be concerned, Richard. This has nothing to do with my childhood."

"And your relationship with your soulmate, sir?'

"Is private."

Richard seemed to have acquired the ability, suddenly, to hear when Tom was on the edge of violence, and he bowed at the waist. "My apologies, sir," he murmured, and found an excuse to leave less than a minute later.

Tom leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

He had thought Harry would balk at revealing their soulmate relationship to more people than the ones who already knew. It seemed he would have to dismiss that possibility and attack on the ground that Harry had chosen.

Tom found his mouth lifting in a smile despite himself, excitement thrumming through him.

It had been so many years since he had had a worthy opponent. And if an opponent was the only way he could have Harry, he would still have him.

"Auror Potter."

Harry turned around, a bit reluctant. Mind-Healer Garnet Travers, who had been assigned to work with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement not long after Harry began working there, was—fine, as far as Mind-Healers went. She was just always urging Harry to slow down and talk to her and listen to others in a way that took his attention away from his cases.

"Yes, Mind-Healer Travers?" Harry asked as politely as he could. He'd got a tip from George and Fred Weasley's joke shop that Fenrir Greyback had been seen in Diagon Alley, and Harry had something special in mind for him. He was the one who'd bitten Remus.

Travers tapped her fingers against the doorway of his office, watching him. She was a tall woman with dark brown skin and dark hair that she kept braided. It still almost reached her knees. "You do know that you can speak to me about anything?"

"Yes, of course, Mind-Healer."

"Then why didn't you speak to me about your soulmate situation?"

"I didn't know who it was until recently. And, well, he seems upset about me burning my mark so that I could wake Michael up. I didn't think there was much to say about it. I thought we would go our separate ways."

"Why did you burn your mark? You know my colleagues at St. Mungo's might have been able to discover some other way—"

"With respect, Mind-Healer, I'm not going to defend my decision to you again," Harry said, as politely as he could. "It was and remains mine."

"And now your soulmate's."

"Well, yes, I suppose."

"Your soulmate came to talk to me today. Unspeakable Riddle revealed some concerning things to me about your childhood."

If this is some kind of attack on my family again—"You know where Unspeakable Riddle spent his childhood, Mind-Healer Travers. He might be prone to seeing abuse and dark corners where there are none."

"Oh, no, he didn't accuse your parents of abuse." Travers's face hardened. "He revealed that you had been violent since childhood, and that that had carried over into your Auror career."

Harry held himself firm for a long moment to keep his mouth from opening in a snarl rather than an exasperated sigh, his heart churning up fire inside his chest.

Riddle, you fucker.

"That sounds more like a concern about my adulthood than my childhood," Harry said. "And one the Head Auror should perhaps be handling."

"I agree. I think we should go to his office now."

"I do have a case, Mind-Healer—"

"One that can more productively handled when we have made sure that you have someone going with you, and that another suspect doesn't accidentally end up dead."

Harry couldn't do much but smile and walk beside Travers towards Head Auror Scrimgeour's office. He would have tried the Memory Charm, but it was much less likely to work on a Legilimens like Travers than most ordinary people.

Riddle wasn't attacking Harry's family now. He was attacking Harry.

He'll regret it. Every moment, every part, every plan. Does he want to experience intense emotion, even if it's pain? I can arrange that. I'll arrange everything.