Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Five

Harry has no idea what to say. His tongue gets tangled up behind his teeth, and his head buzzes with so much fear and self-loathing that he wishes Basilisk were here, so he could bask in her bond and get a little more clear-headed.

"Mate?" Ron takes a slow step towards him. "Is this—has someone convinced you—" Abruptly, he takes the step backwards again. "Hermione, can you cast that diagnostic you found?"

Hermione's wand snaps up, and Theo's does at the same time. Whatever charm she was casting towards Harry meets a silvery shield and dissipates in midair.

"I will not permit you to cast spells on my lord."

Theo's voice is a low snarl. He actually sounds like a guard dog who might lunge at any second. Harry steps up to put a hand on his shoulder, while at the same time snapping their bond like a whip. He hates doing it, but Theo straightens up, and some color comes back into his pale cheeks. He nods.

"Sorry, my lord. I will not attack them without your leave."

"Which I won't give, so you might as well not attack them!"

For a moment, Harry has to hold Theo's eyes. Theo struggles as though he wonders whether it would be worth it to disobey Harry after all, and then he lowers his gaze and bows from his waist. "Your will be done, my lord."

He seems pleased, now, if the bond is any indication. Harry sighs. He's never going to understand Theo, not completely.

He turns to his face his friends. Ron looks like he wants to vomit. Hermione is standing with her wand held upright in her trembling hand, but she looks as if she wants to vomit, too, or cry, or run. Harry has never seen her look like that. Not when Umbridge was in the school, not when they went back in time to save Sirius.

"What are you doing?" she whispers. "Oh, Harry, can you let me cast this spell on you so that we can make sure you aren't possessed?"

Theo stirs again, but Harry clamps a hand down on his shoulder and squeezes, and at least he doesn't interrupt. Draco and Parkinson seem frozen behind them. Draco's bond has turned the clear color of terror again.

It's for them as much as for himself, or hope of keeping his friendship with Ron and Hermione, that makes Harry say, "I'm not possessed. I know that. But you can go ahead and cast the spell, Hermione."

Parkinson stands. Harry keeps a mental eye on her, but she doesn't seem inclined to interfere. She does step forwards so that Ron and Hermione have no choice but to see the Mark on her arm, however.

"What the fuck is that?" Ron whispers.

"My newest accessory. Do you like it?"

"Not now, Pansy."

They didn't discuss Harry calling her by her first name, and he feels a little bad when she gasps and falls silent. But this moment has to be between him and his first friends—former friends?—for now, without his courtiers trying to interfere, even if it's "natural" for them to draw hostile attention away from him.

"Your will be done, my lord," she says in a sweet, submissive voice that Harry doesn't trust one little bit, but at least she stays behind him, and leaves a clear path open so he can speak to Ron and Hermione.

"What is going on?" Ron says, in a tone of thin complaint that doesn't sound like him any more than Hermione looks like herself at the moment.

"Cast the spell, Hermione."

She bites her lip and does it. Harry shudders a little as tiny invisible teeth seem to nip him all over, but he doesn't move. A moment later, a golden cloud melts into the air around him and wavers back and forth.

"You aren't possessed," Hermione says faintly. Harry thinks she would have preferred that result, though. "How did you—why did you—why did you come up with the idea to do this?" She gestures at Pansy and Draco and Theo, at the way Harry stands with his hand on Theo's shoulder. "Did you get the idea from V-Voldemort?"

More than one person flinches, but Harry says, "I had to do it. I had no choice. Voldemort put me up to it this summer."

"What?"

Ron and Hermione cry it at the same time, and the torches flicker in the ritual room behind them. Harry has the impression that the room doesn't like his friends' voices, or maybe their presence. But he has to plunge ahead, no matter how much it feels like he's standing in the middle of a shattering fall of glass. "That's where I was this summer. Staying with him."

"I don't understand." Ron is clutching his wand now, his eyes flickering rapidly back and forth between Harry and the Slytherins. Theo is watching him, and Harry knows how fast Theo will move if Ron tries to attack. "How could V-Voldemort get through the blood protections on the Dursleys' house?"

"Because he shares my blood."

For a second, Harry wonders if he should try to pretend that's because of what happened in the graveyard. Take the coward's way out. But Hermione's mind has already made the jump, and the color drains from her face and she sways on her feet. Ron has to brace her.

"He's your father."

Harry swallows and nods. "My mum—slept with him when she was on an Unspeakable mission. He found out that I was his son when he possessed me in the Department of Mysteries."

In the end, the words are small and quick for something so horrible. Like slashing a wound open down his arm, the way Theo did when he knelt to empower the circle. Harry thought it would be more dramatic somehow.

"Harry. Oh, Harry."

Hermione is crying, not with gasping sobs but with a steady voice and tears rolling as steadily down her face. Ron looks disgusted and heartbroken. He still has his arms braced around Hermione so she doesn't fall.

Harry swallows and nods. "And once he found out, he wasn't going to let me go. He brought me to his—house, and kept me prisoner, and taught me Dark Arts, and gave me people to care for so he could use them as hostages to tame me. And he told me I wasn't to tell you the secret."

"You should have anyway!"

"Maybe I should have anyway." Harry shuts his eyes. "How did you find your way down here?"

"I heard you get up and leave," Ron whispers. "I came down, and Hermione was still studying near the fire and had seen the common room door open and shut. We thought we should follow you to make sure you didn't get into trouble, but we had trouble keeping up. So she cast a Tracking Charm, and we found this room that way."

Hermione says nothing. She's started crying in earnest now, with little hiccoughing sounds. It makes Harry feel worse than if she would denounce him as a traitor of something.

"Mate."

Reluctantly, Hary meets Ron's eyes. He can see, he thinks, a glimpse of the man Ron will be as an adult. Stern, and strong, and loyal, and steadfast.

And, maybe, unforgiving.

"I understand, kind of, what you did this summer. You had to do what you had to do to survive." Ron straightens his back. "But once you got away and came to Hogwarts, why did you keep obeying him? Why not tell us the truth? And why Mark someone new? If you only Marked them because you had to, then you wouldn't—you wouldn't keep doing it. Why are you?"

Harry takes a deep breath. He can feel his bonds with his courtiers thrumming, and he can feel even the bond with Basilisk tightening. She's left the safety of his bedroom upstairs and is racing to find him.

Harry doesn't have time to worry about whether she'll get stepped on right now, though.

"Because loyalty is worth honoring," Harry says quietly, instead of the excuses that Ron and Hermione probably expected from him. "Because they still need me. Because there's no way that I can just drop the bonds when we're back at school and expect them to be safe. And because other people than just the ones I originally Marked can have demanding families or need safety."

Silence. Ron is staring at him with those stretched eyes as if he's never seen him before. Hermione has her hand across her mouth.

Harry is just grateful that Pansy and Draco and Theo are also keeping quiet. He can imagine how easily they could inflame this situation to make it worse.

"But they could go to Dumbledore," Hermione whispers at last. "Parkinson, you don't need this Mark. Dumbledore could keep you safe."

"The way he kept my lord safe?" Parkinson asks, voice as sweet and cutting as a knife dipped in sugar. "By sending him back to abusive Muggles again and again? No, I don't think I'll take the chance."

"Dumbledore would want me to be a spy," Draco says, a weariness in his voice that Harry has never heard before. "With my family connections and the connections that my father has to the Dark Lord? No, there's no way I'd get out of it. It would be a conditional sanctuary."

"You think this isn't conditional?" Ron bellows. His face is bright red. He flips his hand at Harry, who flinches a little. Theo is right behind him, a hand on his wand, vibrating with the desire to curse Ron. Harry leans back into Theo. Theo snarls at him a little, but reluctantly lets go of his wand. "You have to swear an oath and be loyal to Harry and not act against him and not pursue the kinds of ambitions that I know Slytherins have—"

"You know nothing about us." Theo's voice has deepened. He's going to attack, Harry knows it, unless Harry does something drastic. "Nothing about what we face, what our lord faces—"

"Don't tell me the bloody Dark Lord faces obstacles and try to make me feel sorry for him—"

"I was referring to Harry. Our lord."

"Harry," Hermione says, with so much pain in her voice that Harry thinks one of them is going to collapse under it, and it might be him. "You can't want this. You don't have to have it. I know that you can—you can find some other place for him to go, you can renounce the Marks if you want to—it's not a prison—"

It's a prison of compassion, Harry might say. I could only do that if I didn't care about what happened to them afterwards.

But now Ron and Hermione's eyes are pinned on him, and so are his courtiers', and he has to choose, in a way that he never expected. He just feared Ron and Hermione finding out about this, feared it so much he couldn't picture what would happen afterwards. But now is the afterwards.

Harry braces himself and reaches out to his courtiers. Pansy and Draco's bonds are stinging, singing, with fear. They think he'll abandon them.

Theo's bond is singing with faith.

"I can't abandon the people who swore to me," Harry says quietly. "I can't just say that, well, they'll probably be all right, and toss them out into the world that way. I swore to defend them. I Marked them to protect them. And I have to maintain that."

Theo's bond now feels smug. Draco's is frozen. And Pansy is leaning around Draco's shoulder to stare at Harry as if she's never seen him before.

Come to that, Hermione is doing the same thing.

"Harry," she says. "Oh, Harry." As though she's mourning the loss of a dear friend who's died.

Harry swallows and blinks back tears. Then he says, "I was—trying to keep things secret because I was ordered to, but also because I thought it would change things."

"He wants Hermione and people like her dead," Ron says, his voice so tight that Harry wouldn't have recognized it if he wasn't looking directly at Ron. His oldest friend puts his arm around Hermione's shoulders. "How could you, Harry?"

"I made the decisions that were in front of me."

"Then maybe it would be better if you didn't!"

This time, Theo does step past Harry with his wand aimed at Ron. "You don't have the right to say that Harry should die or commit suicide because it would have pleased you, blood traitor," he says, and his eyes are wild. Harry tries to shove Theo behind him again, among other things because he's upset about the words "blood traitor," but Theo elbows him back without looking. "Go and leave him behind like you've been threatening to since fourth year. You're as useless as a broken wand."

"Harry?" Ron's voice is a croak.

"Do you think I should have died?"

Ron stares at him. Harry clenches his fists. "It's a simple question, Ron."

"No, it's not!"

"Then what you're asking me to do isn't simple, either."

Ron keeps staring. Harry does, too. At last Ron makes a rough noise and turns away with Hermione's arm in his hand.

She looks back one last time, then twitches her head and says, "I would have died before I let someone who wants to commit genocide use me."

And they're gone.

Harry notices Theo slip out after them, and thinks that he might be going to Memory Charm them or something. It's hard for Harry to care right now. His head is pounding sickly, and he keeps trying to swallow and not being able to.

But then Theo pauses and turns back, and says softly, "My lord, do you want me to Obliviate them?"

It would be the simplest solution, in a lot of ways. This would mean that Ron and Hermione couldn't tell other people that Harry is Voldemort's son. Harry doesn't want to think they would, but his best friends probably think Harry is a totally different person now and he's betrayed everyone anyway. So they might.

On the other hand, he'll just have to go back to keeping the secret if he does that. And he doesn't think he can.

He swallows and meets Theo's eyes. "Is there a spell you can use on them that would mean they couldn't tell the truth to anyone who doesn't already know it?"

Theo's smile is like a dark sunrise. "Oh, yes," he says softly. "A Vow has to be willing, but a simple enforcement of silence? Yes." He turns around and leaves the room, and in seconds, Harry loses track of his soft footsteps, of everything except the bond that sings and sings between them.

There's silence for long enough that Harry thinks Pansy and Draco will leave without saying anything, but then Pansy adjusts her robes and says in a brisk voice, "My first evening as a courtier of yours, my lord, and it's already an exciting one."

Harry groans a little. "This changes a lot."

"For you, I know. Not for me."

"That's really comforting, Parkinson, thanks."

"Pansy, now." Pansy steps up in front of him, her mouth set in a line that doesn't reflect the fire raging in her eyes or, suddenly, the bond. Harry takes a step back from her, honestly unnerved. "You made the best decision you could, and just because it doesn't make everyone happy doesn't make it a bad one. You've been unhappy for months. Theo and Draco told me. Why does it matter if other people have to be the unhappy ones for once?"

"They're my friends—"

"Then they can put up with a bit of unhappiness as they reconsider the friendship. Or they can stop being your friends, and then why should what they think matter to you?"

"It's not that simple."

Pansy shrugs. "It can be. And honestly, do you know what I think you should do?"

"Tell me, O Great Wise One." A shimmer near the door of the ritual room reveals that Basilisk's arrived, and Harry stoops down and picks her up, winding her around his shoulders.

Pansy's eyes follow the movement of the Disllusioned snake and narrow a little, but she keeps speaking. "I think you should speak to your father."

Harry laughs despite himself.

"No," Pansy says. "Make it plain that Granger and Weasley found out, but that Theo is binding them with a silence spell, and that your court grew by one. Lay out that you don't know what to do next. Parents love being asked for advice. You're admitting that you can't stand on your own, which isn't shameful, because right now, you can't. Just ask."

"And what if he threatens people?"

"Then that's no different from what he's been doing so far, supposedly. At least you'll know where the threat is coming from, and you might be able to persuade him to retract it." Pansy folds her arms. "I think he would do anything for you."

"You don't really know what he's like, Pansy."

"I know what you've said about him. And what Theo and Draco have said about him."

Harry glances at Draco, who looks at him carefully, and then says, without much inflection, "My father would do anything for his heir, things he might not do for his son. He also told me that the Dark Lord talks of you often as his heir, and he seemed gleeful about it."

And his Horcrux, Harry thinks, but he knows that he absolutely can't reveal anything about that. "Okay," he says, and shrugs. "I suppose that that can't hurt. Any more than it's hurt already."

Draco abruptly steps forwards and rests a hand on Harry's shoulder, pressing down. "I think it will be fine," he says softly. "My father told me about the Dark Lord referring to you as his heir so that I would know—not to challenge you too much, not to try and hurt you. The Dark Lord would bring down his full wrath on anyone who did that, Father said."

"I hope you don't think I'm like that."

Draco gives him a painful smile. "No. It's Father who doesn't understand you, more than anything."

"Talk to him," Pansy says, and then her eyes move beyond Harry's shoulder in a way that makes Harry turn around. Theo is slipping in, his bond so thick with satisfaction that it sings and sways in an invisible wind.

"It is done, my lord. I have bound them to talk of it to no one else by any method, including letting someone else read their minds."

"Dumbledore is a Legilimens—he might try anyway, and I don't think they know Occlumency—"

"This particular spell will make them hide it. If they have to study Occlumency, that's what they'll do, but it's much more likely to just raise a wall of magic in their minds if someone tries to read their thoughts. And anyway, you know that both of the Legilimens in the school are aware of the secret already."

Harry nods slowly. Dumbledore would expect Harry to tell him anyway about Ron and Hermione finding out, and has no particular reason to go around trying to read their minds. Snape doesn't, either.

"Thank you, Theo."

Theo gives him a sweeping, melodramatic bow that ends with his hand over his heart. "You are welcome, my lord." Then he glances at the door of the ritual room. "And you should know that the door opened because of your connection to them."

"I don't have a bond with Ron and Hermione!"

"No, but you consider them friends—considered them?" Theo shrugs. "That means the door didn't seal itself against them the way it would have against most anyone else. You didn't think to ward against them, or wouldn't have if you needed to set up wards, and so the ones on the room didn't engage, either."

Harry swallows and nods. It's at least better than thinking that Ron and Hermione have some means of breaking into the ritual room. "Thank you, Theo."

"You are welcome, my lord." Theo's eyes are shining.

Theo insists on walking back with him to Gryffindor Tower. To Harry's relief, no one is in the common room, and he manages to get back to his bedroom under the Cloak without anyone noticing, either. Ron's curtains are firmly shut, and Harry's sure that he's going to pay for their argument in the morning.

At the moment, he doesn't care. He lies back on the bed and flings his mind open, crying out the way he did when Professor McGonagall was trying to find a guardian for him. Father!

This time, he's even less sure of an immediate answer, since it seems that Voldemort is more likely to do his reading and plotting and meetings with his court at night, but he receives one anyway. Voldemort clasps him in what seems like a powerful hand, and Harry opens his eyes to the dream-room of their first "meeting" this term.

Voldemort leans forwards from a chair, his eyes intent and so red that they make the fire seem pale. "You have something to ask me, my son?"

"Ron and Hermione found out I'm your son, and Theo bound them with a silencing spell they couldn't break to tell anyone about it, and my friendship with them might be over, and Dumbledore knows about the Horcruxes—"

"Hush, my son. Hush."

Harry thought Voldemort would fling himself about the room making things explode the way he did when Harry first told him about the memory-lessons. But instead, he reaches out towards Harry and hisses softly, soothingly, in a tone that makes Harry relax against his will.

"It is not your responsibility to make your friends happy or to keep any Horcrux safe other than the one you possess. I have already moved my Horcruxes. Your friends are silenced. It is well."

Harry breathes, and breathes, and breathes. When he really come back to awareness of himself, he's sitting in the chair beside the fireplace, and Voldemort is sitting in one next to him that wasn't there before, one hand soothingly stroking over Harry's wrists. His hissing is wordless now, but it calms Harry down anyway.

"Everything is secure."

"Secure," Harry says, and he speaks before he knows what he's going to say. "But I'm so unhappy."

Voldemort is still for a long moment, eyes locked on Harry as if he's the most precious thing in the world. But still a thing, Harry thinks.

Then Voldemort shakes his head a little and says in a soft, wondering voice, "You need not be. You are making yourself unhappy because you are trying to serve too many ends at once."

"Ends?"

"Yes."

It occurs to Harry that it's extremely strange he's the one talking in Parseltongue while Voldemort is speaking English, but honestly, at the moment, he doesn't care. He turns to face Voldemort, tugging his knees up in front of him and wrapping his arms around them. That displaces Voldemort's hand on his wrist, but it's not like it matters.

"What ends are those?"

"You are trying to be a lord, and your—friends' friend, and Dumbledore's loyal student, and my son, and a Hogwarts student. Has it occurred to you that you can choose between those roles? That you don't have to try and fulfill them all?"

"If I don't, then you'll torture people."

Voldemort is silent, studying him. Harry just waits. He has no idea what Voldemort is going to say next. His mind is drifting in a strange white blankness that reminds him of the walls in St. Mungo's.

"You know that I have not attacked many people in the last three months."

"Many."

"None since your Muggles and Hagrid."

Harry closes his eyes. "You still didn't need to torture Hagrid."

"I disagree," Voldemort says, calm and patient in a way that makes Harry look at him cautiously. "But in the end, I have refrained from torturing and killing people because I knew you would not like it."

"And then I'll join your side, and you'll go right back to it."

Voldemort has a strange smile, even stranger than his smiles usually look, given his lack of lips. "I have refrained from torturing and killing people without your asking, my son. What happens if you ask?"

Harry stares at Voldemort, not sure that he heard correctly. Voldemort watches him back, still as a hibernating snake now, his red eyes looking like the only light in the room.

"I ask, and you ignore me?" Harry mutters at last.

Voldemort gives a long sigh that sounds as if it should come from someone without a forked tongue. "I might do so if I thought the request you made not a worthy one. But you have made no requests so far, worthy or not."

Harry's head is full of whiteness. He bows his head and finally whispers, "Please don't torture Ron and Hermione for finding out the secret."

"Very well."

"Or kill them."

"Very well."

Harry waits, and waits. But nothing happens, except Voldemort watching him. Nothing strikes him down because he said that. Nothing happens to make him think of Ron and Hermione as less his friends.

He blinks.

"I did ask you to speak to me as a son speaks to his father." Voldemort is lounging bonelessly in the chair now, his chin dropped into his hand. His eyes don't seem to have moved from their pinned focus on Harry. "And now you have done it. You have made a request of me, and I am happy to fulfill it."

"In return for what?"

"Your happiness."

Harry blinks again and again. He probably looks like an owl. He doesn't know what to do. Voldemort is just—watching him, and Harry should know what to do with that, how to answer. He did when it was Voldemort in the graveyard and Voldemort in the diary and Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries. But here he is.

"Did you hear me say that Dumbledore knows about your Horcruxes?" he ventures at last, because surely that will bring the storm of rage he's been expecting.

"Did you hear me say that I had moved them?"

"I—suppose I did."

Voldemort just nods. "He may know their nature. He may know what they are." For a moment, Voldemort's fingers flex, his nails sinking into the cloth of the chair and ripping it. "He may have known where they were. But he cannot know their new hiding places."

"Oh."

"When was the last time that you slept a full night?"

Harry blinks and stares at the ceiling of the dream-room for a moment. Then he says, "Don't know," because he doesn't think it counts when he wakes several times from nightmares and when he shares the dream-room with his father.

"Will you allow me to soothe your mind?"

"Just don't put anything in it."

"A task beyond even me," Voldemort says dryly, and holds out his hand while Harry is still trying to determine which is stranger, that Voldemort wants to soothe his pain or that Voldemort made a joke.

Darkness comes surging up around Harry, and he falls gratefully into its embrace. He does hear one more hiss from Voldemort before he does.

"Do not worry, my son. I will take care of what you fear, what makes you unhappy. I am here."