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"I think I screwed things up with your mother, and I'm not sure how to fix it." Tom ran a hand through his hair, agitated. His words in Parseltongue ran together a bit at the edges in his rush to get the words out, but it was still comprehensible. Harry seemed to be keeping up anyway.
"I came with great news. People will finally give her and other new-bloods and partial-bloods the respect they deserve. I thought she would be ecstatic— that's what she always wanted right? But she only gave me this… fake smile. She might think she's good at acting, and you know, she's a great actress as Minister. You have to be great at acting to be a global leader, and she nails it with flying colors, but I can see right through it, and agh... She just looked so... sad."
Harry and Tom were in the living room of their little house on the island. It was now the day after that talk with Lily. As was often the case, although it was embarrassing to admit given Harry's young age, Harry had seemed the best person to turn to.
"I tried telling her how important she is to me, and that seemed like it only made it worse. All I could do was hug her while she pretended everything was okay and that my shoulder wasn't wet and then she went to bed by herself."
Harry, sitting cross-legged on his armchair, seemed to consider his words carefully before tentatively hissing. "Did you see the bags under her eyes...? Mum has been really tired lately. Like, reeeeally tired. If you just go in like that and talk 'at' her a mile a minute instead of to her, of course she's going to be overwhelmed. When she's tired you should try to talk about light things that are comforting if you're going to talk. And you have to listen in equal measure... Did you even let her get a word in?"
That... sounded damningly accurate. Tom raked fingers through his hair again, glad he wasn't bald because he’d probably go crazy without being able to run a hand through his hair as a coping mechanism.
Had she said anything at all? Maybe a couple of words. "Then came you." It sounded a little ominous now. Like the way he swept in and screwed everything up when she probably had something on her mind that she needed to talk about. Damn it.
"Okay, I clearly dropped the ball. So, what do I do now?"
Harry sighed. "Did you even give her the chance to tell you she's having eggs?"
"No...?" He didn't mind one way or the other if she had eggs, whether for breakfast or any other time of day for that matter, and there was no reason for her to tell him if she did. What a strange question.
"Ah man…" Harry murmured, which came across as a soft sibilant hiss. "I told Nagini that Mum would want to share the good news with you herself so we restrained ourselves from saying anything, but at this rate you're not going to be there when the baby hatches."
"Like I keep telling you and Nagini, babies don't hatch...
...
...
...
"Wait. Hold up now!" Tom hissed, taking a step back. "You said Lily is having eggs? A baby?!"
"Yeah. You know, I didn't know either, but Nagini is good at scenting these things out. Anything having to do with eggs, really."
"So that's why you both were talking about hatching. A baby..."
He conjured a plush armchair behind himself and half sat, half fell into it. It seemed like the done thing in these sorts of circumstances.
"I know you and Mum were talking about moving out of this house, but it's really bad timing. During egg laying, what she needs most is a sense of security, so she'll be looking for a safe location to make a nest. If she doesn't trust your intentions, and it really seems like she doesn't, she'll nest somewhere without you."
Without him? Now that Harry mentioned it, his last conversation with Lily had felt somewhat like… a goodbye. Looking back on it, her long stares felt almost like she was memorizing his face because she wouldn't see him for a while, or perhaps never again. He felt the shadows around him grow long as despair clawed at his insides.
"Where else would she go?" he asked weakly, more to himself than Harry. "Her parents aren't alive anymore."
"You took care of that," Harry said solemnly. His stony green eyes didn't slam him with accusation, but the accusation was definitely there. There was no kindness in those eyes.
"I know you killed all my grandparents. Mum's... Dad's... and yours."
Tom's stomach dropped. He had thought they'd kept his entire past a tight secret. How did Harry...?
"...Nagini," Tom hissed.
"You left a boy and a snake alone in a small room together for hours over several days. "What else did you think we would talk about the whole time? The weather and our health?” Harry asked darkly, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I've always known you are Voldemort and what that meant, ever since the first day here even I was scarcely older than a baby. I was there in the house when you killed my father. I saw the green flash of the killing curse just as much as my mother did, and I heard his voice go abruptly silent and the thud as his body hit the floor. I asked Nagini and she told me. Nagini doesn't keep secrets from Speakers. She told me of the murders you and your followers committed. I've always known."
The whole world seemed to tilt with Harry's words... as though remaking itself into a sort of helter-skelter sideways reality where dusty trinkets went sliding off shelves and crashed down into the wall which was now the floor.
The symbolic equivalent of drifting dust motes, broken glass, and loss.
There wasn't much Tom could do but stare. Those all-seeing green eyes stared back at him in equal measure. That green stare that saw everything he ever was and ever would be and found him lacking. Yet Harry had still considered him worth speaking to for all these years, despite knowing what he had done.
"I don't blame you for it," Harry said in a wavering tone. "I didn't then either. Or at least not after I cried a bit and Nagini explained it." The seriousness of his words was belied by his childish voice, yet unbroken by puberty. "It was war, and war necessitates casualties. You had your reasons, which Nagini and I have spoken of at length, just as my parents had very good reasons to fight against you.
"At the end of things, Dad made Mum very unhappy. And, you know, Mum said he had wanted to go down fighting. You gave both my parents the best possible solution.
"Neither could live while the other survived."
Just when Tom couldn't have been any more surprised, Harry had dropped another bombshell.
"...You know the prophecy? And you've interpreted it?" Tom asked weakly.
It hadn't been hard for Tom to get his hands on the prophecy orb once Dumbledore was out of the picture, but Harry hadn't been there to hear it. He'd kept it secret even from Lily. Nagini had been right there by his side, though.
Harry merely smiled a small, bitter smile. "Everything Nagini knows, I know. Everything. And being confined on this island for ten years has left me a lot of time for thinking."
While it was true that the island had been safest for Harry, just as he'd always told Lily, Tom had always been wary of the prophecy. Positioning the one who was potentially the greatest threat to his life on a secured island under constant surveillance had only made sense.
What was left of the prophecy to be completed? He had never physically marked Harry, but he did treat him as an equal in a lot of ways, especially when it came to dating and marriage advice, strangely enough.
Lily still didn't understand the full scope of Harry's perceptivity. He was incredibly astute. Harry limited himself when speaking English, possibly for her benefit or possibly his maturity all of this time when speaking to Tom was an effect of Parseltongue that didn't reflect his age.
He had considered it before that Parseltongue seemed to have an effect of raising a snake's intellect to the Speaker's level. After all, snakes were relatively unintelligent on their own and didn't actually communicate with each other. They led a mostly solitary existence, seeking primarily prey, warmth, shelter, and rarely, reproduction. Hissing was used only to detect scents in the air or as a warning to other creatures that might intend to harm them.
Parseltongue as a magical construct language granted snakes, despite their pea-sized brains, the ability to understand and answer a Speaker's queries at a human intellect level and to be able to carry out the Speaker's orders.
That was why human concepts such as Minister and half-blood were easily expressed in Parseltongue despite it being a language for communicating with snakes. Because it wasn't truly a snake language. It was an adaptable magical language created for human use, in order to turn snakes into useful tools for surveillance or discreet murder.
Tom knew he lacked emotional intelligence in a lot of ways, while Harry seemed to have it in spades. Speaking in Parseltongue seemed to raise all forms of his intelligence across the board. In order to match the Speaker, he realized. Himself.
If he was right, Parseltongue was raising Harry to Tom's intellectual level, but perhaps only when they spoke it together.
Did he revert back to a normal eleven year old intellect when Tom wasn't around? It would be difficult to probe Harry's mind with Legilimency to discover the truth, since Tom performing Legilimency on Harry would require Tom's physical presence nearby.
If Tom described a complicated arithmetic equation and wrote it out and asked Harry to solve it, would Harry be able to do it because Parseltongue granted understanding of whatever the Speaker spoke about?
That was a thought trail to pursue another day, though. For now, the prophecy.
He mentally ran through the prophecy again. Power to vanquish the Dark Lord. He had essentially been vanquished, as a Dark Lord, at least. He had given up the mantle of Voldemort, which still rankled a bit if he was honest with himself, but it was necessary. Dark Lords didn't rule. They conquered. He had achieved what he set out to do. Wizarding Britain and all of its corruption had been fully dismantled and ripe for him to reforge.
Lily had really blossomed as a world leader. All he'd done was send her talking points, helpful hints really, and she had hit the ground running and became a beloved monarch for the people similarly to how the Queen of England was esteemed Muggle-side. And she'd cemented international alliances abroad. The different magical embassies had started sending her rare cultivars of magical lilies to the point that they'd run out of gardening space at the space-expanded British Magical Embassy Garden and had to cull a lot of the roses and auction off a few of the more rare rose bushes to make room.
Tom had bolstered her ranks by recruiting the most promising seventh year students each year to her Ministry department or to their research and development department that they had implemented, depending on the student's strengths and interests. Their Ministry was thriving.
So then, while it was true that he was still accruing power and connections, and that some research topics were well and away on the darker side of things if you looked between the lines, he could no longer be considered a Dark Lord, at least by his own estimate.
Thrice defied still fit James and Lily, more or less. Born as the seventh month died only made sense to be Harry because Tom had never marked the Longbottom boy in any way. Barely knew him really. If power to grant relationship advice counted as a power he knew not, then that really covered everything. Saying that James died at Lily's hand was a stretch, but she had been at hand in the same small house when he died.
Perhaps the prophecy had already been completed years ago, and he hadn't gotten the memo.
Perhaps they would never really know. Prophecies were kind of funny like that.
Of course there was no guarantee Harry's interpretation was correct. For all that he was incredibly precocious, he was still eleven years old. Tom wanted to believe it was right, though. That things really could be that simple.
And then there was the other bombshell. Lily was having another child… His child… In a very real sense he had been like a father to Harry. In a twisted sort of way, he supposed, since he'd killed Harry's birth father in cold blood and then later married his mother, but he'd been a father in all the ways that mattered, really. He'd attempted to connect with him, guide him, provide for him… keep him contained and safe… The same could be said for a pet, to be fair, just as he did for Nagini, but he'd done the best he could considering he'd never had a father to look up to himself.
But now… a sprog of his very own, his right from the beginning. Flesh begot flesh. An heir to Slytherin and the Peverells. But more important than all that, his. His. A child with a mix of Lily's traits and his own, brought out into an unsuspecting world.
Merlin… Would they be seeing dead rabbits again? Surely not. Right? Lily would never allow their child to be abandoned in an orphanage full of horrid mongrel children or dropped on the doorstep of her wretched muggle relatives, even if she… died…
Considering even the possibility of her dying with his child brought to mind his own birth mother.
His mind supplied, in overly gruesome detail like it always did in his darker moments, the imagined image of his mother with an ugly, shriveled face and clothed in grubby rags wrapped around her swollen girth, hobbling half frozen on frost bitten, club-like feet through the icy muck puddles of London. He saw her, like a pitiful figure in a grainy silent film, collapsing at the threshold of Wool's Orphanage and expelling a pale, wrinkled and squalling babe in a wash of blood and bleeding out onto the chipped and grimey black and white floor tiles that his mind's eye still knew so well, even more than a decade after the building had been torn down. Except this time in his vision, it was Lily's flaming red hair splayed amongst the blood.
No, he wouldn't let that happen to Lily. It couldn't. He had built Wizarding Britain all around her like protective scaffolding. There was no way she wouldn't be taken care of. She was the Minister. All she had to do was state her requests out loud and dozens of wizards and witches would bend over backward to see to her every need, and not just because they were paid to do so but because displeasing her and getting fired would be career suicide.
If she ever needed money, all she had to do was paint a few broad strokes on a canvas, and sell her 'priceless artwork' to the highest bidder. Wealthy patrons would be clambering over each other bidding thousands of Galleons for the chance to buy her art pieces and possibly cash them in later in the form of a future favor from the Office of the Minister.
He had made sure she was secure in every way possible, as secure as any world leader could be.
Surely she could see, though, that the most secure place she could ever be was by his side?
-----
“Minister, what would you like for lunch?”
The voice came from the magical intercom box on her desk. Lily paused for a moment to consider before pressing down on the rune on the box and replying.
“A BLT would be lovely.”
“Right away, Minister.”
Lily stirred her tea at her desk. She brought it to her nose to inhale the delicate aroma and take in a moment's peace. Life's crises could fall all around her as they may, but the Ministry kept plugging along. Barring wars, plagues, and Dark Lord invasions, she imagined it always would.
The intercom system was one of her personal inventions. Targeted paper airplanes felt enormously slow and inefficient, but many ministry employees couldn't manage casting a Patronus to send messages, and such a high power spell seemed wasted on trivial messages regardless. Runes were sufficient for the job, though, and no one in the office needed to know that muggles came up with the idea of an intercom first. Instant communication was invaluable.
She liked to believe she was at least leaving the Ministry better off than she found it.
She pressed down the intercom rune again. "Please have a message sent to Harry that I'll be there to pick him up in thirty minutes."
She had decided there was no reason to wait. It was only postponing the inevitable. Today would be the day.
She had purchased three pairs of train tickets from Kings Cross in Muggle currency, all leaving this afternoon at the same time or close to it, and heading to different locations. Specifically to different airports. At each airport she had purchased two pairs of international airline tickets. The final destination wasn't important, just that each flight would take them outside of Wizarding Britain's port key barriers that tracked magical transportation across their borders.
She would decide by her gut feeling at the meeting which train she would take with Harry. That way even if Tom or someone else were to take a glimpse at her thoughts, they won't know which way she would go because even she wouldn't make that decision until the moment she was there.
—--
There was a beep.
Harry read the message that printed on their magical home fax machine, another one of his mother's magical 'inventions’ using runes to imitate Muggle technology.
"Huh. Mom wants to pick me up to come hang out at the office today," Harry said out loud in English.
Then an owl breached the wards and pecked on the window. Since it was allowed through, it was likely safe. The ward scanned all owl post to detect magical traces and also any chemical traces from the long list of explosive or dangerous materials Lily had keyed the wards to scan for, including metal of any kind, and prevented their entry through the barrier.
The owl was for Tom. He unfolded the parchment. It was a simple note from one of his more reliable moles in the Ministry. He had asked, among other things, to be informed of any large expenditures outside of the budget. It seemed that Lily had recently converted a fairly large number of Galleons into pounds and several other types of foreign currency.
Harry had been right. It was the worst case scenario. Despite everything, despite even being the Ministry of Magic herself with all the power of Wizarding Britain at her beck and call, she had apparently decided to throw it all to the wind just to get away from him. Did she think he wouldn't follow her? There was nowhere he wouldn't go to get her back. Not that he wouldn't respect her wishes, but he saw no reason their wishes shouldn't align if they laid everything to light and reached an understanding.
He had hoped he would have a little more time to prepare himself, perhaps to schedule their talk to take place at a location with a bit more ambiance, maybe the shores of an azur lake with the Alps in the background or somewhere up high with a view of cityscape lights at night amid a sea of stars, but it seemed the time was now. The Ministry Offices it shall be.
-----
It wasn't even fifteen minutes later when Tom swept into her office. He didn't bother to wait for the secretary to buzz him in but just waltzed right in unannounced. Like he owned the place. That was fine with her. She would soon be leaving it vacant. He could rig the vote and fill the seat with any rear he chose, but it wouldn't be hers.
"You didn't bring Harry?" she asked. It went without saying that he had seen her fax. Why else would he be here now?
"Lily. I know you took out a large deposit of Galleons and exchanged them for foreign Muggle and Wizarding currencies."
Luckily she had prepared for this line of questioning. "Of course. Is it a crime that I'm planning to go shopping in Paris and Vienna after touring Beauxbatons for their open house?"
Tom sighed. "Let's not beat around the bush. There is no shopping trip. I know you are planning to leave me, and you know that I know."
She swallowed. Looking down, she could see her hands had begun to shake.
Was this it then? For ten years now she had been swallowing back any complaints and dissent she had, always cautious, because just one negative interaction might have been enough to tip the scales against her. All to reach this moment when her transgressions against him finally reached the point in his mind where she had gone too far. Would she now finally see him go full Voldemort on her?
From the moment Voldemort pointed his wand at her by the crib in Godric's Hollow, all the way to this moment now, there had only been one possible, inevitable end.
"If you really must leave, Lily, may I please read your thoughts?”
She hadn't been expecting him to say that of all things. She'd expected more of a flash of green light and a quick death in the best case scenario. From what she'd seen from her time as a Death Eater, those who double-crossed him soon begged only for a mercifully quick end. Though that was obviously not an option. Voldemort didn't do mercy.
Still, she supposed letting him browse her brain for a minute couldn't make anything worse. Assuming she was permitted to have an actual choice in the matter and that he wouldn't force his way in regardless of her preference.
He looked deeply into her eyes and in her mind's eye she followed him in his downward dive as he traced the neural pathways she had forged over the past ten years and lived the memories she had endured since the very beginning, lingering especially on the most painful moments. He took in a sharp breath and seemed to crumple in on himself.
"...I thought I had been granting you privacy by leaving your thoughts to yourself. Lily, you have been suffering so much on my account. I'm so sorry that I never saw that. Your beautiful bright flame... I've been suppressing it, and I never knew.
"The talking points I gave you as minister were merely that. Talking points. Suggestions. You could take them or leave them. And the aides I sent were always for your use. Not as spies or double crossers for my side. They are loyal to both of us, and I always screened the thoughts of each one before sending them to you to ensure that was the case.
"You don't have to feel chained. You are free. Free to do whatever you wish and go wherever you will. You feared that I would burn Britain, but fear no more."
He lifted her chin to look her in the eyes with a gentle sincerity that surprised her. "I don't burn gifts."
He turned away, gesturing to the wider world, using those grand hands gestures he was fond of. "I can always take over France or Bulgaria or what-have-you whenever I please, but Britain is my gift to you. A thank you gift. I cherished so much of our time together. Much more than I deserve, considering the pain it brought you."
He got down on one knee before her, "Lily Evans. You felt our marriage was forced, and I never intended you to feel that way. Will you give us another chance?"
"Tom..." She tried not to choke on tears and the massive lump in her throat. Sure, it was massively cliché, but this was the down-on-one-knee proposal she had never received from him. As she remembered, he had rolled over in bed after doing the deed and asked, "Shall we marry? It will be good for optics." He was always careful of how they appeared in the public eye moving forward with his political aspirations.
As with most of Tom's suggestions, she had assumed 'no' wasn't an option.
She crouched down beside him and he put a hand on her cheek.
"I understand if you can't believe me yet, but you're a Legilimens in your own right. Look into my eyes and see my sincerity for yourself."
She took a deep breath and dived straight into his memories. She saw all the times he went to Harry for what was essentially relationship counseling, and saw, bless him, this egotistical man putting aside his pride to ask advice about her preferences from Harry as a toddler barely more than a babe. He had cared about her opinions and her comfort even back then.
She understood all of their Parselmouth conversations for the first time by proxy. She was amazed by her son speaking coherently in fully formed sentences even while still in diapers. Even more so by the realization that Harry had always known about Tom's bloody past. His willingness to look past it despite everything that happened surprised her. She wondered why Harry had never shown much of that mature side of himself to her, instead acting the child around her, possibly for her sake to not worry her. Perhaps he had also played his role as a child a bit too well. In this helter-skelter reality she was now living in, was the dread Dark Lord Voldemort truly the only one here who had acted with sincerity in their family?
She saw Tom agonizing over gifts to her, planning the talking points he gave her so that they would present her in the best light and best represent her wishes for Britain and the world, as best he understood them.
She saw him watching her speeches with pride and saw his overwhelming affection for her that bled into all his actions, his actions that she had come to assume were only an act. Too good to be true.
But she couldn't deny the truth right in front of her.
He loved her.
His assassinations and bribery and dirty politics still bothered her. Those were also laid bare on full display here in his mind, and he didn't attempt to hide them, wanting to show all of himself. She definitely would have much rather lived the rest of her life without seeing the fingernails of Dumbledore's uncursed left hand ripped out one by one and his living disembowelment while set on fire.
In his head Tom spoke for her to hear. "I'm not a nice person, Lily, but I'm your person. Your enemies are my enemies. As for those you consider your friends… I dislike most humans, so I can't promise to make them my friends, and really no one is worthy of you, but I do promise I will never harm you or anyone who is yours. Especially not Harry."
It was impossible for him to lie while she was there inside his mind. Even if he tried to obscure the truth, she would experience his thoughts as they surfaced before he could hide them. The weight of all the worries she'd been bearing on her shoulders felt blissfully lightened.
“If I stay with you," she said out loud, "I'm doing the Ministry my way. No interfering, no intervening. It's mine.”
His eyes glinted with pride. “I would have it no other way.”