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Harry pulled his sleeve up—at least no one questioned the necessity for long robe sleeves in Hogwarts—and stared at his hand.
Yes. It was the same as ever.
A dazzling silver compass rose sat there, on the back of his right hand, exactly the way it had looked the morning after the Battle of Hogwarts when he’d woken up. He’d gone to the hospital wing at first, convinced it was a prank. Normally he would have just asked George, but he didn’t want to intrude on his friend’s grief for Fred.
Madam Pomfrey had cast several spells, had him take a few potions, and then muttered something to herself and cast a long, complicated charm. She’d gasped at the results that unfurled above his head. Harry had felt his stomach turn to stone.
“I’ve been cursed? Is there a cure?”
“It’s not a curse,” Madam Pomfrey said. Her voice had been shaking a little. She’d directed Harry to sit down on a hospital bed across from her, which hadn’t been great for his mood. But he’d sat, folding his hands in his lap.
“It’s a condition related to soul magic,” Madam Pomfrey whispered, as if she thought that someone would come around the corner and interrupt them. “Normally, it’s a mark that shows—some affinity with someone else. Someone who has the same mark.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s rare. It was more common when people practiced soul magic on a regular basis, and—well, to be frank, Mr. Potter, it usually happens as a result of a damaged soul. People who have these marks are the ones who need someone else’s soul to be intertwined with their own, because they can’t stand by themselves anymore.”
Harry had closed his eyes. Yes, he knew exactly what Madam Pomfrey was talking about, given that he had had someone’s soul intertwined with his own until yesterday.
“Please be honest with me, Mr. Potter.” Harry had opened his eyes and seen Madam Pomfrey regarding him from only a short distance away, her lips pinched. “Did you—did you do something with soul magic that might have damaged yours? Or were you cursed? Sometime in the Battle of Hogwarts? Before?”
“No, Madam Pomfrey,” Harry said, and bit back his sudden sharp weariness that everyone was still suspecting him of using Dark Arts and evil magic, after—everything. “I’m pretty sure this is a remnant of my connection with Voldemort.”
Madam Pomfrey flinched, and asked no more questions.
*
Harry had kept the mark hidden.
Even now, three months after the start of the year they’d returned for, it would have been hard for him to say why. He could tell himself that Ron and Ginny had enough to deal with, given their grief for Fred and the almost catatonic state Mrs. Weasley had entered during the summer. Hermione was frantically studying for NEWTS and trying to make sure that Ron was all right. They still talked, of course, and spent lots of time together, but it wasn’t about the kinds of things they needed to do to save the world, not now.
Maybe the bigger truth was that he’d just wanted something private. Something of his own.
And then the mark had started changing. At least sometimes.
The silver lines would look harder, as if they were made of metal rising from Harry’s skin, and grow more incredibly complex ones. In the middle of the design was usually a pentagram, or a star complex enough to be one. When the mark changed, it turned a deep blue and grew more lines until it was a twelve-pointed star and glowed like the night sky at dusk.
It was—
Beautiful.
Harry didn’t really want to think that, given that it was the last thing Voldemort had scarred him with, but it was. And he thought that showing it to someone else would either make them feel sorry for him or scream about Dark Arts.
Neither was a reaction he wanted to deal with, right now.
In the meantime, he had concealed the mark, and mastered glamours that he could hook onto the end of his sleeve, and admired it in private, and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do about it if he ever wanted to date someone.
*
Harry woke one night in late November with a tugging sensation pulling on him. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and thinking absurdly that one of his roommates had cast a spell that made him wake up for a prank.
But then he saw the muted silver glow filling the inside of the curtains, and cursed under his breath as he drew back his sleeve.
Yeah, the compass rose was shining.
“What do you mean, anyway?” Harry grumbled to the mark, although he kept his voice low so that there was no chance anyone else could hear. Yeah, Neville and Ron and Dean—Seamus had chosen not to come back—were all snoring, but that could change in a second. “Why are you doing this? Why do I have you in the first place? Why a compass rose?”
The shining went on, and so did the sensation that he should get up and follow the tugging. Harry rolled his eyes, to let fate or Voldemort or whoever had done this know exactly how irritated he was, and got up to get dressed.
*
In the end, the tugging led him to the top of the Astronomy Tower.
Harry came out into the open and looked around. He had no trouble pinpointing the exact spot where Dumbledore had fallen to his death, or where Malfoy had stood when he was trying and failing to kill the Headmaster. He walked over to the parapets and leaned against them, staring down.
Yes, that was where Dumbledore’s body had lain.
Harry rubbed his hand, a habit he’d taken up in the last few weeks to replace touching the lightning bolt scar that no longer haunted him. Then he turned around and leaned against the parapets the other way, to look inwards.
That was where the Dark Mark had hovered the night Dumbledore had died. That was where he had stood during the Astronomy OWL when Hagrid had had to run away and McGonagall had been Stunned. If he lifted his gaze, he could see the place where he’d entered the Forbidden Forest when he’d thought he would die.
Harry sighed. So many bad memories here, and even though he had yearned to come back to Hogwarts for one last year, he didn’t know if he wanted to stay.
“Hello, Harry.”
Harry spun around, his wand in his hand and his body in a defensive crouch before he could even think about it. And then he stared in silence at the silvery, misty boy who stood near the top of the stairs.
“You’re dead,” Harry whispered.
“Half dead, in a way. The way you were when you were in King’s Cross.”
Harry backed a step away. He was prepared to curse Tom Riddle, but he hadn’t expected him to appear as a ghost, like this.
Or, for that matter, to have the ghost look nothing like either the sixteen-year-old boy from the diary or the monster Harry had defeated this spring. Instead, this Riddle’s face looked like he was in his early twenties, and his dark hair was cut very short, and he wore an expression of extreme weariness. He looked at Harry and then away.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“Of course I bloody—”
“No, I mean, this specific version of me. You don’t know where I come from or why I look this way.”
Harry jerked his head in a short shake. The majority of his attention was on Riddle, but the rest of him was wondering if he could go down and angrily shake Dumbledore’s portrait until he spilled whatever knowledge he had remaining about Horcruxes.
If he survived to do that.
“I’m the one from your soul.”
Harry stared with his mouth open, then slammed it shut when he saw a mocking smile in Riddle’s eyes. Dead or not, different or not, this was still the man who had tormented him. “You can’t be. I saw that one in King’s Cross. It looked like a baby—”
“That was how I looked there. This is how I look here.”
“I got rid of you. I died to get rid of you! How are you back?”
“Because you came back to life,” Riddle said, very softly. “Because I had lived in your soul for seventeen years and I couldn’t give you up.”
Harry closed his eyes. What he said might have sounded mad to anyone else, he supposed, but he probably didn’t have secrets from Riddle, no matter what version of him this was. “I have to die permanently to get rid of you, don’t I?”
“When, in the fullness of time, you die, then I’ll likely pass as well.”
“But why would I get to live a full life, when you can come back to life and kill people?” Harry clenched his hands so hard on the stone wall behind him that they hurt. “Fuck, I should have known it was too good to be true—”
“What do you think spending seventeen years in contact with your soul did to me?”
“Made you even more manipulative than usual?”
Riddle laughed quietly. He seemed to stand on the stone step, rather than hover above it the way an ordinary ghost would have, but Harry had quit trying to put “Riddle” and “ordinary” in the same sentence long ago. “It made me more like you.”
“Why in the world—”
“Because I was there with you when you were in the cupboard, Harry. I was there when you first discovered that you had magic and when you confronted my older self. I was there through the triumphs and joys of your life, and your deepest sorrows. I know you, and I was part of you, and of course that changed me.”
“Why would it? You clung to your hatred and insanity through thirteen years as a wraith, that’s almost as long as what you’re describing.”
“Because during that, the part of me that did that was alone. I was in contact with your soul. Of course it changed me.”
Harry closed his eyes. Part of him wanted to believe this. He’d longed for someone to understand him completely, sympathize with him, so many times over the years. Of course Ron and Hermione were great, but Harry didn’t think he could ever explain the cupboard and the graveyard and so on to them in detail, just because he couldn’t find the words.
But it was tempting, so it had to be too good to be true.
“Why aren’t you raging at me to keep you alive?” he asked, not looking at Riddle. “Your fear of death is the most permanent and central thing about you.” Other than probably your attempts to manipulate people. You’re just as charming as the diary Tom, and just as trustworthy.
“Because you went willingly to your death. Because I have learned that it’s nothing so terrible.”
“And if I asked you to leave me and die right now?” Harry asked, opening his eyes. “Would you do it?”
Riddle was quiet, studying him. Harry hardened his heart against the whisper in his head about it being out of character for Voldemort not to rage at the mention of death. It could still be a manipulation tactic.
“I would leave you,” Riddle said at last. “But I wouldn’t die. If you severed all the bonds between us, there would be no reason for me to obey you.”
“I—what reason is there to accept you, or even pretend to accept you? You know what your elder self did to me.”
“Yes. And there’s no making up for most of what he did. I can’t bring the dead back to life or erase the memories of the agony and pain that you endured. Not to mention what other people endured.”
“Why would that part matter to you?”
“Because it matters to you.”
Harry bowed his head. He didn’t know what to believe. “How in the world do you think you can make it up to me, when you can’t bring my parents and my godfather back to life?” he whispered. “When, as you said yourself, you can’t take away my memories of what I suffered? Those things are always going to be part of me.”
“I can give you a place to fall.”
The voice sounded nearer. Harry jerked his head up and saw Riddle standing, or floating, right in front of him, his hands spread. He looked less transparent this close, with a hint of color in his hair and eyes. His hair was dark, of course, but Harry thought that his eyes looked more blue than red.
“When you have nightmares, I can comfort you, because I know what you dream of without your having to explain it to me,” Riddle whispered. “I can empathize with you about what you suffered at the hands of your relatives, without the need to have a painful conversation about it. And I can keep you safe from the fame that follows you. I can ensure that you have an ordinary life in the future, the one that you’ve been dreaming of from the time that you entered the magical world.”
Harry cleared his throat, and then cleared it again. He croaked when he tried to talk, but apparently that couldn’t be helped. “How can my life be ordinary when I’m still tied to you?”
“If you choose to accept me, then I can sculpt my body so that no one will know me. I can take on any appearance I wish, with your help.”
“I would still know who you were.”
“Yes.”
“That’s…”
Harry looked out over the grounds of Hogwarts again. The painful memories stung him. Once, while he was on the run, he had thought he would give everything to see Hogwarts again. And he had dreamed of having a career that combined being an Auror and a professor. Maybe he could come to teach students specific lessons, like the Patronus Charm.
Now, he couldn’t imagine walking the grounds of Hogwarts in peace. But he couldn’t imagine abandoning them, either. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, what the next phase of his life should look like.
He couldn’t imagine having Riddle in his life.
And he couldn’t imagine just ignoring the fact that a portion of Riddle was out in the world, maybe becoming twisted and terrible the longer he was separated from Harry.
Maybe the true lesson here was that Harry couldn’t run from the past, rather than that he would go on suffering no matter what happened.
He swallowed and turned to face Riddle. The ghost, or shard, or whatever he was, straightened and looked at Harry with his hands clasped behind his back. He also took a step nearer, but stopped when Harry held up a hand.
“I’m prepared to provisionally try this,” Harry said. “But I don’t know how you can expect it to work out well.”
“We’ll just have to try,” Riddle murmured. His eyes were bright with what at least looked like sincere affection, but Harry knew full well how manipulative he could be. “And I’m willing to go with any story you want as well as sculpting my body to look like someone else. We can be people who met over owl post, if you want.”
“Why would you want to say that?”
“It might reassure your friends more than some stranger showing up out of nowhere with a claim to your affections.”
“My affections?”
Riddle blinked for a moment as though he didn’t understand what Harry was saying, and then he smiled. “Oh, Harry,” he whispered, his voice mocking in a way that made Harry jerk his head up, his heart thundering with the need to meet that mockery. “Did you really think this would stay a perfectly platonic relationship?”
“You can’t…”
“I can’t what?”
Harry just stared at Riddle and willed him to understand, but the man shook his head. His smile was faint but there, spreading all over his face like spilled ink.
“No,” Riddle said. “If you don’t want me as your lover, fine, I can accept that.” His eyes said he would try to change Harry’s mind, though. “But you have to say it. Not just stand there mute and make me guess in a way that would let you out of things.”
“I don’t want to be out of things.!”
“Of course you don’t.”
Riddle’s expression was so condescending that Harry crossed the distance between them before he thought about it. He reached out, and found warm flesh under his reaching hand, not the cold dimness of a ghost he’d more than half-expected. Riddle reached up and clasped his wrist, and Harry found solidity there, too.
“The way you live,” Riddle murmured, his face close to Harry’s, “is either completely or not at all. Even when we were with the Dursleys, you didn’t just tuck yourself into a corner and hope not to be noticed. You taunted your cousin and ran away. You ducked the frying pan. You did what you could to resist them the minute you knew you could, that you had magic. And now you’re lost after the war and don’t know what to do? Now I’ve given you a purpose.”
“That purpose is partially making sure that you don’t cause trouble, you shit,” Harry snarled into Riddle’s face. He was moving his fingers where his hand rested in Riddle’s grasp, hearing his breath come fast and unsteady. He wanted to—he wanted to—
He didn’t know what he wanted, was the problem. But there was a lot of built-up and tumbling longing in him.
“There,” Riddle said in a low voice, and leaned towards him. “There’s the Harry I know.”
“At least you’re not pretending to love me.”
“Who could have spent seventeen years in contact with your soul and not come to love you?”
Riddle was asking the question in a genuinely astonished voice. Harry stared at him, and thought back to the Dursleys, to the way that the school had abandoned him for stupid reasons, how Dumbledore had loved him and sent him to his death anyway—
But Riddle sounded genuine. Harry might not be able to read him completely yet, and he might be a piece of a megalomaniac’s soul, but he thought he could tell this much.
“I don’t want you as my lover yet,” Harry said.
“That’s fine,” Riddle said, so quickly that Harry narrowed his eyes at him. But Riddle just smiled. “What do you want?”
Harry leaned closer. Riddle’s eyes dropped to his lips, then rose again. His gaze was searching, shining.
“I want to finish my last year at Hogwarts and do well on my NEWTS.”
“A worthy ambition. And one I can help you with. No one will make you a better study partner.”
“I want to—I want to travel. To get outside Britain.”
Riddle’s face softened. “I saw so many amazing things on my travels—many of them, I’m certain, still there, because they’re ancient magical places that wouldn’t fade so easily. I can’t wait to show them to you.”
“I never thought about what you must have seen,” Harry admitted haltingly. “I just thought that you were looking for, well. More information on how to become immortal and how to learn Dark Arts.”
“There was a lot of that. But it was also hags dancing in moonlight and ancient tombs that a Muggle has never set foot in. I can show it to you, Harry. I can’t wait, in fact.”
Harry swallowed. “And then I’d also like to come back to Britain and have a normal life.”
“Not, I hope, in a tiny Muggle house in the suburbs.”
Harry laughed before he could stop himself. “Not in the least. Normal for a wizard.”
“Friends? A home?”
“Of course.”
“Children?”
Harry choked and stared at Riddle with wide eyes. Then he said, “I never—I never heard you express a desire for children.”
There was a bittersweetness in Riddle’s expression that twisted the edges of his mouth. “My other self was immortal, and content to be so,” he murmured. “He might have wanted a child for other reasons, but not as part of a family or a continuation of himself beyond death. But we…are both mortal, Harry. And I am content to be so.”
“That’s the hardest thing to accept.”
Riddle nodded slowly. “I know. That’s why I intend to prove it to you by remaining with you and dying when you die. I don’t think anything else would convince you.”
Harry tried several times to swallow, and finally mastered it just when he’d thought that his throat had become stuck. “I—didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know what?” Riddle raised a hand and pressed the back of it to Harry’s cheek as if he were checking for a fever.
“That I could feel—this content with a piece of Voldemort beside me.”
“Please don’t use that name,” Riddle said softly. “It’s a name for the piece of myself who wanted to kill you, and who nearly succeeded, four times. Call me Tom. Or Riddle, if you need to do that until you get used to my first name.”
“Tom,” Harry whispered. He was shaking. He lifted his hand so that the compass rose on the back of it shone. “I suppose that you can’t tell me why this showed up in the first place?”
Tom glanced down at it. “Because your soul was unstable after having been connected to a piece of my predecessor’s for so long.”
“Thanks ever so much.”
“I won’t lie to you, Harry. I think we both know where that road would end.”
Harry drew in his breath and then nodded slowly. After all, it was nothing more than what Madam Pomfrey had already told him. “Fine. Then—will it go away after we’ve spent some time together? Will it always be here?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we find out together?”
This is mad, Harry thought, as he slowly turned to face Tom. The man looked at him with eyes that had traces of love in them, perhaps, or at least traces of a soul softened by the pressure of Harry’s own soul against it.
But was the war less mad? Or the way you feel about Hogwarts now? Or the mark on your hand in the first place?
Harry extended a shaking hand to Tom. Tom clasped it with both of his and bowed his head over it.
“The compass rose is beautiful, by the way,” Tom said softly. “It suits you.”
“Why a compass rose?”
“I don’t know the answer to that one, either.”
Harry breathed out slowly. He didn’t know a lot, either. Why the mark was a compass rose, what the end result of trusting a shard of Voldemort’s soul would be, what his friends would say when he told them that he’d formed a friendship or started to date an older man he’d met through owl post.
Why it was so easy to accept Tom Riddle at his side.
But maybe that’s because he’s been there for seventeen years. And because he doesn’t treat it like my having hosted him is disgusting. Just a fact.
“We’ll have to wait for answers on a lot of things,” he said at last. Slowly, testing it.
Tom looked up at him, eyes aflame with something deeper than joy. “Yes, we will.”
Harry swallowed and looked away from Tom’s eyes across the grounds of Hogwarts. He could think of other things, now. Like how he had played Quidditch here, and laughed with Ron and Hermione, and saved Sirius from the Dementors.
The compass rose glowed on his hand, promising a future—no particular kind. Just a future.
And, in the end, that was what Harry had wanted most of all.
The End.