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Bill and Fleur's wedding went great, just as Harry'd expected with all the planning that had gone into it; at least, what he saw of the beautiful ceremony went great, given how he spent half of it glancing over his shoulder from the back row of chairs and wondering if Voldemort would show up. He could well imagine how that would go over...
The thought made Harry stifle a laugh. Oh, he'd have stood out like a sore thumb against the colorful outfits of the other guests; between the crow's-wing iridescent black of his suit yesterday, and the skull motif he had going - cufflinks, really - it would've been like Death itself had visited upon the ceremony. Merlin, Ron's Aunt Muriel would probably faint. (Did that make it better or worse?)
...He'd have been good company, though, came the idle thought as the officiant's speech neared its end. And the sense-memories of how Tom's hand had felt in his, the faint but pleasant cologne the man had been wearing, were enough to conjure the idea of him sitting next to Harry in the audience, the both of them listening to vows they might someday make. Why, he could imagine the Dark Lord murmuring along with the proceedings in his ear.
He was snapped out of his reverie by the conclusion of the ceremony, and the change from seating to dancing under the marquee. People were pairing off for some kind of waltz, as far as Harry could tell (he wasn't an expert on dancing, okay), with Bill and Fleur starting things off and other couples joining in as the song got started. Bill's parents, Fleur's parents, aunts and uncles and cousins and so on - even Ron and Hermione, which only surprised Harry on the grounds of Ron's persistent inability to dance.
Hm. He was improving, little by little, if Harry squinted. Unless Hermione had him under the Imperius to keep him from treading on her toes.
Harry sighed, fidgeting where he'd taken up a wallflower's place to one side, eavesdropping on other people's conversations, and only then came to the awkward realization that he was waiting for Tom to show up. That merited a drink from a passing server's platter; what had gotten into him? Obviously this whole engagement thing had fried his brain.
Really. He couldn't possibly expect Voldemort to ditch his existing plans for the day, whatever they were, just to show up at an Order wedding, pick out Harry's Polyjuiced self from among the crowd of Weasley cousins, and ask him-
"My dear, may I have this dance?"
Harry's head shot up from where he'd been contemplating the grass, wide-eyed, to see the smiling, handsome face of his - fiance - whose patiently extended hand glittered with the Gaunt Ring. He blinked, not quite believing his eyes. He's actually here?
"I am," Voldemort agreed, and the moment Harry took the offered hand, swept him onto the dance floor in a whirl of dark fabric. Harry's imagination had not failed him: from the shimmering black of his suit - which even had a short cape attached - to the glinting silver skulls - and snakes - on his cufflinks, the Dark Lord was about as subtle among the crowd as a mallet.
"It's like you've got nothing colorful," Harry griped, with a glance at Ron and Hermione as they waltzed past. Despite himself, the idea of Voldemort in color had a smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.
"Mm, I thought I was wearing color," the Dark Lord replied easily, turning his wrist to show off the muted rainbow on his sleeve where it caught the light. Merlin, he was teasing right back, wasn't he? Harry's cheeks warmed. "You know," Voldemort confided, leaning in, "I didn't think to say it yesterday, but awfully bold of you to propose with my family's ring."
"Gryffindor," Harry reminded him, as if it explained everything.
A snort. "Well. You should know it inspired me to respond in kind."
What?
The current song was ending, replaced with a somewhat faster number that would have stretched the limits of Harry's minimal dancing skills; so he was more than happy to let himself be led out of the tent and into a somewhat secluded spot near the vegetable garden in the interval. (He had the brief but hilarious mental image of a gnome biting Voldemort's thumb, and choked on a hysterical giggle.)
There, the Dark Lord put up several layers of privacy spells, and a couple more wards Harry didn't recognize. At last, he stowed his wand, and withdrew a box from the inner pocket of his suit jacket, stepping closer to Harry before he opened it.
Harry gasped, short and sharp. "You didn't," he breathed, too overcome to levy a stronger complaint.
On a bed of black velvet, slightly yellowed with time, there lay a skeletal hand - on whose finger rested a heavy gold ring as ancient in design as the one the Dark Lord already wore.
"Imagine my surprise," Voldemort murmured, removing the ring from its place with feather-light, gloved fingers, "when upon close examination of the Potter ring, I found a sigil graven in the stone: smaller, yes, but one that matched my own." He held it up close to Harry's eyes, tilting the ring until the engraving caught the light. Harry recognized it immediately as the one that had been on the Gaunt ring - and hadn't Luna's dad been wearing that symbol on a pendant earlier, too? "It is an ancient symbol, predating Grindelwald's appropriation of it for his war by some thousand years."
"You researched it, then," Harry observed. And in such a short time, if you didn’t already know about it. "What does it actually mean? He couldn't quite bring himself to look away from the strange sign.
"Tell me, Harry," a pale fingertip traced the engraving, "have you ever heard the Tale of the Three Brothers?"
Harry shook his head, glancing now to the Gaunt ring on Voldemort's other hand where he'd held it up beside the Potter ring. (The box had returned from whence it came.) Just like yesterday's meeting, the atmosphere of today's encounter seemed to have shifted into something much more intimate, more intense.
"It is an English folk legend, shared in its most popular form as one of the Tales of Beedle the Bard." That sounded familiar. Why?
Voldemort guided him to sit on a stone bench he must have just conjured; he entwined the fingers of one hand with Harry's as he wove the tale. "In the legend, three brothers used magic to spare themselves a painful, Muggle end. Death, thwarted, appeared to them, and offered each brother a boon for their cleverness."
Harry hummed, thoughtful, staring at their joined hands. The Potter ring floated in the air beside them for now - perhaps specifically so Voldemort could take his other hand as well, thumb rubbing circles on the back of Harry's knuckles. He went on:
"The first brother, rash with the thrill of cheating Death once already, demanded a wand of unrivalled power. Death plucked a branch of elder from a nearby tree and bestowed it on him without a moment's hesitation." A soft laugh. "This brother gained the notoriety he sought, but soon after made the error of naming the source of his strength; he was killed while he slept not two nights after by a covetous stranger. 'So Death took the first brother for his own'."
"What happened to the wand after?" If the story wasn't exaggerating, anyway.
"If the legend is true, which it would seem to be," Voldemort assured him (whether he'd read the skepticism on Harry's face, or from his mind, didn't really matter), "the Elder Wand has a long and bloody history from that point, each bearer killed by their successor, often through subterfuge; Grindelwald pursued the artifact relentlessly in his time, believing it would be the key to his victory in Europe."
"Did he ever get it, then?" Harry had to wonder.
"I suspect he did," the Dark Lord said, "and that it was the wand Dumbledore won off of him in their famous duel; he wielded a different one in the years leading up to the war. But I digress." Harry glanced up and saw a small, fond smile on the man's lips. He was so pretty when he smiled, Harry couldn't help but think.
"The second brother thought himself clever, and wished to subvert Death's power: he asked for the ability to call the dead back into the living world. Death took a stone from the riverbank and imbued it with necromantic power, and bestowed it upon him without hesitation. 'Turn it thrice in your hand,' it told the second brother, 'and the one you think of returns to you.' This was the so-called Resurrection Stone."
Harry had gone back to staring at their joined hands while he listened, and his eyes lit upon the Gaunt ring as the last words were spoken; a faint chill ran over him, raising goosebumps on his exposed wrist. "What happened to the second brother?" he asked.
"The second brother's request was a product of his longing for his deceased betrothed, you see," sighed Voldemort, squeezing Harry's hand. "Soon after receiving the Stone, he called upon its power to resurrect his beloved - but Death was cleverer than the second brother, and the Stone's power was fleeting. The spirit of the beloved was all that returned, not the body, more like a ghost than anything. Tormented by the way his desire was just out of reach, the second brother eventually gave in, and joined his beloved - on the other side of the Veil. 'And so Death took the second brother for his own,'" he recited, again, like an incantation.
Before Harry could ask what happened to the Stone after that, Voldemort continued the story. "The third brother," he leaned in to murmur in Harry's ear, "was the most Slytherin of them all. He did not trust Death's benevolence one whit. Instead, he asked for the cloak off of Death's own shoulders - the source of its ability to pass unseen through the world - so he could go on in such a way that Death could not follow. And here, Death hesitated." Another soft laugh, bell-clear and charming. "But at length, it was true to its word, and the third brother came into possession of an immensely powerful Invisibility Cloak."
"An.. invisibility cloak," Harry echoed, gears turning in his mind. Could it be-?
"Time passes in the blink of an eye to a being such as Death," Voldemort went on, voice lowered with something like awe. "The first and second of the three brothers were snapped up in its hands in what may as well have been an instant. But eventually, Death realized that the third brother had not come into its realm at his appointed time. Perturbed, it roamed the earth seeking the third brother out, but with the power of the Cloak, even Death could not find him.
"Not until, many, many years later, the third brother deemed himself satisfied, and took off the Cloak to pass it to his son. 'And he turned to greet Death as an old friend,'" he recited, in a voice gone thick with emotion that Harry couldn't place, "'and they departed this life - as equals.'"
Equals, Harry mouthed, staring into the Dark Lord's eyes. They were sitting close enough together that all he had to do was lean up a little, raise his chin, and he could-
The moment stretched between them, only the muffled sound of the musicians and the chirping of birds to fill the space; a breeze blew, carrying with it the sweet scent of some of Mrs. Weasley's fragrant flowers.
"Some centuries after the legend became widespread, a second myth came about," Voldemort informed him softly. "A secretive society of witches and wizards across Europe declared the three artifacts the Deathly Hallows, and began searching for them, with the belief that the one who possessed all three at the same time would gain a power of their own."
Harry squeezed the hands in his own. "D'you think it's true?" he asked him.
"Some," was the reply. "We know that the three brothers of legend were based on three real brothers: Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus Peverell. Whether the artifacts they possessed really were gifted to them by a higher power, or represented masterworks of enchanting and necromancy, is as immaterial as the Veil - what matters more is that Cadmus and Ignotus passed their Hallows down through the lines of their descendants, and though their name has gone extinct, those families remain."
Green eyes glanced down at the sigil carved into Voldemort's ring. Harry steeled himself, and let go of his fiance's hands, getting to his feet. "If that's true," he said, and rummaged through his pockets, "then-"
His hand emerged with the unearthly silvery fabric of the Cloak, and he threw it over himself, looking back to Voldemort in time to see the man's eyes wide with surprise, flickers of red in his irises.
"It was my dad's," Harry said, pulling it off again and holding it out so Voldemort, too, could feel. "His, and I think his dad's, too. But most invisibility cloaks wear out with time, right? And this one - didn't." He realized he'd started rambling, and swallowed, embarrassed. "Do you think..?"
The wonder in Voldemort's eyes as he thumbed over the watery fabric of the Cloak was nothing compared to the same wonder and adoration he turned on Harry. "The Potters were Ignotus' descendants," he confirmed, "hence the sigil on your family ring."
Harry put the Cloak back in his pocket, for now, and sat back down; in the cooling breeze, he'd found himself missing the warmth of the Dark Lord's hands in his own. "And your ring?" he prompted, eyes tracing the cracked, black stone inset on the gold band. Voldemort obliged him, laying his own ring-bearing hand in his palm again.
"That is what I meant to tell you, my dear, before you beat me to it," Voldemort chuckled. "The Gaunts, my mother's ancestors, were the last blood of Cadmus' line. The stone on this ring is the Stone, itself."
Fleetingly, Harry worried they were too closely related to marry, before he realized how silly a thought that was. Voldemort must have picked up on it, too, because he laughed. "Even were that the case, it would hardly be the first objection anyone voices, Harry. Rather, I find myself far more concerned with a different question."
He rose from the bench, patting Harry's knee in a 'stay-there' gesture, and surprised him yet again by getting to one knee, the Potter ring floating into his hand. "That is, whether I might put this ring on your finger, and receive your promise to marry me."
Harry had known this was coming in some form since Voldemort had taken out the ring in the first place, but it still had his heart beating faster. "I- well yes," he said, "of course-" I wouldn't have asked you yesterday if I hadn't, he thought, but in fact, he kind of had, at least until the words of yesterday's proposal had actually spilled from his lips.
He sucked in a breath at the feel of Voldemort's hand on his own, again, gently guiding the skin-warmed metal onto his finger until it rested where it belonged - and, with a tingle of magic, resized, shrinking to fit his hand.
Voldemort kissed the ring, then, and stood, and Harry looked up at him; he had never seen such happiness on the Dark Lord's face, even in the Diary. The hand bearing the Gaunt Ring reached out to him, and Harry took it, and was again swept up into Voldemort's arms, this time with one arm slung about his waist. He coiled his own arms around Voldemort, too, at first lightly, then tighter, seeing and sensing how his fiance enjoyed it.
He rose up on his tiptoes as the Dark Lord leaned down; when their faces were only inches from each other, Voldemort spoke again. "The one who bears all three Hallows," he added, in afterthought, "is conferred the title of the Master of Death. We have two of them between us; and I have an inkling as to the location of the third."
"So, what, you're going to go for the title.. my dear?" Harry tested out the endearment; he stumbled over the words, but it was worth it for the dusting of pink on Voldemort's cheeks when it reached his ears. "A bit of overkill, don't you think?"
"Actually, I thought you'd like it," the Dark Lord pressed a kiss to his brow; Harry stiffened, going bright red. "There is a certain symmetry in things, that way." He stepped back, then, offering Harry his arm for them to return to the party, fairly glowing with satisfaction. "Why, we could incorporate it into the ceremony, with our vows."
That was kind of sweet, Harry thought, trying not to cling too obviously to Voldemort's arm as he took their privacy spells down. "When will the wedding be? Halloween? No," he grinned, "the anniversary of whatever day you take over Britain, I imagine," rolling his eyes at the joke-
Voldemort flinched, looking past him, just as a Patronus emerged into the ballroom and spoke in Kingsley's booming voice.
”The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming."
"Ah," the Dark Lord managed, "about that."
'Plans for the day', Harry despaired. Of course.