Chapter Text
Harry’s next dream is stranger still. He is sitting in the back of the History of Magic classroom, and Professor Binns is droning on about one of the Goblin Rebellions. There’s a quill in Harry’s hand, but the parchment in front of him is blank and he thinks he might be drooling. He shuts his mouth hastily.
“It’s very interesting, isn’t it?”
Harry glances to his left to see who had spoken and has to bite his tongue to keep from shouting. Tom Riddle is sitting at the next desk smiling calmly at him, looking for all the world like he’s any other fellow student. His emerald Prefect badge gleams against his chest.
Riddle frowns at Harry, his elegant brow furrowing in the very picture of concern. “Are you quite all right, Potter?” he asks in a low voice.
He’s not real , Harry reminds himself. You’re not really here, you’re just dreaming . He reaches into his pocket for his wand only to find his hand brush against an elegant holster strapped beneath his robes instead He glances down at himself and sees, to his horror, that his dream self appears to be wearing Slytherin robes to match Riddle’s own.
He shakes his head quickly. “You’re not real,” he says aloud. It must be another vision, he decides, something to do with the new frequency with with his scar has been paining him. “And I’m not telling you anything about where we are.”
Riddle’s frown deepens and he clears his throat, putting his hand in the air. “Professor?”
Professor Binns turns his ghostly body at once, as if Riddle is the professor and he’s the attentive student. Harry is almost impressed—he never saw Binns react like that to a single student. “Yes, Mr. Riddle?”
“Potter here is feeling a bit under the weather,” Riddle says smoothly. “May I take him to the Hospital Wing? Nagging Quidditch injury, you know. We’ll be sure to pick up Lestrange’s notes later.”
Binns nods. “Very well, Mr. Riddle. Mr. Potts.” He clears his throat. “Now, we move on to summer 1867…”
“Come on ,” Riddle hisses to Harry, gesturing towards the classroom door. Harry doesn’t bother protesting—after all, even Riddle can hardly kill him in his sleep from who knows how many miles away. If he could, he would have done it years ago.
Harry shoves his quill and the blank parchment away into his schoolbag and trails after Riddle, out of the classroom and into the empty corridor. Despite himself, Harry feels a blossom of warmth in his chest at the sight of the familiar surroundings.
As soon as the door has shut behind them, Riddle drops the polite mask he had adopted to talk to Binns. He’s still frowning at Harry, but there’s something else behind his eyes now. Sharp suspicion.
“What is wrong with you?” he demands. “How am I not real? What did you mean, ‘where we are’?”
“This is a dream. I’m asleep right now.” Harry has never had any of his dreams ask this kind of thing before—then again, in far too many of his dreams, he doesn’t have the control to speak. He supposes that’s a relief, even if he is wearing Slytherin robes and talking to Tom Riddle. “You can stop pretending.”
“I assure you, you are not asleep,” Riddle says, drawing his wand. Harry’s whole body seizes up, but he’s not used to unsheathing his wand from the antiquated leg-holster and so he has no time to react before Riddle casts a wordless spell at his chest.
*
“Ow!” Harry shouts, bolting up in his bunk. His chest smarts where Riddle had hit him, underneath the warm locket. He recognizes the sensation—a stinging hex, and a fairly nasty one at that.
“Wazzut?” Ron mumbles from the lower bunk. “S’not your scar again, is it?”
“No,” Harry tells him truthfully. “I just—static electricity. Shocked myself.”
*
He doesn’t think of the dream much over the course of the next day, far too caught up in the tasks at hand. He rises early to search the woods for the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient-looking tree he can find and buries Moody’s eye beneath it. He isn’t sure why, but some buried instinct arises within him when he has finished, and he finds himself slashing the lines of a rune he faintly recognizes into the bark.
He stands back to admire his work, satisfied that, little as it may be, it’s a far more dignified resting place than the door of Dolores Umbridge’s office.
He’s antsy as he waits for the others to wake, constantly checking the perimeter of Hermione’s wards even though he trusts her to have performed the spells with her usual brilliance. There’s a restless energy bubbling within him, like the way he had felt whenever the Dursleys kept him locked inside too long, and he can’t stand sitting in the calm silence of the tent for too long.
Hermione agrees that it’s best not to stay anywhere for too long, and Ron is persuaded with the promise of a bacon sandwich, so they pack up their tent and Apparate to a small market town that Hermione remembers once passing on a school trip.
Harry volunteers to snag a bit of food from the town while Hermione checks her new wards, and she sends him off under the cloak with a heartfelt, “Good luck!”
However, Harry has barely entered the town when an unnatural chill, a descending mist, and a sudden darkening of the skies makes him freeze where he stands. He raises his wand to cast a Patronus, mind fumbling for a happy memory and settling on a particularly satisfying Quidditch match. When he shouts the incantation, however, it’s not a stag that appears, but rather a massive winged creature he has never seen before in his life.
He forgets all about the shopping after that, returning to the tent empty-handed and out of breath.
“Harry? What’s wrong?” Hermione asks.
“My patronus,” he pants, clutching the stitch in his side. “It’s changed.”
“Changed?” Ron demands. “Since when?”
Harry collapses into one of Perkins’s old armchairs. There was something unsettling about the winged thing, something very distinctly not his about it. “I don’t know. I’d never seen it do this before.”
“Could it be Ginny?” Hermione asks gently, but Harry shakes his head.
“It’s nothing like her,” he says, thinking of that blazing expression he loved so deeply. “This was unsettling. It felt… corrupted.”
Their expressions of consternation and disappointment make Harry feel ashamed. He knows they want to see the change for themselves, want to try to rationalize it, but Harry never wants to see the thing again. He hates knowing that it came out of him.
“So we still haven’t got any food.”
“Shut up, Ron,” snaps Hermione. “Harry, what happened? You cast a perfectly ordinary Patronus charm yesterday. Are you sure it wasn’t just a funny angle of a stag?”
“I know what a stag looks like, Hermione, and it doesn’t have bloody great wings,” Harry tells her.
Ron kicks a chair leg.
“What?” he snarls at Hermione. “I’m starving! All I’ve had since I bled half to death is a couple of toadstools! What does it matter what your patronus looks like, so long as it works?”
“You go and fight your way through the dementors, then,” says Harry, stung. “I’m not summoning the blasted thing again.”
“I would, but my arm’s in a sling, in case you hadn’t noticed!”
“That’s convenient.”
“And what’s that supposed to—?”
“Of course!” cries Hermione, clapping a hand to her forehead and startling both of them into silence. “Harry, give me the locket! Come on,” she says impatiently, clicking her fingers at him, when he doesn’t react, “the Horcrux, Harry, you’re still wearing it!”
She holds out her hands, and Harry hesitates. He can feel the locket, warm and solid against his chest, and for a moment it feels as if Hermione is demanding he part with one of his limbs. It passes in a moment, however, and Harry lifts the golden chain over his head.
He feels dizzy at its loss. His whole body feels lighter the moment it parts contact with his skin, but rather relief, Harry finds himself filled with a vague sense of loss.
“Better?” asks Hermione.
He fakes a smile. “Loads better,” he lies.
“Harry,” she says, crouching down in front of him and using the kind of voice he associated with visiting the very sick, “you don’t think you’ve been possessed, do you?”
“What? No!” he says defensively, rubbing at his chest. Without the locket, it has started to sting where Riddle’s jinx hit him.
“I remember everything we’ve done while I’ve been wearing it. I wouldn’t know what I’d done if I’d been possessed, would I? Ginny told me there were times when she couldn’t remember anything.”
“Hmm,” says Hermione, looking down at the heavy gold locket.
“Well, maybe we ought not to wear it. We can just keep it at the tent.”
“What? No !” Harry protests before he can stop himself. It’s all he can do to keep from lunging for the thing. “We are not leaving that Horcrux lying around,” he continues in the face of Hermione’s worried expression. “If we lose it, if it gets stolen—”
“Oh, all right, all right,” says Hermione, and she places it around her own neck and tucks it out of sight down the front of her shirt. “But we’ll take turns wearing it, so nobody keeps it on for too long.”
*
They agree it’s not worth trying the town again, even after Harry has cast his own stag Patronus to his satisfaction, so they move to a field besides an isolated farm and scrounge up a few eggs and a loaf of bread while under the cloak.
All their quarrels are forgotten as soon as their stomachs are full, and Harry feels downright cheerful by the end of his watch. It had been completely peaceful, and he’d spent the time watching one of the farmers’ cows slowly grazing along the edge of the road.
He’s practically put the locket and the dream out of his mind by the time he’s preparing for bed, but as he pulls his shirt over his head, he notices a larger raised welt in the middle of his chest, exactly where Riddle had hit him with a stinging hex in the dream.
*
Harry doesn’t dream of Riddle that night, and so he puts it out of his mind the next day, far more concerned with discussing potential Horcrux locations than with examining something that had most likely been nothing more than an invention of his exhausted subconscious during one of the few moments it was freed from Voldemort’s angry outbursts.
It comes as a surprise then, when, on the third night, Harry again finds himself standing next to Riddle in the deserted History of Magic corridor. Riddle’s wand is raised, and Harry’s chest stings.
“Ow,” he says again, rubbing the welt. “That didn’t prove anything, by the way. I woke up when you did it at first.”
Riddle raises an eyebrow. “You woke up, you say? You still seem to be here.”
“I—yeah, I don’t know. I’m back, apparently.” He shakes his head and realizes, with some confusion, that his scar is tingling strangely. It isn’t quite pain, more like the buzz of static he would sometimes feel from Dudley’s television when he used to make Harry sit too close.
“And you’re still convinced you are dreaming?” Riddle asks.
“I am dreaming,” Harry says, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know how to convince you of that, but frankly I don’t really care either way. You’re either a memory who can’t possess me or you’re just a way for me to process latent trauma.”
It was something Hermione had said once, though that had been about a particularly nasty spider that kept showing up in Ron’s nightmares.
“Am I? Fascinating,” Riddle says drily. “Here I was thinking I was your Prefect and a rather dear friend of six years, but apparently that counts for nothing anymore.”
“It never counted for anything with you anyway,” Harry retorts, and Riddle’s eyes spark as if he’s rather proud to be recognized as a cold and unfeeling psychopath. “You’ve never had a friend in your life. The real you hasn’t, anyway.”
“You wound me.” Riddle reaches out to cup Harry’s chin, his deep brown eyes searching Harry’s, and Harry realizes too late that he’s about to perform Legilimency. He screws his eyes shut, but it’s no use. Images are flashing before his eyes—a muddle of them, most too fast for him to discern. The Slytherin common room. The sensation of tumbling off his broom. A younger Professor Slughorn with the nose of an anteater. Riddle’s vice-like grip on his wrist as they run down a corridor. A dead cat.
“Fuck off , Riddle,” Harry snaps, when he comes back to himself. He wrenches himself out of Riddle’s grasp. His head feels… crowded.
“There’s the Potter I know,” Riddle says, straightening up and clapping Harry on the shoulder. “Slower than usual on the Occlumency, obviously, but surely you see what I mean. Your mind is absolutely and completely normal.”
Harry shakes his head again. It feels as if Riddle’s Legilimency has knocked loose some kind of barrier, and now a torrent of unfamiliar memories are trying to jostle their way into his brain. A part of him is certain that he’s asleep in his cot in their tent, faintly remembers Ron grumbling about Hermione’s poor attempts at soup before he had drifted off, but there’s also another memory competing with it, almost as clear, of a sharp-nosed boy he knows is named Avery snapping at him to draw his curtains if he was going to keep them all awake with his reading.
Harry wonders how Riddle had managed to see so much, what felt like an entire lifetime of memories condensed into a single moment, but not catch a hint of the real Harry behind it all. Maybe he’s getting better at Occlumency after all, or maybe it’s just part of the strangeness of the dream.
“Pity you decided to go all funny in the head when you did,” Riddle continues, beginning to lead him down the hallway. “It was just getting good.”
“Yeah, I’m not actually all that cut up about missing History of Magic,” Harry says. That, at least, he knows is true of both versions of him. “We’re not really going to get the notes from Lestrange, are we?”
It’s odd, walking next to a boy that half his mind is convinced is as close to him as Ron or Hermione, while the rest of him is certain is the most evil wizard ever to exist.
“I meant it, you know,” Riddle says, seemingly no longer interested in any of Harry’s inner turmoil. “It was fascinating . You’d do well to listen more carefully to what Binns says—and to what he doesn’t say.”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Harry. “Your pet project, I know. Reform all aspects of magical education.”
“Precisely,” says Riddle, looking smug. “I mean the Goblins alone are fascinating, but did you know that the veela were allied with them for most of the rebellions? We never mention them in class.”
“You’d get fewer of the boys falling asleep in class if we did,” Harry says. His responses are coming more automatically now, and he gets the surreal impression that this is how this other version of himself seems to talk to Tom Riddle.
Riddle gives him a conspiratorial smile and says, “I’ve always found veeela fascinating. Remember when that one came to Malfoy’s party?”
“And Black and Avery dueled each other for a dance,” Harry recalls. It’s there in his head, clear as day, the image of the two boys cowering under Riddle’s scorn, both sprouting several unattractive tentacles from their faces.
Riddle nods. “That was the first time I realized the power of a pretty face. And lucky for me, I happen to have one.”
“Did you just compare yourself to a veela?” Harry asks, incredulous. His face isn’t even that pretty. He’s fairly certain no one’s ever dueled over him, though Vera Rosenberg had once cast a rather nasty hex on Henrietta Blake after Riddle had helped her on her Transfiguration essay.
Riddle shrugs. “All I’m saying is that you never would have passed Charms last year if Professor Kato didn’t think so.”
“That desk was on fire when I got there,” Harry replies, though he certainly remembers Riddle practically batting his eyelashes at the witch to convince her of the fact.
“Not to mention the whole other business ,” Riddle adds under his breath, but before Harry has time to prod his new memories for what other business Riddle could possibly be referring to, he changes the subject smoothly.
“Shall we just make our way to Potions early, then?” he asks. “History’s clearly a bust now, but you seem to have sorted yourself without the Hospital Wing, and it’s always worth putting the extra time in with Sluggy.”
Harry winces—he thinks even this dream-version of himself would agree that it is most certainly not worth putting any extra time “in with Sluggy.”
Riddle laughs at his expression. “How many times must we go over this, Potter? He’s your head of house and he likes you. You could hardly ask for a better in than that.”
“He still trying to make you Minister, then?” Harry asks.
“You know very well that I have no interest whatsoever in becoming Minister,” Riddle replies smugly, leading Harry down a particularly tricky-to-spot side passage that Harry would never have found without the Map. He can’t help but feel slightly impressed. “Not in the traditional manner, at least.”
“The traditional manner of spending all your savings on crystallized pineapple, of course,” Harry adds. “No, you’d never.”
“Do you know, I might’ve put your name on the card this last time,” Riddle muses. “How forgetful of me.”
“I’m not going to thank you for buttering Slughorn up on my behalf, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” Harry says. He’s finding it hard to sort out his reactions to Riddle, the way these responses seem to pop out from some deep well of habit he hasn’t personally experienced. There’s an easy rapport between them, and Harry is faced with the uncomfortable prospect that, somewhere confusingly deep inside his subconscious, he and Tom Riddle may actually be friends.
“I would never ask you to,” Riddle replies. “But perhaps in exchange you could spend a bit of the next Slug Club talking to literally anyone who isn’t involved in Quidditch.”
“ Perhaps . Don’t get your hopes up.”
“With you? My hopes are never higher than subterranean.”
He’s teasing. It’s strange, seeing Riddle like this. He’s acting for all the world like any other seventeen year old, but when Harry looks down, he can see the Gaunt ring sitting heavy on his finger. He tries to remember how Riddle had gotten it, why he remembers it being tied to some brutal act, but all the memories of his waking life keep drifting further away, as if they’re the ones from a dream.
“Boys!” Slughorn announces, interrupting Harry’s train of thought. He has adopted his usual manner of an uncle welcoming his favorite nephews to his home. “Isn’t it a bit early to be out of History of Magic?”
“Potter was feeling a bit under the weather, sir,” Riddle replies smoothly. “Pepper-up worked wonders, though, and so we wanted a bit of an early start on our next lesson.”
Slughorn beams at him. “Ah, and quite a fortunate decision on your part! Felix is quite a tricky brew, and you’re going to want all the extra time you can get before .”
Riddle’s eyes spark at the mention of Felix and Harry gets the distinct impression that he knew full well that this would be the lesson for the day.
“Potter, will you get the supplies?” Riddle asks, indicating the chalkboard. “The preparation will need to be perfect if we want—”
*
“Harry?”
Someone is shaking his shoulder. Harry rolls over and blinks awake to find a strange boy leaning over him, calling his name over and over again.
Except, no, it’s not a stranger, it’s Ron and Harry is lying in the top bunk of their room in the old tent and everything smells faintly of cat piss.
“What time’s it?” Harry mumbles, shoving on his glasses.
“Nearly gone six. Hermione told me it’s your turn on watch.”
“Right,” Harry says. “Fine, okay, I’m getting up.”
He rubs his eyes, groggy, trying to clear his head of the strange sensation that he’s just lead sixteen years of a completely different life. It is unlike any of the other dreams he’s ever had—for one thing, he’s never had access to Voldemort’s memories in any of his others, and he’s definitely never been able to control his own actions in them. What’s more, it had felt like he was Harry in the dream, albeit a Harry with some kind of strange friendship with Tom Riddle.
There was something distinctly real about it, he decides, a clear sense that none of what was happening had been some subconscious whatever-or-other that Hermione likes to talk about. When he had looked at Riddle, he had known him.
He’s just making his way outside, still lost in thought, when Hermione calls, “Harry?”
“What?”
“The locket .” She holds her hand out, expectant.
He sighs and pulls it off, handing it over. His skin feels cold without it there.
*
The following evening, he brings a notebook and a quill out of the tent with him, and he tells the others he is off to forage for mushrooms. He waits until he’s fully out of sight of the tent, even hidden under the cloak, and then he sits down and starts trying to write down everything he can remember from the dream.
His name had been Harry Potter and he had been—halfblood, he thinks? He has a fragment of a memory of a smiling dark-haired man that he thinks must have been this other-him’s father, but the longer he struggles to remember, the faster the image of the man fades away. Something about him makes fury churn in Harry’s gut, though he can’t for the life of him remember what it was.
And then of course there was Riddle. He’d killed his parents already, given the ring, but Harry thinks he had yet to create his first Horcrux. He can’t imagine Riddle would continue to flash the ring around so casually once it contained something so dear to him. He tries to remember what Dumbledore had speculated—how long had there been, between Riddle’s first and second Horcruxes? Had he created the diary already, that night he had asked Slughorn about the prospect of creating multiple Horcruxes?
Is that what the Felix Felicis is for? Does Riddle intend to use it to ensure that his very first Horcrux is created without a hitch? And—what was all the business about veelas?
“Hermione?” Harry asks softly, when he gets back to the tent. She’s hunched over a pile of books and liable to snap at him for interrupting. “Were there veela involved in any of the Goblin Rebellions?”
She looks up, surprised. “I don’t know. I suppose they may have taken one side or another—our textbooks never mention it.”
“I think,” he frowns. “I think the Death Eaters recruited them last time?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Hermione says. “All variety of dark creatures joined You-Know-Who during the first war. Why do you ask? Is this to do with the Horcruxes?”
“I’m not sure,” Harry says, honestly. “It was—Riddle mentioned it. In a memory.”
Hermione sat up straighter at that and pulled a different roll of parchment towards her. “He did? Harry, you never told us that! What else did he say? You know that every detail is vital!”
“I, erm, just that they took part in the Goblin Rebellions, I think? And, erm, one of his friends suggested that he was trying to reform magical education.”
Hermione frowns. “Reform it to include veela? That hardly seems like it could be related to Horcruxes… Was there anything else in the memory? Could Dumbledore have been trying to tell you something?”
“He, uh, Riddle said that he’d always been interested in veela because they were where he learned the power of a pretty face. You know, so he could manipulate people.”
“With a veela? That’s fascinating, actually.”
“Is it?” Harry asks her.
“It’s a very different style of persuasion than he’s using this time, certainly,” Hermione muses. “It makes you wonder when and why he became so convinced that intimidation was the way to achieve power.”
“Well he can’t exactly flirt his way to an O anymore, with the…” Harry gestures at his face.
“ Did he flirt his way to an O?” Hermione asks, and Harry gets the impression that she wouldn’t mind learning that all the historical academic records she had failed to beat had been inflated.
“He flirted his way to Os for all his friends,” Harry tells her, and watches her face fall slightly. “He wanted them to have more time for him, and more power after Hogwarts too, I reckon. And so when he saw all the reactions to this one veela, he figured out a new way to do it.”
“I realize now I have no idea what Tom Riddle looked like,” Hermione says, sounding surprised. “I knew he was charming, but I was always picturing—well, Percy Weasley, if we’re being honest.”
Harry chuckles, remembering his own reaction to Riddle’s boasts in his second year. “I know what you mean. But no, not Percy at all. More like…” he struggles to find a comparison. “Have you ever seen any photos of Sirius? The ones at my parents’ wedding?”
Hermione’s eyebrows rise. “ Really ? That handsome?”
“Erm, more so? I think?” Harry can feel his cheeks starting to burn under her surprised gaze. “I don’t know, Hermione, I’m not a girl.”
“You have eyes , though.”
“Well, okay, my eyes tell me that Tom Riddle was extremely handsome,” he says. “Like, he looks a bit like that bloke from the one band that’s always on the cover of Witch Weekly .”
“That is fascinating,” Hermione repeats, tapping her quill against her chin. “Handsome, charismatic, popular, and a perfect student—I’ve asked this before, surely, but why not simply ride his popularity to the Ministership? I’m certain he could have come across whatever artifacts he encountered at Borgin and Burkes outside of being a shop assistant.”
“I’m not sure,” Harry replies. “Dumbledore says the Ministry never interested him. He had enough influence there already, I guess, with the Malfoys and the Lestranges and whoever else.”
“If only he’d gotten the Defense position, I suppose things might have been quite different,” Hermione says. “I wonder… I mean, surely no one is born evil.”
“I’ll bet some people are born evil,” Harry responds, thinking of Umbridge. “Besides, Hermione, are you forgetting the murders? The Heir of Slytherin?”
“Hmm,” she says, eyes flickering over her parchment again. “I wonder.”
*
The mood in the tent fluctuates wildly from night to night, mostly in accordance with how much food they’ve managed to scrounge up each day and who is wearing the Horcrux at any given time. Ron is nasty enough on an empty stomach already, but whenever lack of food coincides with his turn to wear the locket, he becomes downright unpleasant.
“So where next?” is his constant refrain. He doesn’t seem to have any ideas himself, but expects Harry and Hermione to come up with plans while he sits and broods over the low food supplies.
Hermione, on the other hand, has begun obsessing over the dream memory Harry had made the mistake of mentioning. In between their spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they had already got, Harry catches her poring over the chapter on veela in Darkest Creatures and Their Secrets time and time again, as if she might find the solution to this latest puzzle among in the pages. When it was her turn to wear the locket, the obsession would reach fever pitch, and she’d snap at anyone who tried to pry her away from any of the books.
Harry would feel worse about it, but he figures she could use the distraction anyway. Without any new information, their conversations about the Horcruxes had become increasingly repetitive. As Dumbledore had told Harry that he believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they repeat, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they know that Voldemort had lived or visited.
The orphanage where he had been born and raised; Hogwarts, where he had been educated; Borgin and Burkes, where he had worked after completing school; then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile. Every so often, a new location will spring up in Harry’s mind, conjured by a faint memory of his dream-self, and he’ll have to clamp his mouth shut to avoid announcing to the entire tent that Riddle had once brought Harry and a few other of his closest followers on a lovely summer walking holiday along Hadrian’s Wall.
“Yeah, let’s go to Albania. Shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to search an entire country,” says Ron sarcastically, seemingly unaware of Harry’s sudden distraction.
“There can’t be anything there. He’d already made five of his Horcruxes before he went into exile, and Dumbledore was certain the snake is the sixth,” says Hermione. “We know the snake’s not in Albania, it’s usually with Vol—”
“Didn’t I ask you to stop saying that?”
Riddle had stood under the midsummer sun, a single shadow in a world of light, and he had laughed in sheer delight as the runes appeared in the stones of the wall…
“Fine! The snake is usually with You-Know-Who —happy?”
“Not particularly.”
Lydia McKinnon had brought along a picnic basket for them to share, and Harry had never tasted apples quite so fresh…
“Harry?”
He blinks, returning to himself. “Sorry,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I can’t see him hiding anything at Borgin and Burkes.” He’s made this point many times before, but he needs to say something under Hermione’s concerned gaze. “Borgin and Burke were experts at Dark objects, they would’ve recognized a Horcrux straightaway.”
Ron yawns pointedly. Repressing a strong urge to throw something at him, Harry plows on, “I still reckon he might have hidden something at Hogwarts.”
Hermione sighs. “But Dumbledore would have found it, Harry!”
Before the dreams had started, Harry had strongly suspected she was wrong about this. Now that he’s seen Riddle up close, knows how he drifts around the castle like it’s a part of himself, Harry is certain. He repeats the argument he keeps bringing out in favor of this theory.
“Dumbledore said in front of me that he never assumed he knew all of Hogwarts’s secrets. I’m telling you, if there was one place that was really important to Riddle, more than absolutely anywhere else, it was Hogwarts!”
“Oh, come on,” scoffs Ron. “His school? ”
“Yeah, his school! It was his first real home, the place that meant he was special: it meant everything to him, and even after—”
“This is You-Know-Who we’re talking about, right? Not you?” inquires Ron. He’s tugging at the chain of the Horcrux around his neck and Harry is suddenly overcome with the a desire to seize it and throttle him.
Ron drops his hand with a yelp. “ Fuck ,” he swears loudly, tossing the locket onto the table. “The blasted thing just burned me.”
Hermione draws her wand, pointing it at the locket. “Are you sure, Ron?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Ron snaps, holding out his hand as though displaying a gruesome wound. It looks perfectly normal to Harry.
Hermione frowns nonetheless. “Maybe we should take a break from wearing it for a bit,” she suggests hesitantly, but Harry scoops it off the table before she can finish.
“I’ll take it,” he volunteers quickly. “You and Ron can have a bit of time off. It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” Hermione asks doubtfully.
“Course. I’m fine,” Harry assures her. “Anyway, as I was saying: Hogwarts. I’m sure of it.”
“But you told us that You-Know-Who asked Dumbledore to give him a job after he left,” says Hermione.
“That’s right,” says Harry.
“And Dumbledore thought he only wanted to come back to try and find something, probably another founder’s object, to make into another Horcrux?”
“Yeah,” says Harry, hesitating. It’s not right , what she’s saying—for all of Riddle’s falseness and manipulation, Harry is sure he wants the post first and foremost as a means to shape the minds of the next generation of wizards. He starts to say something to this effect, but catches himself before he sends Hermione down another fervent research rabbit hole.
Hermione, however, seems to be thinking along the same lines for once. Her frown deepens, eyes skimming over the pages of memory notes she’s collated. “That seems like an awful lot of work, not to mention the jinx on the position, just to go on a bit of a treasure hunt,” Hermione says. “I mean, if he’d really wanted to search the castle, he could have gone through the Ministry for an Archaeomancy permit.”
“I doubt he wanted a paper trail,” Harry says, though the excuse seems hollow even to himself.
“Well, he created one with a job interview,” Hermione says. “I feel as if we’re missing something simple, don’t you?”
The locket beats against Harry’s chest, and he supplies, “Not at all. I feel like we’re missing something very complicated.”
*
Hermione drops the subject for a few days but there’s no diverting her, once she’s set her mind to something. They’ve just finished a mediocre dinner of a grouse that Hermione had successfully caught and rather less successfully cooked, when she pulls a copy of the Daily Prophet out of her bag.
“How did you get that?” Ron asks, shocked. “Is there anything about anyone we know?”
“Given that it’s from the year 1959, I don’t think so,” she replies. “I have it because, well. I wanted to show Harry that Eileen Prince was in it.”
“ Hermione ,” Harry groans. “You were right, all right? Don’t you think I feel awful already?”
“That’s not it at all!” she protests. “It’s just the only Prophet I have saved from the time period. It’s something Harry mentioned the other day…”
“A Horcrux?” Ron asks, excited.
“No,” Hermione replies. “ Not a Horcrux. And isn’t that interesting?”
“Are you going to speak in riddles, or are you actually going to explain yourself?” Ron grumbles.
“Harry, haven’t you told him yet? Go on, tell him what you told me. About the veela memory.”
Harry squirms under their matching expectant expressions. He regrets bringing it up now, but he can’t think of any way out of the conversation that doesn’t end in Hermione shouting at him about his Occlumency practice again, so he explains to Ron about the History of Magic class and the veela at Malfoy’s party and the way that Riddle had convinced their charms professor to raise his friend’s grade.
Ron seems as oblivious as Harry is to what it was about the conversation has sent Hermione into such a fervor, though he shares Hermione’s interest in Riddle’s good looks.
“I mean, no wonder Ginny was so funny about that diary,” he says, chuckling. “I just thought she wanted a friendly ear. Turns out, you’ve got serious competition, mate.”
Harry thumps his shoulder with A Hundred Evil Artifacts .
“So what’s the point of the paper?” Ron asks Hermione, rubbing his shoulder. “Are you just trying to find a picture you can, you know…”
“Ew, Ronald, don’t be disgusting,” Hermione lowers the paper to fix him with a withering glare. “No, it’s interesting, because when we think about all the memories Dumbledore shared with Harry, what did they have in common?”
“Horcruxes,” Ron answers quickly.
“Right. Except this one . Harry, that’s right, isn’t it? Not a mention of a single object? Nothing setting up a favorite hideout?”
“Not unless he really wanted to commemorate meeting a Veela at a party,” Harry replies hesitantly. He doesn’t like where this is going, but it feels as if he’s in too deep to divert Hermione now. “I really think we should focus—”
She ignores him and plows on. “Exactly. So that leads us to the question: why did Dumbledore show you this memory? Why did he think it was significant?”
“Maybe Dumbledore just thought it was funny to see baby You-Know-Who trying to flirt with his professors,” Ron chortles. “I mean, it is kind of funny.”
“Trying to and succeeding , Ron,” Hermione corrects him. “I really think that if Dumbledore took the time to extract and show you this memory, Harry, he must have been trying to tell you something. Which then leads us to our next question: What did You-Know-Who want?”
“What?” Harry asks, confused. This conversation was going in a completely unexpected direction. “We know what he wanted, Hermione. I mean, he’s doing it now! No more muggleborns, control over the Ministry and Hogwarts, and a way to avoid death.”
Hermione shakes her head. “No, no, the whole pureblood ideology thing… That can’t be it, right? I mean, he’s a halfblood himself! Naturally, he said what he needed to in order to garner mass support among both pureblood society and what was left of Grindlewald’s followers, certainly, and I’m not trying to deny that he’s not a very nice person, but why have we never asked what he wanted?”
“I think he’s just a psycho who wants to live forever hunting muggles,” Ron says. “You’re overthinking this, ‘Mione. I reckon Dumbledore was just a bit batty and collected all the memories he could of You-Know-Who as a teenager.”
Hermione flattens the paper, shaking her head. “No, you see, I don’t think that’s right. Because I think it’s fascinating that a bill entitled A Plan To Restore Old Magic To Wizarding Britain was introduced by a man named Sebastian Mulciber—who, according to this reporter, was never exactly a great legal thinker—and that it was defeated by a single vote. Dumbledore’s. Ministerial Action Plans need to be unanimously approved by the non-partisan Ministerial Steering Committee, you see.”
“So?” Ron asks. “Like, what does it matter, even if that was You-Know-Who?”
“To restore old magic to Wizarding Britain?” Hermione repeats. “Have you even heard of ‘Old Magic’ before?”
“I’unno,” Ron replies. “It’s like, ancient runes, isn’t it?”
“I wonder,” Hermione says again. “Harry, pass me Magick Moste Evile , won’t you?”
*
It takes the third dream of Riddle for Harry to realize that they coincide with any time he falls asleep while it’s his turn wearing the locket. Now he knows for sure that he can’t bring any of it up with Hermione, because she would be liable to insist he stop wearing it altogether.
The dreams aren’t affecting him, he reasons, and hadn’t it been Dumbledore himself who wanted Harry to learn as much as possible about Voldemort’s past? If the dreams really are some kind of memory contained in the locket, wouldn’t they be the best possible way for Harry to learn about Riddle’s plans after Hogwarts, and where he may have hidden the two remaining Horcruxes?
Harry tries to convince himself that information is the only reason he’s started looking forward to sleep whenever it’s his turn with the locket, but he knows it’s more than that. He misses Hogwarts with all of his heart, far deeper than even Hermione would ever understand, and he can’t help but feel a deep sense of home in this dream world of his.
Besides, in the last dream, he’d learned that he’s apparently Quidditch Captain, even if it is the Slytherin team and he’s flying on a Cleansweep prototype that belongs in a museum. It’s been too long since he’s been flying and, even if it is only a dream, the swoop of his gut as he makes a particularly nice dive in practice feels real enough.
“It’s a waste of your penultimate school year,” Riddle tells them, though he waits in the stands for the end of practice to walk Harry, Avery, and Black back to the castle. “You should be thinking about your futures.”
“It’s not a waste ,” Harry retorts. He suspects if he weren’t here, Avery and Black would have caved to Riddle ages ago and quit the team. “We’re having fun. Have you heard of the concept?”
“Never,” Riddle replies haughtily, “So it can hardly be that important.”
“Besides, you can’t pretend that even you don’t care about beating the pants off Gryffindor,” Avery supplies. “Harry can wipe that smug expression off Prewett’s face for good. Imagine if he ends his career as Captain last place all three years.”
“I wouldn’t be unhappy if you manage to win,” Riddle concedes, “so long as you continue to have time for the things that really matter, of course.”
The things that really matter , to Riddle, mean their studies first and their little late night meetings second. It’s not unlike being friends with Hermione, if she flirted with their professors and were about a hundred times as terrifying.
The meetings surprise Harry. If he’d been asked what he thought a young Voldemort spent his time discussing with his closest followers, he would have guessed that they practiced curses and plotted to rid the castle of Muggleborns, not that they agonized over translating ancient scrolls and tablet fragments and attempting to map the ley lines that crisscrossed particularly significant magical sites.
There’s gossip too, of course, and that’s far more unsettling than Riddle’s fixation on ancient magic.
“Did you hear,” Lestrange asks one night, as Harry is trying to understand a particularly convoluted reference to Beowulf , “that Lucretia Black was seen walking out with a Smith ?”
“Perfectly decent family,” Malfoy replies, shrugging. “Even if they are Hufflepuffs.”
“A John Smith ,” Lestrange says with conviction. “Not a hint of magical blood in him. And he’s American .”
Orion colors. “She would never,” he insists, though he sounds unconvinced. “Besides, her engagement is nearly settled. She wouldn’t risk upsetting the Prewetts.”
Lestrange smirks at him. “I don’t know, I’ve always heard that your sister very much would with any boy to give her a second glance. All the same, I never thought it would be with a mudblood .”
“Black, deal with it,” Riddle says coldly. “If it’s just a rumor, stop it from spreading. If it’s more than that, fix it.”
“Absolutely not,” says Harry. To his surprise, Malfoy rolls his eyes and Lestrange groans—they seem to be used to this pushback. “What does it matter anyway? If you shut up the gossips, she’ll be engaged by Yule and it won’t make any difference to anyone if she once snogged some Muggleborn.”
“Surely the last thing you want is more bastards being brought into the world,” Riddle counters, and Harry gets a flash of memory from his childhood, a tall mousy-haired woman telling Harry that bastards stay out of sight whenever they are entertaining.
“Lucretia’s nothing like Dorea,” Harry protests. “And besides, she’s smart enough not to get herself pregnant. So can we leave it?”
“As long as I don’t hear of it again, I don’t care,” Riddle responds, waving a hand dismissively and returning to his reading. “McKinnon, do you remember if Ferchinged’an’rí ever made contact with the giants?”
Lydia McKinnon says something in response, but Harry is too distracted to follow the conversation. Riddle had dismissed him, had feigned as if he didn’t care, but Harry hadn’t missed the fact that he had conceded to Harry of all people.
There’s something rather satisfying about that knowledge.