Chapter Text
By the time Harry found the right compartment, the noise coming through the door was familiar enough to fix something loose in her chest, and she stood with her hand on the handle a second just to have it before she slid it back.
Seamus saw her through the glass first.
"She's alive!" The door banged open from the inside. "Dean. Dean, she's alive, you owe me-"
"I never said she wasn't alive-"
"You said, and I'm quoting you, 'I bet she's transferred,' which for the purposes of the bet is-"
"That is a completely different thing from-"
She got hugged before she could put her bag down. Seamus first, smelling like he'd eaten the entire sweet trolley, then Neville, who'd gone enormous over the summer and nearly took her off her feet doing it.
"You got tall," she said into his shoulder.
"Gran says it's the gardening."
"That's not how gardening works," Dean said from the window seat, not getting up, raising a hand. "All right, Harry."
"All right, Dean."
"You cut your hair."
"I did, thanks, I-"
"It looks the same, though."
"It's shorter," she said, and gave up, and dropped into the seat across from him, and it was so exactly like every September before the missing one that her eyes did something stupid and she had to look out the window until they packed it in. A year of not being sure she'd see any of them whole again, and here they all were, arguing about her hair. Nobody was going to make her say that.
"So how was your-" she started, and Neville, who'd plainly been holding it in since King's Cross, said "Gran let me have an outdoor garden" at the exact same moment, and they both stopped.
"Go on," Harry said.
"It's just, the drainage for Mandrakes in open soil is completely different to a greenhouse, the books don't cover any of it, the roots go twice as deep and then they bifurcate, which they are not supposed to do before second year-"
"And he's off," Seamus told the ceiling, fondly.
"-it's a documented problem, Seamus-"
"I believe you, mate, I just genuinely do not know what bifurcate-"
"It means split," said Hermione, arriving sideways through the door with her trunk drifting behind her on a charm. "Ron. Your coat's on backwards."
"No it isn't."
"The buttons are on the wrong side."
"That's how I do the buttons."
"That is not how anyone-"
"It's a choice, Hermione." Ron dropped into the seat on Harry's other side and put his feet up on Dean's bench, and Dean shoved them off without looking, and Ron put them back, and that war ran quietly in the corner for the next hour while everyone talked over the top of it.
"Hi," Ron said to her, sideways, under the noise, quieter than the rest of him.
"Hi."
"You're actually here."
"I'm actually here."
He knocked his shoulder into hers, once, and left it there, because that was Ron, and across the way Hermione was already informing Neville that bifurcating roots were in fact documented, in a monograph from 1953, and Neville looked like she'd handed him a birthday.
The whistle went. The platform slid off sideways and was gone, and the talk just kept running over the top of it, everyone catching up at once, three conversations stacked into one the way it always went, and Harry sat in the middle of it and let it close over her head.
"Where'd you end up, anyway?" Dean asked, in a gap. "Heard your lot went north."
"Edinburgh, mostly. A safe house. Dad was doing warding for the Ministry." She watched the first fields start to unroll past the glass. "It was boring. Which I know isn't-"
"Boring's good," Dean said. "Boring means nothing happened to you."
"Yeah." She let a beat go. "You?"
"Kent. My mum's sister's." He turned his thumb over a seam in his sleeve. "Robbie Perkins isn't coming back this year."
The compartment stopped.
"Oh," Neville said, very low.
Nobody asked. They'd all gone a year without asking. They'd known Robbie, third-year Hufflepuff, a Chaser with a laugh you could hear a floor up, and that was enough, and the not-asking had turned into its own thing they did now, a held breath the whole carriage took together and let out at the same time.
"Right," Seamus said, after a moment, in the voice he kept for working hard at ordinary. "New Defence teacher. Has anyone actually heard anything reliable, or is it all Seamus-heard-it-off-a-bloke."
"Madam Marchbanks recommended her personally," Hermione said, book already open across her knees. "Her theoretical framework for non-verbal-"
"Is she going to set homework on the first day," Ron said.
"Obviously," Harry and Hermione said together, and Ron slid down in his seat like he'd been hit with something, and Seamus said "knew it," cheerfully, and stole the Chocolate Frog out of Ron's hand purely so he could be the one to open it.
⁂
Ginny turned up somewhere around Bristol with her hair longer than last year and the particular set to her jaw that meant she'd already hexed someone before lunch.
"If anyone sees Marcus Thyme from Ravenclaw," she said, "I was never on this train."
"What did you do," Ron said.
"His eyebrows will grow back. Probably." She dropped down between Harry and Neville and stole Ron's Frog out of his hand. "Hi. My summer was Mum crying and gnomes. I'm much better at Stinging Hexes."
"Clearly," Harry said.
Ginny looked at her straight on, which was the Ginny version of a hug. "You look better than I thought you would."
"You sent three letters."
"They were informative."
"The second one was four words."
"They were important words."
Ginny snorted and let it drop, and something in Harry's chest came loose a notch she hadn't known was tight.
Luna arrived near Bath in robes covered in hand-stitched bumblebees, a small glass jar in one hand and the Quibbler under her arm.
"Wrackspurts," she announced, by way of hello. "This carriage is thick with them. This is preventative." She held the jar out around the compartment.
"I'll have some," Neville said, and mimed taking a pinch.
Harry held out her hand too. Luna tipped a careful nothing into her palm. Harry closed her fingers on the empty air, because that was the game, and because there was something steadying in being handed nothing by someone who meant it kindly.
Luna sat and looked at her with those pale, unhurried eyes.
"You're waiting for something," she said.
"N.E.W.T. year," Harry said.
"Mmm," Luna said, in the tone that meant yes, and also, and opened her paper.
Across the way Hermione turned a page without looking up.
Harry put her eyes back on the window.
Three or four carriages up the train there would be a compartment with Lucius Malfoy in it, and Bellatrix Black, and the rest of the families who'd come back from the war with grudges to bank and points to make, and at the quiet centre of all of them, the way he'd been their centre for years, there would be Tom.
A Potter could walk up there. A Potter would be a thing those particular families noticed walking up there, this year more than most. She knew exactly how little it would cost her to do it and exactly how much. She spent the rest of the journey being very deliberate about everything she wasn't going to look at, and about the fact that the worst of it sat three carriages away and she could feel it like weather.
⁂
Hogsmeade station, half six, the September dark coming down cold off the hills. Harry stepped onto the platform and made the decision the way you decide to hold your breath underwater. Not this time.
The thestrals stood quiet in their traces, pale and bony in the torchlight. She could see them now, which she hadn't been able to before, and she didn't look too long at the reason for that.
"You can see them too," Luna said, beside her, untroubled, already climbing up into the nearest carriage. "More of us can, this year. It's the saddest sum in the school."
"Luna," Ginny said, getting up after her. Not sharp. Just a hand on a door.
"It's only true."
"I know," Ginny said. "That's why."
They rode up four to a carriage, Harry and Ron and Hermione and Ginny, the wheels finding every rut in the lane, the lit castle swinging closer over the rise. Ron had produced another Frog from somewhere and was working through it on principle.
"Sickle says the stairs have moved the Charms corridor again," he said.
"The stairs always move the Charms corridor," Hermione said.
"Right, so it's a safe bet."
"That's why it isn't a bet, Ron, a bet has to have an actual-"
"Did Edinburgh have moving stairs?" Ron asked Harry, straight over the top of her, and Hermione exhaled through her nose and looked out the window.
"It was a safe house," Harry said. "It had the one staircase. It went up, and then it went down again."
"Tragic," Ron said, with real feeling, and held out the last bite of the Frog to her without being asked.
She took it. Above them the castle came up, every window lit, sitting exactly where she'd left it. A year of safe houses and the wireless going on about the war and it hadn't shifted an inch. She let that hold her the rest of the way up the lane.
She was going to be fine. She was going to be fine. Say it enough times, and she will start believing it herself.
⁂
The feast was loud and warm and good, and she got most of the way through it before she looked.
She held out a long time, for her. She ate. She laughed at Ron doing Percy's letter about the new Ministry liaison, throat-clearing and all, three times, until even Hermione gave up and laughed. She watched the first-years come in looking the way they always did, too small for their robes and pretending not to be, and clapped the Gryffindors down the bench, and had two helpings of treacle tart, and let Neville bring Ginny fully up to date on the Mandrake crisis while Hermione annotated a timetable nobody had asked her to annotate.
She kept her eyes on her own half of the hall, and it cost her more than she let show, and somewhere around the pudding she lost.
She looked.
He was already looking at her.
Of course he was. The length of the hall away, at the Slytherin table, Head Boy badge catching the candlelight, Lucius saying something at his shoulder that he wasn't bothering to answer. He had the still public face on, the one that gave a room precisely nothing. And then he saw her catch him at it, and for half a second the still face did the thing it was not supposed to do, a flicker, gone almost before it arrived, like a line dropped and snatched back out of the water. She knew that flicker. She'd spent two years learning to find it. It undid the whole careful afternoon of not-looking in one go.
She put her eyes back on her plate.
"They made him Head Boy," Neville said, to his own plate, no weight on it at all.
"I saw the badge," Harry said.
A pause.
"You all right?"
"Yeah."
"You don't have to be," Neville said, mild, still not looking up, buttering a roll he didn't especially want. "Just so you know. There's no rule about it."
She looked at him. He ate the roll. He'd said the kindest thing available in the most ordinary voice he had, and was now pretending he hadn't.
"I'm all right, Nev," she said, and was a bit surprised to find she half meant it.
"Okay," he said, and let it be.
The feast wound down and the hall began to empty in pieces. She got her bag onto her shoulder and let the Gryffindor crowd carry her toward the doors, and she had almost made it, almost, when a hand closed around hers in the press of the entrance hall and stopped her dead.
She didn't have to look to know whose it was. She'd have known that hand in the dark.
"Harry."
She turned. Tom had come through the crowd to get to her, which he didn't do, which in two years he had never once done where people could watch him do it, and his hand was still around hers and he wasn't letting it go.
"Let go," she said. She didn't pull.
"Why didn't you write?"
That was the part that landed wrong in her chest, because Tom Riddle always had an angle, always knew the shape of a conversation three moves before she did, and this had come out of him with the front torn off it.
"I didn't think you'd care," she said. "You didn't write either."
"Of course I care." His voice dropped, fast and low and not quite level, and not-level was a thing she had never heard from him. "I was worried sick."
She stared at him. Worried sick. From him. The two words sat there between them in the noise of three hundred students going up to bed.
"Funny way of showing it," she said.
Something crossed his face that she didn't get to read, because that was when Lucius arrived at his shoulder with two prefects and a question about the dungeon patrols, and a knot of younger Slytherins stacked up behind them waiting on him, and all at once the moment had people in it.
Tom let go of her hand. But before he turned, quick, under the noise, pitched at her and nobody else:
"Meet me at the Astronomy Tower. Later."
"Yeah, right," she said.
And then he was gone, taken off into Head Boy things, Lucius a half-step off his shoulder the way Lucius always set himself, and she stood in the emptying hall with the hand he'd held going cold and her heart doing something loud and stupid that she had no intention of forgiving it for.
"Ready?" Hermione said, appearing at her elbow with her eyes set carefully on the middle distance.
"Yeah," Harry said. Her voice came out almost normal. "Let's go."
⁂
She lasted until just past eleven.
The common room emptied out by stages. Ron went down first, in the chair by the fire, asleep with his mouth open and a half-eaten Frog melting on his knee, and nobody had the heart to wake him for a good twenty minutes. Ginny prodded him upright in the end and steered him at the stairs, and on her way past Harry's chair she stopped.
"Harry, no." Ginny said.
"Uhm, what?"
"Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about." She considered Harry a moment, fair and unbothered, the way only Ginny could. "He flickered at you. At the feast. I saw it from down the bench."
Harry didn't say anything.
"I'm not telling you not to do it again," Ginny said. "I learned that one the hard way. I'm just saying this has happened too many times already, Harry." She started up the stairs, then turned on the bottom step. "We're worried about you. And most of all, right this minute, I'm worried you're going to get detention on your first night back."
"I'm not going anywhere," Harry said.
"Sure," Ginny said, not unkindly, and went up.
Hermione had gone at ten, with a look Harry had got good at receiving and not answering. Harry sat on by the dying fire and tried to be sensible about it.
It didn't take. It hadn't taken on the train and it hadn't taken in the carriage and it didn't take now.
At quarter past she gave up. She changed into clean clothes, lay on her back and counted the cracks in the dormitory ceiling for about four minutes, and then got up and dug her father's invisibility cloak out of the bottom of her trunk, where it had spent the year under things she still hadn't unpacked. Don't get detention your first night back. Ginny's voice, and Ginny was right, and the cloak was the answer to it. She pulled it over her head down in the empty common room and went out through the portrait hole as a draught and nothing else.
The castle was dark and enormous and asleep around her. On the third-floor landing Filch's new cat was sitting square in the middle of the flagstones, and it turned its head and stared dead at the patch of air where she was, ears flat, and she held her breath and went very slowly around the wall, and the cat watched the empty corridor a long moment after she'd passed and then, grudgingly, looked away.
She came up the last of the spiral and pushed the door, still under the cloak.
He was at the railing, back to her, robes shed and dropped on the bench, shirt open at the collar, the wind off the lake going through his hair. He turned when the door went. He'd heard it, and for half a second he was looking straight at an empty doorway with the still, cooling wariness of a man who'd rather not be found up here by the wrong person at all.
She pulled the cloak off.
His face did the thing then, the same flicker from the feast, except up here with no hall and no Lucius and no audience he let it stay a beat longer, and what was under it she couldn't name, and she'd had two years of naming things in that face.
"I thought you wouldn’t come," he said.
"Same here."
"And here you are."
"And here I am." She stayed by the door, the cloak pooled silver over her arm. "I can't sleep. It isn't for you."
It was a lie and they both heard it land as one. She'd been telling herself the same thing the whole way up the stairs and it hadn't held them either.
He looked at her, and the fast clean thing he always did, the half-second where his face settled on what to be before you could catch it, didn't happen. He just looked, like the sight of her was doing something to him that he hadn't planned for and couldn't get out from under.
"I've been up here twenty minutes telling myself you wouldn't."
That cracked something open in her. Tom Riddle, in the cold, talking himself out of her for twenty minutes and standing in it anyway. She set the cloak on the bench beside his robes and crossed to the railing and stood next to him, close, because the tower was small and neither of them had ever once left the gap.
The lake held the starlight. The forest was a black seam at the edge of everything. She made herself say the thing she'd climbed the stairs not meaning to say.
"You were worried sick," she said. Not a question. His own words, handed back to him.
"Yes."
"For a whole year. And not one line."
He was quiet.
"That's the part I can't get past," she said, and heard her voice go thin on it. "You let me sit in a safe house all year thinking you'd decided you were finished. A note. Four words. Ginny managed four words, Tom."
"I read every report that came out of Edinburgh." He said it to the water, low and fast, the words getting ahead of him in a way she had never once watched happen to him. "I knew the week your father's warding contract renewed. I knew the safe house moved in March before half the Ministry did. I knew you were alright, every single week, because I made it my business to know. And I told myself that knowing was the same as you knowing that I-"
He stopped.
He'd run out past the end of where he had a sentence, and he stood there with the unfinished thing in the wind, looking faintly appalled at himself, at having got that far out loud.
"It's not the same," she said, and it didn't come out gentle the way she'd half meant it to. The hurt was still sitting right under it. "You could have found a way. You always find a way. It's the thing you're best at."
"A letter from me to a Potter, that year, would have been opened and read by six people before it ever reached your hand." He said it flat, to the water. "Every one of them would have understood exactly what it meant. I told myself I was keeping you clear of that. It was even true."
"But."
"But it was the safe version of true." He kept his eyes on the lake. "I could have found a way. I didn't want to pay what finding one would have cost me. So I read the reports instead and called it the same thing."
It was the most honest thing he'd handed her all night, and it made her angrier, not less, because it meant the silence had been a decision and he'd known the whole time it was one. She turned and put both hands flat on the cold iron of the railing and looked at the long drop to the grounds and breathed.
"I'm so angry at you," she said, to the dark.
"I know."
"A year, Tom. I'd have taken anything. I'd have taken a blank piece of paper with your handwriting on the envelope."
"I know."
She stood with her hands going numb on the rail, and the wanting and the fury did the thing they only ever did with him, which was refuse to cancel out, both of them only getting louder.
She'd sworn she wouldn't, on the platform. She'd sworn it on the train with three carriages between them. She'd sworn it on the stairs ten minutes ago.
She turned around. He hadn't moved, hadn't reached for one thing to put over his face, was just standing there letting her be furious at him with nothing in front of it, which was new, all of it new.
And then the standing-still went out of him all at once.
He crossed the gap before she'd finished turning into it and kissed her, hard, both hands coming up to her jaw, and there was nothing careful in it and nothing managed, just a year of holding himself still going off at the touch of her. She made a sound against his mouth she hadn't planned and didn't take back, and got two fists in the front of his shirt, and felt the whole year go at once, the way a badly-set ward goes the second you lean your weight on it.
He kissed her like he'd done it a hundred times in his head across the long year and got the details wrong every time and meant to be right about each one of them now, hungry, with no patience left anywhere in it. He backed her into the railing and came after her, one hand sliding into her hair to tip her head where he wanted it, the other fisted at the small of her back to hold her hard against him, and she gave it all back. He'd climbed the tower in the dark and waited twenty minutes against his own better sense, and now that she was actually in his hands he kissed her like he'd be damned before he let her leave it unchanged.
⁂
He walked her back out of the wind, into the dark of the tower's inside where the stone was cold at her shoulders and he was warm everywhere else. His hands were in her hair and at her waist, and there was none of the patience she was used to from him, the half-step he usually kept between himself and his own wanting. It wasn't there tonight. She could feel it gone, in the grip of his hands, in the unsteady breath when she pushed in closer.
"Tom," she said.
"I know," he said, and it came out rougher than she'd ever heard him.
He kissed down her jaw and her throat while his hands shoved up under her shirt, palms hot against her ribs, and she tipped her head back against the stone and gave up on sensible entirely. She'd known on the platform. She'd known the second the train pulled out and she turned her face to the glass. He dragged the shirt up and she lifted her arms to let him take it off over her head, and it went somewhere into the dark, and then his hands were on her bare skin and his mouth came after them.
He got the clasp of her bra on the second try, the first one catching, his fingers actually slipping, and she felt him breathe out a short frustrated sound against her collarbone, Tom Riddle whose hands never once slipped at anything, and she would have laughed if his mouth hadn't closed over her breast in the next second and turned the laugh into a sound that wasn't one.
He took his time there. That was the thing about him undone, that it didn't make him quick, it made him thorough, like he'd had a year to think about exactly this and meant to be right about every part of it. The heat of his tongue across her nipple, the slow deliberate pressure of his mouth, his other hand coming up to cup and knead the breast he wasn't using until both were tight and aching and she had a fist in his hair without remembering putting it there. He drew back to look at her, the pale of her in the dark, the rise and fall of her breathing, and made a low wrecked sound deep in his chest and went back to her like he couldn't physically not.
"Tom-" Her voice had gone to nothing.
He moved his mouth to the other breast, wet and warm, and his teeth grazed her, careful, and she gasped and arched off the stone, and he soothed it with his tongue and did it again until she couldn't track which side of her he was undoing. He worshipped her like that against the cold wall, unhurried and starving at once, both hands and his mouth, until the want had gone molten and low and heavy in her and her breath was loud enough to fill the whole empty tower.
"The whole school's under us," she managed, at the ceiling.
"Asleep," he said, against her skin.
"Not all of them."
"Quietly, then," he said, and kissed lower, down her sternum, the flat of her stomach, the jut of her hip, going to his knees on the cold stone of the Astronomy Tower, and she looked down at Tom Riddle kneeling in front of her, unhurried and undone in the same breath, and gave up on finding a word for what it did to her.
He got her trousers and knickers down and she stepped out of them, and his hands parted her thighs, and he looked up at her once. She didn't say anything; he could see her face, and her face was the whole answer.
Then his mouth was on her and the rest of it went wordless. He worked her slow at first, finding the places that made her hips jerk and staying there, his tongue and then two fingers pushing into her, curling, and she got one hand in his hair and the other flat to the cold wall and held on. The wind came up off the lake. She was bare on the top of the castle with his mouth between her legs and the whole sleeping school under her feet, and he took her apart patiently and completely, and when it broke over her she pressed his name into her own palm so the night couldn't have it.
He was on his feet before she'd finished shaking, kissing her, and she tasted herself on his mouth and pulled him in by the open shirt. She got his belt open with hands that didn't work properly and shoved everything down and got a hand around him, and felt him go rigid and still against her, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, his breath coming apart.
"Harry." Just her name, low and specific, like it was the only word he had left in him.
"I know," she said, which was the thing he always said to her, and felt him huff something that was almost a laugh against her throat.
He got both hands under her thighs and lifted, and she wrapped her legs around him and the cold stone took her back and he pushed into her slow, all the way, and they both stopped breathing at the top of it. Then he moved, and she met him, and it wasn't careful and it wasn't measured, it was the whole year going off at once, his face in her neck and her heels at the small of his back, the two of them moving together hard enough that the cold and the height and the war and all the rest of it fell away beneath the tower and left only this. He said her name again, broken in half on it. She bit down on his shoulder to keep quiet and felt him shudder.
He got a hand between them, found her, and she went over the edge a second time around him, mouth open against his skin, and he followed her a few strokes later with her name pushed into her hair and his whole weight pinning her to the wall, undone, completely, the way only she ever got to see him.
They stayed like that, tangled, his heart slamming under the hand she'd flattened against his chest, both of them breathing like they'd run a long way to get here.
She left her hand there. Not to remember it. Because she wanted to.
"We cannot keep doing this, Tom," she said.
"I know."
He frowned, like the word was costing him and he was paying it anyway, and didn't quite know what his face was doing while he did.
She kissed him again, slower now, and his hands tightened at her waist, and the tower kept its old quality of being its own country, cold and high and belonging to nobody.
⁂
She dressed while he leaned on the railing and watched her, and she let him, because she'd given up pretending she didn't know how he looked at her. Below them every window was dark and the lake lay flat and still.
"I meant it, you know," she said. "I wasn't going to do this."
"Hmhmm."
"And I climbed all those stairs anyway."
"Five flights," he said, before he'd decided to. "I counted them on the way up. I was telling myself the whole climb that you wouldn't come, and counting the steps so I'd have something else to do with the part of me that knew you would."
She stopped with her jumper half pulled down and looked at him. He hadn't meant to say that. She could see he hadn't, the way his jaw set a half-beat too late, the small private horror of a man who'd let a true thing out by accident and couldn't reach back in for it.
"You're not supposed to tell me things like that," she said.
"No," he agreed. "I'm aware."
She finished dressing. There was a sentence still sitting between them, the one he'd dropped at the railing and not picked back up, the one that went that I- and stopped, and she knew, looking at him with his control this far gone, that if she asked him now he might actually finish it. She wanted it badly enough to frighten herself. Which was exactly why she wasn't going to be the one to drag it out of him on a freezing tower at midnight on the first night back, before either of them could survive having heard it.
So she picked up her wand, and the cloak.
"Goodnight, Tom," she said.
"Harry-" He stopped himself. Visibly. Something moved in his face, the wanting to say it and then the not, and she saw him put it away, and saw that it cost him to.
"Don't," she said. Not unkind. "Not the first night. You'll have it back behind your teeth by Tuesday, and then I'll have heard it and you'll act like you never said it, and I'd rather not do that to either of us yet."
"...All right," he said, which from him was a concession the size of a country.
She pulled the cloak over her shoulders, and the last thing she saw before the silver of it took her was his face changing, just slightly, the composure going out of it all at once, the way it only ever did the second she started to leave.
Then she was gone under it, and he was alone on the tower with an empty doorway, and she made herself go down the stairs and not turn around.
She did not think about the unfinished sentence on the walk back.
She thought about it the rest of the week.