The Dark Prince - Chapter 25 (Patreon)

ADULT CONTENT DISCLAIMER

All characters depicted in this story are 18 years of age or older. This is explicit adult erotic fiction.

Chapter 25

The Other Side of the Sum

The lake window held a thin strip of late dark when Harry left the chair.

The room behind him still smelled like two girls he had used to stop thinking. He had sent them out. He had washed. He had dressed. The line he had spoken into the empty air was still sitting in his mouth.

Now I need to find my father.

He stopped with his hand on the latch.

Father would take whatever Harry brought him. Father would put a hand around it and decide which pieces were allowed to remain. If Harry walked into that grip carrying only Liam’s question and a hole where a brother should have been, Father would fill the hole for him. Father had filled holes before.

Harry took his hand off the latch.

He needed the other column first. The one the manor had never written down. James and Lily Potter. The house. The five years. The reason a boy only four years younger did not exist anywhere in the memory Harry had been given to live inside.

He left the dungeons without waking Draco.

The west corridor was quiet enough that his own steps sounded like an argument. He did not look for Ginny. He did not look for Hermione. He had already shut those doors. Opening them now would turn this into comfort, and comfort would make him sloppy.

The visiting suite still had the extra charms Dumbledore favored. Harry set two fingers to the wood. James had told the lock to know him. The lock opened.

Lily was on her feet before the door had finished swinging. James sat at the table with a mug between both hands, not drinking. Liam was not in the room. The boy’s question had already done enough work.

“Harry.” Lily stopped on her side of the rug. “It’s late. Is something wrong. Is Liam-”

“He is asleep, if the castle is kind,” Harry said. He shut the door. “I did not come for him.”

James set the mug down. He did not stand all the way. He had learned what his height did in a room Harry already occupied.

“Do you want to sit,” James said.

“No.” Harry stayed in front of the hearth. The grate was cold. His hands hung empty. The disc was gone from his chest and the bracelet from his wrist. The dampeners had been off since the courtyard, since Dumbledore and the Potters had called that empty place trust. The magic under his skin had nowhere to press except outward, and he kept it there, unused.

“You have been waiting for me to ask,” he said. “Since the courtyard, and the lawn, and the sentence of Liam’s you both heard and pretended was only a boy being hurt.”

Lily’s fingers found each other. “We have wanted you to ask. That is different from waiting.”

“It is not different from where I am standing.” Harry tipped his head. The tie at his nape held. A loose end of long hair brushed his collar and stayed there. “I am going to ask now. You are going to answer. You will not dress it. You will not bring Dumbledore into the grammar. You will not tell me what I am supposed to feel when you are finished.”

James’s jaw worked once. “Ask.”

“The house,” Harry said. “The five years I spent in it. What those years were. What you said in the rooms when you thought I could not hear you. Why I left. Why you never came after me.”

Lily’s mouth opened. She shut it again.

James looked at the table, then at Harry. “Harry. We need you to tell us what you think those years were. Otherwise we will answer the wrong life.”

“I am not here to trade versions.” Harry’s voice stayed even. “I remember a house that did not want me in it. I remember nights I did not sleep. I remember voices that used my name like a problem they had not solved. I remember deciding the dark outside was cleaner than the rooms. I remember being found. I remember you never arriving.”

He let that sit.

“Liam is four years younger than I am. He asked why I do not remember him. I have no picture of him in that house. No cot, no cry, no smaller body in a doorway. If I lived those five years under your roof, he should be in them. He is not. You will explain the gap.”

Lily took one step and stopped, the way she had learned to stop.

“There is a gap,” she said. Her voice had gone thin. “There is a gap because the years you are describing are not years we had with you.”

Harry waited.

James dragged a hand down his face. When it came away, he looked older by a decade he had not earned in this room.

“You were taken from a crib,” James said. “Peter Pettigrew put Lily and me down and carried you out of Godric’s Hollow. We woke up to an empty room and a war that had already chosen the story it wanted. Dumbledore told the Order you were gone. The Order treated gone as dead because dead had a ceremony and a place to stand. We stood there. We said your name into dirt. Then we kept living.”

Lily’s eyes had gone wet. She left the water where it was.

“Liam came later,” she said. “After we had already learned how to set a table without you. He grew up on stories. He did not grow up in a house that held you at the same time. That is why he asked what he asked. He has been trying to climb into rooms you were never standing in.”

Harry’s mouth curved.

“So the house I remember is a lie.”

“I did not say lie,” James said.

“You said crib, and taken, and funeral. None of that contains five years of a house and a decision to run. If your version is true, the nights I remember were built by someone else and put in my head to live in.” Harry’s gaze moved from James to Lily and held. “Which of you is going to say his name first.”

Lily’s throat worked. “Voldemort.”

“Father,” Harry said.

Lily flinched from the word. James did not. James had used up his flinch on other nights.

“He raised you,” James said. “We know that now. We know he called you son. We know he trained you. What we did not know - what I still cannot make sit still - is that he would invent a childhood to hang the training on.”

“You cannot make it sit still because it accuses you of something smaller than kidnapping.” Harry’s voice stayed level. “If he stole a baby, you are victims. If I ran from you at the end of five years, you are the reason I ran. You have been clinging to the first shape because the second one would require you to look at the way you speak when you are angry.”

James’s hands flattened on the table. The knuckles went white. He did not raise his voice. The dinner table had taught him that much.

“I have looked,” James said. “I look every time you go still when I stand up too fast. I look every time Liam says your name like it belongs at breakfast. I am not asking you to call me father. I am telling you there was no fifth year in that cottage. There was a storm and a traitor and an empty cot. If you have more years than that, he gave them to you.”

Lily’s next breath caught.

“I dreamed you were cold,” she said. “For a long time I called it grief. I should have called it what it was. You were somewhere. I did not follow the cold far enough to find the door.”

Harry turned his face toward the grate.

The manor’s version had been clean. A bad house. A brave leaving. A man who found value in the leaving. Liam’s arithmetic punched a hole in the clean version. James and Lily were pouring a different story through that hole, crib and traitor and a funeral for a child who had still been breathing.

He could feel the two accounts trying to occupy the same bone.

The silver scar warmed. The old faint itch became a press, a listening across the bond.

“He can feel this,” Harry said.

Lily’s wand hand twitched at her sleeve. “If he is in it, we should-”

“You should do nothing.” Harry looked at her. “You took the collar off because a village wanted a statue. Do not spend that choice by running for Dumbledore the moment the statue speaks.”

James stood. He did it slowly. Both hands visible.

“Then finish asking,” James said. “If this is the night you want the rest of it, take the rest of it. What else.”

Harry had more. He had a stuffed dragon from a sentence no one in this room had offered him tonight. He had the way Liam grinned when his hair was ruffled. He had the gap, still open, still asking to be filled by someone who would benefit from the filling.

He opened his mouth on the next precise piece.

The warning charm on the outer corridor split the air.

James’s wand cleared his sleeve. Lily’s was already up. Harry did not reach for his. He had not brought it. He had come to collect a column of facts.

The second charm died faster than the first.

Boots in the corridor, too few for an Order rush, four points of impact and then a fifth, spaced on purpose.

The lock failed. The door came off the frame and hit the inner wall.

Bellatrix Lestrange stepped through the opening with her curls loose and her mouth already bright. Her wand sat loose in her fingers.

“There,” she said. “I told him. I said you would be in a room with them, asking them for things he already gave you. He hated that I was right. He came anyway.”

James moved.

Bellatrix’s curse caught him in the ribs and put him into the wall hard enough to crack plaster. He stayed upright. His second spell she swatted aside with a flick that had laughter under it.

“Slow,” she told him. “You were faster when you were young. I remember the stories.”

Lily’s cutting curse left her mouth clean and died on a shield that did not belong to Bellatrix.

Voldemort entered without hurry.

He was tall and unnaturally pale, red eyes finding Harry first and refusing the rest of the room that courtesy. The bond in the silver scar slammed open with heat and pressure, the attention Harry had been taught to read as love.

“Harry,” Voldemort said, soft and exact.

Lily made a sound with no language in it. James shoved off the wall and put his body in a line between the hearth and the man in the doorway. His wand hand shook once and then locked.

“You don’t touch him,” James said.

Voldemort’s gaze passed across James and did not linger. “James Potter. You made yourself a Keeper and then lost the only object the charm existed to hide. Do not instruct me in touching.”

Bellatrix drifted left, cutting the angle to Lily without being told. She looked delighted.

“My Lord let me come,” she said, to Harry, as if the Potters had already stopped being present. “He read your little message. Father’s son is waiting. And planning. He gave you the hour you asked for. The hour became days. Days became a castle putting sentences in your mouth. He is finished granting hours.”

Harry’s gaze went past her shoulder to the dark of the corridor, then back.

“Hogwarts does not allow Apparition,” he said. “The outer wards should have screamed longer than that.”

Bellatrix’s smile widened.

“West face,” she said. “I dropped the outer ward and the anti-Apparition on this stretch with it. We stepped into the corridor. We did not walk from the gates.”

Voldemort came forward two steps. The air in the suite went colder. He did not circle and he did not waste a speech on the method.

Harry heard himself speak before he decided to.

“Father.”

Lily’s face broke. Harry kept his eyes on Voldemort.

“You sent word that my son was waiting,” Voldemort said. “I waited. I felt you stand in snow and choose their gates. I felt you put a hand on the second Potter’s magic. I felt you sit in a room tonight and ask these two for a childhood. That last one decided the schedule.”

Harry’s throat worked. He did not step back.

“I asked them because the numbers do not hold,” he said. “Liam. The years. The house. I wanted their column before I brought you a hole and let you fill it.”

“And did they fill it.”

“They started.”

“Then they have done all I require of them.” Voldemort’s head tilted. “You will not complete this conversation in a building that profits from the completion.”

Lily’s wand rose again. “He is not a thing you collect. You stole him. You wrote on him. You do not get to walk in here and-”

Bellatrix hit her in the shoulder and spun her into James’s empty chair. Lily kept the wand. Her mouth went white around the pain and stayed shut on a scream.

James shouted her name and took two steps. Harry’s arm came up without a meeting in it. James ran into that arm and stopped because the alternative was walking through him.

“Do not,” Harry said.

James’s fingers closed on his sleeve. “Come with us. We can move. The wards-”

“The hole she cut is still open,” Harry said. “You are holding fabric.”

Voldemort’s wand appeared in his hand without travel. He pointed it at the floor between James and Harry. The stone under James’s boots went slick and unkind. James dropped to one knee and kept the sleeve until Harry opened his own fingers and let the cloth go.

Bellatrix laughed, delighted, and then quieted when Voldemort did not look at her.

“You asked for your father,” Voldemort said to Harry. “I am here. Their kind writes letters and forms committees and hopes a reaching will pass. I arrive.”

Harry looked at Lily in the chair, shoulder wrong, wand still up. He looked at James on one knee, glasses knocked crooked, breath loud. He looked at the gap they had begun to fill with a crib and a traitor and a funeral.

The fill had not finished. The hole was still a hole. Father had come to stop the pouring.

“If I walk out of this room with you,” Harry said, “they remain breathing.”

Voldemort’s mouth moved in a thin line that might have been approval on a warmer face.

“You do not purchase them. You never have. Tonight I came for you. The column that contains their lungs is separate. I will leave it uncollected as a courtesy. Courtesy is not policy.”

“Bella,” Harry said.

She stilled, eyes bright, waiting for a leash she liked.

“Not them.”

“My Prince sets terms,” Bellatrix murmured. “My Lord allows them. For now.”

Voldemort’s wand-tip shifted. James’s wand snapped across the middle. Lily’s followed. The pieces hit the rug and lay there like ordinary wood.

“If either of them follows the pull,” Voldemort said, “remind them what following costs. Keep the reminder short of ending.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

Footsteps hammered the corridor, younger than the spaced boots that had come first.

Liam appeared in the ruined frame in a sleep shirt and bare feet, wand up, messy hair in his eyes, the gold-green of the lawn already starting to gather under his skin because fear had taught him that gathering was the same thing as help.

“Harry-”

Harry turned his head.

The boy took in the room in one ugly sweep: James on a knee, Lily in a chair with her shoulder wrong, the tall figure in black, Bellatrix watching him with her head tipped.

Liam’s magic shoved at the air, gold first, then that sharp green.

Voldemort flicked two fingers. The shove went nowhere. Liam hit the doorframe and slid down it, conscious, empty-handed, the gold-green gone as if someone had closed a fist around a candle.

“The second Potter,” Voldemort said. “Useful, and unfinished. You may keep your interest in him for a later hour. This hour is closed.”

Liam tried to speak and got Harry’s name out of it, raw.

Harry did not cross the rug. He did not pick the boy up. He looked at him long enough for the look to count, and then he looked back at the man who had taught him what a look was worth.

“Home,” Voldemort said.

Bellatrix’s hand closed on Harry’s other arm, possessive, almost shaking with the pleasure of the errand. Voldemort’s hand settled on his shoulder. The grip was familiar. It had lifted him off floors and out of drills and, once, off cold stone, if the crib story was the true one. Harry still did not know which story survived the walk out of this room.

Lily shoved herself forward in the chair. “Harry. Look at me. You can refuse him. You can stay in the gap and let us finish answering.”

Harry looked at her.

“You started,” he said. “He arrived. That is the part of the night that belongs to you.”

James lunged off the knee.

Bellatrix’s curse took him across the chest and put him flat, lungs emptied, eyes wide, still alive and no longer up. Lily went to the floor beside him with her wrong shoulder and her empty hands and Liam crawling toward both of them from the frame, making a sound that wanted to be a spell and came out a brother’s name instead.

The anti-Apparition charm on the west stretch was already down. The pull took them through the same hole Bellatrix had cut on the way in.

The visiting rooms dropped out of reach. The lemon-scented charms went away. Liam’s raw mouth went away. Cold replaced them, then stone, then the green of the manor torches Harry could have drawn from memory with his eyes shut.

His boots met the hall floor.

Bellatrix dropped to one knee because the crossing had ended and the throne room required it. Harry stayed standing. The air smelled of damp rock and old metal and the east-wing fires someone had already lit. Nagini was absent. The hook on the far wall was empty. Harry was the only lesson left in the hall.

Voldemort released his shoulder and turned to face him.

“You will recite what they managed to say,” Voldemort said. “You will separate their words from the ones you added while you listened. Then I will tell you which of those words you are permitted to keep.”

Harry’s mouth curved.

“They said crib. They said Pettigrew. They said the five years are not theirs. They did not finish.”

“They will not finish.” Voldemort’s red eyes held him without blinking. “Unfinished is safer than theirs. Unfinished belongs to me.”

Bellatrix rose when he glanced at her. She was still smiling, hungry, with no one left in the hall she was allowed to spend it on.

“Shall I go back for the little copy, my Lord. Or the woman. She said stolen. I dislike that word in her mouth.”

“You will dislike it in silence,” Voldemort said. “The castle may keep its wreckage tonight. I have what I came for.”

He looked at Harry again.

“Welcome home.”

Harry stood in the hall he had been raised in, under the silver brand on his forehead. He could not remember a crib. He could remember running. The sum still refused to close.

Behind him, in a suite that no longer had a door, James Potter tried to find air, and Lily Potter held a shoulder that would not sit right, and Liam Potter said a name into a room that no longer contained the person it belonged to.

Home, now, was the manor.

The question he had walked into the west corridor to ask had not received its last sentence.

Father intended to keep it that way.