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Jonquils and Lightning	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Tom Views: 4139 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Title: Jonquils and Lightning
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, a few one-sided het pairings and canon het pairings
Content Notes: Angst, blood, dubious consent, dimension travel, OC’s
Rating: R
Summary: Harry Potter found peace after the war in another world where a large number of Potters live. He makes his living as an animal healer in Godric’s Hollow, surrounded by family and away from all wars. But his peace shatters with the arrival of a Tom Riddle from another dimension, who seeks a Potter who can be his foretold weapon in his own war.
Author’s Notes: At the moment, I can’t say how long this story will be.
Jonquils and Lightning
Chapter One—Godric’s Hollow
“That’s right.” Harry leaned against the mare’s side and reached up to slide his hand carefully back and forth down the heaving bay flank. “You can do this, Princess. Push!”
When he spoke the word, he flooded his fingers with magic, which struck inwards through Princess’s muscles, strengthening them, soothing her pain, and giving her an instinctive understanding of his words. Princess pushed as hard as she could, leaning partially on him and partially on the stable wall and snorting. Harry reached back and touched the soft swell of the emerging colt’s head.
“Just a little more,” he said, and watched golden sparks flicker from his fingers into Princess’s coat, where they shone like miniature stars. “Push.”
She did it again, and the colt dipped and dropped a little more out of her. Harry immediately knelt down behind her and pulled up the soft net that he’d conjured hours ago. Princess pushed one more time, and the colt dropped out and into the net.
Probably the floor of the stall, covered with new straw, would have been soft enough, but Harry had lost the first foal he’d ever delivered to injuries. He didn’t want to take chances.
“Hello, beautiful,” he murmured, heedless of the blood and other fluids on his hands as he turned the colt so that he could make sure the cord was broken. He had already started flailing around, the way he should. A little more blood soaked the straw. Harry stepped carefully back, out of the stall, and watched. Princess should be able to take it from here, but she’d delivered a filly with several problems last year, so Harry had wanted to remain close.
Princess slowly turned her head around, her sides still laboring as she pushed the rest of the placenta out of her. She began to nudge and lick at the colt, and Harry smiled a little. The baby, whose sex he already knew because he’d used magic to sense it before birth, lifted his head and moved his feet clumsily. It was hard to tell what color he was right now because of the fluids staining him, but Harry glimpsed a white patch near his nose and a dark stripe down his back.
He began trying to stand about ten minutes later. Harry watched him waver and crash, and removed the net with a simple wave of his hand when it looked like he might get his hooves tangled up in it. Nearly half an hour after Princess had given birth, the foal was standing. Princess started using her nose to shove him around, and Harry leaned on the door of a stall a few doors down to watch.
It looked like the colt had found the teats maybe twenty minutes after that, given the enthusiastic twitching of his tail. Harry relaxed. He used another wave of his hand and quirk of his magic to clean up the mess in Princess’s stall. That was all he would do for now. Coming any closer any faster might make the colt anxious.
He slipped out of the stable and sauntered up the starlit path towards Charlus and Dorea’s house, feeling a tired satisfaction work its way through his muscles. He’d only stayed up this late because Princess had started to give birth at night and because of the problems she’d had last year.
But it was wonderful to watch new life come into the world, and to feel the spring breeze in his face. Harry was smiling as he entered the kitchen through the back door.
“It went well, then?”
Harry paused when he saw his great-aunt Dorea—well, sort of—sitting up for him at the kitchen table. “Yes, it did. What are you doing up? It’s almost four in the morning.”
“My great-nephew is up. Why shouldn’t I be?”
Harry shook his head and crossed the kitchen to kiss her on the cheek. Dorea reached up to hold his chin in place and looked him sternly in the face. She still had incredibly piercing grey eyes, despite the long ivory streaks in her black hair and the loose skin along her neck. Harry only grinned at her.
“You look tired.”
“I know. I was up late last night, too, because I thought she’d give birth any minute, but it was only false labor. And then of course she couldn’t give birth in the sunlight, that would be too simple.”
“As long as you get some sleep now. I’ll tell Jonquil not to wake you too early in the morning.”
“I don’t mind if she does—”
“Get some sleep.”
There was no arguing with Dorea when she was in that mood. Harry hugged her around the neck and went to his bedroom, which was upstairs and had once belonged to his cousin—sort of—Arthur, Charlus and Dorea’s son. But Arthur had moved out a long time ago and lived at the other end of the village with his wife and children, more of Harry’s sort-of cousins. Harry gratefully dropped straight down into the big bed and closed his eyes.
*
“Cousin Harry. You promised me a magic lesson.”
Harry grinned at Jonquil Potter, who was sitting at the table waiting for him. She was Arthur’s daughter and had dark hair more like Dorea’s than a typical Potter’s, which meant it behaved. She had blue-green eyes that only looked a little like his. She had been in Slytherin, had successfully taken her NEWTS about half a year before Harry arrived, and was intent on learning all the magic she could, including the battle-magic that Harry didn’t currently plan to teach anyone.
Jonquil had told him that was all right when he told her his intention. She was more stubborn than he was.
I doubt that, Harry thought now, as he had every time since she’d told him, and took his seat at the table across from her. “I promised,” he agreed, and spent a little bit of time gulping down kippers and sausage while Jonquil tapped her fingers on the table.
“Well, when am I going to learn it?”
“Where do you see yourself in five years, Jonquil?”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Here, probably married and raising children, unless you can tach me magic worth more than that.”
It was the answer she had given before, but this time, Harry picked up on some undertones that he disliked. “So you don’t really want to stay here? But you don’t think you could make it in the world outside Godric’s Hollow without advanced war-magic?”
Jonquil frowned at him. “The pressure to have a family is very strong—”
“I’ve resisted it.”
“You’ve only been here seven months. Wait until Grandmamma Dorea has time to work on you. And they’re as stubborn as I am. I wouldn’t hate having children. But I want to do something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Harry nodded slowly and went back to his meal. Great, frustrated ambition, without a goal. He had seen that kind of ambition before, in a few people in his first world after the war. Neville had known he wanted to do something with Herbology after the war, but not what. And a few people, like Dean Thomas, had been changed so dramatically by fighting and fleeing for their lives that they found it hard to settle into anything.
“I’ll teach you some spells that I wasn’t planning on teaching you,” he said, when he’d finished eating. Jonquil had stayed silent the entire time, just watching him. Harry didn’t know why people carried on about his own gaze being piercing. It couldn’t compare to his cousin’s. “But you have to promise me that you’ll never use them except in defense of your own life or someone else’s.”
Jonquil smiled, an expression that transformed her face. “I promise! At least you didn’t say it had to be self-defense only. That’s what everyone else says when I ask them for lessons in powerful magic.”
Harry snorted a little as he went to get more pumpkin juice. “That’s stupid. Other people need help, too.”
“At least if they’re on your side.”
Harry rolled his eyes. No war with Voldemort had happened in this world; as far as he’d been able to tell, Voldemort had never existed. But Jonquil had survived in Slytherin, in a House where, even though she was pure-blood, people stared at her suspiciously because of her last name. And it seemed dueling was practically a spectator sport, here.
“Fine. Let me check on Princess and her foal, and then I’ll come into the garden with you.”
*
“I yield. I yield.”
Harry had to remind himself to leash his magic and step back from Jonquil, who was lying, exhausted, on the ground. He had gone too far, as usual. Used too much power, and that meant he’d flung his cousin around the garden instead of simply cursing her to stumble or something. Whenever he fought, he had to remind himself that it wasn’t for his life.
But Jonquil looked at him with a fierce smile as he helped her up. “Thanks, Cousin Harry! That was the real magic.”
“It was, indeed,” said an unamused voice from behind them. “I wonder what you’re thinking, teaching that to my cousin?”
“There you are, Calliope,” Harry said, without turning around. He rolled his eyes at Jonquil, who snickered. “I missed your melodious voice.”
“Very funny. I want to remind you that you’re an intruder in this place and our family, and that—”
“You’ll never forgive me for surviving when your own son Harry didn’t, even though he wouldn’t have been a Harry Potter,” Harry recited. Jonquil clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes going wide. Harry frankly didn’t care. “Yes, yes, I know. And that’s the reason that I’m living with Dorea and Charlus, and I don’t see what you have to say about it.”
Harry turned around. Calliope Bagshot stood behind him, her arms folded as if she were cold, huddled inside her grey cloak as always. She was the daughter of Fleamont and Euphemia Potter, who would have been Harry’s grandparents, one of the two children they’d had in this world instead of his father James. Calliope had married one of Bathilda Bagshot’s grandchildren and had a single child, a son named Harry who’d died when he was three months old. She couldn’t forgive Harry for having his name, or for telling her that she hadn’t existed in his first world and that James had.
She can’t forgive me for living where he died.
Harry understood her pain, which was one reason he didn’t live in Fleamont and Euphemia’s house where she was a frequent visitor, even though they’d invited him. He respected it. But she would find and harass him even when he was trying to work or teach magic to Jonquil, and Harry had had about enough of it.
“You don’t need to be spiteful.” Calliope’s voice trembled.
Harry sighed. “No, I don’t have to.”
“Neither do you,” Jonquil added. “And I’m eighteen, Calliope. I’ll learn any spell I bloody well want to.”
Calliope turned and walked away without answering. Harry shook his head. He had offered to change his name when he came to Godric’s Hollow, because at least that way he wouldn’t remind her of her dead son. But apparently the fact that he’d once had it would still have been a problem.
Calliope had refused to go to a Mind-Healer for years. Harry pitied her, but there was nothing to be done for her, really.
Not unless he was willing to leave altogether. And he didn’t want to give up his newfound family any more than (most of) the Potters wanted to give him up.
“Don’t mind her, Cousin Harry.” Jonquil was brushing dirt out of her hair. “She’s always like that. She’s angry that Cousin Zachary has three children and she doesn’t have any.”
Zachary was Calliope’s brother. He’d made Harry welcome in his home and Harry had to admit he infinitely preferred him to Calliope, but he frowned at Jonquil anyway. “It’s not nice to make fun of her like that.”
“You don’t know her yet. You might as well make fun of her because she’s never going to change.” Jonquil started running towards her parents’ house. “I’m going to have lunch, and then Mum and Dad—”
She stopped so abruptly that Harry looked at her in concern, afraid she’d fallen over from magical exhaustion. But she was standing by the gate that separated Charlus and Dorea’s garden from the road, staring down it. “Who is that?”
Harry followed her gaze. There was a wizard with a swirling black cloak on his shoulders walking down the path. He was too far away for Harry to see his face, but he was immediately sure that he was a stranger. For one thing, the cloak was edged with silver. No one who had clothing that rich lived in Godric’s Hollow or came there on a regular basis.
For another, the man moved the way Harry did, graceful and confident, as if he’d been trained in war. Harry found his hand falling to his wand without his permission.
“He’s so handsome.”
“And dangerous.”
Jonquil glanced at him, her eyes clearing. “Why do you say that?”
“You remember how I told you that you should always walk like someone’s about to attack you? How do you think he walks?”
Jonquil watched him, leaning on the fence and staring at him unabashed. Harry wanted to shake his head. Stubborn and Slytherin his cousin might be, but she was still pretty naïve in some ways. “Like he could turn and launch a spell in any direction at any minute,” she finally said.
Harry nodded. “There’s no reason to think he’s a bad person. I mean, I walk that way and I’m not a bad person—”
“So you say.”
“Hush, you. Anyway, he could be a battle-mage, or maybe an Auror. It just might be better to keep your distance in case he came to Godric’s Hollow hunting someone.”
Jonquil set her jaw, and Harry withheld his groan. His other small cousins were either all away at Hogwarts or young enough that they were toddlers and spent all day every day under the supervision of some adult. Jonquil was the only one who was old enough to get into trouble with this stranger.
I’ll have to watch her.
The man had apparently spotted them, so he altered his direction to come towards them. Harry watched him idly. The more he came near, the more Harry decided that he was a dangerous man rather than an Auror. Or, well, maybe Auror trainee. He was just too young to be full-fledged, even if he had entered training right after taking his NEWTS the way Harry (briefly) had.
Then the man glanced up to smile at Jonquil, and Harry found himself choking. The man turned to him.
There could be no mistaking those dark eyes and impatient jaw and gently-swept-back dark hair.
This was Tom Riddle, a year or two older than his diary self.
Harry set his hand on his wand. He didn’t know what was going on, but if he had to sell his life to defend himself and his cousin, that’s what would happen.
Just try something, Riddle. Just try it.
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Jonquils and Lightning