Lightning and War

The Great Sheild

Harry was paler than Tom liked as he sat at the dining room table in the newly rediscovered Potter House. Tom had had one of Abraxas’s house-elves bring them a thick stew for dinner, not something that he would have eaten normally, but the elves were reluctant to disobey the elder Malfoys. They were just more afraid of Tom.

“Is something wrong?” Tom asked, when they had eaten for several minutes and he had asked Harry five questions and only two had been answered.

Harry sighed and looked up at Tom. “I was just thinking that this isn’t something I ever got to see in my first world. If my father or his family owned more properties than the little house my parents were living in when Voldemort attacked, I never knew it.”

Tom inclined his head. “Dumbledore stole your heritage from you in more than one world. I do not blame you for grieving.”

Harry rolled his eyes then, which made him look a lot more like himself. “Tom, you don’t know that it was related to Dumbledore. Maybe my family was more humble there and just didn’t have a lot of property.”

“No, I think it was him.”

“Listen,” Harry began, leaning forwards and launching into a spirited defense of his first world’s Dumbledore. Tom just listened and nodded. It was irritating to hear, of course it was, but it kept Harry from brooding on the implications of what he had seen here, and that was more than enough.

Perhaps ten minutes later, Harry abruptly stopped himself in the middle of a word and looked suspiciously at Tom. Tom raised an eyebrow at him and took another pointed sip of the stew. Harry hadn’t eaten enough, either.

Harry picked up his spoon, but he said, "Did you just distract me from worrying about whether there were properties like this in my first world, too?"

"Would I do that?"

"You would do so much." Luckily, there was a touch of amusement in Harry's voice, and his lips curved as he propped his chin in his hand and stared at Tom. "Dare so much. I don't know why I got lucky enough to have you."

Tom grabbed the hand that held Harry's spoon and pulled it to him, touching Harry's knuckles with his lips. "I think it's the other way around."

"Why don't we say that we're both lucky, and split the difference?" Harry turned his head with a sigh and rested it against Tom's arm for a second. "I'm tired, but I am more hopeful than I was when I left my first world."

"And in your second?"

"I was content there," Harry said stubbornly. "But you've taught me contentment isn't the same as joy."

"No," Tom said, his own joy mounting up in him like phoenix flame. "It is not."

*

"Masters Potter and Potter!"

Harry sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The blue gem on his forehead was already lighting the room around him. Tom was awake next to him, but lying flat, one hand gripping his wand, as if he thought he would need the energy later.

"Mizzy is not supposed to be being here," whispered the house-elf that Harry recognized as one of Abraxas's, wringing her ears. If there had been anyone still asleep, her "whisper" would have woken them up. "But Mizzy remembered that Master Harry Potter had been kind to her one morning when she was spilling his cereal. She is telling them that she heard Master and Mistress Malfoy speaking of battle plans."

"Who with?" Tom asked, sitting up now. Harry turned again to look at Mizzy. Shamefully, he had to do it because the tumble of Tom's dark hair across his forehead was threatening to distract Harry.