Lightning and War

joining the hunt

"Thank you for coming to listen to us."

Tom spoke in a tone that was probably intended to seem modest. Harry, knowing how far away he was from actually feeling that, had to bite his lip and look up at the ceiling.

They were standing in another courtroom on the lowest level of the Ministry, not far from the one that he and Dumbledore had battled in. Harry thought the Wizengamot would have liked the symbolism of hosting this press conference in the battleground itself, but it had been fairly thoroughly destroyed. They were lucky that, except for a few Order of the Phoenix and Wizengamot members who were of similar age to Dumbledore, everyone there had survived.

Not all the Order members had been destroyed by Dumbledore's draining, though, which was why they were here.

"And especially for listening to me, since I'm not the hero of the hour." Tom turned his head, his eyes burning with the same fire that never seemed to be far from them since Harry had resumed his full power. "That is my husband, Harry Potter."

Harry concealed his sigh as he stepped up to the podium that had been established where the defendants' chair would ordinarily be. At least he knew that Tom would never fear his magic the way so many people had in his first world.

And while he had loathed possessiveness other people there had displayed for him, he had to admit he didn't mind the slow way Tom caressed his back at all.

Harry cleared his throat and focused his attention on their audience before he started enjoying the caress a little too much. "I honestly don't have a speech prepared." He could feel Tom's eyes rolling without even looking at him. Then again, if Tom had wanted Harry to have a speech, he shouldn't have been so distracting last night. "So I thought I would see what questions you wanted to ask me, and—"

Half a dozen people started shouting at once. Harry willed a wave of silence to sweep the room, and it did. He nodded. "Madam Marchbanks, you had something to say?"

The new leader of the Wizengamot clear3ed her throat and stood a little taller. "How did you defeat Albus? What happened to him?"

"He was pulling all the magic he could from the Order members and anyone else around him," Harry said, with a slight shrug. He felt that Tom's hand had gone still, but he ignored that. He'd never had a desire to tell anyone else here the truth, unless they were Tom's Knights and already sworn to secrecy. "I forced him to release that magic back to everyone."

"Yes, we know that," said someone else, a slightly stuffy silver-haired man Harry didn't recognize. "But what happened to him? There was no sign of even a body."

"When I forced him to release the magic, his body couldn't take the strain," Harry said simply. "It disintegrated."

That made the crowd gasp and Tom's fingers tighten against him, but Harry still thought it was the best response. They did need to account for the lack of a body somehow, and this was easier than trying to explain what Harry had actually done.

Harry wasn't even sure he could explain it in a way that didn't sound threatening. "I wove him into the pattern of pure magic and made him dissolve" would still strike them as terrible, and no one who hadn't been there, in the woven pattern, would understand if they tried to talk about it.

"Why was he so intent on opposing you?" Madam Marchbanks asked then. "He seemed to have some kind of grudge against Mr. Gaunt—"

"Potter," Tom and Harry corrected at the same time, and then Tom snorted as he glanced sideways at Harry. Harry just shrugged back.

"Mr. Potter, then." Madam Marchbanks might have been smiling, but it was hard to tell. "But what did he have against you?"

"I think I became terrible in his eyes the moment I joined Tom's side." Harry shook his head. "Dumbledore wanted to take over the world, and he didn't want challengers to that." He paused, because what came next would be difficult, but it had to be said. "Or challengers to his view of the Dark Arts, either."