His Darkest Devotion

Chapter 1: Phoenixes

Harry glanced up as someone called his name. Auror Jalena Whipwood was tapping her wand on her hip as she glared at him from the other side of the common office where the junior employees of the Department of Magical Games and Sports had their desks. Harry stood up at once and made his way across the room to her, bowing his head a little when he got close.

"Auror Whipwood. What can I do for you?"

"Time for the monthly interrogation, Potter," Whipwood said, and spun on her heel to walk down the corridor. She fit her name as far as her leanness and sharp movements went, although her honey-blonde hair that she wore long to her back didn't. She had supposedly sworn to cut it when she met someone who could defeat her in a duel. Harry stared at her back and dreamed about using a Severing Charm right now.

But in the end, he managed to subdue his impulse, and a good thing, too, because when Whipwood led him into the small room with the round table usually used for interrogations, Harry found not just Head Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt, a calm man who never made him feel intimidated, but Minister Tom Riddle. Harry's heart constricted in his throat.

The name sprawled along his wrist in magically-inked letters seemed to burn.

Harry reminded himself, as he hadn't had to do in a while, about the Muggle tattoo of a phoenix rising from broken shackles that covered the words, and which he'd had done long enough ago that most people thought that image was his soul-mark. Harry nodded politely to both men, making the bow of his head deeper to the Minister. "Head Auror Shacklebolt. Minister. Will it be under Veritaserum this time?"

"Yes, of course," Minister Riddle said, the smile on his face pleasant if you didn't look at it too closely. "Concerned, Mr. Potter?"

"I always am, sir," Harry said, and made his voice anxious as he sat down across from them and took out his wand to put it on the table. "I really want to succeed in this job."

Minister Riddle snorted, his gaze drifting away from Harry, and Harry relaxed a little. He had permitted himself to excel at Quidditch in Hogwarts, but nothing else, because he knew Riddle thought Quidditch only a few steps above a brawl. It meant he had no reason to find Harry interesting. The position in the Department of Magical Games and Sports was a ruse for the same reason.

Harry did wish he could have taken a different job, but only so that he could have fed more useful information to his parents and godfather. Quidditch schedules and gossip about which Gobstone teams were in debt had limited currency.

Harry let himself study Riddle from sidelong glances as Shacklebolt read him the long, long list of reasons they would be involving Veritaserum in this interrogation and the rules under which it would be used—things Harry knew so well he could mouth along, but which had to be read every time again, because of Ministry rules.

No one would deny that Riddle was a handsome man, taller than most wizards, with dark hair silvered at the temples that he wore short and sharply cut at all times. His eyes, dark blue with only a hint of red, could soften or blaze, and he seemed to do the right thing at the right time, always. The phoenix of onyx and diamond that hung on a slender silver chain over his heart, the two jewels making its feathers mixed black and white, might have been an unusual touch, but everyone knew the story.

Riddle had once borne the soul-mark of the rising black-and-white phoenix on his chest. Then two students who had attacked him at Hogwarts when he was thirteen years old had burned it off. Riddle had had the jeweled phoenix he wore crafted several years afterwards, relying on Pensieve memories of the original mark, and wore it always on a chain exactly the right length to make the phoenix dangle where his mark would have been.

The two students who had burned him had disappeared on the anniversary of the attack a year later. Then the single sibling they'd each had at Hogwarts had disappeared on the next anniversary. Their parents on the third. And so on, until all of their families and friends and allies were dead.