Title: Shadows Darken to Night
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Established Harry/Theodore Nott, others mentioned
Content Notes: AU, present tense, angst
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: Harry meets another shadow mage for the first time. He supposes he should have known that even with another one for company, he turns out to be bloody unique.
Author's Notes: One of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" fics for this year, for iria4885's request about Harry from the Shadow Magic universe meeting another shadow mage. You definitely need to read Shadow Magic first for context.

Shadows Darken to Night

Harry has been watching the strange shadow for an hour.

It turned up for the first time last night, lying in the corner of the bathroom when Harry was getting a drink of water after an intense lovemaking session with Theodore. Harry knew immediately that he didn't control it, but he was content to leave it be. He also knew that it couldn't harm him or his vassals.

But it remained, which seems an odd choice for someone who sent it to spy on him. After all, it couldn't have told the wizard using it much. Harry got a drink of water, he pissed, he made love to Theodore, he argued with two people who wanted to be his vassals but didn't have the kind of loyalty required.

If Harry had felt any of that was important information, he would have expelled the shadow from the house already. Right now, he wants to know who commands it, and he wants to send it back to them with a message.

"My lord?"

Theodore says that even now, long after they've joined their loyalties, much more often than Harry would like. But he's concluded it's useless to try and force him out of saying it. Harry nods and turns towards the bathroom doorway. "Yes, Theodore?"

"You've been in here for an hour. Is…something wrong, my lord?"

Harry smiles. Theodore can be delicate about many things, but asking about illness makes him almost fastidious. "Everything is fine," he says, and nods to the corner where the shadow lies, although he's not sure Theodore will see it as separate from the ones that Harry generates and controls. "Someone sent a shadow to spy on us. I'm trying to figure out what it could tell them."

There's silence from behind him. Harry turns so that he's between the shadow and Theodore, because that kind of silence isn't necessarily good. He is interested in Theodore's reaction, though.

"If some other mage pierced your defenses so easily, my lord…"

"You think you might be in danger? I would not have let the shadow remain if I thought it was harmful, Theodore."

"I thought you might be harmed, my lord."

Harry reaches a hand back towards Theodore, and luckily, his lover understands what it means. He crosses the threshold into the bathroom and clasps it strongly. Harry leans back until he can feel the heat of his first vassal's body and murmurs, "No. It lacks the power to hurt me. I repeat, I would not have let it linger if I thought it was harmful."

"Yes, my lord." Theodore is wearing his polite mask again. "So what do you intend to do with it?"

"Send a message."

Harry stretches out his power. In the years since his defeat of Voldemort, he has learned things about his shadow magic that he would be hard put to explain to another person. He lets his awareness expand and flow down the walls, and two larger shadows reach out to engulf the little one.

He has an impression of a startled, flickering mind, like a candle in a distant window. He might be able to draw it through the shadow and dispose of it, and he would do that if he sensed hostility to Theodore or his other vassals. But the surprise seems genuine, and Harry is in the frame of mind where he might like to meet another shadow mage.

He tosses a sensation of uncoiling rope through the shadow, a darker grey path that will lead back to him when the other wizard or witch wants to follow it. The candle flickers again, and then the shadow vanishes and the connection between them with it.

Except for the taut, invisible path the rope creates, lingering there, waiting to be acknowledged.

"Everything is well now, my lord?"

Harry nods and turns around with a smile for Theodore. "It is. I'd like to go back to bed and show you what I spent that boring meeting with Helton dreaming about."

Theodore's eyes are immediately wide, and his grip on Harry's hand tight. "I'd like that," he breathes.

Harry waits in the middle of a moonless meadow, his shadows gathered around him. It's true that right now it's dark enough to provide very little light for the shadows to exist, but Harry has learned to bring them with him from other places. And if this does turn out to be a trap—if the shadow mage who sent a pulse back along the rope asking to meet with him wasn't sincere—then he can use them to kill, or use their connections to other shadows to leap back to his home.

Theodore was uneasy about Harry coming by himself, but Harry insisted. He's fascinated by the chance to meet another shadow mage, who might not want to show up if there are other people here. And it's not as though he's taking foolish risks. He just doesn't see the point in acting afraid when he's not.

He realizes the moment the shadows stir to admit someone at the other side of the field. It feels odd, as though he's a spider with an extended web and someone is plucking and pulling on it. Harry tilts his head and lets his own power flutter in welcome.

A tall figure in dark robes steps out from the shadows and casts a Lumos Charm off the end of a wand. Harry appreciates the way that new light spreads across the field and provides more chances to hide or strike if he has to.

"You are a child?"

Harry faces the woman—he knows that now from her voice—with a little amusement. "No, I'm nineteen now," he says. "Will you take the hood off so I can see your face? I'd like to know who I'm dealing with."

There's a long enough silence that Harry thinks this might be a trap after all, and he starts gathering his magic around him for the leap away. But apparently the woman was only considering, because she reaches up and pulls her hood back to reveal waves of dark hair and grey eyes that look almost like Sirius Black's.

Idly, Harry remembers that Sirius sent him a present yesterday and didn't send an annoying note with it. His probation as godfather is probably going better than Harry expected. He'll have to invite Sirius to visit soon, and as long as he doesn't try to pull stupid pranks in person, things might go fine.

"What's your name?" he asks as he pays attention to the woman in front of him. Her face is lineless and ageless in a way that might be illusion crafted from shadow—finer than Harry could do it—or might be real.

"Cassandra Black."

"I thought you had the look of a Black," Harry says with a little triumph. "I just didn't know you were one for sure."

"You aren't going to ask why you haven't heard of me?"

"Well, I thought I would let you explain that. But you could talk about it if you want." Harry settles himself comfortably on the grass and stares at Cassandra expectantly.

Cassandra seems thrown, but settles down, too, with a cushion of shadow between her and the grass. "I was blasted off my family tapestry at the time for being a shadow mage and not wanting to marry a pure-blood. I'd had too many shadows visit too many old houses and knew exactly what 'proud pure-bloods' got up to when they thought they were alone. My parents disowned me."

"I know that Sirius's parents disowned him, too, and other people," Harry says, studying the woman. She has a strange, spooked look to her eyes, as if she expects bad news any second. Harry wonders why that is. Wouldn't you be less worried with shadow magic, since it keeps a watch on your enemies for you? That's the way it works for Harry. "But he ended up inheriting everything, you know, since he was the only one left."

Cassandra nods. "I heard about that."

"Even the ones who were blasted off the tapestry are still there, just as scorch marks. But I don't think I've heard of you."

Cassandra swallows. Then she says, "How much do you know about shadow magic?'

"Enough." Harry won't let this woman position herself above him just because she's older, and he's not about to admit his ignorance. He saw where that kind of thing led when he was living with the Dursleys.

"You must not know that it makes you immortal." Cassandra slumps forwards with her elbows on her knees.

"Immortal?" Harry shakes his head. "No. So you were some ancient Black, and that's why you're not on the modern tapestry?"

Cassandra chokes. "How can you can take it so calmly?"

"I haven't thought much about death," Harry admits. Part of that is because he just knew he wanted to survive. Part of that is that he has shadow magic because he is Voldemort's Horcrux, and he had the possibility in the back of his mind that he might be immortal because of that, anyway.

"Aren't you worried knowing that you're going to outlive everyone you love?"

"I don't think so. I only love one person, and I would find a way to make sure that he's as immortal as I am. I'll protect my vassals as long as they want, but I don't think most of them would ask me for immortality."

"Vassals? You've taken them, like a Dark Lord?"

"Shadow Lord," Harry corrects her. It's the only title that he'll accept, and even then, it's mostly a joke from his vassals. Harry prefers it when they call him by name. "I don't want to rule the world. I'm not a Dark Lord."

"But you're still—you're acting as though you could live a normal life, or even a powerful one, when you have shadow magic!" Cassandra acts as though she's right to cringe away from him. It's an annoying reaction.

"A normal life for me would be one without vassals. But they sort of forced their way in," Harry mutters. Honestly, he doesn't know what to do with his vassals sometimes. He gets the odd feeling that they rule him more than the other way around, despite how careful everyone always is about calling him "lord."

"You have to keep yourself separate from other people when you have shadow magic!"

"Why, though?"

Cassandra leans nearer and whispers as though she's confessing a dreadful secret. "Because your shadows can go anywhere and look at anything! How can you look someone in the face, knowing what you know about them?"

"I keep a certain level of observation on my vassals at all times, enough to know if they're injured or in trouble," Harry says slowly. He feels more and more like he's missing something. Is it because Cassandra is a natural shadow mage, or what seems to be one, and he got his powers because of a Horcrux? "I don't look into their bedrooms or their diaries. Why would I? I would know pretty soon if someone was trying to betray me."

"But your shadows go everywhere and watch everything—"

"No, they don't. They do what I tell them. Do you have some lack of control over your shadows?"

Cassandra shudders and covers her eyes with her hands. Shadows surge up and cover the edges of her hands like grey gloves. Harry watches with raised eyebrows. Yes, it's starting to look more and more as if being a "natural" shadow mage isn't worth it.

"I can't keep the secrets out of my mind," Cassandra breathes. "I can even look inside people's skulls. I can hear their thoughts. I know when they hate someone, when they want to commit murder while they're smiling on the outside, when they're indulging in perverted fantasies about someone sitting across from them. I've seen—you don't know how many murders and rapes I've seen."

"Well, no, because you haven't told me."

Cassandra jerks and looks up at him with her eyes wide. "And then I meet you, and I find that I can't look inside your head," she whispers. "Is it because your own powers protect you?"

Harry shrugs. "I don't know. I know the shadows have done what I want since I was young. I could use them to create illusions or travel or spy out secrets, and none of them ever tried to turn on me. I wonder why you're different?"

Cassandra gives a sob. "I don't know! And I know that I can't die, and the shadows repair ravages of aging on my body. I sought you out, once I knew about you, because I thought perhaps you knew something I didn't and you could teach me how to die."

"Take control of the shadows. That's the only thing I can tell you."

Cassandra gives him a miserable look and stands up. "I thought meeting another shadow mage would give me an idea of what to do, but you're as obdurate as all the others."

"All the others? Are there shadow mages besides us, then?"

"No. I mean other people I've told about my gift." Cassandra's eyes are wide and tragic. "They all said that it sounded wonderful to them to live forever. They didn't pay attention when I told them how awful it really was. I thought you would at least understand since you're at risk of the same problem, but you don't."

Harry rolls his eyes and stands up. "I think you're being soppy about it. Your shadows are yours. If they're so far out of control, then something has gone wrong, with your will or your soul or your magical core. I would look for the source of the problem there rather than sobbing to the darkness and expecting answers."

Cassandra stares at him with wide, wild eyes, and then leaps into the night.

Harry shakes his head as he departs. He was right when he told Theodore that he was in no danger from the other shadow mage, but he does feel irritated that she wasted his time so badly.

"What did you mean, I could have a problem with my soul?"

Harry groans as he wakes up. He's in his bedroom with Theodore, and his vassals know better than to disturb him unless there's an emergency—something he would feel anyway before they could get to the door through his link to their marks. But he thinks this is probably someone who's not a vassal.

And when he opens his eyes, he's right. Cassandra is standing, half-lapped in shadow and half with a visible face, in the corner, staring at him.

"I mean that you're not firm enough," Harry says. He yawns pointedly, so that Theodore, stirring against his back and reaching for his wand, will understand that this is boring, not dangerous. "Your magic belongs to you. Shadows do what you tell them—and that's at least true some of the time for you, or you couldn't have come to meet me or come in like this or contacted me at all or spied on people you wanted to spy on."

"There were so few I wanted to spy on." Cassandra lowers her head, and Harry finds it hard to tell the differences between the edges of her black hair and the shadows. That only increases his conviction that she could control this if she wanted to. "How do you decide whose secrets you wanted to see? Why would you want to see any at all?'

"To protect me and mine." Harry leans back so that his shoulder touches Theodore's. It's for both their benefits, but he also hopes Cassandra will take a message from the gesture and clear out of his room soon. "The magic is a gift."'

"The magic is a curse."

"If you see it that way, then it's no wonder you can't control it."

"What?" Cassandra's eyes are very wide, and she has one hand clasped in front of her heart, which Harry thinks is a bit unnecessarily dramatic. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," Harry says, and lets his patience leak through his voice a little, "that if you think something is a curse and go out of your way to avoid learning about it, then it's no wonder that you can't control it. Your magic will do what it thinks it should to benefit you. I would place a large sum of money on the wager that those secrets that your shadows seek out do benefit you in some way, if only because they might stir your curiosity. When you truly want to visit a certain place, you can do it. You aren't transported helplessly through time and space. You can control this. You just don't want to, because thinking of yourself as a victim suits your soul better."

Cassandra's eyes shimmer with tears that don't fall. Then she abruptly disappears in a rush of wind. Harry shakes his head and lies back down in bed.

"What was that all about?" Theodore asks his shoulder in a sleepy voice.

"Someone treading a path that I might have walked if not for the fact that I just don't care what other people think of me."

Harry shuts his eyes and shudders a little. He hopes he won't have any nightmares about ending up like Cassandra did tonight.

"You meant what you said."

Harry rolls his eyes at the wall of the bathroom before he glances over his shoulder to see Cassandra hovering behind him. "I virtually always mean what I say," he replies. "But what about this particular thing?"

"You meant that you could control the shadows, and they just obey you."

"Yes. There's this remarkable thing, it's called strength of will."

Cassandra ignores him, and also ignores the fact that Harry has just got out of the shower and only has a towel wrapped around him. "I've been watching you. The shadows—they do obey you."

"Yes." Harry rubs his hair dry with another towel than the one around his waist. He wouldn't care, but Theodore gets touchy about things like that.

"But it's because you have no heart."

"I can feel it beating any time I want."

"You know what I mean." Cassandra clasps her hands and acts as though she's going to pace back and forth, even though part of her is still shadowy and dangling through the wall. "You don't have any caring or compassion for people. I think that's the price you've paid to control the shadows."

"I care for my lover. I care for my vassals." Harry shrugs and sits down on the toilet, bending down to make sure his feet are dry. "And it's not as though you have lots of people who love you because you've failed to control your shadows."

Cassandra freezes and stands with her shadow-covered back to him. "What?"

"You heard me."

"But—I've always striven to have love and compassion towards others…"

"And what did it win you?" Harry casts a charm on the towel that dried his feet so it'll dry faster, and flings it at a rack. It falls on the floor. He sighs. Well, that's why they have house-elves. "Nothing. No regard from your family, just a disowning. You've never found someone you could sympathize with, even if you met other shadow mages. I've never met anyone who has my kind of power except you, but I've made a life for myself."

"A selfish life. You're a Lord."

"Like that was my idea?"

Cassandra glances over her shoulder, neck twisted at an impossible angle. Harry has to admire her level of control over the shadows and the way that her flesh blends with them. He doesn't think he could do that. Of course, he has almost everything else she will never have.

"What do you mean?"

"Other people didn't just want to be my friends and allies. They wanted a level of protection from me, and they wanted some kind of bond to me." Harry squints thoughtfully at Cassandra. Now that he thinks about it, maybe he should be thanking his vassals for their insistence. He could easily have drifted away and become someone like Cassandra, without ties to anyone except maybe Theodore, if they hadn't pressed. "Thus the vassal bond."

"It just seems so selfish. I didn't want to have that kind of power over people."

"I don't think of it as power over people, not really. I just didn't want to be bothered."

"But you're selfish anyway." Cassandra looks at him again, as if trying to see his soul beneath the skin.

"That much is true." Harry snorts when he sees her skeptical look. "I was raised by Muggle relatives who abused me. I was yearned after by people who thought they knew me because I was the Boy-Who-Lived. Trying to live a selfless life wouldn't have worked even if I wanted to. I would have given up everything, and it wouldn't have been enough. People had competing visions for me, and I couldn't please everyone."

"None of that tells me what I should do."

"That's because you have to decide to please yourself." Harry Summons clothes from where he's left them hanging behind the door, safely far from the shower, but he holds them, not wanting to remove the towel from around his waist because of Theodore's sensibilities. "You stood up for yourself at least once, when you refused to marry the man your family picked out for you. Why can't you do that again?"

"If I hurt someone…"

"Wanting to have more control over your magic won't hurt anyone. Wanting to die, if that's what you want, won't hurt anyone. Besides, the way you are, at least one person is being hurt."

"Who?" Cassandra demands, with the directness of someone who's looking for a chance to be a martyr.

Harry raises an eyebrow at her. "Yourself."

Cassandra gives a sob and disappears, leaving Harry free to finally get dressed.

"I thought about what you said. And I understand, now."

Harry feels Theodore tense behind him, but he keeps lying right where he is, with his head in Theodore's lap and his legs stretched out in front of him. It's a beautiful starlit night, and he and Theodore are out in the meadow behind Nott House, watching a fountain play. "You understand which part of it?"

Cassandra glides around in front of him on a cushion of curling shadows like a flying carpet. Harry studies it in curiosity. It's a brilliant idea, and one that he promptly wants to try.

Theodore has relaxed again. He understands that there's nothing to be afraid of if Harry is relaxed. Harry wishes that some of his other vassals had that temperament. They're sweet, of course they are, but they refuse to accept that he can defend himself.

"I realized that I could control things, if I want to," Cassandra whispers. "And—I tried. And my shadows stepped invading bedrooms around me."

Harry smiles. "I told you. They only did it in the first place because you thought of bedrooms as repositories of dirty secrets, and so they were trying to serve you in bringing you what you thought you wanted to hear."

Cassandra swallows and nods. "And I think I know the way to die if I want."

"Do tell me." Harry isn't even pretending his interest. If it turns out that he is immortal and someday he doesn't want to be, then he'd like to know how to get rid of that "blessing."

"I'll tell the shadows that I want to enter them, the way I always would when I wanted to travel somewhere, and then I simply won't come out."

"That would mean that you would wander the paths of shadow forever rather than die, though."

"I think I know how to let myself go further and further, into the place where there are no shadows because there's no light to cast them."

Harry nods slowly. That makes sense, now that he thinks about it. He has never been able to travel through areas of absolute light or darkness, unless a shadow runs through them and comes out the other side, intersecting somewhere with a different shadow being cast. He has avoided them on instinct, not because he knew they were dangerous, but to step into one on purpose will almost certainly kill a shadow mage.

"Thank you, Harry Potter." Cassandra Black sweeps him an elegant bow. "I wish I could stay to teach you some of the lessons about shadow magic you will find it hard to learn elsewhere, but I have my own destination."

"You must go where you are needed, of course," Harry says politely, and barely manages not to roll his eyes. To teach him anything useful, she would have to be a different person.

Cassandra nods, her eyes bright with something that might be called happiness by someone with less experience of it. Then she turns and vanishes.

Harry lies further back and sighs as he listens to the noise of small frogs around them. Theodore's hand moves hesitantly through his hair.

"You would—you would tell me if you wished to die, wouldn't you, my lord?"

Harry tilts his head back and lifts an arm, and Theodore lowers his head, already anticipating Harry's desire for a kiss. Harry licks his lips as he draws back. "Of course," he murmurs, "but I don't think I'll want it until decades have passed. Maybe centuries."

Theodore's eyes brighten more than Cassandra's. At the moment, Harry hopes he is immortal. He is never going to tire of looking at Theodore's eyes. "Good. I don't want to lose you, Harry."

Theodore rarely calls him by his first name, and then only when in the grip of some powerful emotion. Harry turns towards him, links his arms around his waist, and shakes his head. "Just because the only other shadow mage I've known was mad doesn't mean I am. I embrace life. She retreated from it long ago."

Theodore smiles again at his words, and he is growing hard beneath Harry's cheek. Harry does something about that.

And they are quiet in the meadow, among the shadows and beneath the stars.

The End.