Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On a night in mid-October, 1944, Tom Riddle wakes to the sensation of something folding inward where nothing has stirred in over a year. It is an elusive but sour shift, buried deep, as if a part of him had buckled quietly under pressure he hadn’t known was there. 

Sitting up, he presses a hand to his chest, half-expecting to find a foreign body trying to break free from the cage of his ribs. But there is only skin, sweat, and the dull gallop of his own pulse. When he tries to remember what he’d been dreaming, he fails. 

He hadn’t dreamt in years. He shouldn’t be dreaming at all.

So Tom reaches for his nightstand and unscrews the cap of a familiar phial, swallowing his prescription dose in silence. 

The nausea does not subside.

Druella Rosier is the first to tell Tom of the new transfer in his year. 

It is not that he makes it a habit to speak to the younger girl. Just that it is early, and they are usually the first two people at breakfast. On any normal day, she’d spot the book propped open on his lap and understand that, for all his known proclivity for reading, it is also his well-practiced method of warding off conversation.

But today, it seems the excitement of yet another refugee from the continent is enough to dim her restraint. She plops down right in front of him and embarks on a long-winded report with no prompting — and though her knowledge is its own monster, cobbled together by second-hand reports she no doubt spent all of last night gathering, Tom finds himself intrigued by the circumstances of this newcomer’s sordid appearance. 

“Ogg found the boy in the forest. Just lying there in the middle of a clearing, apparently, covered in dirt and blood. He notified Dippet right away, of course. Alphard had been doing his prefect rounds near the hospital wing when they brought him in, that’s how I know, but according to him, the boy looked as well as dead. Even Dumbledore seemed worried. Mentioned something about Grindelwald advancing on British soil. No way someone in his state could long distance apparate, after all. I mean–” She stops, takes a deep breath, then continues talking. Tom’s eye twitches. “Of course he didn’t. Die, I mean. Madam Belby healed him before he could. Though when he woke up, he didn’t remember a thing about how he ended up here. Rowle has an aunt at St. Mungos, you see, and she said that the Professors contacted their best mind healer for some insight into the matter. Even that line came back empty. It’s all very mysterious. 

“But if you ask me,” She smirks, folding her arms over the table and leaning in like she’s about to divulge some secret. “I think Rowle loves to exaggerate her aunt’s position. She probably doesn’t know a bloody thing, that girl.”

Tom stares blankly back at her. If, in some moment of catastrophic misjudgement, he anticipated any practical insight, he would now be thoroughly disabused. But Druella’s usual feat of wasting both oxygen and his time is a kind of incompetence he has learned to expect from the dimwits surrounding him.

Before she has the chance to think of some other gormless thing to say, they are interrupted by Edwin Rosier, who tugs on his sister’s ear to shut her up. Druella turns a beetroot shade of red, and Tom tunes out her subsequent screeching to come to his own conclusions on the matter of the boy in the forest. 

Tom Riddle has a particular method to his curiosities.

When something piques his interest, he will start by scouring the library. Typically, what he unearths is enough to satisfy him, at which point he will swiftly discard the subject in favour of the next. These are the fleeting fascinations that have, over the years, formed the body of his knowledge: mild, short-lived affairs, never quite worthy of long-term commitment — on matters such as lethifolds, wandlore, wizard genealogy, magical cores, or even mealtime etiquette .  

It is only when the library proves insufficient, when he exhausts all his immediate avenues of knowledge pursuing something that remains impenetrable, does the predator in him stir. A quiet, persistent instinct that doesn’t much care for limits, scenting the blood of something intentionally being kept out of his reach. These are the rare obsessions that take hold. And nothing — complexity, taboo, effort — none of it matters in the dawn of his hunger. He is not likely to think about much else until he is sated. 

Tom supposes people have the unique disposition to become these objects of obsession, if only because their lives aren’t as conveniently catalogued as most else. And perhaps that is the foundation for repulsive affairs like friendship or, Merlin forbid, love . But to Tom, people have always remained predictable. Transparent. They parade their histories like nothing is sacred and wear their thoughts so plainly it’s insulting to see. He rarely ever has to try with them. He sees everyone for what they are almost immediately — and once he does, there’s nothing left to want.

He reflects on this as his Knights drone around him in conversation. There’s only one topic that occupies them, of course; as has been the case with all of Hogwarts over the past three days. Featureless little lives made briefly interesting by the thrill of sordid gossip. All that collective effort, Tom thinks, you’d think they’d total enough brain power to get the story straight. 

“Well the Professors wouldn't be so secretive about it if he were just another refugee. Remember last year? We had four transfers who were brought into the fold almost immediately, the grounds for their arrival explained, but we have yet to see or hear from this boy.” Corvus Lestrange speculates, face taut with an anxious frown. He looks around when he says this, as though Grindelwald himself might pop out from his pot of face cream to hex him.

Thaddeus Nott, well accustomed to Lestrange’s irrational bouts of anxiety, sighs. “So, what? Corvus, they wouldn’t have brought him into the castle if he were a threat. He’s been holed up in the hospital wing, for Merlin’s sake. You heard Alphard, the boy was in a state when they found him. That takes more than just a night to recover from.” 

“Alphard also said that Dumbledore was extra worried. Orion, tell him!” 

“Dumbledore seemed extra worried.” Black says plainly as he undoes his tie, doubtlessly sick of recounting his cousin’s testimony to anyone who asks — most of all Lestrange, who has taken it upon himself to fret over the situation like he could prevent anything from actually happening, pillock that he is. 

“Well, there you go!” 

Nott, quickly losing patience, grinds his teeth together in that tell-tale way of his. “Because the kid was half-dead.” He has to emphasise. Again. “And stop yelling. You’ll wake Avery.”

Lestrange opens his mouth to say something, then snaps it shut, seeming to finally stop and consider this. His face screws up like he’s thinking very hard for a moment. 

Until Malfoy emerges from the bathroom. 

“I think Corvus makes a rather astute point.” He says, with all the blasé air of someone who’s just undone ten minutes worth of progress and couldn’t care less. He’s wearing his monogrammed silk robe, looking rather like a peacock in cerulean.

“You do?” Lestrange snivels, and the melodramatics start again. He sounds more put out by the possibility of being right than he did while arguing for his case. Tom decides that he cannot handle any more of this nonsense, or else each of his roommates will die hanging by their own entrails. 

“Enough.”  

The boys halt their arguing immediately, looking rueful as they return to their bed-time routines in silence. Tom delights in the trill of power the sight sends through his chest. It is almost enough to balm any wound their bickering inflicted on his temper, and would certainly be a decent end to his day. 

Would, because Tom doesn’t go to sleep. Not for a while. 

In bed, once the curtains are drawn and spelled shut around him, his thoughts return to the nameless, faceless boy. It is, he admits with no small degree of irritation, a detestable thing, to find himself just as drawn to the mystery as the rest of the student body. He has several better things to do with his time; productive things, things that would see to the accomplishment of his goals, and to the future he imagines for himself.  

But Tom has a particular method to his curiosities. And nowhere, never, does it entail letting them go.  

Veritaserum requires one Adder’s Fork sliced perfectly in half, lengthwise. Tom knows that this is a rather precise endeavour, and that he should focus on stabilizing the small muscle upon his workstation to ensure perfection. But he has brewed every N.E.W.T. standard potion at least four times on his own before. By now, he is sure it is something he can do in his sleep.

Currently: he might not be asleep, but his attention is otherwise occupied.

“Oh, and have you heard?” The girl behind him whispers to her partner, though whisper is too gracious of a word. Gryffindors, so unsubtle. “That kid? Yeah, the one they found in the forest. They sorted him in Dippet’s office last night. So he’s joining us. Officially now, I suppose.” 

“Us? As in–” Her friend starts. 

“No, no. The hat dumped him in Slytherin.” 

Avery stills beside him. Tom drops the halved Adder’s Fork into the cauldron, bringing the mixture to a boil with a flick of his wand. It turns a glassy shade of periwinkle, as it should at this stage. Unlike his potions partner, who has been entirely useless this lesson, Tom excels at multitasking: able to eavesdrop and work with equal rigor. 

The friend scoffs. “As if we needed the confirmation that letting him in is a bad idea. Yvonne went in for a headache the other day and managed to sneak a look at him. She told me– I mean, did you hear about what’s on his n–”

“Shhh!”

This achieves the opposite of its intended effect. Everyone turns to stare at the two girls — everyone except for Tom, who rolls his eyes instead. He always sits at the very front of the classroom, and so the only person he risks seeing this indiscretion is Slughorn, who has been busy composing a letter to one of his various acolytes for the better part of an hour. 

Avery shuffles a little in place, turning back to their workstation. “It says we have to wait three and a half minutes now.” He points to the specified line in his textbook, looking at Tom with a witless expression. 

Tom blinks back, a little incredulously. 

In the end, he decides not to dignify him with a response.

“And I want twelve inches on the sedative properties of Valerian root in by Monday!” 

As his classmates shuffle out in a disordered line, Tom corks the small vial of Veritaserum for maturation. Theirs is one of the few groups to produce a perfect result — completely colourless, odourless, and presumably tasteless — earning Slytherin house twenty points. 

Avery hovers, clutching his book bag over his chest. Tom gives him a single, pointed look. That’s enough. He leaves without a word, and the room settles into quiet, leaving only Slughorn and Tom behind.

“Tom m’boy! Wonderful work today, wonderful work! Well I was just talking to Galatea the other day about what a difficult position you put me in as your Head of House. She warned me not to be so generous with the number of points I award this year, else she’d take it up with Dippet should Slytherin win the House Cup again — and I told her! I told her, ‘Galatea, you discredit me. Had Tom Riddle been in any house but my own, I daresay you'd be lodging your complaint with their Head instead. The boy’s brilliance leaves me little choice.’ Course she had to concede to that!” Professor Slughorn says this with the self-satisfied spirit he says most things with, hands splayed over his belly and cheeks ruddy with humour. 

Tom affects a humble smile. “You flatter me, sir.” 

“Not at all, m’boy. Not at all!” Slughorn chuckles. He is not an unobservant man, however, and notices the expectant way Tom folds his hands behind his back. “Is something on your mind, Tom?” 

Just the one thing, and it’s driving him mad.

“I apologize for being so forward, sir. It’s just… well, I imagine you’ve heard the rumours floating about the castle. At least in my year, no one’s made much of an effort to suppress them.” Tom pauses, watching the faint furrow in Slughorn’s brow to gauge just how far he can press. “I bring it to you only because it concerns me. I hate to see the speculation distract my classmates from their work. And beyond that… it hardly creates the right environment to welcome a new student into, don’t you think? Particularly one who’s been through quite a bit already.”

“Ah. You understand, Tom, that I cannot disclose anything about the boy, nor the circumstances in which he was found. But the board of governors, and indeed, even Albus himself, agreed that it would be best to admit him. Keep him close, as they say.”

Interesting. He sets this information aside for later. It’s more than he’d hoped for. More than Slughorn should have offered. 

“Of course not, Professor. Nor would I dream of asking; I’ve no appetite for gossip, truly. But I did happen to hear he was placed in Slytherin, and, you see, as Head Boy, I consider it my responsibility to look after all students, but especially those of our house. I only meant to offer my help in easing his transition, perhaps as his first point of contact with the student body.”

Slughorn’s expression softens, moustache twitching with approval. “Well, I must say, that’s most commendable of you, my boy. You’ve always shown such maturity, and it does one good to see that sort of initiative in a young man.” Tom straightens his back, biting his cheek in a practiced show of diffidence. It is nauseating, what he has to resort to feed his professor’s ego. “Yes, yes, I daresay a bit of guidance might do the boy some good. Within reason, of course.” He gives a small, knowing chuckle. “Albus meant to ask the Head Girl to mentor him, but in light of his sorting into Slytherin, I must say that you’re a better fit than Miss Abbott. I trust your judgement. Just keep an eye on him, nothing too formal. We mustn’t overwhelm the poor lad, yes?”

Of course. Who else but Dumbledore would see fit to undermine Tom? It is just like the old fool — to surreptitiously disregard his position as Head Boy in favour for some flailing little Gryffindor, as though customs are empty rituals and merit counts for nothing. For all of Slughorn’s faults, at least he is discerning of where real promise lies.

Tom has to bite his cheek for real this time. Dumbledore’s snub was to be expected. At least he was not late to act. 

“Just so, Professor.” 

Loretta Abbott walks with all the grace of an obstinate bull. Even before he turns the corner to the hallway of the Hospital Wing, Tom can make out the exact rhythm and speed of her gait. He matches it, savouring the click his brogues make upon the stone floor, and catches up to the girl in no time. 

“Abbott.” He says, rather amicably. 

She falters in her step, looking warily at him from the corner of her eye. They do not talk often outside of meetings. Tom imagines the red tint to her cheeks is an effect of feeling flattered, and hopes she does not get the wrong idea about his affections.  

“Riddle.”

“I see you’re headed to the infirmary. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s been a slight change in plans. It seems I’ve been selected to liaise with our newest student. I was only just informed by Dippet himself.” 

Dippet, of course, is none the wiser of this development. But Tom doubts that Dumbledore consulted him before selecting Abbott for the job, otherwise the headmaster would have suggested Tom instead, and they wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. 

Thus the lie works, and effectively stops Abbott in her tracks. “Oh. But Dumbledore only just asked me to… I mean, I just had Transfiguration–” 

“Yes, well. One can’t expect too much from a place where the modus operandi is largely improvisational.” Because both the Head Boy and Girl know that Hogwarts, with all its academic primacies, is rubbish at operating like the bureaucratic institution it should be. 

“Right.” She huffs. “Okay.”

“Wonderful.” He flashes his winning smile, just shy of showing too much teeth. Abbott grimaces in return and shuffles away, less self-assured than she had been only moments ago. Tom is quite sure he’s done the school a kindness, freeing its corridors from the racket of her graceless clomping. 

He is truly remarkable.

Madam Belby has harboured a particular fondness for Tom ever since she nursed him back from ‘the brink of death’ by malnutrition in his first year. Naturally, Tom had not really been anywhere close to dying. In fact, he’d considered himself in decent health at the time, especially by the standards of East End orphans. By eleven, he’d grown adept at swiping food off other children’s plates, or lifting enough coins from strangers' pockets to keep himself fed, and so he’d taken it as something of a personal affront when she’d gasped over the ‘state of him.’ 

Prominent ribs didn’t mean he couldn’t look after himself. On the contrary, he thought they rather proved he could.

Still, she is liberal with her affection on the rare occasion he visits. He begrudges her this — her wizened hand patting his cheek or brushing back the curl he intentionally leaves swooped over his forehead for a debonair flair — because it would be a wasted effort to make her stop. 

People, he finds, are stubborn with their sympathies. Better, then, to turn it to his advantage than fail at the hopeless task of promoting his level of impassivity.

“You’re looking well, dear.” 

“All thanks to you. The dreamless sleep has helped, truly.” He replies. Though his voice remains cordial, his eyes wander away from her smiling face and around the Hospital Wing. Searching. It would be a terrible breach of etiquette in more refined company, but after decades tending to the ailments of pubescent schoolchildren, Madam Belby is likely numb to a number of improprieties. “It’s lovely to see you, Madam, but I’m afraid this isn’t a social call. I’ve been asked to introduce myself to our newest student, as I’ll be assisting with his adjustment. I understand he’s currently under your care?”

The Matron’s face drops at the mention of this, lips pursing in that manner Tom is uncomfortably familiar with. She looks back over her shoulder, at the very corner of the infirmary, where Tom finally notices an occupied bed. 

The white curtains are drawn around it, cutting off any access he has to the resident inside. He discovers that he quite likes the air of mystery this affords, like he is being presented with a shiny, newly wrapped present. 

His hands flex instinctively. Greedily. 

“Yes, alright. Follow me.” She sighs. He knows that, if left to her own judgment, she’d keep the boy under observation for at least another week. “He should be awake. Dippet mentioned he might be discharged today. Wait just a moment.” 

Madam Belby slips through the gap in the curtains and secures them shut behind her. Tom can only stand there, trying to listen in. And when that fails — because she had the prudence to erect a silencing bubble around them — he amuses himself by imagining what exactly to expect from the boy of the forest; first by recounting all that he’s heard about him. 

Even Dumbledore appeared worried. 

The Professors wouldn't be so secretive about it if he were just another refugee. 

As if we needed the confirmation that letting him in is a bad idea. 

Albus himself agreed. Keep him close, as they say. 

I daresay a bit of guidance might do the boy some good.

Slowly, the mental image starts to take form, like watery strokes of paint laid over each other, saturating into something with solid edges.

Someone big. Brutish. Of the thuggish sort he imagines Durmstrang churning out by the dozen. Drawn to the Dark Arts so fiercely it’s left its mark on his body, perhaps. Or marked by Grindelwald himself, in a lasting way. In some harrowing way, surely — to have come this far, to have endured so much just to escape him. 

Vulnerable for it, but nonetheless– Tall, callous, bestial. War-worn. Volatile. 

Dangerous. 

Yes. Dangerous. Enough to be useful one day. 

(Or enough to pose a threat.)

“Tom, this is Harry Evans.” Madam Belby says suddenly, drawing back the curtain to reveal a bed of messy sheets. “Harry, this is our Head Boy, Tom Riddle.”

As it turns out, Harry Evans is none of those things.

Tom does not know what to make of the boy in front of him.

For one, his posture is appalling, and makes him seem even smaller than he is. Which isn’t saying much. He really is thin, ill-fed in a way that might be jarring to a lot of people, but not to Tom. The planes of his face have been hollowed out to cast dark shadows upon his face, and his complexion might be noteworthy was he not so… sun-starved, ashen like a burnished statue that has lost its lustre. 

And the hair… Merlin, his hair. Tom itches to get his hands on a comb, to do something about the nest that sticks out in every direction. It curls at his ears, brushes his neck, frames his jaw. It falls across his forehead in a slash of black, shading his eyes and the round wire rims of his glasses.

No, Harry does not look dangerous. Harry does not look like anything at all.

Tom is not sure how he smiles, but it does not feel like his winning one. His cheeks are too tense, and his nose puckers against his will. He wonders if he should have indeed let Abbott handle this. 

Nevertheless, he sticks a hand out, as is polite. 

“Harry. It’s a pleasure.”

Harry keeps his hand tucked firmly at his side. 

“If you say so.” He mutters, and turns to thank Madam Belby for her care. He is noticeably warmer when addressing her, his gratitude genuine. When he turns back to face Tom, all that affability melts into a puddle at his feet. A puddle which he leaves behind as he marches right past. “Let’s go then.”

Madam Belby slips a lolly into Tom’s hand before he leaves. It is a ridiculously infantilising gesture; even if it is lemon flavoured, his favourite. 

But no amount of lemon lollies can appease the hot rush of indignation burning through his blood. 

“Seven stories. Over a hundred staircases, some of which move, just to make things difficult. Doors may require passwords, riddles, or sometimes, gentle persuasion. Suits of armour are prone to dramatics. Most of the ghosts are harmless, barring Peeves. Avoid him. Potions is in the dungeons, Charms is on the third floor, Transfiguration is not far from the library. I’d be happy to help you navigate to your other classes. Outside is the Black Lake. And the Forbidden Forest, which, despite the name, some students still insist on testing. I wouldn’t recommend it.” Tom recites the words mechanically, running through the checklist he’d long since memorized as a Prefect. His tone remains cordial, but devoid of any real warmth. Harry’s earlier rejection still stings, and he aches to confront him on far more relevant matters than the tedious details of Hogwarts castle.

“Mhm.” 

The boy in question keeps his chin tucked to his chest, eyes fixed on his scuffed shoes. Tom bites his tongue, suppressing the urge to scold him for not paying attention. If he means to spend his first few weeks here hopelessly lost, that’s his prerogative. As long as he doesn’t expect Tom to come to the rescue. 

“This is the Entrance Hall. Best to remember where it is. Most of the castle can be reached through it. Dungeons are down the stairway to the right. Just here.” Tom holds the door open, stepping aside to let him through. But Harry only stares, blinking at him with a woolly, probing expression. It takes a few seconds before he seems to come to, and then he barrels quickly past.

At their pace, they soon reach the blank stretch of wall that conceals the Slytherin common room. Curiously, Harry stops before Tom can tell him to, right where he ought to. Tom observes the way he stands — tense, expectant, barely keeping still. Both irritable and uneasy, as though something crawls beneath his skin. 

“The Slytherin common room.” He says. And if the information means anything to Harry, the boy hides it well. “The password changes every fortnight. They’ll be posted on the notice board. Atramentum.” 

The blank wall yields, revealing a large, vaulted chamber. No matter how often he’s seen it, quiet reverence catches in Tom’s throat. The common room is especially sacred when no one is around. Its emptiness makes the ceilings look higher, arched like the belly of a great stone leviathan. Light seeps in through the lake, casting the room in an aquatic colour that shifts faintly across the flagstone floors. The air is cool and still, thickened with the barest trace of damp; which is not unpleasant, merely old. Ancestral.

Harry takes a slow breath beside him. When Tom looks over, he expects to see a flicker of awe finally softening the choler that has etched itself upon his face. 

Instead, he finds Harry looking right at him. And there’s something simmering in his gaze — not gratitude, nor anger, but a far less simple thing. One which Tom doesn’t have the mind to decipher; not as he realizes, only then, that he hadn’t truly noticed his eyes before. He is sure he would have remembered if he had. 

Because they are the most remarkable shade of green. Sharp and gem-bright; their colour so incongruous with the washed-out pallor of his skin, they look out of place.

Tom is suddenly gripped by the urge to pin him down, to dig his fingers into Harry’s skull and wrench them from their sockets to keep for his own. It’s a brutal, all-consuming desire, so intense it clamps down on his chest and rattles his heart against his ribs. He can hear the swift blood rush to his head, drowning out any other intervening thought he might have, leaving nothing but the raw, jagged mantra: steal, steal, mine, take, want, steal, mine, mine, mine.

In that moment, the world blurs. The violence, the hunger, feels like the only thing worth pursuing, like nothing matters more than to mark the immaculate rug beneath them with the carnage of his impulses. The thought is so irresistibly intoxicating, Tom almost lets himself fall into it.

Until Harry steps back, his face wiped clean of whatever intensity briefly overcame him, once again donning that trademark skin of wary emptiness. Tom, jolted out of his haze, is forced to pull back from the precipitous cliff he’d been teetering over only seconds ago too. Absurdly, before he can fully compose himself, he worries if Harry might have read into his mind. But the notion is absurd, and he shirks it with a quick test of his occlumency barriers. Intact.  

Though perhaps he should’ve been the one looking. Their eye contact had been the perfect opportunity; a proverbial open door. He wonders what Harry’s mind feels like. Is it cluttered? Tightly walled, like a locked drawer overflowing with objects he cannot name? Chaotic, unfinished, deeply private? He knows it would not be empty, but surely uninviting and loud in resistance. 

Tom finds it harder to talk now, for whatever reason. Brittle silence hangs between them, then. Harry fills it by wandering aimlessly around the common room, poking at different artifacts with detached curiosity. It rings hollow, but Tom doesn’t care. He doesn’t care for anything he would have cared about just an hour ago. The aftertaste of unfulfilled cruelty is bitter. He knows nothing will supplant it but blood, or time.

He licks his teeth, gathering his last dregs of sense to form a coherent sentence. 

“The boys' dormitories are up the staircase on the left. The last door down is ours. I am sure a bed has been prepared for you. Dinner is in two hours at the Great Hall. It would not do to miss it.” He says perfunctorily. It seems a very appealing thing, to distance himself from this wretched, confounding boy. If only for a moment. If only to better rouse his mind. 

“We’ll see.” Harry replies. He does not seem to care that his school-assigned liaison is abandoning him so soon after introductions. Unable to help himself, Tom lingers on this — about why he, a Slytherin no less, is so careless with first impressions, or why he hardly paid attention to the tour; why he makes no effort to endear himself to the one person who could open doors for him amongst their peers; why he came to be here in the first place; why the Professors are all so damn wary of him, and why Tom does not see what they all seem to.

It agonizes him, being so utterly out of the loop. But Harry (for all his mystery, for all his strange unspoken knowledge) does not look dangerous. Not in the way he should. Not in the way they talk about. 

And yet…

And yet–

Tom leaves. Harry lingers, inconveniently, at the edge of thought; not quite seen through, thus not quite gone.

He has time to kill before dinner. This is perhaps the worst time for it. He’ll find no answers at the library. 

Harry is not at dinner. Nor is Dumbledore. 

His knights ask him about his meeting with the new boy. Tom has no proper answer. Not one worth sharing. He tells them his name is Harry Evans, yet the surname sticks oddly in his mouth. 

Midway through his soup, it dawns on him why: he’s never once thought of him as Evans. It was Harry from the start.

He tells himself that this is because the name is not even worth thinking about. It is worthless and of no worth. Even Riddle sounds better than Evans. 

On the walk back to the dormitory, Lestrange peels off toward the library, muttering something about warding spells. He doesn’t seem reassured by Nott’s insistence that their new roommate won’t slaughter them in their sleep, perhaps because Nott sounds almost eager as he says this. Tom senses something similar wafting off of Malfoy. And Avery. And Black. They orbit him like carrion birds, half-bored and half-hungry. 

But the curtains around Harry’s bed are already drawn when they arrive. And unlike Lestrange, he does not need a book on warding to hold them off. No one thinks of disturbing him — least of all Tom, who is still weighing too many variables in his head. 

The next day breaks with the kind of crystalline cold only autumn can manage, burrowing under their sheets until it’s sleeping alongside them. It’s a Saturday. His roommates take this as divine permission to rot where they lay.

Harry’s bed, conversely, is empty. Perfectly made.

Tempus tells Tom it’s seven o’clock. Early, even by his standards. Despite yesterday’s intuitions, restlessness coils tightly in his gut.

They don’t see Harry at all that weekend. And it rankles.

Occlumency does not come naturally to Tom, but he excels at it through sheer force of discipline, a talent for weaponizing stillness and a refusal to tolerate internal disorder.

In this mental architecture, emotion cannot be indulged. Thus every shiver of impulse is catalogued with precision. And he knows, now, exactly where the darkest parts of him reside. Knows how to keep them from surfacing when it would be unwise. 

His bloodlust is a hazard, to be leashed until it can serve a purpose.

His ego is permitted to flourish, so long as it remains neatly folded beneath the surface.

And his obsessiveness is apportioned according to relevance; a measured dose for his studies, the rest funneled into less sanctioned pursuits, carried out well beyond the reach of curious eyes and under his complete control. 

But something has slipped.

Not much. Just enough to make him notice. Enough to irritate him in that insidious, low-burning way that slips past his usual defenses and takes root before he can excise it cleanly. He finds himself thinking about Harry without preamble, catching stray questions circling his mind in the oddest hours of the night.

Harry, who does not flinch. Who neither courts favour nor postures, who doesn’t respond the way people ought to. Who moves according to a private logic that Tom cannot decipher. 

Harry, whose non-presence isn’t fear or submission, but dismissal. 

And Tom does not stomach irrelevance well. He knows he should leave it. There are greater, more important things. But already he can feel it tightening, that maddening compulsion to excavate the boy’s mind, if only to quiet the part of himself that keeps asking why.

Why is Tom so unremarkable to him? So undeserving of mirrored fascination?

Perhaps he’d misjudged the introduction. Been too subtle, too reserved in how he offered up his brilliance. What was it he said? Harry. It’s a pleasure, with an underwhelmed smile that spoke too loudly. He should have crafted something more elaborate, laced with mystery and intrigue to present himself as compelling as he knows himself to be.

Or worse: perhaps the boy caught a glimpse of his mind in that moment, when Tom’s only intelligible thought was how best to take his eyes.

It gnaws at him. Not necessarily Harry’s secrets (though they are numerous, and Tom has not ruled out violence to pry them free) but the fact that he wants them at all. That is what offends; how this hunger too closely resembles need. 

However brief, it makes Tom aware of himself in a way he despises: less like a mind in perfect order, and more like a locked room full of teeth.

Chapter Text

On Monday morning, Tom spends longer than he should in the shower, meditating. The water hammers his back as he dissects his dilemma, paring it down into smaller and smaller parts — halving, then quartering, until each piece can be locked away in that dusty mental cabinet he reserves for matters like his mother, and the Blitz.

Though he rose a full hour before his roommates, by the time he emerges, damp and thinking about nothing but the new unit Professor Merrythought teased, they are all awake and in varying stages of dress. Malfoy is posted at his vanity, an arsenal of creams laid out before him, massaging each into his skin with ritualistic care until he stinks of cedar and bergamot. Lestrange is doing up Nott’s tie, muttering at a pace only he could track. Nott listens, not because he has to, but because he always does. Black is already gone, likely at Quidditch practice. And Avery waits for Tom, bag packed already.  

But Tom does not leave immediately, deciding it is best they arrive at breakfast together. By now, word has surely spread about the new boy being quartered in their dorm. It is prudent to present a united front, then. One that is impenetrable and exclusive. Let it quash any rumors about his influence before they take root.

It’s no hassle, anyway. The moment his Knights catch sight of him standing idle by the door, a fire lights beneath them and they’re spurred into action, gathering themselves with brisk, clumsy energy before falling in pace behind him.  

On the short walk to the Great Hall, Tom feels the dividends of his meditation begin to settle. His thoughts fall back into their proper arrangement. His Knights chatter some meaningless, tireless prattle, and for once, his first instinct is not to throttle them, but to grace them with his own, superior knowledge, as a courtesy to their intellectual impoverishment. The air tastes crisper. He walks with momentum again, as though sloughing off something unclean, something transient and ill-formed; the psychic residue of an anomaly he should never have dignified with attention. Harry — Evans, as he now resolves to think of him — was a disruption. A minor irregularity mistaken, for a moment, as significant, but who has since proven to be another insolent philistine not worthy of his time. 

Now that lapse has been addressed. Tom is himself again.

They arrive well into the breakfast hour, but their place at the Slytherin table remains untouched. Tom takes his seat first, back to the wall, and the others fall in around him like chess pieces on a checkerboard. He does not overcrowd his plate, opting for only toast, and tea.

“I’m positively famished,” Malfoy groans. “One would think they’re attempting to starve us with these infernal meal times. Dinner at six in the evening, breakfast at eight in the morning, fourteen hours of utter deprivation in between. And when we duly order additional provisions from the house-elves, Dumbledore has the audacity to tell us off for treating the castle staff as our own. As though taking orders isn’t their very purpose for existence.”

“Oh, yes, yes. But of course! Because Merlin forbid little Braxy should go without his bedtime sweet and a morning cuppa delivered to him on a silver tray. One shudders to think what standards this school has fallen to.” Nott snickers as he ladles porridge into Lestrange’s bowl, then his own. He ignores Malfoy’s indignant response to glance at his companion instead. “Bacon?”

But Lestrange isn’t listening. His gaze is fixed down the table, where Lucretia Black laughs softly into her juice, eyes crinkling at something Druella Rosier has just said.

“She looks rather pretty this morning.” Lestrange says. “Done something to her hair, I think. It’s bouncier. Shinier, too. Like she’s trying to be noticed, which is terribly desperate of her, really. I’d be incensed if I were in Prewett’s place.” He reaches for his spoon with theatrical disapproval.

Nott settles into his seat, wordlessly dropping the bacon onto his plate.

“You ever consider she does it for him, Corvus? They’re all but married.” He mutters, all humour lost from his voice. “We know where this ends, so do spare us.”

“Well, he isn’t here now, is he?” Lestrange shoots back, too quick. “And who is? You’d think she’d be more subtle. But no, she’s practically casting herself in my direction. One of these days–” he lifts his chin, smirking faintly, “One of these days, I shan’t bother with self-restraint.”

“So you’ve said,” 

“Every day for the past seven years,” Avery adds without looking up.

“I should like to see it happen before I die.” Malfoy drawls, slicing his toast.

“Yes, I daresay you would, you sick little ghoul,” Lestrange snaps. “You’ve always been odd like that, haven’t you?” 

Malfoy narrows his eyes, color rising faintly in his cheeks. “Odd, perhaps. But certainly no ghoul. You’ve yet to comment on my hair, Corvus, and it is glossier than even the lacquer on this table.”

“With no small effort on your part, which does rather beg the question—”

“Abraxas is right,” Tom interjects, evenly.

They all glance at him as if he’s gone mad, doing their best not to let the full extent of that sentiment show.

“About… his hair?” Avery ventures.

“No.” Tom’s gaze cuts sideways toward the blond, who has already straightened in his seat, visibly heartened by this brief shard of approval. He faces Lestrange. “About your ultimatum, Corvus. It would be quite the spectacle, wouldn’t it? Your long-awaited… ravishing of Miss Black.”

Lestrange does not know what to do with his face. He blinks and huffs and cringes all at the same time, but Nott leans emphatically forward, frowning.

“Come off it, Tom. You don’t actually mean that.”

“But I do, Thaddeus.” Tom’s voice is soft, deliberate. “Wouldn’t it be something to see? I’ve no doubt he’s well-versed in the art of force, with the entire Lestrange library at his disposal. Even if one were not inclined to such perversions, a well-cast incarcerous would be enough to entertain.”

He savours the flash of discomfort that passes between them. There is a particular satisfaction in pressing on the soft underbellies of his Knights, watching them flinch beneath the weight of his boot. They speak of cruelty, often — in theory, in jest — but when it is impressed upon them, it becomes something best kept at a distance once more. A secondhand tale to be heard from Tom, who alone remains unshaken by it.

Lestrange breaks out in a nervous laugh. It dies almost instantly in his throat.

“Alright, alright.” He says, voice thinner than before. “No need to put me on trial for having eyes.”

But the false bravado has slipped, just enough for the others to sense it. He reaches for his juice to busy his hands, pretending not to notice Nott watching him over the rim of his own goblet.

No one pushes further, and the table quiets just slightly, tension settling like a held breath.

This is what makes the ensuing moment all the more jarring.

The doors to the Great Hall open with a gust of corridor air, and in strides Orion in full Quidditch regalia: emerald robes still wind-ruffled from practice, shin-guards flecked with grass, his gloves slung through the belt at his hip like a soldier returned from war. With him is Alphard, a carbon Black copy, in a dishevelled uniform of his own.

And beside them both, laughing, is Harry.

His hair is tossed more carelessly than usual, cheeks vivid with the flush of cold, and he looks, impossibly, alive. Not the half-dead boy of the forest, nor the pale, sullen one Tom had shown around the castle. No. There’s colour in him now. Motion. Something visceral that disturbs Tom in its contrast. He looks, Tom thinks, the way the castle’s moving portraits had once struck him in boyhood: startlingly animate, possessed of something unknowable. Something not meant to be observed in stillness, but chased.

He had thought himself cured of the boy. But here he is, needling at something raw in him again. A quiet, inward ache that makes a liar of him.

Tom does not let it show. Of course not. But the part of him that thought itself scoured of curiosity now feels cheated. As if Harry has broken some tacit rule by reappearing and forcing Tom to feel again that unnameable thing, one which is both beneath him and yet impossible to rise above.

And worst of all is the way Harry– Evans does not even look at him.

Tom clenches his jaw until his teeth squeak, the sound loud in his own ears.

“Who’s that?” Avery murmurs, thick brows furrowed as he squints toward them.

“Who else, you nit?” Malfoy hisses, voice sharp and low. “Evans, obviously.”

Avery blinks. “Well, he’s all right, then, isn’t he? Not half as terrifying as I imagined.”

Lestrange has gone a shade paler, sallow beneath the morning light. His eyes track Evans with something between dread and fascination.

“The Blacks and him are certainly… familiar,” Nott offers, not bothering to mask the interest in his tone. “Friendly, even.”

Malfoy huffs. “Too friendly. Orion’s never spoken more than ten words to a mudblood in his life.”

“Perhaps he isn’t one.” Avery suggests mildly.

“Don’t be dense. Evans? Does that sound like a venerable name to you?” Malfoy sneers, rolling his eyes.

“Maybe they’re trying to civilise the boy,” Lestrange says, but the jab rings hollow, lacking his usual bite.

Tom remains silent. He watches. Watches as Evans smiles, open and unguarded, responding to something Alphard has said. The boy’s eyes crease at the corners, his whole face alight with a verve he did not see fit to grant Tom.

A sharp, electric pressure settles behind his eyes. It feels like heat and noise and veers dangerously close to covetousness. His fingers stretch and curl in on themselves and stretch again. 

Orion breaks from the trio and lumbers toward them like some overbred draft horse. He drops into the seat diagonal from Tom, and with no small effort, Tom tears his eyes from the grotesque little tableau at the far end of the hall to take stock of the fresh insult now polluting their table.

He is not the only one. The rest of his Knights watch Black with varying degrees of incredulity. Black, being the dolt that he is, does not seem to notice their silent judgment until his mouth is full of sausage.

“What?” He mumbles through the food.

“You stink.” Lestrange says.

“No, no. Allow that. What in Salazar’s name are you doing with Evans?” Nott demands, his tone sharp with disbelief. “How did you two become so... you know, so suddenly?” 

Tom, for his part, is appreciative of Nott’s prudent questioning, if only because it spares him the effort of speaking at all when the urge to curse Black on the spot is nearly overwhelming.

“Oh.” Orion shrugs. “I found him in the Common Room, actually. On the way down to practice this morning. He was already talking to Alphard, who’d been waiting for me. He mentioned he likes Quidditch, so saint Alphie invited him to watch us practice. I wasn’t particularly fond of the idea, but… well, the bloke’s a prodigy.”

He swallows, then grins. 

“He got through Selwyn and Mulciber’s thick skulls and helped them sort out their grips on their bats. And then he offered Rosier seeker advice, though the useless twat was prematurely knocked out of the scrimmage by our newly competent beaters. So Evans played in his stead, just for today. Caught the snitch in ten minutes flat. I could see the resignation in Rosier’s face as soon as it happened. He knew, as did everyone watching: Evans is better than any seeker we've seen since Burke graduated in ‘33. If it were up to me, he'd be on the team by tomorrow."

Avery lifts a brow. "Well. You are captain, aren’t you?"

Orion shakes his head, reaching for the plate of kippers. "Sure, but tryouts were weeks ago. The roster’s already been finalised and handed off to Slughorn. Making changes now would be delicate. Politically unwise, what with his… You’ll see.” He gestures to the back of his neck, as if that means anything. “Not to mention, Lord Rosier all but bought his son a place on the team this year."

There’s a ripple of agreement around the table. Tom doesn’t join in. He doesn’t care for this conversation now that he’s wrung the information he needed from it. 

Against his better judgment, his gaze drifts to the far end of the table once more, where Evans now sits with Alphard. They’ve been joined by a cluster of other fifth-years, as well as Lucretia and Druella. The girls lean in, posturing like serpents ready to strike, though Tom suspects their venom has been momentarily stayed by the boy’s proximity to a Black. Blood, after all, sanctifies. And the Blacks have always been priests in that regard. 

(Tom knows this better than anyone. It was Orion’s idle acceptance of him in third year that first loosened the collective grip of disdain amongst his Slytherin peers. But of course, he owes the oaf nothing. Not when, by the following year, he had laid any doubts of his wixen lineage to rest with his parseltongue.) 

The group surrounding Evans titters at something he says. Lucretia leans in, placing a casual hand on his shoulder. Tom feels the raw wound inflicted by his presence begin to fester within him. Lestrange similarly stiffens, spine straightening like a struck chord. He scoffs, too loudly, and stirs his porridge with unnecessary force.

“Must be some joke,” He mutters. “Didn’t know she was so easily amused by half-wits.” When no one responds, he tacks on, quieter now. “It’s probably pity. The girl’s always had a charitable streak.”

Still, his gaze lingers, longer than it should. Nott murmurs his name softly, and the others look his way.  It is only Avery who seems to feel the heat of Tom’s simmering ire. He meets his eyes across the table and gives a single, deliberate nod.

“We should head to class.”

That day, Tom commits himself to the pointed task of ignoring Evans. He does not spare him a glance in the corridors, nor a sliver of acknowledgement in class; not even when the boy speaks to introduce himself to their professors. Especially not then.

And, for the most part, he is successful.

He channels his attention into his work with a focus so razor-sharp it borders on punishing. In History of Magic, he transcribes every tiresome word of Professor Binns’ lecture. In Arithmancy, he finishes his equations early, then corrects the errors on Nott’s chart with cold efficiency, saying nothing as he swaps out half the numbers. In Potions, Slughorn beams at him for producing a Draught of Living Death so perfectly rendered it darkens to a flawless obsidian while the others are still fumbling over their base infusions.

But in time, as the day drolls on, or in those quiet intervals, his control begins to fray. The memory of the morning presses up like a bruise under his skin. Despite all appearances, he is hyper-aware of Evans in every room: the scrape of his chair, the way his voice cuts through the space, where he chooses to sit and with whom.

Still, Tom does not look. He does not speak. He holds himself with absolute composure and continues to assert that the boy is entirely beneath his notice. 

By their last period, he has almost convinced himself.

After all, what has Evans done to warrant even a particle of his attention? Nothing of substance. Nothing valuable. Certainly nothing now that Tom knows he is not, in fact, the whispered prodigy of the Dark Arts some had foolishly imagined him to be.

He bears no name of consequence, no lineage worth mentioning, no reason to be here beyond the vague and ever-questionable endorsement of Dumbledore and whatever godless accident saw fit to drop him in their midst.

And worst of all, he makes no effort to belong. He unsettles without intention, aggravates without cunning, offers advice on Quidditch as if the privilege were his to bestow, and charms simpletons like Alphard and Lucretia with that same vacant detachment he applies to everything else. 

He does not try. He does not care. And it is this not caring — not caring about convention, certainly, but mostly not caring about clever, inviolable, preeminent Tom, of all people — that is the worst offense of all.

He tells himself that this is precisely what will ensure his irrelevance in time. Hogwarts may be sentimental and prone to hearsay, but it is not blind. It does not reward shapeless insolence or vague peculiarity unless it is refined into something formidable. Something deliberate. Something like him.

And Evans is not like him.

Professor Merrythought, despite her tenure of over fifty years, conducts her classroom with none of the complacency usually afforded by Hogwarts’ other professors. Perhaps it’s a holdover from her time as a curse-breaker, where adaptability was a matter of survival. Or, more likely, it’s her advancing senility, which seems to turn every minor disruption into a harbinger of war. 

Whatever the cause, her curriculum changes year by year, subject to the whims of her increasingly dramatic sensibilities.

Tom is well aware that last year’s graduating class focused almost exclusively on non-verbal spellwork in preparation for their N.E.W.T. evaluations. But the recent spate of Daily Prophet headlines, which all but shriek of Grindelwald’s forces amassing near the French border, appear to have rattled Merrythought’s nerves. This year, she has decided to dispense with measured theory in favour of a more frantic syllabus: practical warding, protective enchantments, rapid-response hexes, and counter-curses. It seems she is convinced that each of them will need to fend off a dark wizard by year’s end.

Most met this with dread. For him, it was a welcome development. Nonverbal casting can always be honed in solitude, and Tom’s already surpassed the required standard. But a focus on advanced defensive application grants him the ideal arena. He can demonstrate his superiority openly. Use this as an opportunity. 

There are few things more gratifying than being invited to outclass his peers, after all — especially those that don’t yet know just how far beneath him they are.

(Evans currently stands just a few heads down. Like a blot of ink on parchment, he mars the hedges of Tom’s periphery). 

“As most of you know, we’ll be starting a new unit now that we’ve covered concealment charms,” Professor Merrythought says, pacing the cleared center of the classroom with a slight limp. The desks have been shoved to the walls, leaving an open space where students now stand, wands in hand. “Naturally, this still falls under the larger section on protective magic, which will occupy us through January. If you’ve done the reading — and I advise you start making a habit of it — you’ll already have some idea of what I mean. No, we will not be duelling,” she adds dryly, gaze flicking to the far right. “So you can wipe that panicked look off your face, Miss Tremblay.

“No. Rather, for the next few weeks,” Merrythought lowers her voice ever so slightly. “We concern ourselves with entities that do not kill cleanly. Dementors, those soul-drinkers you know to be guarding Azkaban; and lethifolds, the creeping death. Silent, formless, smothering.” Her lips curl as she turns, marching the space between their bodies again. “These are the things your wands must also protect you from. Not just curses, or other wizards, but the dark when it comes without warning.” 

A hesitant hand lifts from the Hufflepuff side.

“Will we… be examined on this?”

“I should hope your willingness to survive does not hinge on whether you’ll be tested, Mister Crouch. But to answer your question: yes, you will be.” She stops now, facing the class, chin raised. “Though it is not the theory you’ll be marked on, but your ability to apply it. Tell me: what is the one charm known to repel both a Dementor and a Lethifold? Mister Lestrange.”

Lestrange, not expecting to be called on, stumbles on the balls of his feet.

“Um– Surely you… A patronus charm? Professor. But you don’t mean to ask us to produce one? They’re– well, notoriously difficult. Not just to cast, but to even attempt. And there are limits, aren’t there? On who can manage it. And if some of us fail, what becomes of that? What—”

“You’re right.” Merrythought cuts him off. Her voice is thoughtful, almost grave now. “Not everyone can summon a patronus. Not even some fully trained wizards. Most live their entire lives never needing to try. The charm is rare for a reason. But you will. Try, I mean. Because if you ever do need it, mark my words, you will live only long enough to regret not doing so.”

Tom doesn’t blink. The speech is effective in how emotionally manipulative it is, in a way he believes all good teaching should be. He can even admit, privately, that the idea of being asked to produce a corporeal patronus in front of the class is thrilling, despite never having looked into such an obscure bit of light magic himself. It is rare for schoolwork to offer something so visibly stratifying. There is no bluffing a patronus. One either has it, or one doesn’t.

Despite himself, his gaze slips a few heads down the row.

He should not care how Evans reacts; not when he’s done so well, all day, to quarantine him from thought. But Tom’s eyes land on him anyway, sharp and seeking, searching for some tell. For a modicum of fear, perhaps. Or surprise. Or a fire burning behind those gem-like eyes. Anything. 

But Evans is unreadable. He stands still, as he always does, and watchful, like he’s hearing something no one else can discern.

Tom clenches his jaw and looks away, disgusted with himself.

Let the boy struggle with it. Let him fail in front of everyone. Let him not even know what memory to reach for.

If the charm demands something special, then surely he has none of it.

Professor Merrythought does not dawdle. She demonstrates the wand movement, offers a clipped note on the incantation, and reminds them that their intention matters above all else. 

Tom draws his wand in a precise little spiral, briefly practicing, straightening his spine until he feels the line of it like iron. He’s not concerned about the mechanics. 

“The charm works by channeling all your positive emotions into a protective shield, of sorts. Thus, think of a happy memory as you cast it. The happier the memory, the stronger the magic.” She surveys the class. “Most fail here. Happiness is hard to define, but it is not pleasure. It is not triumph. It is something real. Something warm. If you fake it, you will fail. If you lack it… You will fail.”

Then they’re given space, and told to begin.

Tom does not waste time searching his mind. A memory springs forth, unbidden. It is of the day he discovered the truth of his lineage.

He remembers the texture of the book in his hands, the brittle weight of the paper, the scent of old ink that clung to it. He remembers finding a name using his own (Marvolo) then tracing up the family line with mounting certainty, until it all culminated in a single, hallowed truth: Salazar Slytherin. 

That moment, that revelation, had been ecstasy. The purest kind. Cold and righteous and exalting.

He draws a breath. Flicks his wrist.

“Expecto Patronum.”

Nothing.

Not even a shimmer. The air remains still.

Tom lowers his wand. His jaw sets tightly. Around him, students groan in frustration, their efforts yielding little more than thin vapor. Merrythought walks among them, offering the occasional correction, her cane tapping rhythmically as she moves. He does not look at her.

His failure strikes him harder than it ought to. He has the knowledge. He has the will. The memory was magnificent. It should have worked. 

Yet the room is no warmer. No brighter. His magic buzzes quietly around him. His hands twitch once at the fingers.

He tells himself he is tired. 

He tells himself the memory was too elevated, too grand, to nourish a spell rooted in something as primitive as joy.

But an intrusive thought edges into his mind: perhaps it is not primitiveness, so much as the very concept escapes you.

He rejects this idea at once.

Instead, almost involuntarily, his eyes drift across the room. Again.

Evans stands with Merrythought, speaking in hushed tones. His head is bowed slightly, expression grim, and their professor listens with an air of sympathy to her. She hums along, offers a few quiet words once he’s finished, then nods. He nods back. Merrythought moves on.

And then, like a needle snapping to true north, he turns. His eyes find Tom’s.

The effect is immediate, like ice water down his spine. It is not accidental, he knows. He was seeking Tom, as Tom had been seeking him, and the resulting contact slices through the fog in his mind faster than any clarifying draught. For one dizzying second, he remembers exactly why he’d been so unmoored the first time they met eyes like this. Why his mind had looped, feverishly, with the desire to understand him, unmake him, consume him entirely. 

Deep in the fractured catacombs of his soul, something moves.

It tugs. It beckons.

It fills his head with the eerie, wailing cry of air raid sirens, and despite himself, he braces, not entirely sure against what. The world around him begins to smear and slip, faces blurring like paint left out in the rain, until Harry is the only thing left with any definition at all. 

Harry. Harry.

There’s a bright, blinding light. For a moment, Tom thinks it must be the universe intervening. A mark of something inevitable taking shape. It feels pointed, deliberate, as though reality itself is declaring this moment as singularly right.

He blinks against the brightness, a sliver of awe cutting through him, only for it to be smothered once he pinpoints the true source.

To his right, Nott’s wand pulses with silver. A vague, shapeless mist hovers there; barely formed, but unmistakably a patronus, if incorporeal.

“Well done, Mister Nott! ” Merrythought calls, clapping once. “Ten points to Slytherin!” 

When Tom looks back toward Harry, Harry has already turned away.

“Do come off it, you insufferable prig. Just tell us how you managed it.” Malfoy drawls, one leg slung indolently over the other.

The Slytherin common room simmers with a cultivated sort of chaos; the kind only possible during the rare alignment of free periods or that soft, drowsy interlude between the end of lessons and the call to dinner. Voices flutter from obscure corners, all giggles and conspiratorial whispers, while the lower years engage in some gobstones tournament with the seriousness of war. A fifth-year girl sobs quietly behind a book. Two sixth-years have their heads far too close together to be discussing anything of academic merit.

Tom sits with his Knights in their long-claimed bastion by the fire — a leather-backed alcove meant, by all appearances, for men of consequence. It has been theirs since fifth year, and not once contested. But today, the room it surveys feels somehow beneath him. He can feel everything pressing against him like too-tight cloth: the triviality, the noise, the deeply irksome fact that Harry’s name is still being passed around like a wine too sharp to be enjoyed, but far too rare to forgo pouring out away. 

“I already told you,” Nott says, with the strained patience of someone past the point of indulgence, “I followed Merrythought’s instructions. She wasn’t lying. There’s no clever workaround.”

“Well, what was the memory, then?” Lestrange demands, as though this might finally pry something useful from him.

At that, Nott’s face splits into a cheeky grin. “The very first time I met you, of course.”

“Oh, sod off. If you’re going to lie, have the decency to make it interesting.”

“I might have, if you lot hadn’t spent the entire day circling me like lions! As it stands, I’m rather at my wit’s end.”

Currently, Harry sits sequestered with Alphard in a spot not far from where they are. There are no chairs left for them, but they appear perfectly content seated on an intricately woven persian carpet, knees drawn to their chests. That the two have grown close so quick is hardly surprising, despite their difference in age. Alphard has always been the outlier among the Blacks; too quiet when blood politics are aired aloud, too reluctant to lend his voice to the crueller rituals of their house. A disappointment, by some standards. A liability, by others. A perfect divot for Harry to slot himself into, maverick that he is. 

But just because it makes sense does not mean Tom has to like it. The picture they make — that quiet, unspoken camaraderie — claws at something he cannot name. A keen, needling awareness that Harry has made room for someone, and that someone was not him, but Alphard. Careless, unambitious, soft around the edges, Alphard. A boy who has never once had to scrape or scheme to be wanted.

Tom tells himself it’s the principle of the matter. Alphard should know better than to stoop. Harry remains an interloper. But the logic does nothing to blunt the sting. It feels like being passed over. It feels like being replaced in a race he never agreed to run.

And it holds his attention anyway, the way fire always has, morbid curiosity drawing him to the heat. He has been watching Harry’s back for the better part of an hour, unbothered by the notion of being seen.

Because now, at last, everything has aligned; that which wasn’t clear before. There is no other explanation. No sane one, at any rate. Harry must feel the same unnatural gravity between them. That pull Tom feels every time they’re near each other, and indeed, even when they’re apart. It was just the case that Tom mistook simple hesitation for rejection. 

(A misreading, nothing more. Of course it would not be rejection. Never. Not when Tom is this singular, this divine, this utterly beyond compare.)

“I find it somewhat difficult to believe myself.” Someone whispers, too close to Tom’s ear to be mistaken as talking to anyone else. It’s Orion, whose voice lingers with furtive urgency. Tom tears away from the two boys to better discern what he is referring to. But his associate remains locked on the same sight — Harry.

He loathes the idea of needing to ask about anything. It is a rare occasion indeed that he has to. “What the devil are you talking about?”

Black’s eyebrows arch in surprise, as though unable to comprehend how Tom might be so slow on the uptake. Tom, struggling to suppress the surge of irritation, bites his cheek to keep from cursing him openly in front of this crowd.

“I mean, he hardly seems the type, does he?”

Tom’s gaze coasts back to Harry. What type is Black precisely referring to? Certainly, there’s an… intimacy in the way Harry sits so close to his younger cousin, though that alone does not seem sufficient to draw such an inference. And everything Tom knows about Orion suggests that his disdain for blood-mixing far outweighs any distaste for homosexuality.

He must be projecting his impatience now, for Orion’s expression shifts noticeably. His shoulders sag, the previous hint of jest draining from his face as he becomes more solemn. “Tom, what else could I mean? Look there, just beneath his collar, on the back of his neck. It’s not entirely visible, but if you look closely, you’ll discern the edges of it.”

The light is poor, distorted as it is by the watery cast of the lake-view windows and the green of enchanted flames. Still, Tom leans forward, squinting, and begins to see it. At first, only the faintest suggestion of contrast — pale against brown skin — but then it clarifies. Gleaming, almost opalescent. 

He sees it in full a moment later as Harry shifts, and the effect is disorienting. How had he missed it? How had anyone? It sits openly on the nape of his neck, as plain as any open proclamation. A scar in the form of a vertical line, bisected by a circle. And around them both, a triangle: neat, geometric. Unmistakable.

Grindelwald’s mark.

Tom fancies his reaction discreet, but evidently something in his posture betrays him, for Orion tilts one shoulder in a shrug, stupidly smug in the way only a Black can be.

“And from what I understand,” he continues, voice pitched low, “only the most devout get marked like that, in plain view. A gesture of pride, or punishment maybe. The lines blur at that level of madness. But what in Merlin’s name could a boy like that possibly offer a Dark Lord? Seventeen, British, unremarkable lineage, halfblood at the very best. It’s not as though he fought his way into favour with a wand, and I doubt Grindelwald’s court requires a seeker.”

He reclines, the picture of ease now that he’s succeeded in disturbing the delicate balance Tom had only just re-established in his own mind. One day, Tom thinks absently, he will kill him. If not for this, then for something equally inconvenient. 

“Makes you think.” Black adds, as if that were the point of any of this. 

Tom stops listening. Whatever else Black says drifts into the low murmur of the common room. His attention returns to Harry, this time with scrutiny he realises, almost bitterly, he ought to have applied from the moment they met.

He is small, yes. Undersized, verging on wiry. Once, Tom might have written that off as the consequence of trauma, some postscript to the chaos of his arrival. But there’s a different shape to the leanness now. Taut and enduring, carved by hardship rather than healed by it. He imagines it: this boy in motion, always in motion, pulled from place to place under Grindelwald’s eye, sleeping in shifts, watching his back in the dark. There were shortages, surely. Hunger. Maybe the bigger ones ate first. Maybe he went without. Whatever the cause, it has left a kind of elegance behind. Hard-edged, utilitarian, but elegance nonetheless.

And then, of course, the scars. There are the obvious ones — a gash at the forearm, deep and gnarly, and another on his left hand, healed poorly, the work of someone who didn’t have time or didn’t care. Tom does not allow himself to wonder how many more hide under his clothes. Or rather, he does, but only once he suspends considerations of the consequences. If given the chance, he would disrobe Harry entirely just to catalogue them all, coerce the stories behind each until he is satisfied. 

He hadn’t thought his hunger could deepen, but it has, and now it gnaws at him with insistence, almost tender in its ache. He recalls the shoebox he kept in his closet at Wools, recovered once from a dumpster behind the kitchens, its rain-softened cardboard storing his stolen treasures. A harmonica, a thimble, a yo-yo with its string frayed. He stashed it in the undercroft below the orphanage before he left for Hogwarts and hasn’t thought of it since, but now he is gripped by the image of what it could become. 

He pictures clearing the childish debris inside to make room for something finer. The delicate bones of Harry’s hands. Clippings of his hair, wild like ivy. His eyes. All the collected stories etched deep into his flesh. 

A reliquary, of sorts. 

It satisfies him more than he can say. 

At some point in the evening, Harry glances over his shoulder at last. It is commendable, the restraint he’s shown so far. Most would have cracked under the weight of Tom’s gaze hours ago. But he held out, firm, until now.

Tom sees the challenge resolve in his eyes just as he feels his own conviction settle. 

Yes. Harry will be his unravel, and his to keep.

Chapter Text

Weeks pass, airless, each one pressed into the next with the dull head of repetition.

His Knights remain hopelessly provincial, as always. Hogwarts’ curriculum holds no revelations. Dumbledore, persistent as mould, continues to skulk in the wings of his life. The patronus charm still eludes him. And the matter of locating his family has slipped into the background.

But he is not idle.

No, his time is not wasted. He has simply redirected his attention toward a subject far more pressing. 

That is, the matter of Harry Evans, and how best to take him.

Several options present themselves. Each with its advantages. Each demanding caution. There is the slow burn, the long-game seduction of friendship, trust, some notion of shared cause. There is the spectacle, a grand gesture worthy of myth. And, of course, there is a more direct route: to corner and to cleave. Tom has not yet decided. It will depend, as these things always do, on his boy’s likely method of reciprocity.

(Because the taking is inevitable. The only question left now is how cleanly it will be done.)

So, Tom waits. Watches. Measures the scope of Harry’s personality with the exacting diligence of an anatomist preparing for dissection. He observes his boy’s rhythms: what draws his eye, what triggers a smile, what subjects quicken or silence his tongue. He catalogues his loyalties: the confidences he shares with Alphard or, newly, Ignatius Prewett, who he met through Lucretia. The way he seems to exist at a remove from his own admirers and skeptics alike, as if wary of being known.

He is cordial when the moment requires it. Tom does not overplay his hand during those shared morning rituals before the bathroom mirrors, when no one else is awake but them, or during moments where their circles intersect. He is attentive, unintrusive, and occasionally gracious; particularly of late, as Orion, for reasons still unclear, begins inviting Harry to linger at their end of the Slytherin table during mealtimes, under the pretence of discussing Quidditch .

He has never concerned himself with the sport, nor with the halfwits who treat it as vocation. Still, there is a singular appeal in watching Harry speak of it. It animates him in a way little else does. His posture will loosen, his hands moving as if conducting an invisible current to the conversation. At times, there is even a tremble of real joy; which, on him, reads as almost foreign. Prod at his past, by contrast — make even a passing inquiry of blood or allegiances — and he shuts down almost immediately.

(Which, by now, proves a regular occurrence on the fertile ground of pretence that is the Slytherin common room. Malfoy, in particular, proves indefatigable in his efforts: an overweening creature bred of a thoroughly unearned pedigree. He had decided, at some point early on, that Harry’s unplaceable surname constituted an affront to the natural order, and had since made it his mission to uncover what dilution might lie in the boy’s blood.

That morning marked his fourth sortie.

“Evans,” Malfoy intoned, “is a rather commonplace name. Muggle, I dare say. One might be curious as to your maternal line and… Whether there is anything of consequence to claim.”

Credit where credit is due, it did have the desired effect. Conversation at large receded like a tide, and several heads turned, hungry for a display.

Harry, for his part, did not look up immediately. He seemed to weigh the interruption with the distaste of someone forced to acknowledge a stain on an otherwise passable rug. When he did raise his gaze, it seemed deliberate, as though affording Malfoy precisely the amount of attention said stain might deserve.

“My blood,” he said, “is my concern. Not yours.”

For once, Malfoy had the good sense not to reply. His mouth gave a sort of reflexive twitch, the beginnings of a smile or a scoff — neither of which came — and he turned his eyes elsewhere.

Tom, from his vantage point of brilliance, found the entire exchange delightful. There was a severity in Harry’s tone that spoke of habit, the reflexive shield of someone long since bored of justifying himself. That his retort had come so quickly struck him as the sort of defensive rigor that must have been worn into him over years. It was a blade, yes, but not one drawn in show. It was already in his hand. 

There is, he thought, admirability in a boy who can so thoroughly dismantle a question by denying it the dignity of an answer; even if Harry’s refusal did yield more than any confession might have. Evasion, after all, is not the instinct of those with nothing to obscure.

But if he is a mudblood — and one suspects he may well be — then his Grindelwald sympathies are all the more striking, for he has seen fit to transcend the sentimentality of his kind and align himself with power. 

And if he is a half-blood, then the affinity runs deeper still. There would be, between them, a symmetry so grotesquely satisfying. A shared origin, of sorts. It is not lost on Tom how exquisitely that would suit him; his cock throbs at the very thought.)

Besides, if nothing else can be said in Quidditch’s favour, there is the fact that it keeps Harry coming back. At first, only now and then. But soon, with increasing regularity.

“…It’s flash,” Orion says, dragging out the word like it tastes foul. The worst of the lunch crowd has dispersed by now, leaving behind only stragglers like them. “That’s all the Thimblerig ever is. Makes a bit of noise, stirs the pitch up, and wastes time. If you want the match to feel like theatre, go ahead. But if you’re after a goal, Hawkshead what you want.”

Harry snorts. “You like Hawkshead because it lets you play centurion. There’s no actual subtlety to it.”

“Subtlety doesn’t score, Evans.”

“It confuses, though.” Harry says with the confidence of someone entirely secure in their argument. “And confusion opens gaps. Gaps get you through.”

Beside them, Nott chimes in, chin propped on his fist. “Evans fancies himself clever, but Hawkshead is tradition. And you can’t argue with results.”

“I can if they’re your results,” Harry fires back. There’s no real heat to it, only the faintest hint of challenge beneath his grin.

Tom watches them without comment. Orion is goaded easily, which Harry has learnt quickly. Nott plays court jester when it suits him. And Harry — his Harry shines most when he’s just on the cusp of smug. It softens the edges of him, makes him less guarded, more real. 

And, as usual, utterly unaware of the effect he has.

“Fine,” He shrugs, as if to end the discussion. “Stick with your Hawkshead. I’ll be busy scoring while the two of you get your heads bashed in trying to look menacing.”

“You’re assuming you’ll get the quaffle.” Orion mutters.

“And you’re assuming you’d stop me.”

Nott laughs then, a sharp bark of a sound. “He’s got you there, Ry.”

Tom does not join in the laughter. But the corner of his mouth lifts, briefly. Enough, though. Harry sees it. He can tell, because his previously lit expression falters, reshaped under the pressure of thought. And then it drops, heavily, weighed down by the same ambiguous conclusion he’ll always come to.  

It happens often, this involuntary betrayal of feeling. Like merely looking at Tom costs him something. It seems that, however familiar Tom’s presence ought to be by now, Harry meets it each time like a blow. 

This does not bother Tom as it once might have. If anything, he welcomes the primal reflex in Harry as irrefutable proof of what he already knows. It is recognition. A response to his presence, his weight in the room. And that’s all Tom requires: substance to shape his hands around. 

“Transfiguration in ten.” Avery announces. The group stirs with reluctant motion. Nott, finishing the last of his dessert in a single, graceless bite, scatters crumbs across his robes, which Lestrange brushes off fussily. Malfoy, hunched over a crumpled bit of parchment, is still scrawling the end of what is presumably his essay for Dumbledore — already a week overdue, and, by the looks of it, no closer to coherence.

Harry slings his satchel over one shoulder and makes an unobtrusive move toward the edge of the group. Tom takes this opportunity, stepping lightly over the bench to follow a few paces behind. By the time they cross the Entrance Hall, it is only the two of them. The others, mercifully, fall behind.

“Harry.” Tom says, easily overtaking him.

His boy startles, stumbling slightly, face slackening in that soft little way.

“Riddle.” He answers, blinking far too quickly.

“I’ll walk with you.”

“Er– you don’t have to—”

“Nonsense. We're heading for the same place.”

A pause. “Right.”

He clearly tries to end the exchange there, hastening his pace. Harry’s spry, but Tom’s stride is longer, and he never has to rush to keep up.

“I trust you’re settling in well. Everyone’s been kind?”

“Yes.” Harry clips

“You don’t seem to be struggling in any of our lessons. I must say, I’m quite impressed.”

“Thanks.”

“What sort of education did you have before coming to Hogwarts?”

Tom doesn’t particularly care for the answer. He knows that it will be a lie, like most else forced out of Harry. The question only serves to narrow the corridor through which the conversation will move.

“I was homeschooled.”

“By whom?”

“A tutor.”

“Mm. And this tutor of yours, were they broadly educated? I ask only because you strike me as remarkably well-rounded for someone with such an unorthodox background.”

There’s another pause, it’s breadth barely long enough to notice.

“I– yes. They were. Yes.”

“Fascinating.”

Harry keeps his eyes on the ground as they walk. Tom watches the arch of his neck, stretched to catch the light. The mark is visible now; Grindelwald’s symbol gleaming faintly under where his hair stops at his nape, no longer looking like a scar at all, he realizes. There’s no angry edge or raised skin. Rather, it appears as though it had always lived on him. Like the skin itself had always refused colour in that shape. 

His teeth itch with the urge to abandon all propriety and ask. Polite conversation is a miserable ritual, but from what he’s gleaned of Harry thus far, Tom knows his best chance of acquiring him lies in the appearance of friendship. As is, for now, the route he’s chosen to go down.

“Forgive the imposition, but I am curious. Why homeschooling? I assume you were visited by an official, either when your magic first emerged or upon turning eleven. Yet, rather than being enrolled in one of the established schools, you stayed where you were. It does invite speculation.”

Harry doesn’t answer. Tom feels a sharp, anticipatory tightening in his chest as he maneuvers sneakily to the next step.

“Surely you were visited?”

“I was.”

“Ah. Then you were Muggle-raised.”

Harry stops in his tracks. The silence that follows is a full one. He looks, for a moment, as though he might blame himself for stepping neatly into Tom’s snare. Tom expects the usual response, a flustered concession of sorts, acquiescence, but Harry lifts his head and stares him down with an altogether more pointed, direct address of his manipulations.

“You’re a prick.”

Irrepressible heat rises to his cheeks. It’s all he can do not to giggle with the ridiculous delight of a debutante on her third sherry of the night. 

From his private collection of expressions, Tom scrambles to select one of his gentler masks. A mild, dimpled smile, almost apologetic.

“I didn’t mean to unsettle you, Harry. Truly.” He implores. “I was raised by Muggles too. I suppose I was... encouraged by the thought we might have that in common.”

But Harry doesn’t bend. 

“Please. Cut the shit, Riddle.”

Tom tilts his head. “I’m not sure I follow.”

Harry exhales sharply through his nose, in a mocking, almost laugh. “No, no of course you don’t. Like you don’t always know exactly what you’re doing.” He shakes his head, hair falling across his brow in a momentary distraction. Tom wants to tear it all out, strand by strand, and keep his whole scalp on a chain to wear around his neck. “The compliments. The way you ask questions that aren’t really questions. You wrap your intentions up and pretend it’s generosity. It’s not. I can tell.”

And this. This is new — this fuse of real fury, too quick and bright to be rehearsed. Harry’s voice wavers with emotion, but he doesn’t stop. “You don’t give a damn about what we have in common. You don’t care about my past. You care about leverage. So cut the shit.”

There’s a moment then. The corridor holds its breath. 

Tom grins.

But it is not the sort he’s practiced in the mirror before. This one twists his face and he knows; he bears an expression he never thought anyone would see.

“You’re very perceptive, Harry.” He whispers, and means it. 

His boy got nearly everything right. All but that last part.

Because Tom doesn’t want to use him. In fact, he’s never wanted to know, to possess, to hollow someone out and wear them like a second skin, quite like this.

Harry scoffs and keeps walking. 

Things have unfolded beyond even Tom’s most indecent hopes. Harry, sweet, furious Harry, has done the hardest part for him; he’s cleaved through the tedium of small talk and carved straight to the centre. Tom could weep for the beauty of it.

His magic hums beneath his skin like it’s trying to claw its way out. He almost skips to keep up.

There are others about, but he doesn't care. Harry has taken a shortcut through an old disused corridor — one he shouldn’t know exists — and Tom doesn’t care about that either. Nothing matters now but what he says next. What reaction he can provoke. What truth he can peel free.

He licks his lips.

“I do hate to traffic gossip.” He practically sings, voice light, almost playful. “But I’m not foolish enough to ignore what’s so plainly visible, my dear Harry. Fortunately for you, I happen to be rather... sympathetic.”

The words are still hanging between them when impulse overtakes him. His hand darts forward and catches the crook of Harry’s elbow. Whether it’s magic or some other volatile current between them, the contact jolts through him like a live wire. Charged as he already is, Tom doesn’t flinch. But Harry does and jerks back, trying to twist away. 

He holds fast.

“It’s suffocating, isn’t it?” Tom continues, low and intent. “That pressure to mould yourself into a version they find palatable. Believe me, I understand.” He leans in slightly, enthralled. “Which is why I’ve started a society. A gathering of minds, of sorts. A place to unlearn what’s expected and pursue what’s excellent. What’s true.” 

A deep draw of air to steady himself, though the fever in his blood only climbs.

“That’s where you’ll find the real me.” He says, at last. It escapes him as coolly as water, inevitable as a pulled thread. It was always meant to unravel this way. 

Tom leaves the rest unspoken. And should you choose to come, I hope to meet the real you, as well.

He watches Harry closely. Watches the silence take hold of him.

There is a war happening upon his face. A slow, grinding shift of fragile structure resisting its own collapse. Harry looks at him the way a person looks at a locked door they aren’t sure they want to open. 

And then, with no small violence to himself, he does.

“When?”

The question is barely more than ripple in the space between them, but Tom feels it like a hand closing around his chest. His heart gives a sudden, traitorous lurch, like the absence of weight at the top of a fall.

“Witching hour, tonight.” Tom replies. “Fourth floor, in the old room behind the Snidget tapestry.”

Harry says nothing. His gaze lingers for a moment longer, then drops. He walks away. 

And though they’re meant to be heading to the same place, Tom watches Harry’s retreating figure for a moment longer, then turns on his heel in the opposite direction.

There’s no sense in attending Transfiguration now. He’s already late, and he’ll need the rest of the afternoon to prepare for tonight.

By the time the sun has made its descent, Tom is halfway through his toilette. 

His hair requires significant intervention. It is washed, then washed again. The first rinse dries frizzy; the second helps better define his curls. Then, he parts, ruffles, and coaxes it into an arrangement that appears incidental but is, in fact, the product of twenty full minutes and a spell he invented at thirteen. Before he steps away from the mirror, he coils a lock forward with his finger, then adjusts it millimetrically until it rests where it ought. 

Three shirts lie rejected across his bed: one deemed too soft in the collar, another unflatteringly cut at the waist, and the third dismissed on principle, having been seen on him before in the presence of unremarkable company. He ends up selecting the fourth not because it is ideal (nothing ever is, his standards as high as they are), but because it strikes the appropriate balance between studied ease and the kind of fastidiousness he does not acknowledge as such. Its buttons are inspected, polished, and aligned until they draw a clean vertical line down the torso, smooth under his robe. He fastens and refastens them several times.

Cologne is considered. Tom ends up applying a single drop at the throat, and another at the wrist. If Harry notices, good. If he doesn’t, he’s a philistine to whom Tom is doing a great favour dedicating this much effort to.

And when he finally steps back from the mirror, he sees what he always does: the most elegant version of what is already a superior form. 

Hogwarts at night is an entirely different castle altogether. In the early November dark, the stones hold cold, exhaling it in slow, invisible pulses through the corridors. Torches burn sparsely, their flames casting long, stuttering shadows that sway like bodies in water. Every sound carries; the hollow clacks of their shoes, the drag of wind through mullioned windows, the creak of wood somewhere several stories above. Even the portraits sleep at this hour, folded into their armchairs or sunken into painted glades, breathing in that shallow, mimicry-of-life way.

But beneath the stillness, there is a hum, a charge stitched into the very bones of the place. Tom feels it respond to him as he passes, pressing into him, as though the castle itself is leaning in to listen to what he has to say.

His Knights move in silence, their footsteps reverent as they fall into procession behind him. They always travel in ordered pairs, the very architecture of their movement sacrament in of itself. And to be among the first, part of those who accompany Tom, is no small privilege. Tonight, that honour belongs to Avery and Nott, selected for their recent displays of composure while the rest of the student body seems to have lost their minds. 

The others will follow in staggered formation: Malfoy, Black, and Lestrange, that insufferable triumvirate, then a handful of acolytes from the younger years — Mulciber, Dolohov, Carrow.

Harry had not been present when they left the common room, but it is no matter. There are certain gravities in the world, and his attendance tonight is one of them.

They arrive at the fourth floor with no issue.

The chamber hidden behind the Snidget tapestry bears the bones of its age, its arched ceiling ribbed with soot-darkened beams, set upon a sunken floor of uneven flagstones worn soft over centuries. Whatever purpose it once served has long been lost to the shifting sands of institutional memory, but Tom has claimed it as his own, and he has wheedled it into refinement over time.

Chairs — none of which match, but all high-backed — form a ring around a low, lacquered table that gleams with obsessive polish. Atop it sits a simple hourglass and a silver dish for the collection of wands. The walls are bare and the windows remain firmly latched against the outside air. Moonlight filters through a stained-glass depiction of a thunderbird, mid-swoop, its wings stretched in a silent cry across the leaded panes. Its brilliant plumage casts shattered colours across the floor: violet, amber, bruised crimson. The effect is lurid, like light spilling from a wound.

Upon entering, his Knights cross the space in silence, pausing just long enough to place their wands in the shallow dish at the centre of the table. None are instructed to do so. They have simply learned, early on, that it was expected. 

Naturally, Tom does not surrender his own. He never does. 

Then each boy touches two fingers briefly to the inside of his forearm, marking his fealty. For years, Tom has sought a means to make this ritual endure beyond the symbolic. It is only recently, upon catching sight of the mark on Harry’s neck, that the notion of a tattoo has taken hold. This is a matter he intends to resolve at a later date.

Soon, the next batch arrives, and then the next, until the table swells with bodies. They sit with hands pressed between their knees, mouths drawn in trembling lines as if trying very hard to keep solemn. Tom likes to compare them to hyenas; these sleek, sharp-toothed things masquerading as disciples, all muscle and appetite beneath their neurotic restraint. 

And, predators that they are, they all notice the empty chair to his right. He had said nothing of a new addition, yet the vacancy speaks louder than any announcement might. Despite their presence, this is an affair meant for him and his boy alone, and so Tom finds no pleasure in their speculation and furtive glances. 

It is a little after twelve. But of course Harry wouldn’t be functional at this hour, mutinous little thing that he is. A lazy flutter of warmth stirs in Tom at the thought. He allows the tardiness.

He will not start until Harry is here, so he lets the silence stretch.

Ten minutes pass without a single word. The others remain unmoving, barely daring to shuffle or cough or shift their weight, watching him from the corners of their eyes for any sign of his intention. But Tom gives them nothing. His fingers steeple beneath his chin, his sights fixed somewhere beyond the flickering edge of the lamplight. Waiting.

With each passing second, his patience begins to twist, coil, knot into a tension both private and seething. The reserved chair starts to taunt him. The thought that Harry might not come (absurd, impossible) stirs gradually, low in his belly, and works its way up to his throat, and then his brain, like hot poison. His chest tightens, a feverish throb of fury lodged behind the ribs.

If he doesn’t show, Tom will take him. 

No more games, no more patience drawn out in the name of subtlety. He will gag him, shatter his ankles, and chain him to his bed. Tom had been willing, maybe even eager, to possess him quietly, to coax rather than claim. But if even gentleness is enough to drive Harry away, then let gentleness die. He will be thunderous in his wanting.

He’ll peel the teeth from his gums. He’ll carve into the tender weight of his liver and savour the taste. He’ll spit into his mouth and force him to—

The door creaks open.

Harry slips inside without apology. The air in the room shifts. Tom does not move, but a fire within him roars victoriously. His spine straightens like he’s been reeled back from the edge of catastrophe. Across the table, Avery sags ever so slightly, as though he had been bracing for Tom’s wrath, and is only now remembering how to breathe.

No one else in the room matters, now. Harry is here. 

He is barely a silhouette at first, haloed in fractured colour. Then, violently, the stained-glass spills its hues across his face, splitting him open, like a holy thing desecrated. His hair is a mess, sleep-flattened and curling at the edges, and his hastily thrown on robes hang slightly askew, the collar of his shirt stretched and dipping low over the slope of his sternum. There is something utterly disarming about the disorder he brings with him, the way his eyes sweep the room like an owl’s, almost glowing, impossibly alert. 

Tom wonders, a shriek ringing in the pit of him, where he'd come from if not the dormitories. Why he looks as though he'd just stumbled from someone else's bed. But all of it, all of it, silences when, at last, Harry finds him.

Tom doesn’t have the sense to be embarrassed as the name punches out of him, unbidden. “Harry.” 

Harry blinks. “Um. Hullo.”

He feels deliriously happy. His cheeks ache with the force of it alone. “Come. Sit. This seat is yours.” 

A dozen pairs of eyes track Harry as he moves, the scrape of the chair legs a jagged thing against the hush. He doesn’t look at anyone but Tom. For that alone, Tom could crown him. 

He waits until Harry is settled, tense in his seat, taking in the heavy wood table, then the boys seated like disciples around them.

Then, Tom stands. 

“This,” he starts, “is not a club.” Echoes lap at the fringes of his words. “This is not a project, nor a pastime.”

He begins to move along the arc of the table, the long sweep of his robes trailing behind him. His hands remain clasped behind his back. He speaks with deliberation, each word weighed like a coin.

“What you’ve been allowed to glimpse, until now, was a sliver of purpose.” He stops, casting consideration slowly across them, his Knights all straining not to blink. “In a few short months, our time within these walls will end, and I grow tired of pretending this is anything less than what it is. We are not followers. We are architects. Tonight, I mean to speak plainly. And I will not offer an apology for the ambition that drives us. Not when it demands we shape the world, rather than suffer its shape upon us.”

He turns his head slightly, just enough to catch Harry in the corner of his eye. He sits slouched in his chair, one elbow hooked lazily over the armrest, brow drawn in quiet scrutiny. Entirely unbowed. There is no diffidence in him or slack-jawed awe. Only the measured distance of someone who sees clearly.

Tom drinks it in.

It is rare, and he delights in the challenge it poses. The thrill of a will not yet bent, a soul still flaring against his draw. Tom smiles faintly. He will cajole worship from those eyes. He will earn it, if he must. 

And what a joy it will be, when Harry finally kneels.

Tom has his words prepared today. Unusual for him, as he often prefers improvisation, but necessary. Persuading Harry requires more than charisma. It demands caution. Harry, after all, is no stranger to the seductive craft of oratory. Grindelwald would have ensured that.

“Our kind is shrinking.” He croons. 

It will strike every chord. It will revisit all the foundations, sharpen them. Even his Knights, long-accustomed to the contours of his vision, will not find it stale. One does not grow weary of fire simply because it burns the same way. 

And no one is ever bored by Tom.

“They will not say it so plainly. They dress it up in kinder words and call it progress. Integration. Co-existence. Tolerance. But I do not deal in illusions. I deal in truth, and there is but one truth: we are vanishing. Our numbers dwindle. Bloodlines are thinned to threadbare. Children speak the old names like blasphemy. Our traditions are relics. And every year, there are fewer of us who remember why they ever mattered in the first place.

“They have taught you to be embarrassed of what you are. To shrink from your own inheritance like a stain. They force-feed you history written by the conquered and call it enlightenment. They hand our customs to filthy, heretical cretin and call it education. If you so much as question it, you are told you are backwards. You are told you are cruel.

“But I know cruelty, intimately. I have worn it. Slept beside it. Watched it in the eyes of those who struck me for the crime of being different. The way Muggles treat power they cannot control? That is cruelty. The way they mistake ignorance for righteousness? Cruelty. The sound of air raid sirens devouring the sky, the scent of blood and burning beneath it — that is cruelty in its most honest form. That is the world that they have built, and it is cruel. 

“And now they want to build over us.” He pauses. The current of his conviction compels him forward like siren-song. He knows he looks as riveting as he sounds. “In June, this school will close its doors to us. Then, we will no longer be children. We will be cast into a world bloated with fear, governed by lesser men, and trembling beneath the weight of its own ruin. And what a ruin it is. The Muggle world chokes on its own filth. It has gutted its forests, salted its seas, and worships machines that kill by numbers, all because they are powerless to do what we can do natively.

“They burned us, once. You’ve read the histories. The strangling of brilliance in its crib, because it frightened them. The torture of those too strange, too gifted, too unapologetically powerful. And since then, what has changed, truly? Only this: that we were forced into silence. But the Statute of Secrecy did not free us. It bound us. Disguised our retreat as mercy. We live in the shadows of a world that should kneel at our feet!

“They send their spawn to coexist among us. Mudbloods, raised on delusion and commodity and the false gods of men, walk our halls as if they belong. They do not understand the power they are handed. They do not revere it. They seek to reforge our world in the image of their own. Into one that is ugly and loud and faithless, and no dares stop them. No one even speaks. Because to speak is to invite condemnation. Madness, they call it.

“Do I look mad, my Knights of Walpurgis?” He asks, rhetorically, but they shake their heads with fervour anyway. All but Harry, who does not move. “No. Nor am I afraid. We are the last line. The last keepers of sanctity.

“And though there are those among us whose own blood is not unimpeachable, that does not disqualify them from the reckoning. It is more than lineage, it is a philosophy. There are purebloods who squander it, too, who debase their heritage by colluding with our lessers. And there are others, some of us here, who were forged in darker places, who understand the price of power because we have paid it.

“I say to you: power is not granted by name or coin or law. It is taken. It is enforced. We must be the ones who remember what magic once meant! We must rebuild the world in its rightful image, shaped by those who are willing to grasp it with both hands, unflinching.

“And if this world will not recognise our right to rule, then we will carve that recognition into its bones.”

The last of his words fall from his lips with the strike of inevitability. Some surge forward with devotion they can no longer keep contained, adulation spilling over their shoulders to splat wetly onto the table. 

Tom allows a moment for the echoes of his speech to bleed through their final iterations, tension thickening until they all choke in it. Then, without breaking the stillness, he speaks again, his tone deliberate, imbued with an authority that is unmistakably no one’s but his own.

“Let it be more than words.” He murmurs, flicking across the table, watching for his Knights' reactions. Tom does not allow himself to look at Harry here, not yet. He holds back, knowing that when he finally casts his eyes on the sight of his adoration, it will be all the sweeter for it. “Let us make this real. Now.”

He could ask for anything in the world, and they would find a way to make it his. This power is potent, as sweet as ambrosia itself. In this moment, he is immortal in every way of the word. 

Tom lifts one hand, long fingers twisting in a flick of motion so fluid it might have been a trick of the light. A tarnished box materializes, the clasp clicking open with a metallic hiss. Within, a charmed knife gleams faintly. The blade will absorb the blood of anyone who offers it, binding them to him until he can more permanently do so. He conjures a spare piece of parchment as well.

“A drop of blood. Not to me alone, but to the cause. Let it bind you to this future we have set in motion. Let it mark you, as it will mark us all.”

The Knights do not hesitate. They step forward as though they are drawn by a force beyond themselves. Avery is first, his palm sliced open with a slick, utilitarian motion. The blood, dark and sticky, soaks the yellowed page when he presses his palm to the parchment. Nott follows suit, then Malfoy. Black. Lestrange. Dolohov. Carrow. Mulciber. 

Tom finally allows himself to look toward the boy for whom this show was truly meant for, the one who has not yet stirred from his seat.

Harry's wide eyes are fixed on Tom.

(Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.)

This is it, he tells himself, and his prick swells suddenly. This is the moment, the scene of first submission he will tuck away in memory to savour for a lifetime. For Harry, Tom thinks, he will conjure a new parchment. One unmarred by the vile secretions of his other Knights, for Harry alone to spill his blood onto. And Tom will keep it for the forever he intends to live. Framed on his wall, perhaps, or folded beneath the warmth of his cheek as he sleeps.

Triumph coils in the pit in his gut.

The stillness stretches a second too long.

If Tom wasn’t so sure of himself, he might interpret Harry’s expression as… horrified. 

Surely not. 

This cannot be the end of it, not after all this. Harry will come around. He has to.

He must.

“Harry,” Tom says, carefully, his voice drawn with effort, as though wheedling a feral creature from the dark. There is a bitter flood rising now, unease lapping onto the edges of his pride. He refuses to name it. “You must understand better than anyone. You followed Grindelwald once. I promise, I will not fail you as he has.”

Harry’s eyes drop to the blade, slick with ichor not his own, then rise again to Tom. His voice, when it comes, is thunder held barely in check.

“You’re deranged.” He nearly yells. It is only an octave below. “All of you are fucking sick!”

A muscle jumps in Tom’s jaw, his molars clenching so viciously, it’s a wonder they don’t grind into powder.

“This– this isn’t vision! It’s a mausoleum! A prison whose bars have been gilded by thousands before, and no less brutally. You think you’re building a future, but all I see is a monument to your own ego, carved by the same tired doctrine that’s strangled the world before.”

A hiss cuts through the ranks, and one of the Knights jerks in his seat. Tom doesn’t register who. His vision has narrowed to a single point. There is nothing in the room but the glorious, spitting boy before him.

“You’re not a prophet.” Harry continues. He glances once at the others — familiar faces turned strange — before returning to Tom again. “You’re not architects. You’re scavengers. And you are a boy playing tyrant. You think the world owes you dominion because you’re too frightened to exist without it.”

Harry’s final blow lands unflinching. “And I won’t bleed to feed your delusion.”

Tom’s mouth curls into a hollow curve, frown like a fault line.

“You won’t bleed for this.”

“Never.”

And he sounds, impossibly, as though there is nothing he is surer of.

The silence that follows is total. The dagger lies idle, thirst unsated. The parchment glistens with blood, near-black and still wet, but Harry’s print will not be among them. Nor will it be on a record of its own. 

Somewhere, unseen, Tom wounds in kind.

Chapter Text

The Restricted Section smells of rot.

Tom has long since grown used to it, but never enough to be indifferent to the dry, acrid taste it leaves at the back of his throat. He suspects the stench comes from the varnish particular to its volumes, released by spines cracked for the first time in decades, or perhaps from the curses buried so deep in their bindings that they leak dark magic’s miasma. Naturally, the under-handled air doesn’t help; the slightly sticky stagnation of dust only absorbs the stink and amplifies it. 

He has annexed a corner behind a leaning pillar, where the shelves curve in on themselves like a spiral shell. The desk is warped at the edges and littered in engravings immune to all patching spells; and on it lies nothing but ink, the dagger, the parchment, now crusty with dried blood, and a scattering of tomes too dense to carry without injury. Their titles leer up at him in worm-eaten Gothic: Binding in Essence, Magicks of the Marked and Bound, Infernal Marks.

There are no windows around. Only a single light, suspended just overhead in a wrought-iron bracket. It casts a grudging circle of illumination around the desk. His quill sits crooked in its pot, the ink gone to clot. He hasn’t noticed.

Because Tom is not currently doing what he came here to do. Instead, he paces. Irregularly, jaggedly, the pace discarded almost as soon as it begins. His shoes drag in places. In others, he moves too fast, like something’s chasing his heels. The movement feels loud in his body. Too loud. It is a hum in his gums, impossible to scratch out.

A book slips from the corner of the desk and lands face down. He doesn’t stop. The light glimmers. His eyes keep catching on the edge of the dagger. The metal blade seems to pulse.

He rounds the corner of the desk again. Again. Slower this time.

A foreign presence lodges in his throat. He thinks he should get it out. He thinks he should sit. He should write. He should keep reading. But the thought of it repulses. The text swims when he looks at it. Every word strikes the wrong chord.

He stops, but it doesn't feel like stillness. It feels like drowning upright.

The library used to think with him. Now it feels occupied by a force he cannot distinguish. There is a tautness to the walls, stretched too fine to see. He will not name it. Lending it shape would only give the tautness power.

But the silence isn't clean anymore. It clings. It trails him when he moves, then rushes back to fill the space he leaves behind, like water over a wound.

He shuffles the parchment. Picks the book off the floor. Repositions the dagger, just so. Nothing resists him. Nothing dares to. And still, it won't settle.

His thoughts circle the same inch of ground. Not forward. Not back. Just round and round, carving a hole he can’t step out of. The need to ruin comes and goes. He feels as faint and childish and persistent as he did as a child.

Tom’s wants’ have wants that have wants. 

And each is hungrier than the last. He cannot tell if he is moving toward a conclusion, or only fuelling the flame that scorched him.

I won’t bleed to feed your delusion.

The quill tips out of the ink pot and rolls across the table. He snatches it too quickly. Too hard. The nib snaps. A black star of ink blooms across the page with the blood, veining into the various brown handprints like tributaries. He stares at it.

That night should have been perfect. It should have been theirs. 

He had set the stage with care. There was no coercion in it. 

And still, Harry had refused him. 

Tom closes his eyes and sees his boy’s face, white with fury, lit by a hundred colours that could not compare to the distinct shade of his wild eyes.

He is a god spurned, he thinks. Then: no. Not godhood. Not yet.

But a debt must be owed.

The bloom of ink keeps spreading.

He drags the parchment aside so abruptly it crumples, and forces himself back to the books. The nearest one crackles beneath his grip. Binding in Essence. It’s grubby, the vellum cover warped with damp, but exhaustive in a way most are not. He begins to flip through the thin pages.

There is a reason he came here tonight, and it is not to wallow. 

He finds the passage halfway down a leaf scrawled in tight, unpleasant script. The theory is archaic, certainly, pulled from half-legible sources and overwritten with dissenting notes, but a structure has begun to emerge from what he’s gathered. Old blood rites insist on permanence. Sacrificial symbols carved into living hosts. Repeated offerings, layered sediment until they harden into truth.

Tom finds this approach unambitious.

What he intends will be enduring, yes, but not burdensome. His followers will not merely bear his mark, they will be shaped by it. Made willing vessels, attuned to his presence even at great distance, inclined toward him like iron to lodestone.

It will be a permanent resonance.  His voice beneath their skin. His summons carried before sound. An inauguration. A ritual. A seal drawn on the faithful. 

And he has the necessary agents to make this happen. The dagger had not been mere theatre, after all; not when he so meticulously charmed its blade to memorise the unique makeup of each Knight’s blood. Nor was the parchment symbolic alone, when it holds the imprint of their willing fealty. Together they make essence and intent, preserved in tandem, a convergence magic often favours.

It just falls to him now to impress himself into the space between them, to find the exact circuit through which his will might enter theirs. Only then will there be progress. 

He conjures a new quill and bends over a clean scrap of parchment. His fingers twitch, hesitating as he calculates. The design must come from within the logic of the thing.

Runes first. 

Of course, there will be a border, eventually. A threshold to contain what he builds. But not yet.

He works quickly. This is always the part of magic that comes easiest to him: this act of creation, the weaving of a system that belongs to no one else.

Midway, he refers to Magicks of the Marked and Bound . The same principles hold. There’s a portion about commitment being stronger than command. Of binding not through force, but equal recognition.

He pauses.

Recognition.

His teeth click together. The word turns sour in his mouth.

There comes a rustle from above, some distant shift in the stacks, and he jerks, irrationally, as though it might be him, though of course it isn’t. Harry wouldn’t come here. It is too shady a place.

Tom dips his quill again. When he presses it to the page, his hand is unsteady. The nib scratches too deep. The rune runs off in an awry direction.

He tries to correct it, drawing the line again from its root, but it catches once more and veers subtly off course. The symmetry proves compromised, the motion no longer natural. 

This is not how it should feel. 

He stares at the page, willing it to make sense again. The momentum that had begun to stir in him only moments before has scattered beyond reach now, replaced by a slackness he does not recognise.

Tom looks back through the book, pages fluttering beneath his clammy fingers, but the writing takes on the texture of mould, the words stretching too long and too slow across the parchment, as if disassembling themselves before they can be grasped. They blur together until they become black maggots on bone.

He blinks. Starts from the top again. The passage is useless.

Another rune caves the moment he draws it. The line bends wrong and the energy unravels. He feels the fault not in his wrist, but somewhere deeper, just behind his eyes, where attention used to hold. The page, the quill, the shape of the spell itself — they have begun to feel as though they belong to someone else.

(And perhaps they do, so long as a part of him still follows the turn of Harry’s shoulder as he walked away.)

Tom should not be this susceptible. He should be able to outlast this. He ought to be sharper, colder, capable of reaching past such noise. Yet the moment keeps returning, Again. And again. And again.

He squeezes his eyes shut. Harry’s voice resurfaces the moment he does, so loud it doesn’t feel like memory. 

I won’t bleed to feed your delusion. Never. 

And when he opens them again, the parchment containing all of his hard work is suddenly, inexplicably blank.

Part of him has come loose.

Tom stares at the empty page and feels a sudden lacking like thinning air, as though some interior mechanism he had taken for granted is beginning to fail him in increments. And for all his cleverness, try as he might, he cannot locate where the rupture begins. 

If he cannot write, he cannot mark; if he cannot mark, he cannot bind; and if he cannot bind, then nothing he builds will hold. The error is not in the theory. The theory is immaculate. The failure is elsewhere. The failure is external. 

The failure is Harry.

Only—

It cannot be, not really. Harry is merely… misguided, his vision obstructed by sentiment or some treacherous narrative impressed upon him by those who didn’t understand what power looks like when it isn’t softened. One cannot condemn a blind horse for missing the gate. 

Tom believed he could correct this with his own persuasion, in turn. But words, it seems, are a crude tool for men who are all action. There had been no mistake in Tom's rhetoric. There had only been misapprehension in its reception. Whatever part of Harry failed to receive it remains out of Tom’s understanding.

And that is the root of the issue.

That is the part he cannot suffer.

Tom cannot possess what he does not understand in full. He cannot account for what he cannot anticipate. There had been a time when he thought himself close to it, when Harry’s patterns began to suggest themselves to him, but he has grown lax recently, distracted by construction and ceremony and by the false assurance that knowing the boy’s movements meant knowing the boy himself. 

Committing himself to glances across a hall, intercepted conversations, secondhand rumours gathered from mouths too slow to grasp implication is clearly not sufficient. It never was. 

But it would be weak to forfeit now.

He must understand what eluded him when Harry rejected his hand, and why it came cloaked in such certainty that Tom had been blindsided. He must see every fold of the mask and every absence beneath it. He must be witness to the parts no one else sees. He must possess not just the image of his boy, but the intervals between his gestures, the space between his every breath, the patterns to his unguarded minutiae.

The solution, then, is not camaraderie, but investigation. To know, he must study. 

Annotations re: Harry

— Returns to the dormitory before curfew, without fail. Makes sure his presence is known. 

— Curtains closed without exception. No disturbances overnight. No snores.

Tuesday: breath identified at 10:05, 12:43, 2:22, 4:18–4:29. 

Wednesday: breath identified at 11:00, 12:17-12:34, 3:58, 5:20. 

— Three absences in five days. Irregular intervals. Morning bedclothes untouched. No body heat retained. No observed exit. No noise.

Unaccounted for at breakfast twice.

Missing at dinner four times.

No reported illness. No sanctioned absence on record.

— Private Quidditch drills with Alphard Black and Ignatius Prewett off the main pitch on free afternoons. No permits filed. Sessions last forty to seventy minutes.

Recreational. No observable coaching.

Removed from team practice by Orion. Petty retaliation. Useful to me.

Demeanour during drills: focused, enlivened, sharper than in class. 

— Remains behind after Transfiguration every second or third session. Intervals irregular but frequent. Dumbledore keeps him longer than warranted. Always private. Door closed.

No punishment. No sign of reprimand afterward.

Adequate class performance and frequency too high to be instructional.

Longest duration: twelve minutes, thirty-eight seconds.

— Never receives owl post. No mail or packages.

— No visiting family or mind healer logged on file. No permissions requested for leave.

— No social anchor outside Black and Prewett.

Harry’s absences do not align with any sanctioned obligation, and there is no natural rhythm to them. That they occur in defiance of sleep, and without visible consequence, suggests planning. There is no academic demand sufficient to warrant such secrecy. No social tether to obscure. I doubt it is some clandestine affair. Dumbledore lingers over him with a closeness that cannot be excused by pedagogy alone, and Harry permits it. Their connection is not casual. He protects it viciously. 

I have not accounted for everything yet. But the pattern exists. I will find the root. He is not slipping past me again.

His words settle on the page, the parchment knowing to cement what is entrusted to it. Tom’s diary is the only vessel he allows to bear the full weight of his thought; if any other hand attempts to open it, it will offer them nothing — charmed to appear as an empty, lifeless thing, blank and unremarkable in every way.

But it has been months since he last fed it, and the soul pressed between the pages has grown restless in its hunger, starved of thought and attention long enough now that it makes its presence a nuisance. 

What precisely am I meant to conclude from this? Have we lost our mind?

The critique scathes in a voice too familiar to himself. Tom lowers the quill a moment, glancing down as though at an unruly child daring correction.

We… He answers, slowly, deliberately. Are beyond such pedestrian thresholds as losing or keeping a mind. If you cannot follow the logic, restrain yourself from commenting until you can.

There is a pause. Then the reply appears like venom curdling in water.

You are following him through corridors in the middle of the night. You are timing his breathing. This is not logic. It is humiliation.

It is scrutiny. Tom writes. Precision. You would prefer what, in its stead? Spontaneity? To simply feel our way into knowing him? You mistake methodology for madness. That is not my failure.

The diary’s ink pools into a blot before spitting out the next words.

No. I would rather prefer nothing at all. This is an obsession. You’ve made him central. You orbit him like a lesser thing.

Tom’s jaw tightens. The quill snaps slightly at the angle of his grip before he tempers it.

He is a variable, and I will understand him entirely. 

A beat. Then:

You sound like you’ve already lost. There’s no mastery in need.

Tom smiles, but it is cold, and it does not touch the place inside him that has begun to feel the sting of those words. He dips his quill again.

And you sound like a child too frightened of wanting to admit that you do. What you mistake for need is only the sensation of potential not yet realised. If you cannot see the difference, I am relieved to have outgrown you.

The page trembles faintly under his hand, as though it were resisting what has been written there. Then nothing follows. His younger soul retreats into itself like a thing chastened.

Head Boy rounds are a rote obligation, pedestrian in nature and devoid of the dignity they once seemed to offer him. Tonight, in particular, they border on insulting.

Tom finds there is no satisfaction to be had in the assertion of authority when he suffers from the failure of exerting control over even his own self. The diary. That stubborn, irreverent vexation. One might expect a soul, when cleaved, to offer fidelity to its source, like a mirror held to the flame, not a snide caricature of its origin. But what resides within those pages is a younger version of himself rendered insufferably puerile, arrogant in the precise ways that now repulse him. To be confronted so directly with his lesser self is evidently not enlightening, and certainly a poor start to his evening.

Still. Tom’s steps are measured as he makes his way through the darkened hallways. There is no prescribed path for a Head Boy on patrol, only a stretch of time to fill, and the vague expectation that presence might be detected in the more trafficked arteries of the castle. But he has long abandoned such inefficiencies. Tom knows which corridors yield results and which do not. That the third-floor antechamber behind the bust of Anselm the Alert is a common refuge for late-night snogging, and that the West Gallery beneath the bell tower seems to draw students with a performative taste for danger, thrilled less by risk than by the thought of being witnessed.

He does not waste time there tonight.

Instead, he cuts east through the transept, stones narrowing and arches pitching higher with grandeur. He slips through the shadows of the old alchemy wing. He glances behind the tapestry near the staff’s private hallway — a site of former discretion among students clever enough to circumvent prefects, but not him. 

It hangs, undisturbed.

Tom, despite shirking his official duties, does not feign his vigilance. He is hunting. And the steps he takes, precisely placed between floorboards that creak and ones that do not, are done with a singular fixation. The corridors bend to him as though they, too, remember who walks them.

And then — on the narrow descent from the trophy room — he hears it. Footsteps. Thread-thin, their sound caught and distorted by distance. Faint enough to miss. But not by him.

His ears attune to it instantly, back straightening, breath holding itself hostage to the beat. There’s a distinct cadence to them, alert-like. Heel, then toe, then lift. A subtle spring in the step that speaks of agility. Not a professor. Yet they move with the ease of one who knows the castle in its silence, avoiding any slab that would shift underfoot, just as Tom himself does. A regular miscreant. Regardless, it is certainly the sound of someone who expects to move unseen.

Tom stills completely. His mind, so fractious as of late, coheres at once. It’s no ordinary sound. It’s a signature. The slight narrowing of stride when rounding a corner, the almost imperceptible drag when descending, the particular weight distribution that gives each footfall a clipped finality. He has all but internalised its specificity by now. He could transcribe it like music if made to. He knows it the way one knows a repeated line of scripture: by soul.

It is unmistakably Harry.

A surge begins to rise in him, zealous and electric and consuming. It begins in the chest and coils outward. His lips part. What he feels is closer to hunger. And it quickens him.

He spells his footsteps to silence and moves down the staircase with impetus. Out of the cylindrical walls of the turret, the sound becomes clearer now. Tom’s pulse stutters with the flush of cold, roaring blood. He rounds a corner, taking the tight turn without pause, and slips through a gallery hall, passing alcoves, old suits of armour, a long disused classroom where the air still smells faintly of the fire that put it out of commission.

The echo shifts, moving upward. Harry is changing levels, taking the north stairs near the observatory hall. Tom adjusts course without hesitation. There is no doubt in his mind. He does not need to see the back of Harry’s head or the fall of his shoulders to be sure. 

The sound is enough. 

It lives in his ear the way the scent of viscera lives in the nose of a hound bred too long for the hunt. A primal instinct flares to life in him, predatorial in shape, sharpened and inhuman, as if his very body has been engineered to track this singular quarry, through any terrain, through any silence. Each of Harry’s footfalls tightens his focus. Every turn feeds the anticipation curling inside him.

There is no room left for abstraction now. Tom will find out where he slips away to. He will catch him. He will know. He will understand.

The sound draws nearer. Tom gains ground. A few seconds more. Right. Left. Up a flight of stairs. He moves too quickly to register where, exactly, the castle has carried him — only that Harry is close, unbearably close, the warmth of his body still lingering in the gaps of air Tom steps into.

Just around the next bend.

He slows. Rounds it with practiced caution, breath shallow, pulse thudding with the dull pressure of blood behind his eyes.

But the corridor is empty.

No one is here. Not even the flash of a robe’s edge or the hiss of air displaced by motion. Just blank stone, and a smothering nothingness.

Tom forces stillness onto himself. His heart does not skip a beat. But the silence gapes, like it knows what was taken from him.

Harry is gone. Harry is gone, despite having been just here. 

He was here. That was him. Tom is sure of it.

His eyes narrow as if focus might reshape the hallway, or might summon from it some suggestion of where his boy has slipped. He stands still, scanning the edges, the floor, the walls. It relinquishes nothing. Things remain as they are. Long and silent and unobliging. 

He starts moving again. The spell on his footsteps has fallen, and he hears each like a gunshot. Retracing, eyes flitting over doors, corners, light. No gaps. No crevices. No magical latches or hidden passages or secret cupboards.

A breath slips from him. His hand twitches at his side, then curls into a fist.

The night hollows out. Tom is left standing in it, suffocated by a question that refuses an answer.

He has claimed a spot beneath a bare-branched elm, his books arranged before him in a half-mockery of study. It is a slow afternoon — a rare occasion indeed, given the weight of his course load — and Tom is set to make the most of it. 

 The air, thin with that crisp, metallic chill particular to the Scottish Highlands in mid-November, bites at the fingers and settles into the joints, no matter the amount of warming charms he layers over their spot. Wind thrashes through the dead reeds by the Black Lake’s edge and rakes long, violent claws through the trees behind them. Avery, seated two paces off, is muttering over folded parchment and has not looked up in nearly fifteen minutes. 

They sit at the fringe of the forest, bracketed by conifers dark with sap and stripped winter shrubs. And beyond the soft rise and dip of the hillock before them, a field flattens out into a makeshift pitch; which is, really, little more than a stretch of churned grass marked by clumsy, poorly transfigured hoops. It is barely visible from this distance, but the action unfolding upon it is unmistakable.

Three figures swoop against the pallid grey afternoon like finches. The sky above them hangs low and mean, battered by weather that is truly unforgivable for sport.

But Harry flies as if the wind bends to him.

Even at this distance, even through the scrim of his own disinterest in Quidditch, Tom cannot help but mark the way he commands his broom. For a seeker no doubt accustomed to hanging just beyond the margins of action, he makes a remarkably proficient chaser, though his style is unshaped by the formal discipline typical to a team.

Tom turns a page of his book without once looking at it.

The match — if one can call such a scrimmage between three rogue players a match — is not a novel occurrence. Tom has observed the pattern more than once. Alphard, Ignatius, and Harry, around whom the entire thing orbits like some inevitable celestial fact, play often, even though the other two boys are bound by the obligations of their own house teams and the early morning drudgery of official practice. He supposes there is an appeal about it, unperformed. No eyes, no expectation, no consequences. 

(Or perhaps it is simply Harry himself, who seems incapable of doing anything without infecting it with that particular vitality he carries like a contagion, as though the world should stir merely because he’s chosen to touch it.)

Tom’s jaw clenches as he takes in the display. There is an obscenity to the ease in which he plays. The unstudied possession of the sky, the trust in the broom beneath him, the laughing openness of someone who, for the brief span of flight, can forget what the ground requires of him. 

And then there he is, Tom, sitting in the brittle cold, rendered inert and foolish in his silent observation. If he could, he would distill that laughter, that reckless, maddening trust, and hoard it for himself alone. He would bind it in glass, strip it of its freedom, clip his boy’s wings, and fashion for him a gilded cage so exquisite in its making that Harry would not notice the bars.

He watches as Harry veers up recklessly into a headwind, only to twist mid-ascent and drop backward into a spiral so tight it seems to violate the broom’s very make. One hand on the shaft, the other outstretched, his fingers brush the leather blur of the Quaffle and pluck it from the air. 

It is not envy, what Tom feels. He has never been prone to such misery. But he remembers his own first flying lesson at that moment; the hot embarrassment of a broom that refused to obey him, and the lilt of the instructor’s voice as they explained that willpower alone was insufficient. Control, they said, must be coaxed, never imposed. And he had hated the air for years afterward. 

Yet the old, school-issued broom follows Harry, as does the wind. He banks on a gust too sharp for reason, cuts through a crosswind without falter, and it occurs to Tom that his boy is not merely skilled. He is in command of something elemental. There is no trace of calculation in him. He simply acts, and the world forms itself around every decision he makes.

In the complicated recesses of his mind, a thought turns and clicks softly into place. The kind of obedience that matters will never be wrung from resistance. It must come freely and unknowingly and as intuitively as the air answers Harry's call. That is what makes it last.

When the cold starts to seep past the fabric of his robes and into the marrow of his bones, the scrimmage finally ends, and Harry begins his descent. Across from him, Avery is still absorbed in his work, eyes flicking back and forth in that slow, bovine rhythm that suggests he’s no closer to clarity than when they first sat down. He is, evidently, not as bothered by the weather.

Tom rises without announcement. His books obey at once, floating from the grass before tucking themselves into his bag in perfect order.

Avery glances up, thick forehead creasing as he squints. “Would you like me to go back in with you?”

“No need.” Tom says. 

Then, without another word, he turns toward the castle.

It yawns wide open for him as he slips through its side entrance. The relative warmth within its walls catches only on the surface, doing little to thaw the damp that has wormed its ways into his clothes. A smear of blackened mud streaks one cuff of his trousers, the hem heavy, waterlogged, his shirt beginning to chill in earnest along the collar where the wind caught him.

Tom descends the dungeon steps until he reaches the common room. Inside, he cuts through it without pause, slipping past people too absorbed in themselves to offer more than a glance. His dormitory is empty, as expected, so he unclasps his robe with a flick, already reaching for a drier pair. The garb peels from his skin in cold, wet folds.

Then, he stops.

From the bathroom comes the unmistakable sound of running water. 

He knows where his Knights are. Precisely where. Every one of them. Which means only one thing.

Harry is here.

But of course he would be. He’s been out just as long, thrashed by not just the weather but the added exertion of exercise too. And since Orion, in all his predictable petulance, has barred him from the team’s quarters in some half-hearted assertion since Harry’s dismissal of Tom, there is only one place left for him to come.

His gaze lingers on the crack beneath the door, steam puffing out in bursts of air. 

Impulse takes him whole, possessing his limbs before logic can intervene, vision tightening at the edges as he moves toward the bathroom door. The thrill climbs his legs like a fever, needy and electric, until it collects at the base of his spine. 

The door gives without resistance. Perhaps it makes a sound. Perhaps it doesn't. He wouldn’t hear it either way, deep as he is inside the moment to notice.

Harry doesn’t either, and if Tom believed in divine interference, he might be tempted to thank it. His boy stands in one of the showers, curtain shoddily left half-open, water running over him. His head is tilted up, eyes closed, hands scrubbing his scalp. Soap slips through fingers and trails down his back.

He’s filled out in recent weeks. The looseness of his frame has given way to definition, muscles now carrying a volume to them. The prominence of his ribs has been replaced by a padding of health and his shoulders are no longer bony. Even his skin has changed, now golden-brown and touched by life; those recent spates in the sun bathing him with colour that suggests he belongs more fully in his body than he has in months.

This is beneath me, Tom thinks.

Then, as Harry pours more soap into his hands: No, it isn’t.

*

His eyes rove down, down, and his cock must grasp it before his mind even begins to process the image, because it jumps behind the confines of his pants and heaves with a sudden rush of desire. Harry’s arse is small, but pert. Round. 

Another surge of heat throbs through him, his cheeks flushing to a deep, wine-dark red. Sweat needles the back of his neck. The air does not much help; Tom is caught in the liminal threshold between the dormitory’s chill and the oppressive steam of the bathroom, pulled taut between cold restraint and a far more consuming heat. 

Tom palms the bulge straining the material around his crotch, halfway hidden behind the door like some lowlife outside a brothel, and imagines fully giving into it. Stumbling blindly through the mist, seizing Harry beneath the water, sinking his teeth into that ripe skin until it breaks. He would drink the blood from him, fingers thread through wet hair to tug him into submission, to bend him whichever way he pleased. Onto the tiled walls, onto his knees. Moving Harry like a rag doll while his boy grins up at him all the same. 

And then Harry — real Harry — turns, just so, and Tom catches the beginnings of dark, curly hair between his legs, and the shape of a fat, soft mass hidden within it. Tom grinds the heel of his hand into his erection, almost painfully so, biting the knuckles of his free hand as Harry uses the excess soap to wash himself. 

In Tom’s fantasies, Harry would exploit this illusory moment of privacy to get off. He’d tug his calloused fingers around his prick, or knead the soft swell of his bollocks until he’s hard and needy; until he shoots his release in long, milky streaks. Afterwards, he would be no doubt so ashamed of himself, pink and ruined, but pliant still, so easily subdued if he was made to bow and lick his own mess off the floor. 

A cruel delight unfurls in Tom at the thought of making him do just that.

In reality, Harry deals with it pragmatically. He soaps around his flaccid cock and lifts it only to scrub his scrotum just underneath. But Tom is far too gone for distinctions now. It all collapses into one, and fantasy bleeds into the present until the seam between what is and what can be ceases to matter. Harry swirls his hand around his prick to aid the water in rinsing it, and Tom, with the kind of conviction that borders on faith, believes that he must be imagining that Tom is doing it for him instead.

With that, he throbs thrice and ejaculates, growing wet and sticky in his pants, still struggling to stand upright just outside the bathroom door.

Harry continues washing himself, oblivious.

Tom’s hand dithers, still tucked in his underwear. Cum webs his fingers together.

*

It takes several minutes to restore himself to order, minutes he would prefer not to have needed. He hadn’t meant to unravel so quickly, but what of it? It was inevitable. One does not suppress appetite without consequence, and he’d really gone without indulging himself for far too long. Though it pains him to be beholden to such things, the body must assert itself, as it is wont to do. 

And if there is any consolation to be had, it is this: better it happens now, in solitude, than later, when it matters. When the moment comes, and it will, Tom will not cream himself like some overheated, poorly-socialised adolescent. He will be the picture perfect model of restraint, discipline reincarnate, and Harry will come undone in his place.

Eventually, once he has internalised this, he moves away from his voyeuristic position by the door, casting a wordless scourgify over himself and changing into a fresher set of robes. Tom hears the sound of Harry’s footsteps in the bathroom, but makes it a point not to acknowledge him when he finally emerges. Instead, he focuses on the simple act of fastening his cuffs, fingers moving with prudence, like the task requires all his attention. 

Only when his appearance is sufficiently ordered, and when any further adjustment would seem fussy, does Tom look up at Harry, affecting the nonchalance of someone who hadn’t noticed his presence.

His hair is still wet, water rolling off his jaw, and for a beat, neither of them moves. Harry shifts awkwardly, hopping from foot to foot, clutching his towel to his chest, while Tom fixates on any detail but his face, feeling the uncomfortable weight of the silence stretch between them. It is stifling.

He clears his throat. “Well,” Tom says, his voice too tight. “You’re finished then.”

The statement hangs like dead weight. Harry offers a brief nod, his eyes flickering toward Tom for just a fraction of a second before dropping to the floor.

Tom feels the heat rise again, but this time, it’s not the same. This time, it’s sharper, almost defensive. He fights the urge to speak just to break the spell of this ridiculous moment, to test whether Harry’s awkwardness is because he knows. Instead, he turns down to his trunk, rifling through it as though it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

They exist beside one another in strained parallel. In his periphery, Tom notes as Harry hovers near the furnace, laying his towel out to dry on the rack, fingers combing absently through his hair. Tom, still bent over his trunk, knows better than to rise empty-handed now. His hand closes around the spine of a random book, and with it, he retreats to the safety of his bed, seating himself against the headboard with a composure he does not feel.

What remark might be made, offhanded yet exacting, that would seize Harry’s attention without surrendering Tom’s pride? What can be said? He combs through phrases and discards them in the same breath. A quip, perhaps? A dismissive remark? An observation masquerading as curiosity? Nothing fits. He cannot appear eager. Worse, he cannot appear uncertain. And yet, the prospect of silence — of squandering the opportunity that circumstance has so graciously dealt him (Harry. Harry. Here!) — chafes at his sense of order.

He shifts, tightening his grip on the book as though its weight might anchor him. Harry is here. Present, unhurried, and maddeningly mute. Not leaving. Not speaking. It rankles. Tom must take hold of this moment, must guide it, ensure that whatever comes next is of his own design. 

Absurd. This is deranged, he thinks, sounding too close to his diary for comfort. Tom is behaving like someone cornered. He, who has stood before death and conquered it, is now disturbed by a silence too finely drawn. He moves again, adjusting his posture, feigning ease with a gesture that does not feel his own. Discomfort eats at him from the inside. Perhaps, in some lesser man, it might be called guilt for what’s been done. But no. That is not the name for it when it lives inside Tom.

The tension has turned oppressive, and he finds himself, against every instinct, conscious of it in the same way one is conscious of being watched. He has become the subject, not the observer. And it is intolerable.

 Is this what those on the receiving end of his scrutiny feel? Is this the charge he so regularly wields? He is, fleetingly, grateful that no one alive had possessed the power to reduce him to this before. That he has gone so long in life without ever knowing the texture of true nervousness is a testament to his singular constitution.

But Harry—

Tom chooses not to dwell on what it means that Harry can do so without so much as a word. Their conversations in the past have been meagre, none of which should warrant this unrest (discounting their disastrous last one), and yet here Tom is, reduced to agonising in the sanctity of his own bed, groping for language. 

The indignity of it is galvanising. He will not be made a fool.

“You fly well.” He says, at last. As the words leave him, he cringes inwardly. They’re artless, pedestrian. But they surface from that part of him that understands the mechanics of winning an individual’s favour: admiration disarms. And despite the shame of stooping to it, he meets Harry’s gaze without flinching.

Harry blinks, unimpressed. “You haven’t seen me fly.”

Patently untrue, though Tom cannot very well confess to that. “I’ve heard as much. And all the Quidditch talk, you see. It’s a given.”

“Then why remark on it?” His tone is flat.

“I suppose I find it interesting.”

“Really.” Now Harry turns to face him fully, arms crossed. Tom registers the shift with a feeling not unlike triumph. He revels in this attention, wherever it may come from. “What could you possibly find interesting about the fact that I’m decent on a broom? You can’t stand sport.”

“You’re right. I think it's vulgar. All that sweat.”

Harry raises a brow. “So?”

“So it’s not the broom I’m interested in.”

A pause. Not long, but just enough for the words to settle uncomfortably between them. Harry leans against his bedpost, face unreadable. “You’re not saying what you mean.”

“That would be rather dull, wouldn’t it?”

“I like answers.”

“And yet, you give none.” Tom throws his book to the side, sitting up to focus all his attention on Harry.

Harry snorts. “You’re not entitled to my history.” 

“Perhaps not,” Tom concedes. “but you might consider that curiosity doesn't always come with ulterior motives.”

“That’s rich. From you.”

“Is that what you think?” He tilts his head. “That everything I do is part of some labyrinthine plot?”

Harry shrugs. “Isn’t it?”

Tom doesn't answer right away. Harry’s right, of course. Every choice Tom is done with omniscient intention. But they haven't known each other long, so the only way for Harry to know this is if he’s been watching Tom just as closely as Tom has been watching him.

He studies Harry’s fingers, the way they flex at his elbows, the slight crack in his detachment. There’s a limit, then, to Harry’s disinterest. It thrills him more than he’d like.

“I just want to know who you are.” He says, willing his voice to break vulnerably.

But it lands somewhere it shouldn’t. Harry straightens as though struck, shoulders tightening with the effort of containing whatever instinct rises first. It seems he always reacts poorly to Tom’s sincerity.

(Because Tom, remarkably, is being sincere.)  

“No. You want to know why I am. There's a difference.”

Tom’s lips curl. “You wouldn’t believe that if you had nothing to hide. Or you just think highly of yourself.”

“I don’t think about myself at all, actually.” Harry snaps. “You’re the one who’s obsessed.”

“Obsessed is a strong word.”

“But not inaccurate.”

“I could stop.” Tom says.

Harry’s lips pucker into a shape both provoking and enticing. “Could you?”

Tom’s own press into a line. 

Then, his voice lowers, all trace of irritation stripped away as though it had never existed. Harry sounds… tired. 

“What do you want from me, Tom?”

There it is. Harry wants Tom to falter. To come clean about the thing that’s been plaguing him for weeks. 

But Tom cannot do that.

So instead, he says, “Don’t kid yourself. I only hate silence.”

Harry lets out a mirthless breath. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“I could try harder.”

“I’m sure you will.”

Another long pause. This one is thinner but no less alive. Tom looks up at where Harry stands in his thin shirt and wet hair and beautiful, gem-green eyes, and an ache he’s never known claws its way violently up his throat. Perhaps he shouldn’t have gotten off earlier. The afterglow is doing all sorts of wretched, useless things to his body. 

He needs to speak, to wrench the moment back into his hands before it disappears like every other thing he cannot seem to hold. But Harry moves first, his body slackening with a sigh, and he walks toward the exit as if the conversation hadn’t meant anything at all.

Tom watches mutely, the space between them growing until every step feels like the fabric of fate straining, thread by thread, against a devastating rift. 

And then Harry, without turning, says quietly before he leaves, “Thank you.”

Two words that are, by all accounts, extremely ordinary. Yet they fall with such strange precision, landing somewhere within Tom he did not know was left open. 

His heart knocks once, hard, against his sternum, and he does not smile, but the sharpness of his thoughts have dulled and for the first time in a long time, the silence he is left with does not feel like punishment.

He waits thirty minutes to ensure Harry is truly gone before stealing his towel. It smells like musk and damp. With it pressed to his nose, Tom cums again.

On another day — though time feels loosely strung together lately, softened by that exchange in the dormitory, by that thank you that lingers in him like a half-healed burn — Tom finds himself, with no real excuse, loitering outside the Transfiguration classroom after class has ended.

The corridor is empty but for the scuffing shuffle of departing students. He places himself just outside the threshold, back to the stone, and folds his arms like he has reason to be there. Harry has stayed behind, the charmed oak of the door firmly shut between them. No spell would carry sound through it without being detected. Tom cannot see or hear what is unfolding inside, and yet, he waits.

This moment matters only because it has happened before. Several suspect times, in fact, the Transfiguration classroom emptied but for Harry after class. Tom had watched then too; caught only the edges of it as he filed out with the rest. 

(A particular hush. Always that same hush. Dumbledore looking up from his desk like he’d been the one to invite Harry to stay, lips already composed around some dreadful wisdom, presumably revelling in being Harry’s chosen confidant.)

Now, with nothing visible to observe, Tom finds his thoughts unfolding too quickly, trying to fill the gaps for him. He sees it without seeing: Harry leaned in close, voice pitched low, speaking not as a student but something else. And Dumbledore, obliging. The intimacy irritates him. Not because it is surprising, but because it isn’t. Of course Harry would speak to Dumbledore this way. Of course Dumbledore would pretend it meant nothing while drawing the full shape of it into himself.

Tom clenches his jaw. The thought that anything about Harry (his past, his allegiances, that untouchable strangeness) might be laid bare before another sticks like grit behind his teeth. He is reminded, not for the first time, that his regard for the boy is not a quiet thing. It is loud, now, clanging, and he cannot bear to think of it echoed in someone else, least of all in Dumbledore.

It is not affection. It’s a feeling entirely different, older than that. Possessiveness, perhaps, but even that feels too low. Tom doesn’t want Harry in the way others want things. He doesn’t covet him. He sees in him an essential truth, though what precisely it is, Tom cannot say for certain yet. 

But to imagine Dumbledore laying claim to it, in such a simple, untroubled way…

What passes between them is likely political. Dumbledore has always moved pieces when others weren’t looking. And Harry, with his suspect history, would be an ideal piece to acquire. It makes sense that he'd be called upon to answer for it all — perhaps to trade information on Grindelwald for his continued enrolment at Hogwarts. But Tom knows Dumbledore does nothing without reshaping things in the telling. There’s no interrogation that doesn’t come dressed as counsel. No manipulation that doesn’t wear the face of care.

Still. It’s the shape of their bodies behind the door, how close he imagines them standing; how still Harry becomes when he listens; how carefully he must be watched to be understood. Tom should be the one watching. He should be the one listening. The thought that someone else might already have the beginning of that knowledge ignites an unnamable ache in him, hovering just on the edge of dread.

And there is a smaller, more irrational part that wonders if Harry is already hearing things about Tom, whispered beneath the veneer of concern, twisted just enough to curdle the truth. 

The possibility, once given space, roots itself quickly, flaring into near panic.

(Harry. Taken, drawn out of reach, altered before he ever had the chance, guided from the open space in which Tom still might have reached him.)

He realises that he can no longer afford to wait. If Tom is to reclaim what is slipping from him, he must act, and quickly, before Harry is lost to someone else.

Chapter Text

You will refrain from your usual commentary. Tom writes, his quill biting deep enough into the parchment to leave a wound. 

He wonders, not without amusement, whether the diary feels it. If the pressure trembles somewhere inside that sliver of soul like pain in a phantom limb. It would serve it right. Insolence directed at one's creator ought to carry a price.

You will refrain from writing like a governess if you want to be taken seriously. And really, starting with a warning. How thespian.

If you insist on misunderstanding me, I won’t ask your opinion again. And I’d tread carefully on that front. I’m well aware how much pleasure you take in flexing that vestigial echo of nothing you mistake for a brain.

I don’t need to understand. I will be forced to watch you come apart over that boy regardless.

Tom exhales, slowly. The only noise in the room is the drag of ink across paper and the weary, Sisyphean effort of restraint. He cannot destroy the lump of leather, but the temptation is constant, familiar. The diary goads him in much the same way his Knights do when they mistake proximity for privilege. Like lapdogs, yapping at a hand they forget can close.

He is an investment. 

Ah. A long-term investment in emotional collapse. Smart portfolio.

Tom’s jaw tightens. His hand stills over the paper.

You forget your place.

I am your place, the diary counters. The sum of your cleverest ambitions. And even I know a gamble when I see one.

It isn’t a gamble, Tom writes. It’s properly guided.

Of course. 

Then why write to me at all?

Tom doesn’t answer immediately. Then, with a precision that feels like punishment:

Because you are the only mind besides mine worth consulting. And because you, at least, have the decency to understand what power is supposed to feel like. I only require exactly that; a presence to brainstorm with. You will respond when addressed, and remain silent otherwise. 

The diary does not respond. Tom’s hand is steadier when he starts again.

Harry is being pulled from my reach . 

It takes longer than usual to process that information. You mean Dumbledore.

Of course I mean Dumbledore. Who else would slither so guilelessly into a boy’s sense of self without ever announcing his presence? He always acts the benevolent magus. Positioning himself as a confidant. It’s laughable, if it weren’t so transparent. The man cannot move without setting a trap in the same gesture. Harry is clever, but not yet immune to manipulation that disguises itself as magnanimity. Evidently.

I loathe the man, his younger self concedes, at last. He imagines he can shape the boy. But you imagine you can steal him, and really, what understanding do you offer in his stead? Aside from brooding in corners like some rejected Romantic who’s forgotten how to blink.

Tom’s lips curve, though it isn’t in amusement. 

I offer transcendence. And unlike Dumbledore, I don’t sugarcoat it in maudlinism. I imagine that is what upset Harry’s bearings during the Knights meeting. He has never had someone tell him the truth, as it is. 

If that is the case, the response comes, slower now, ink thickening, touched more by curiosity than mockery, dressing it in grandeur is worse. You cannot assume he’s missed the point by failing to worship us. Perhaps worship is not in his nature.

Tom’s quill flutters in his grasp. His hesitance is brief, but the page seems to feel it.

I want him to kneel.

I think you don’t yet know what you want. And that, more than anything else, has begun to trouble you. You could torture him into subservience. We’ve made many do worse with far less poetry, and yet you refuse to do so. 

I recognise uncertainty when it festers. Even in you. Especially in you.

Tom’s next stroke carves itself into the page, his handwriting gone angular, stripped of its usual elegance.

I know what must be done. That suffices. 

I require a gesture. One he cannot refuse.

How quaint. I hear Madam Puddifoot’s is quite the venue for such affairs. Flowers. Chocolates. A touch of Amortentia in the tea, if you’re feeling traditional.

Don’t be ridiculous. I meant with Quidditch.

A beat. Then: You astound me.

He wants it. I’ve seen it. He watches as an exile from a life he ought to have lived. The current Seeker is a charlatan with a vault for a father. Remove him, and the position opens. Harry steps in. Glory follows. And somewhere in the pomp that comes after, he wonders who cleared the path. And why.

The diary deliberates this. Tom watches the silence stretch, knowing precisely what thoughts now circle in the pages. He can taste it: the judicious, luxuriant turn inward, the way his own mind moves when cruelty begins to mimic art. Bloodthirst.

Subtle enough to resemble chance, the diary remits, script smaller now, as though speaking to itself. But meticulous. Only you will know the full elegance of it. I must admit... there’s an appeal.

Precisely.

And when he shines, when they chant his name, you’ll pretend not to watch?

Tom’s answer is immediate. No. I’ll be watching. I want him to feel it.

Feel what?

That someone gave him the sky. That someone is me .

There is a pause, long enough for the candle to gutter, casting the desk in a wavering half-light.

You’re becoming sentimental, the diary observes, not for the first time, the ink almost dry before it finishes the final word. 

And you’re becoming dull, Tom hurls, already reaching to close the wretched book. If it means to continue revolting like a petulant child, he would see it shelved in the deepest hollow of Salazar’s Chamber, spine-down in dust, and never suffer its words again.

It answers before he can move, the words blooming across the page with such speed it’s as though the ink had been waiting in ambush. 

We all decline, in time. 

Very well. I’ll lend my thoughts to your little project. 

They speak of it with that particular brand of airiness reserved for most magical mishaps; which is to say, far too lightly. Edwin Rosier had fallen, no, dropped, thirty feet during routine practice when his broom veered hard left and declined to correct course. A collarbone snapped neatly in two, ribs shattered inwards, and a concussion so severe Madam Belby spent three full hours reintroducing him to the concept of self.

Some murmur about broom fatigue. Those with functioning instincts note that school brooms rarely ever splinter at the core. Not on their own. Not mid-air. Still, by breakfast, the story has begun to congeal, sealed beneath Headmaster Dippet’s trembling decree: accident.

Tom sits at the centre of the Slytherin table, where the din is loudest, untouched by it all. His gaze is lowered to his plate. He spreads marmalade over his toast with a care so exacting it edges into the compulsive. He has said nothing. Not last night, when the news came through the prefect channels. Not now, as Slughorn warbles a syrupy note about revised rosters and Druella sobs about her little brother’s misfortune.

He does not look up when Lestrange suggests Rosier had it coming. He does not correct Nott, who swears he saw teeth on the pitch.

But he does when Harry enters the hall, because even when he doesn’t mean to, he always will.

He seats himself further down, nearer the fringes beside Alphard, whose grin is too ostentatious. There’s a shift in the air when he does. Heads turn, and so do whispers. Someone leans in to mutter that Harry’s broom handling is unmatched. Someone else remarks, too quickly, that he’s had practice. Dangerous practice, with the sort of company one doesn’t name in daylight. Grindelwald, someone says. Dark arts, says another. The implication ripples forward.

Tom lets his spoon click lightly against the rim of his teacup, just once. The sound arrests the space around him. When he speaks, his voice is idle, almost lazy.

“Don’t be absurd.”

The table hones in on his contribution, lesser minds catching in the gravity of the greatest one.

“If Evans had truly wanted to displace Rosier, he would have done so where it counts — in the air. His skill is more than adequate for that. Unlike some, he does not grovel in the mud when the sky offers a better path. As for the rest, if any of you possessed half a brain, you would see that whatever sordid tales are whispered about him bear no relevance here. Not to this school. Not to this moment. And certainly not to this discussion.” His gaze sweeps across the group, glinting with a haughtiness he learned to affect from Malfoy. 

There is a hush after he’s done, the kind that feels like death has passed through it.

Harry, from his place at the end of the table, lifts his head. The look he sends Tom is unreadable, eyes trained with that peculiar, searching sharpness he never quite manages to hide. 

Tom goes back to his toast, making it a point not to stare back.

But he knows Harry continues watching him. Knows that he has heard every word. And he permits himself the most modest satisfaction at the moment’s composition: his championing of the underdog; that glow of moral ascendancy above his baser peers when it would not have been necessary to do so. He must cut a rather compelling figure. That is to say, he knows he does. 

Harry should be absolutely wanton with desire right now. 

Tom truly is remarkable. 

He waits where he always does when he means to be obeyed without extra ceremony: half-shrouded in the hall with the Snidget tapestry, hands folded behind his back, listening to the water slither through the pipes behind the walls. It has been some time since he last checked on the basilisk, he thinks, as charmed into slumber after the unfortunate business with Myrtle as she presently remains. He ought to ensure she is settled, as any dutiful master would.

A matter for another time. 

Soon, Orion arrives as instructed, robes askew from training, hair damp at the temples, breath still a little quick. Tom notes it with faint distaste.

“Rosier’s out, I heard.” He begins. Crisp, uninterested in pleasantries.

Black nods once. “Clean break. Won’t be flying till spring.”

“You’ll be giving the Seeker position to Evans.”

This is evidently not what Black expected their meeting to be about. He shifts his posture, sitting up straighter. “Evans?”

“Was I unclear?”

“No,” Black replies, slowly, as if he were asked to pinpoint the trap. “Merely surprised. Evans has not exactly made himself… amenable.”

“That is irrelevant.”

“But it is true.” He persists. The conviction of someone used to being indulged. “He insulted you, us, our principles, our goals, and did so after we so graciously extended our hand. I don’t see why we should elevate him after that.”

“He is a Slytherin,” Tom says coolly. “Which makes him ours. And, more to the point, he is your best option.”

To this, Black says nothing. But Tom sees the realisation cross his face. He is clever, in the way all serpents must be, shrewd beneath the languor of breeding.

“You did it.” He says at last, very softly. “Rosier’s fall.”

“I don’t concern myself with broom safety.” Tom replies. “I merely recognise opportunity when it descends from the sky.”

Black exhales, a low breath that borders on laughter. There is a quiver of admiration behind his eyes. Nervous, but real. “All this… for Evans. Merlin. I’d have sooner thought you’d curse him outright, after what he said.”

Tom’s silence is polished to a point.

Black presses on, emboldened by the space he’s been given. “Still seeking his loyalty? Or is it the legacy you want? That business with Grindelwald must be useful.”

“That,” Tom says, not looking at him, “is none of your concern. What is your concern is ensuring he appears on the team sheet by morning.”

There is a beat, then the shadow of a smile pulls at Orion’s mouth. Knowing, indulgent, almost conspiratorial.

“As you wish.” He says. “If it serves the cause.”

Harry makes the team.

More to the point, he seizes the opportunity Tom has granted him, and looks a vision while doing so, arriving at breakfast each morning in his emerald robes, vivid and laughing and flushed with life. He seems, Tom thinks, almost deliberately composed for his viewing pleasure, as though the whole tableau were arranged with him in mind. He pictures Harry spending extra time in the team’s antechambers just off the quidditch pitch after every practice, skewing his clothes and rouging his nose with the hope that Tom will be around to appreciate it. 

Well, he does. 

The development seems to have unfolded in more ways than one, too. Whatever distance lingered between Harry and the rest of Slytherin house has all but vanished. He makes his way back into the fold as if he’d never been apart from it, takes his seat among the team at every opportunity, and speaks to them like they’ve always known each other. 

He is happier than Tom imagined he could be.

The fluttering in his chest is a strange shape for satisfaction to take, but it will do.

Days pass. 

He does not hear the approach at first so much as he feels it, like a draught that moves without breeze. The alcove is narrow, flanked by tall shelving and sequestered enough that even Madam Cygnine rarely bothers to peer in unless she suspects insolence. Tom has claimed it without resistance, as he does most things, and now he sits surrounded by work, scratching a half-hearted essay on Galenic transformations for Slughorn’s next class. The assignment is beneath him. It dulls the blade of his mind, and yet he completes it, as he always does.

When the footsteps begin, soft-soled but confident, he stills. Just barely, just in the fingers. There are several students in the library, but no one walks like that. 

Tom looks up.

And there he is. Harry, framed against the curve of the stacks. The boy does not speak. Tom does not need it to understand why he has come, though it is happening sooner than anticipated.

He closes his books, lifts his eyes fully, and drinks in the sight of him. His hair is in its usual mess, his robe collar turned slightly, three moles pocking the exposed stretch of his neck. The details root themselves with terrible ease. 

Tom has imagined this in several iterations. Each time, Harry is bashful, struggling to find the words, his voice half-lowered by a trace of awe when he says that he understands what has been done for him, and why. That he sees the care in it, the precision with which one life was moved to clear a path for his. That he is grateful. And in every imagining, he is softer than Tom has ever seen him. Supple in reverence when he makes his way to kneel between the knees and show the true extent of his appreciation. 

Tom feels it rise in him then, that rich, broiling warmth that so often precedes triumph. He believes, with the fervour of a man who cannot be wrong, that Harry has come to him because he must. That his boy is, finally, beginning to understand the depth of what has been offered in Tom’s devotion to him.

He opens his mouth to speak, but soon stops. Because Harry is still watching him, unmoved. 

And he does not appear grateful in the slightest. 

“Did you think you were subtle?” His voice is pitched, like a secret. Tom strains to catch every word, resisting, just barely, the pull to lean forward, to take him by the shoulders and absorb them. “That no one would notice?”

He does not flinch away from the accusation. It takes no time at all to recover from the disappointment. 

“Rosier was unfit.” He says levelly. “He had no right to the position.”

Harry stares at him, face clouded by the gathering keenness of judgment. 

“And you,” he replies, “are judge and executioner both? Rosier did nothing to you. He was just a boy. Fourteen.”

“He was in the way.”

“Of what?”

The light from the high window throws Harry’s face into uneasy contrast when he takes a step forward. Sharp beneath the eyes, unreadable around the mouth. He does not look angry, though Tom would prefer it. What gathers in his expression is worse: the resignation of someone who had always expected this.

“Of something better.” Tom finally answers, and the moment he says it, he knows he has made a tactical error, because Harry hears what he means and does not blink.

“You did it for me, then.”

The conclusion carries no exultation. It is delivered plainly, the way one might diagnose rot in the walls. An ugly misfortune, anticipated, beneath sympathy. 

Tom does not refute it. His chest swells defensively. He tilts his chin.

“I assumed you wanted to play.”

“Never at that cost.”

“He fell.” He bites out, too quickly. “That’s all that matters now. You're on the team.”

There is a long pause. Unpleasantness curdles beneath Tom’s ribs, a slow, sour pressure that climbs. The room feels narrow. He cannot seem to breathe deeply. Each inhale is shallow. His skin prickles. Panic surges.

“You poisoned it,” Harry whispers. Low and sad, his lips twisting painfully. “Quidditch was mine. And now you’ve turned it into a burden I never asked for. A debt I shouldn’t owe.”

This admission settles in Tom like sediment. There is no good answer to it. Or rather, there are answers, practised and rational and polished to a sheen, but each feels skeletal in the face of this vulnerability.

This is not how he had envisioned it going. But of course, the arithmetic never balances where Harry is concerned. Variables slip through his fingers. Certainties unspool into contradictions. Nothing remains intact. 

Not even him.

“You’re welcome.” Tom says, at last. 

It earns him a scowl. “You think you’ve done me a favour?”

“I know I have,” Tom huffs. He feels much like a child. “You belong on that pitch. I’ve only ensured it happened sooner. You should be thanking me, if not for the act, then for the respect of my attention.”

Harry stares at him for a long, flat moment. “Is that what this is, then?” He says. “Attention? You want my attention? Because… what? I refused to give it to you?”

Tom works his jaw. “I don’t waste effort on trifles.”

“No. You ruin people for them.” An older and dangerous lilt affects his voice. “I don’t want anything to do with that. I don’t want anything to do with you, Riddle.”

That lands harder than it ought to, and Tom resents him for it, because to be seen is one thing, but to be seen and then rejected is another entirely.

For a long moment, he holds himself still, simmering anger finally boiling over. All the nights spent tailing, all the calculations, all the humiliations swallowed… This is the price he pays. He hates that he has stooped so low, that he has become the thing he once thought beneath him. And for what? For what?

He wants to shout, to strike, to unmake this moment and the self it exposes. He sees a red so vibrant he wonders if he burst a blood vessel in his eye.

It is disorienting, the velocity of the fall: from a state of near-exultance, to this graceless undoing. He feels flayed, scorched, stripped of dignity mid-flight. Like Icarus, though not in the poetic ruin so often recited. There is no beauty in this fall. Only the snap of wax, the shriek of failure, the mortification of having reached and been cast down. He cannot speak, cannot move without laying bare the full extent of what has been done to him. 

So Tom withdraws.

“Then go away.” He hisses, and he hears it back too clearly — how thin it rings, how unlike command, how close it trembles to plea. He means it, though the wish is not clean. It is not the absence of Harry that he wants, but the erasure of the change his presence has wrought. He wants the hours back, the ones spent thinking in circles too wild to be called thought. Tom wants the transparency of ambition unmarred by preoccupation. He wants the stillness that once sat at the centre of him like a gem. He wants to want what he used to want, and nothing more. He wants to forget the shape Harry has taken in his mind and the space around that shape that he has not been able to fill with anything else.

But Harry doesn’t leave. He keeps standing in the same defiance, gaze locked and level, and the refusal is more ruinous than anything else. Something in Tom splinters in a way that cannot be undone. Soundlessly, with the deep, sick recognition of fault. He feels, for the first time in full, how far he has deviated from the line he once traced with such certainty. All his discipline has warped around this boy. 

Perhaps the diary was right. 

His gaze falls to the desk, the words on the paper before him blurring into one another, their meaning shed like skin as the space beside him shifts, filled now with a presence too singular to mistake, and warmer than it has any right to be in this cold, forgotten corner of the castle. Tom feels near sick at the proximity. Harry smells like pine and ozone, like lightning in a forest. Tom had not known that before.

“What is wrong with you?”

The question is not barked nor hissed nor laced with his usual accusation, and somehow that makes it worse.

Tom keeps his eyes on the page. He will not dignify such a vague thing with a reply. The list is too long, and it will not help him to hear it said aloud.

“You’re not what I expected at all.” Harry continues, like he has known Tom for years at this point, when it has only been a month.

“Evidently not.”

“And I am not who you think I am, Tom.”

This hangs between them.

“I don’t think anything of you, Evans.”

“But that’s a lie, isn’t it? If you–”

“I’m not scared, if that’s what you think!” Tom snaps, louder than he means to, as he rises from the chair in one jerking motion. He towers above Harry but feels no taller, feels diminished in the worst way, as if Harry sees right through him and finds the emptiness wanting. “I must look like just another schoolboy to you, but if only you knew the things I’ve done. Wherever you’ve come from, whatever it is you think you know, I am not scared. Grindelwald has nothing on me, so stop standing there like you’ve seen more than I have.”

Harry’s brows draw together, face morphing to one that makes him feel mocked in a way he can’t articulate. His hair clings damply to his temple, and Tom spots a new scar cutting through the mess of it, glinting at the edge of the candlelight, pale and deep and branching across his forehead.

The sight curls in him. He feels the hunger react at once, ravenous, gluttonous, because whatever that is, it means something. It matters. It tells a story he has not been invited to hear. He wants to know. He wants to know. 

“I want to know! I can handle it. Everything, Harry. You could tell me the worst things you’ve ever done and I will have it.” His voice fractures on the edge of too much. His chest heaves and he cannot steady it, not now. “And we can be powerful. So powerful. If someone hurt you, if there’s a leverage Grindelwald’s holding over your head, we can make it right. We can replace him. You and I.”

Harry shudders. He does not seem excited by the prospect. 

“Is that what you want?”

Tom wills himself to sound strong. “Yes.”

But Harry just shakes his head. 

“Then I can’t help you.” 

Somehow, he sounds just as devastated to say this as Tom is to hear it.

Harry peers down at the clutter spread across the library table: the abandoned quill and inkpot, the papers with their notations, the margins frayed where his thoughts had pressed too hard. Tom is still stuck in place when he reaches out and begins to gather it all. Tucking the parchment into neat folds, aligning the spines of the books, closing each one with care that feels unearned. His hand brushes Tom’s as he reaches for the final sheaf, and Tom feels the jolt of it somewhere deep.

Harry slings Tom’s bag over his shoulder when he is done.

“C’mon. It’s Charms soon.”

Something has changed.

Not only in Tom (though that, he cannot deny) but in Harry, too. There is a difference now in the way the boy regards him. In class, he no longer leans away when Tom speaks, but turns slightly to hear it. At night, in the common room, his laughter with his friends will falter if Tom crosses the threshold, and his gaze, once always deliberately cast elsewhere, now finds its way back to him like clockwork. Mornings in the bathroom bring the faint sound of Harry’s voice before the mirror — good morning, like a passing acknowledgment — as he steps aside to make room for Tom to reach the sink. There is no edge to it, anymore. It’s as if everything has been burned between them, and there is nothing left to smoulder.

The change is too sudden to be sincere. Too mannered to mean anything. And Tom knows the shape of pity. He detects it in Harry, and he loathes it.

Pity is worse than contempt. Pity assumes understanding. And understanding, placed where it does not belong, is a kind of undoing.

(He knows now, for sure, that Dumbledore has spoken of him to Harry. But Tom tells himself it is irrelevant. Whatever damage the old man might have hoped to do, Tom has already done worse. He has offered up something unrecognisable in himself, and watched it be refused. He has lowered himself past the reach of even ridicule. 

And no one, not even Harry, would bother to touch what remains.)

I’ve decided to focus on what matters.

And what matters has changed so suddenly? Or are you pretending it never did?

The diary is adept at pretending it does not gloat, even if it always does.

Clarity returns when one rises above distractions.

Clarity, or disappointment? 

Tom watches the words vanish into the page, then reappear.

In any case, I understand. You’ve returned to your ambitions. To eternity. Good. I was beginning to wonder where I’d lost you.

I hadn’t gone anywhere.

But the truth sits there, unspoken. He knows he did. 

It doesn’t matter now. There are better things to focus on.

The basilisk is barely breathing, coiled onto herself like a spring, her great form hidden within the cavernous dark of Salazar’s mouth. Tom can hardly see them, but his hands find the cold, smooth scales upon her strong body, the texture so familiar it grounds him in a way nothing else has in months. The air is thick with mildew, dampness pressing in on him from all sides, the slow drip of condensation from the ceiling settling like an old, constant rhythm.

It occurs to him that more than two years have passed since he last stood in these depths. 

He marks this only to know it. The chamber had once formed the epicenter of his world, and if his path has faltered since, it has still remained, untouched. The silence has not changed. The cavernous space carries the same weight. The basilisk still sleeps where he left her.

Graduation looms somewhere in the near future. He acknowledges the fact, then sets it aside. There is time yet to become the wizard he wants to be when he leaves these walls. What matters now is that he has returned to where he once began, and the shape of his purpose begins to fit again.

It should still define him. And so it will.

He returns to the archives under the guise of project work, though the subject he claims bears little resemblance to what currently lies open before him. 

Village registries, trial records, ministry rolls, each folded and thinned by time, their names faded but not gone. He cross-references birth years with property disputes, inheritance claims, sanitation rolls. All roads once led to the Gaunts. Somehow, somewhere, they must do so again.

His eyes ache. The hours slip past without remark. The writing on his notes grows smaller. He scratches out errors without irritation. This is not the kind of work that grants satisfaction, he knows. It is quiet, recursive, slow. Still, there is a steadiness to it, and that steadiness is what he requires. His hands do not tremble.

What he is doing is necessary. It is the foundation of what must come next. He must know where he comes from before he becomes what he will be. There is a cyclical satisfaction in that. There is dignity. If he lingers too long on the thought of lineage, it is purely logistical.

He does not think of Harry. 

(And when he does, it does not stop him.)

The Owlery is nearly empty, the wind turning in low, unkind circles through the open arches. Feathers stir along the stone floor. Tom’s usual barn owl blinks slowly from its perch, unmoved by his arrival.

He doesn’t expect company. He’d only come to send a letter — nothing urgent, merely another inquiry, addressed without hope but sealed all the same, part of the steady hunt he’s been working on. His hand hovers at the bird’s side, fastening the seal, when the door opens behind him with no regard for subtlety.

Harry. No doubt about it, with that special way he moves. 

They don’t speak at first. Harry steps past Tom, selecting a school owl from among the roosts without needing to look for it. He wears no gloves. The cold clings to his fingers, reddens the knuckles. Still, he doesn’t flinch when the bird grips his wrist, talons sinking into his skin. 

Tom studies him. 

“You send letters,” He says, at last, and is immediately afflicted with the sour knowledge that it was an idiotic thing to say.

Harry, unfazed, feeds the owl a scrap of dried liver. “For my next trick, I’ll tie my shoes.”

The abrupt, mortifying urge to laugh seizes him. He swallows it down with great effort and remains still, thoughtful. Strategic. Or, rather, he forces himself to appear so. Somewhere between the words just uttered and the silence now stretching, Tom becomes preoccupied with his posture. He rearranges the way his book bag lays across his chest. He thinks, with great care, about what next to say that might yield the maximum return.

He is no longer pursuing the boy. He would hardly debase himself by doing so — not after their last encounter. That is fine. Tom no longer wants Harry, anyway. He just wants what Harry knows. His past. His provenance. The precise nature of the thread that runs under his skin, electric and unaccounted for. 

And he deserves everything he wants. 

“I can’t imagine who you’d be writing to. Unless you really are here as a spy. Shall I take it up with Dippet?”

“Oh, no need. Nothing I’ve gathered so far would be of use to Grindelwald. This one’s just to my handler at the Ministry. British Ministry, of course.”

Tom blinks. The joke lands, but the candour beneath it throws him. It’s not only the reference to his suspected involvement in the war, but the ease with which Harry offers the real truth without being pushed.

“Parole?” Tom asks, testing his luck.

“Of the sort.” Ambiguous and casual as ever. He watches the owl take flight, then shrugs. “Bye.”

The mark progresses over time, slower than he intends or will ever admit. He says nothing of it. Not even to his Knights, though he watches them speak and study and sleep with the certainty that their bodies will soon bear the proof of his work.

Tom spends nights reworking the shapes, correcting the sequence of gestures required to embed it without collapse, adjusting for what it would take not merely to endure in a body, but to rest there, indistinguishable from the self, and to reach those who bear it, at any time, without significant effort on his part. 

It is evening now, late enough that the dormitory has quieted. His roommates are surely asleep. Even Harry, whose breathing has become impossible to ignore. 

The curtains around his bed are drawn shut, the space within confined and dark. Tom holds his wand between his teeth, lumos casting a blue, steady light over the work spread across his mattress. 

He steadies his hand and begins on his thirty-eighth sketch.

(The runes he has already perfected. The blood in the dagger will carry their power when the time comes. That part, at least, is settled. What remains now is the symbol. The mark that will bind it all together.)

In time, a serpent emerges beneath his hand, winding in a smooth, symmetrical loop, a figure-eight that carries infinitude to its form. It is simple, but in that simplicity, precise. 

Tom examines it with an almost detached pleasure, his fingers lingering on the edges of the drawing. 

This will be the one.

He draws it again on a piece of dugbog skin pilfered from Slughorn’s personal collection, trimmed to the size of a palm. It accepts the mark so easily it almost flatters him. Tom waves his hand over it, feeling the air grow taut. Then, with a careful motion, he pricks his finger with the same dagger. A single drop of ichor falls, settling at the center of the symbol. The ink shivers for a moment but it does not dissipate. Then, it sinks, deepening, becoming more than ink, becoming permanent, absorbed into the flesh.

When he touches it again, the skin is warm.

He breathes once, shallowly, then folds it and seals it inside his diary, as though it were any other note. It isn’t, of course. It is the first proof that a part of his will can persist outside of him, not merely in the form of an inanimate horcrux, but in the manner that speaks of ownership over a living host, a claim that violates the very sanctity of autonomous self. 

The windows of the Defence classroom have frosted over, pale panes etched with ice work fine as capillaries, catching the morning light with a spectral radiance no one feels. Beyond, the grounds slouch underneath a sky the shade of tarnished pewter, trees thinned to their barest anatomy, their limbs stooped beneath snow. The world looks like it was caught, mid-exhale.

December. 

To Tom, it seems as grey as it does in London, the landscape outside no less bleak than that around Wools. The days have started to curl inward, time itself suffocated by the slow-burning fog of winter. Hogwarts has never felt more empty.

Professor Merrythought’s voice rises, pitched just enough to be heard above the murmur of voices.

“And remember,” she calls, hands clasped. “you will be tested on your patronus charms before Yule break. Make sure to revise the incantation and your memories in the meantime.”

Groans ripple through the room, though it can scarcely diminish the typical relief of a lesson coming to its end. Chairs scrape back. The usual knot of boys near the front rises as one, a living tide pushing toward the exit. Tom lingers, allowing the rush to pass, and by the time he steps into the corridor, the crowd has mostly waned.

To his left, just adjacent, walks Harry. He is not alone.

Nott hovers at his elbow. Tom had not realised they'd become friendly. 

“I nearly had it. It was more than a wisp this time. Had a proper shape, you know. The tail of… something.”

Tom keeps his eyes forward, half-listening. The conversation scarcely matters to him. 

(Of course, try as he might, nothing is beneath his notice where Harry is concerned.)

“That isn’t for nothing.” Harry replies. “You’re close. Try not to force it too much. Push too hard and you’ll get nothing. The patronus is meant to be instinctive, else it’ll fail in the face of danger.”

“You sound like you’ve done it.”

Harry gives a small shrug. “I’ve tried.”

Tom does not mean to interject. But the words come anyway.

“Funny,” he says, not looking at either of them. “I wouldn’t say you have been.”

That earns him their attention. Harry glances over, surprise quickly morphing into the careful consideration Tom has grown accustomed to seeing on him lately. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” He says.

Nott, sensing some private exchange underway, mutters about lunch and quickens ahead to catch up to Lestrange, leaving them walking in loose tandem.

“You haven’t been making an effort in class.” Tom says, finally looking at him. Harry does not seem upset at the observation. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

“Not every skill reveals itself on command.” He answers, his lips just shy of a smile, pliable, as though his expression might be willing to change, though it does not.

They walk a few paces more in silence, brogues tapping against old stone.

“And you?” Harry asks, glancing sidelong. “Smoke, or nothing?”

Tom’s lips curl despite himself. “Neither. I’m above theatrics.”

Harry huffs. “You’re not above much.”

The remark should sting, but instead, Tom feels only the strange, inexplicable lightness that often supplements these novel exchanges — when he permits them to unfold, of course. 

“Perhaps,” Tom allows. “But when I do it, it will be memorable.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

For a breath of time, the corridor draws inwards. Then Harry inclines his head in acknowledgment and turns, his gait unhurried as he recedes toward the Great Hall. Tom remains where he is, one hand buried in the folds of his robe, watching the back of him vanish down the long stone passageway, the echo of his steps settling into thought.

The pleasure it stirs is unwelcome. He reminds himself that he cannot let it fester.

The room has been stripped of its clutter. No chairs remain, no table, no trace of the ordinary gatherings Tom has held here before. Tonight, the old classroom behind the Snidget tapestry exists for a single purpose. The flagstones have been scrubbed to near-reflection, and on them he has drawn a circle of runes in ink thickened with blood. It dries black. 

At its centre waits Avery, bare-armed and steady, gaze fixed forward with the blunt solemnity of a boy who has no fear because he has ceded the burden of thought to someone else.

Tom approves of that. He has never needed Avery to be clever.

Before him lies the parchment from that night, yellowed at the edges, the blood-prints of his Knights stamped like dark petals across its surface. Beside it, the dagger. His instrument of collection, still faithful. And on a scrap of dugbog hide, the mark he has fashioned: a serpent, curved into eternity, mouth never quite swallowing its tail.

He kneels. His wand travels in precise sweeps to trace the runes he has worked on for weeks, and has now committed to memory, whispering them in their true order. As the last curve completes, the circle exhales. The stone beneath them feels momentarily hollowed. The candlelight above recoils. Avery flinches slightly in reflex, as though his body, without consent, has remembered to react to the threat of dark magic.

When Tom presses the edge of the blade to Avery’s skin, he feels the small tremor of muscle, the body’s unthinking betrayal. It is brief. The cut is shallow. More blood wells, and Tom guides it to the mark on the dugbog hide. It receives the offering like a thing long-hungry. Then, with care, great care, he presses it to Avery’s forearm.

The light it emits is deep and pulsing, a murmur through the room. The runes along the circle glow once, as though affirming the bond, then fade. When Tom peels the hide back, the mark has perfectly transferred to Avery’s forearm, settled into the skin, as if it had always waited beneath it. To the untrained eye, it would appear as any old tattoo.

Avery exhales a shuddering breath, just once. 

It worked.

And yet— 

His success brings with it no elation. No thrum of triumph like hot water through his ribs. Only quiet. An anticlimax that settles into his limbs. Not because the magic faltered. But because it did not. Because it was real, and it is done. 

He steps back, wand returning to his side.

“You’ll feel it when I call,” Tom explains. “like a shift in atmosphere. A pressure behind the heart, perhaps. Your body will know before your mind does. And you’ll come to recognise it in time, the sense of being turned gently toward me. You will feel what I need you to feel. Fear, urgency, readiness. Not because I impose these onto you, but because the mark opens you to my influence. That is its elegance. It makes your loyalty reflexive. It removes the question of will.”

Avery, of course, has always been that way, pliant in his very nature, as if made to obey. It was why he had been chosen to take it first. The mark fits him as though it had always been there, a foregone conclusion written into the grain of his person.

The others will prove more... instructive. Tom will have to watch closely, gauge how the more self-concerned among them bear it. He is curious, in a clinical way, to see what breaks first. Resistance, or illusion.

Avery nods. Nothing else is required.

Tom looks down at the dark mark. He finds himself listening to the stillness of its aftermath, waiting for it to mean more than it does.

Chapter Text

There is always a contagion of gaiety that sweeps the student body on Hogsmeade weekends. And the final jaunt before Yule is a particular brand of farce, self-indulgence worn like festive garland under the pretext of respite before internal examinations. By noon, the grounds are thronged with wretches swaddled in overstuffed cloaks, their pockets bulging with coin — destined for gifts that will elicit nothing more than obligatory gratitude from bored relatives — all stampeding toward the carriages as if the very last hour of freedom depended upon it. 

Tom rarely stoops to participate in these exhalations of lunacy. Today, however, he has seen fit to grace the occasion with his presence — not out of any misplaced desire for tradition, but to keep vigil over Avery, whose magical constitution remains precarious beneath the weight of his new dark mark. A public mishap would be, if nothing else, dreadfully gauche. Thus Tom intends to be close enough to extinguish any such calamity before it can take root.

“You can’t be serious, Corvus. Abandoning us to trail after Lucretia and her red‑haired gargoyle? It’s pathetic.” Nott drawls, the last to kick off the carriage. “There are more dignified ways to ruin your Saturday. Find another hobby. Get your prick wet, for a change.”

Lestrange straightens the line of his collar. “I call it fidelity, Thad. A concept clearly beyond your reach.”

“Oh, I grasp it.” Nott’s tone cools. “Just not the version where you loiter behind lovers like a wet nurse.”

“She is not his lover.” A quick intake of breath. “She is… temporarily misdirected. And trust when I say, Prewett will blunder. Make a maladroit comment. Use the wrong fork. And when he does–”

“You’ll be lurking behind a potted plant, waiting to catch her as she swoons in horror.” Nott smiles without warmth. “Gallantry, Lestrange‑style. No, really. I do applaud the way you martyr yourself for a woman who does not even know your middle name.”

“Jeer if you must. Patience secures the prize.”

“Maybe I just don’t like watching you throw yourself at someone who doesn’t care.” Nott’s shoulders tighten beneath his coat. 

At this, Lestrange falters for half a second, the clipped rhythm of his steps thrown ever so slightly off. When he speaks again, his voice is frail, furious. 

“Then avert your eyes!” 

He stomps off, struggling to do so gracefully in the snow.

“I will!” Nott yells at his back. Then, with a resigned huff, follows him anyway. “I swear, one of these days…”

Tom wonders, not for the first time, if the universe’s way of punishing him for his sins is saddling him with this parade of snivelling, inbred lordlings.

“That’s my sister they’re talking about, mind.” Black mutters.

Malfoy snorts, nose turning to the sky as though the very ground offends him. “Well, if we’re all making spectacles of our departures, I suppose I must contribute. My cousins have arrived from France — Veela on their father’s side, you know — and Mother insists I be present at the manor to greet them, so I’ll be apparating home. One simply doesn’t ignore continental guests.” He begins to strut away, imparting a derisive, Malfoy-brand farewell. “Do enjoy your little village excursion.”

This leaves only Tom, Black, and Avery, who descend from the carriage station, their cloaks drawn close to their forms. The path stretches ahead in sullied drifts and half-melted ruts, leading to the village crouched no more than five minutes off; a scatter of low, lopsided buildings rendered quaint by snow, their rooflines sugar-dusted, the windows set aglow. Smoke rises from their chimneys, drawn upward without muddling the sky — some discreet charm at work, no doubt, to keep the village picturesque and smog-free.

They have not yet reached the gates when Black, midway through a digression on the Ministry’s recent embargo on Romanian fwooper quills (“utter nonsense, of course; the birds are entirely docile if kept silenced”) lifts his chin with sudden alertness.

“Evans!” He calls, drawing the eyes of several passing students. “Over here!”

Two figures emerge from the fork where a footpath cleaves between the Forbidden Forest and the castle. Harry among them, shoulders hunched against the wind, a thick scarf wound high on his neck. Beside him, the smaller Black cousin trots loyally like a terrier taken on a walk. 

Alphard’s face brightens when he sees Orion, but it earns him only a brisk wave and an even brisker dismissal.

“Yes, yes, run along.” Orion says. “We’ve borrowed your ickle friend for the day.”

Harry raises a brow, not quite resisting as Orion slips an arm round his shoulder and turns him toward their direction of travel. “You’re coming with us. First butterbeer’s on me.” He says. “Call it an incentive. We expect triumph tomorrow, and it never hurts to warm a champion before the charge.”

He grins over Harry’s head with all the exuberance of one who imagines himself conspiratorial, and appends to this display a wink so clumsy in its collusion that Tom declines to acknowledge it. Evidently, Black still labours under the misapprehension that he is involved in some clandestine campaign on Tom’s behalf, concerning the delicate matter of securing Harry. That Tom has, for some time now, abandoned the whole affair has done little to disabuse him.

He cannot say which irritates him more: the interference of his witless company, or the instinct that led him to believe it could be any other way.

Still, it is not in his nature to protest decisions once they have taken on a life of their own, and already Harry has fallen into step beside them, his breath condensing in pale curls like smoke, gloved hands tucked into his pockets, his gaze flicking between the ground and the establishments ahead.

“Nervous, Evans?” Avery asks suddenly. An unexpected intrusion. He has remained completely silent up until now, and it is uncharacteristic of him to address a near stranger so directly. 

He is, of course, talking about the match against Hufflepuff tomorrow; the last before the break and Harry’s first as Slytherin’s official Seeker.

Harry, caught slightly off-guard, looks up from his boots and gives a half-hearted shrug, as though his nerves are not quite his to claim. “Er, no. No, not really. I think I’ll do alright.” He maintains, modestly. Tom finds it oddly compelling.

“If you play like you’ve been practising, ‘alright’ won’t quite cover it. Brilliant, maybe,” Black offers, his tone laced with an insinuation Tom cannot quite decipher. Perhaps it is that blend of camaraderie and familiar expectation which sets Tom’s teeth on edge. As if Black claims some proprietary knowledge of Harry that Tom himself lacks. And while he would sooner dissect a stone than admit it aloud, the thought persists: perhaps Black does know him better. “I’ve seen you. You’ve got the skill. Hogwarts hasn’t had a player as swift as you in ages. Don’t underplay that.”

“I dunno. Montague’s pretty good at feinting.”

This gives way to a debate over Hufflepuff’s preference for pragmatism over flair.

Tom can do nothing but observe the choreography of his companions. Each settles effortlessly into their roles: a glance exchanged here, a well-timed jest there. Their manner is fluent, their conversation light, everything exchanged with the assurance of belonging. He is strangely displaced within the moment, watching it all unfold without truly being able to play an equal part in it.

The cold presses at his gloves. He adjusts them needlessly for something to do. This isn’t discomfort he feels, precisely. Just the unease of inhabiting a room whose dimensions were never meant for him. 

He wonders if there is any way to contribute without being encumbered by the gravity he has crafted around himself. There is a truth he longs to share: Harry, your talents are often overlooked, but they are undeniable. Even if you do not fully grasp your own potential, I do. I know you will succeed tomorrow, Harry, because I know you.

But he is keenly aware of his image in the eyes of his Knights, and to some extent, in Harry's, too. Any word will be twisted into another meaning, misinterpreted as either calculated or detached, never sincere.

So he says nothing at all, unwilling to have his meaning lost.

Rather, he just watches the boy. 

Golden-brown, freckled, tousled ink-black hair. Cloaked in deep, jewel-toned wool (sapphire and garnet, emerald at his throat). He stands out so defiantly against the bleached slate of snow that Tom is tempted to pin him there, press him like a flower in an old book to preserve forever. 

It is only as they round the corner by Dervish & Banges that he is addressed directly and pulled out of this reverie.

Black, with all the tact of a steam train, turns mid-anecdote. “You remember the snitch incident of ‘43, don’t you, Tom? Vanished halfway through the match and turned up in someone’s goblet the next morning.”

Tom hardens his expression into a mask of passivity. Of course he remembers. Myrtle had died scarcely a fortnight prior, and he had been in the throes of what could only be described as a controlled nervous collapse when Headmaster Dippet, in all his infinite wisdom, saw fit to assign him the role of amateur sleuth. Evidently, his earlier ‘show-stopping investigative performance’ regarding scapegoating Hagrid had set expectations unhelpfully high.

“Flint’s doing. She cursed it to spite MacDougal after the break up. It was his pumpkin juice it reappeared in, if memory serves. Nearly strangled on it.”

“Yes! And she still claimed it was worth the detention.” Black grins, vindicated. “Not that I blame her. MacDougal used to go on and on, claiming the snitch had a preference for him, crediting Ravenclaw’s win streak to that. Shut up about it soon after, though, that bastard.”

Avery lets out a snort. “Snitch doesn’t court no one. It’s all chance.”

“Suppose it depends whether that sort of luck can be trained, though, innit?” Harry murmurs, eyes shifting to regard Tom. 

It isn’t really a question at all, but it finds its way to him regardless. No one replies, and for a moment he remains still. Harry’s recent attitude makes him harder to read. Tom cannot tell whether he’s being sincere or just playing a part, though he suspects the latter.

Or hopes it, perhaps. It would be easier.

He draws his reply carefully. “Luck,” he resolves, “is simply mastery concealed by circumstance. Given time, all outcomes can be directed.”

Harry’s gaze lingers on him a beat too long, imperceptible to anyone else, a crease forming between his brows, before it drifts off again. The others accept this without remark, their chatter spilling past it. But Tom feels the pause lodge within him, a tightness he refuses to name spasming in his chest.

Later, they manage to secure a booth at the Three Broomsticks, though secure may be too dignified for what actually amounts to intimidation — a group of third-years, still halfway through their butterbeer, scatter at a single glance. Harry watches the scene unfold with that particular brand of silent reproach he’s perfected, but by the time he thinks to object, the children are already out the door.

Avery is dispatched to fetch drinks. Black vanishes toward the washroom, trailing blithely after a local girl whose robes seem to have been tailored by a degenerate.

Which leaves only the two of them, Harry and Tom, seated opposite one another in a booth too narrow to permit an easy retreat. The air is close, the wood still warm from the bodies that left it, and Tom is half-aware of the notion pressing at the edge of thought — that this might almost resemble a date. 

He attributes the heat in his cheeks to the room.

“That thing you said earlier.” Harry says, suddenly. “I’m not sure I’m satisfied with it.”

Tom, momentarily disarmed, forces himself to hold the composure his face refuses to surrender. “Oh?”

“It assumes the world can always be interpreted cleanly. Or that mastery explains everything we don't yet understand.”

“Interpretation is a form of control. It helps to begin there.”

Harry just nods. It is not in agreement.

"But there are things that resist control. Things that won't yield to study, or force."

A familiar rush stirs in Tom, just then. Lucid and surgical, the feeling of operating within his proper medium. The earlier drift — that vague, social formlessness — recedes like a fever broken. In this shape, he is legible to himself: incisive, at liberty to wound. And Harry permits it. Worse, he invites it.

He does not ask whether this was done intentionally, if Harry had seen the way he faltered on their walk here, answering instead with the smallest lift of his shoulder.

“There is no such thing as resistance without cause. Only unknown laws. Even the oldest, most arcane forms of magic operate that way.” Tom crows. He doesn’t need to consider his words first. The rhythm of argument as sport, debate as a dance, is a muscle he has long-trained.

“But I don’t think the world is a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be put together.”

“Well, it certainly doesn’t mean to remain broken.”

“Not broken. Just not assumed to be yours by right.”

Tom’s mouth lifts slightly. He takes the blow without resistance, letting the reply settle so he might twist it back. 

“You think this is about possession.”

“I think it’s about limits. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s.”

“I don’t believe in limits. Only thresholds.”

“And what do you expect to happen when you breach them, exactly?”

“Transcendance.”

“Right. Even if it costs something?”

“It always does.”

That bright verve begins to snowball within him. It is a rare exhilaration, of being met where most fall short. Minds that grovel bore him. Minds that resist for resistance’s sake insult him. But Harry strikes differently. He doesn’t yield or flail. He narrows the field, sharpens the terms. And Tom, startled by the elegance of it, finds himself veering into dangerous territory. Enjoyment. Perhaps even the beginnings of play.

But in his periphery, he notices Avery carrying the steins to their table, a small sign before the space around them starts to thin, intimacy slipping away like water pulling back from the shore.

Suddenly, and with a sinking feeling resembling urgency, he turns to meet Harry’s eyes. The glance lasts no more than a breath, yet in it blossoms a strange disquiet. It strikes him, then, that Tom has never tried to enter the boy’s mind. Curious, given how thoroughly he has otherwise dismantled him — detail by detail, moment by moment, until only this remains.

The impulse comes reflexively. A voice inside him counsels restraint. He silences it, still warm with the illusion of ascent; the sense that together, they have climbed to some higher place, and that Tom, by right, may demand anything as though it is his to possess.

So he slips through those green halos hooked onto his. Easily. Too easily. No resistance rises to meet him. Harry’s mind flexes as if it were already shaped to accommodate him, and for a moment, he mistakes this for victory.

Then the image forms.

Tom sees himself, staring back. 

A reflection, seen at some unforgiving distance. His gaze scorched, expression ungoverned, trembling, collar damp, flushed to the throat. His eyes catch like glass under heat, pupils shattered wide beyond composure. Tom looks wracked by a wild, unmasked fever, rivalling even the true one he’d experienced at four when he’d contracted scarlatina. 

For one suspended second, he cannot look away.

Then, he tears free, full body recoiling, as if burnt.

It was nothing. Nothing. Contamination, perhaps. Some accidental conflation of thought. Tom hadn’t meant to bring anything in with him, but even a mind as exacting as his is not immune to bleed. And Harry– Harry clearly is not practiced in Occlumency. That makes his senses suggestible. 

And yet—

He presses his tongue to the back of his teeth, suddenly aware of himself in full. Embarrassing. Undisciplined. He’s reading too much into it. Harry’s mind is unguarded. Unguarded minds grow wild things, like gardens lavished by many invasive species. There is no reason to believe that what he saw was true. No reason to think it meant anything at all.

Still. If it is any indication, Tom certainly feels the way he had looked.

He swallows it down, hard. He has made a tactical error. Tom will not make it again. If that is how Harry sees him, then he was safer not knowing.

There is a brief period of recalibration, in which Tom must pretend the insight has not unsettled him. He adjusts the tilt of his posture, leaning back, choosing stillness over reaction, and lets the wash cleanly over them. Whatever existed just moments ago has fallen. Their new dynamic has been clarified, emptied of ambiguity. And it is pity, just as he’d suspected. Harry pities him.

He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter.

"Though in some cases," Tom accepts without a fight, mood diminished. "I suppose your point stands."

Harry frowns.

Despite his resolution to keep watch over Avery, Tom does not attend the match the very next day. 

He already knows how it will go. Harry will carve through the air like a hawk, the crowd will shriek itself hoarse at every well-placed dive, and when the snitch is, inevitably, caught in that gloved hand of his, his team will descend on him with all the grace of a feeding frenzy. Fists in the air, voices cracking with delight, some tangle of adolescent adoration, piling on top of each other and winding their limbs, stuck like gnats to honey.

It will be insufferable. A grotesque little opera of sweat and boyish fervour, and Tom, who considers himself a creature of finer instincts, would rather not attend.

So, as the others sweep off in their emerald scarves, he stays behind in the dormitory, untouched by the fervor of team spirit and perfectly content to remain so.

His desk is a sprawl of documents, creased and blotted, maps curling at the edges, folders stamped with the seal of the Department of Magical Records. He flips through them with an increasingly deadened hand. Ministry censuses, owl-post ledgers, burial registers. Years and years of names and places and none of them affording him the answer he is due.

Tom had thought the name Gaunt would rot on the pages of history like a stain, that it would resist erasure, cling to every old deed or ancestral claim like a bad smell, but it has vanished almost entirely, like everything else belonging to Slytherin’s lineage. Every trace leads only to a closed door, and every closed door reminds him that this country has too many rats and not enough records worth their ink.

Currently, he is scratching a scathing letter. One of the more rural archives — Wiltshire, or perhaps Somerset, the details swim — has sent word that no such living remainder of the family exists within their registers. It is a lie, or incompetence, or some special alchemy of the two. He will go there himself if he must. Tom has always found that answers come easier off the end of a cruciatus curse.

Still, his eyes keep flicking toward the window. Submerged under the black waters of the lake as he is, he can still, somehow, hear cheers rise distantly, as muffled and indistinct as they are.

He doesn’t need to hear them. He doesn’t need to imagine Harry at the centre of those adoring chants, his expression careless and bright and made for that happiness. He doesn’t need to picture the errant life he wears in those moments, when no one is asking anything of him but what he can reasonably deliver.

Tom leans back in his chair, the leather groaning beneath his weight, and forces himself to focus. The quill trembles slightly in his grip before stilling. His mouth draws tight. There are no answers in the sky. Only noise. Only heat. Only him.

He is so very done with the noise.

But of course, that isn’t up to him.

The din reaches him well before the corridor bends. Tom rounds the corner with a sigh so faint it scarcely parts from him, the borrowed volume (Records and Offences in the British Penal System, 1802–1919) still warm where his hand has curled around its spine. He had meant only to retrieve a reference from the library, nothing more. But in his absence, the common room has surrendered itself to bacchanal-like revelry. Slytherin has won, after all — and not merely scraped by, but thrashed Hufflepuff to the point of no return. Now, victory swells to the coffered ceiling with little to limit it.

The standards for decorum have evidently been lowered. Armchairs have been arranged into a web around a self-playing phonograph, which strains to blare out an increasingly frantic Celestina Warbeck record. A few enchanted garlands twitch in time with the music. And even Slughorn’s usual brand of indulgent negligence would blanch at the sight of Corvus Lestrange half sprawled upon Druella Rosier’s lap on the chesterfield, snogging her with a disregard for subtlety that could only belong to someone far older, or perhaps far younger, in sensibility. The display, of course, finds no notice in the room; not even by Lucretia, who is far more absorbed in the carefully fixed lapel of Prewett (Gryffindor, though always around) than in the spectacle being performed for her sake.

Avery drifts past, flushed and glossy-eyed, murmuring an off-key refrain under his breath as though he’s forgotten the lyrics halfway through. There’s a listless sway to his step, more festive than truly drunk, though one could hardly tell the difference in this light. Harry is nowhere obvious, but Tom catches the unmistakable cut of his profile near the hearth, half-lit in the fire’s glow, his mouth curved in response to Alphard’s chatter. 

He suppresses the instinct to rip the Black boy to shreds and cuts quickly through the crowd, barely touched by the static crackle of elation in the air, making for the stairs. By the time he reaches his dormitory, the noise has dimmed only marginally.

Inside, Nott is draped across his bed, one leg hanging idly over the side, his gaze fixed on the banister above like there is an interesting way to the grain.

Tom sets the book on his desk. “Celebrating privately, are you?”

Nott doesn’t turn his head. “Nothing appealing about the view downstairs.”

Tom glances at him, then at the room, heavy with the sullen quality of spoilage, and draws the appropriate, if vague, conclusion. One would have to be wilfully obtuse to miss it; what, with the half-drained bottle of firewhiskey dangling from his roommate’s hand. 

“Lestrange.” He poses.

“Mmm. You noticed, then.”

“Hard not to. His tongue was practically down Rosier’s throat.”

Nott’s expression curdles. Tom lowers himself to the edge of his bed and sits, hands still, studying the wavering spill of lake-light cast across the floor, the distant strains of someone laughing too loudly. He does not know what to say that might stop Nott from finishing the bottle and later painting their lavatory floor with the contents of his stomach.

“I’ve never understood it.” He remarks, finally. “The mania. The affectation. You’d think people had no higher faculties.”

“It’s not meant to be understood.” Nott sniffs. “You either want someone or you don’t.”

Tom considers that. “Wanting is not a condition I’ve found particularly productive.”

“You wouldn’t.”

At that, tension catches in Tom’s shoulders, but he smooths it away. 

This was a waste of time. 

Standing, he takes up his winter cloak from the wardrobe, slipping his wand into the pocket sewn on its inside.

Nott forgets himself. “Where are you going?” 

“Out. The air’s gone thick in here.”

He doesn’t wait for a reply. Best not to. Any further prompting and the idiot might take it as an invitation.

In the hall, music still pulses through the walls. But outside, the grounds lie in a hush that feels almost pointedly contrastive. The wind has dropped, the sky flat and low. Snow has condensed into itself, crunching underfoot as he walks, and the Black Lake stretches out before him, dark as tar and rimmed in frost. Its surface bears no disturbance but the crisp, mirrored outlines of the shore, the trees, and the looming castle behind him, glowing windows like starlight. 

He steps closer to the edge. It is enough to simply watch the water for a moment. To let the quiet do what it does best and pare him back to the essential.

Tom has done well for himself. 

In mere weeks, he has returned to the ambitions laid out last summer and brought most of them to heel. His post-Hogwarts course is already arranged: a discreet tenure at Hogwarts as professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts in Merrythought’s succession, which will serve him conveniently as he tracks down the remaining objects with which to consolidate his power. After that… The continent, perhaps, or further East. There are disciplines Hogwarts refuses to teach, and he means to master them all.

He will become the most powerful wizard the world has ever known. He will grow elsewhere — unchallenged, unmatched, and utterly alone. He will come back, and make Britain his. He will kill Dumbledore. He will kill Grindelwald, if the man doesn’t get himself killed first. He will never see Harry again. 

And, in time, he will forget the strange, sudden emptiness that knowing this carves into him now.

Will Harry forget him, too?

Tom considers the impression he’s left so far, searching for an enduring mark, one that might remain when the rest fades. But all that surfaces are the missteps, the arguments, and every occasion in which he’d been made to look foolish. 

It shouldn’t matter. 

Yet— 

He thinks he would very much like to leave behind a finer legacy, just this once.

(“When I do it, it will be memorable.”

“I don’t doubt that.”)

He draws his wand. The books on wandlore he’d devoured in his first year seems to rise to the fore of his mind. 

Yew wands lend themselves to magic of singular purpose, often fearsome, seldom benign. They do not perform light magic easily, nor should they be made to. Yew is the wood of kings and killers, steeped in the poison of its mother tree. It thrives where little else does. Naturally, it is a wand for endings, not for light.  

If the wand chooses the wizard, then Tom wonders if perhaps he is ill-suited for a charm as declarative and redemptive as a patronus. That sort of magic demands joy in its purest distillation, and what does he know of that?

Still. He will try; the idea of impossibility has never much dissuaded him.

Tom reaches for a memory. The day he’d uncovered his ancestry offers nothing, evidently. It was not enough before, and it is not enough now. He casts it aside and reaches further — thinking of joy, careful not to get too hung up on how insufferably vague that definition is — toward a smaller fragment. Older, and likely misremembered.

The day he had first discovered his magic.

Not Dumbledore’s visit, of course, doomed as that encounter was. No, beyond that, to the very moment Tom realised he was special.

He had been four. It was late at night, and he was ill. Scarlet fever had made its rounds through Wools, and soon, it found him. Mrs. Cole saw the rash blooming up his back like lichen and locked him in quarantine; in a room where his only company were warped floorboards and curtains that stank of the death of those before him. Small as he was, he understood what the isolation meant. It was where children were put when there was nothing more to be done. 

Yet his fear hadn’t manifested itself in the prospect of death, not yet. 

It was the dark which took on a brand new form, swelling and thinning, folding over itself in viscous layers that stuck to the ceiling and trickled down the walls. It made holes where there weren’t any: grinning tunnels between the floorboards, slits in the crown moulding that blinked when he wasn’t looking. He thought he saw arms at some point in the night, reaching from under the bed, and after that he did not look there again.

And then, just as he was about to give in to the fever — light.

It spilled from his palm in one warbling orb, pale and warm and pure, and floated upward to hover above. He had not known what it was, only that it stayed, and when he reached for it again, another popped from the palm of his sweaty hand, and then another. Soon the room was full of them, drifting like dandelion spores, softening the gritty edges of the room, and of the dark, with their golden hush.

By morning, his fever had broken. Mrs. Cole crossed herself and said little. No one could explain it. Least of all Tom himself.

(He would later learn that magical constitutions burn through muggle disease quite ruthlessly. But he hadn’t known that then. At four, he had believed, wholly, that the light had saved him. That he had called it into being, and it had answered.)

Tom lets the memory take hold. The serenity of it fills him now, and he moves without hesitation, wrist circling once through the air in a smooth arc. For a moment, he nearly forgets the incantation, his body held in stillness, breath suspended. But then, it rolls off his tongue like it’d been waiting there, with or without his efforts.

“Expecto patronum.”

A thread of blue light purls from the tip of his wand. It drifts a moment, then fades. It is nothing like the orbs he conjured as a child, but within him, the same, remembered delight bubbles over.

He came close. He almost—

“Tom?” 

A voice suddenly breaks into his private stillness. He did not hear anyone approach. The clearing was empty. He had been alone, he’s sure of it. 

Tom turns at once. 

There stands Harry, a few paces away, as if materialised from the cold itself. His coat dusted with snow, face wind-bitten and alight with an expression that Tom has trouble placing. It is near foreign, for it has never once been directed at him, and he finds himself doubting whether he is even interpreting it correctly — Harry’s smile, unabashed and startling in its warmth, appears to be one of happiness.

The sight is so stark it feels unreal. Tom wonders if it is a selkie, or a vision wrung loose by magical exhaustion. The idea that Harry might look at him like that (so pleased, so freely) does not admit itself easily into his understanding of the world. 

And still, Harry continues to smile. Brightly. Brilliantly. As if he’s seen proof of a miracle. As if Tom is the one who’s delivered it.

“I saw that,” He says, stumbling forward, nearly tripping on his own feet. “You nearly had it. You– God, you were right there!”

The laugh catches in the air, luminous with disbelief. Tom stares at him. It is not the sort of sound that belongs here, and he cannot fathom why Harry sees fit to make it so. Has he been drinking? Is this some crude attempt at mockery? What exactly is there to praise Tom for? 

After all, there is no merit in just coming close. Proximity is not accomplishment. 

Any earlier triumph he might’ve felt sours at the prospect of condescension. Still, Tom holds his posture with care, unwilling to betray himself.

“Well, what did you expect?” He asserts. “I am one of the finest wizards of our age. That doesn’t count for nothing.”

But Harry does not flinch. He advances, resolute, heels grinding through frozen earth. Nearer now — close enough that Tom catches the heat of him. His face, half-lit, burns with impossible colour. A flush over the cheekbone, the gleam of perspiration upon his brow, and in his eyes, that same stubborn flame. 

He has never looked further from reach, all while being this close.

“Try again,” Harry whispers, despite.

The words land like a hand placed gently where it has no business being. Tom stiffens. Such encouragement is reserved for children at the piano, or dogs just shy of understanding. He finds it offensive in principle, and more so in the peculiar heat it stirs in him: shame mislabelled as softness, as though he ought to be grateful for being spared humiliation.

He is not grateful.

His jaw sets. He is not accustomed to failure, less so to witnesses. That Harry should speak to him with such insistence (as if his success were not inevitable, but in question) is intolerable. It suggests Tom is in the process of becoming, rather than already complete. 

Worse: it suggests Harry sees him that way.

He turns his face, enough to veil it from full view. “You presume much.”

Harry still doesn't retreat. His body language doesn’t slope with disappointment. The easy way to his expression doesn’t wane. He just remains as he is, simply looking at Tom as though it is finally safe to do so.

Tom’s mouth curls into his ugliest sneer. “How very benevolent of you to take an interest in my magical development. One might almost think you cared.” He lets the silence stretch, then adds, quieter, sharper: “Since you're so well-versed in the theory, perhaps a demonstration is in order. Unless, of course, you've simply chosen to abstain from producing one yourself.” His eyes flick once over Harry’s wand hand. “An odd omission, for someone so eager to instruct.”

He expects that to be the end. Whatever potential Harry thought he saw has surely collapsed beneath the weight of Tom’s derision. That ought to be enough.

And for a moment, it appears to be. The exultation melts from Harry’s face. But in its place is only another smile. This one is a slanting, irreverent thing, and he tilts his head, one brow lifting, gaze steady as if none of it has touched him at all.

Tom feels it reverberate in him involuntarily. His humiliation deepens until it is a living, breathing thing inside of him. It is clear to him now; whatever he says, Harry will see right through it. 

But Harry doesn’t mention it. Rather, he rolls his shoulders back, spine lengthening with the movement. He is taller, suddenly, though not by much. A rogue curl of hair brushes the hollow beneath Tom’s jaw when he steps past, right before the chill reclaims the space between them.

There is a pause.

Without flourish, Harry raises his wand over the hem of the lake. From the edge of the forest, even the nocturnal creatures falter in their hunt, and the wind through the branches becomes nothing more than a whisper. 

Then the light appears, as though it had been waiting somewhere just beyond the veil of the visible. It pours from Harry in a single, uninterrupted motion, too bright to take in all at once. Tom’s vision contracts. His eyes narrow, water, resist. He blinks, once, then again, and again. The form resolves slowly, refusing to waver.

And when his vision clears completely, there is no room left for doubt. It stands before him entirely, inviolate. A stag, vast and blinding, its antlers sweeping like branches in frost, moving with impossible lightness, hooves skimming the glass of the lake without leaving so much as a tremor.

Tom cannot breathe. 

He does not mean to reach forward, but his fingers twitch with the memory of reverence. A long-forgotten, blasphemous instinct stirs, one he has not felt since the first time they tried to exorcise him. He is not at the lake. He is kneeling on the stone floor of the chapel near Wools, the dust of incense clinging to his lungs, the candlelight softening the face of a crucified figure whose silence was never kind. But this– this is not silence. This is not judgment. The light does not condemn. It simply is.

The stag turns its head. Its eyes, if they can be called that, seem to regard him with impossible clarity.

And then it is gone, no rupture left in its wake. The dark returns without ceremony, folding itself back over the night as though nothing had ever stirred it. Harry stands where he was, wand lowered, watching.

When Tom speaks, the question emerges before he consents to it. It is indelicate and not at all what he would have chosen for himself. 

“How.”

Harry’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “I’ll teach you.”

Tom’s body reacts before he can find a way to reject the offer. He lifts his arm and waits, biting into his cheek to stifle a flare of mortification.  

Harry mirrors the motion. “I find it helps to keep the spiral going,” he says, his wrist turning in a slow, continuous circle, round and round, over, down, and up again. “I don’t know if it’s a real thing, strictly speaking. But imagine it gathering in you. All the while, hold your memory.”

None of it bears logical scrutiny. There is no mechanism by which power accumulates in the momentum of a wrist. Charms are not old crank up toys. Tom nearly says so. But Harry is already watching him, and that look he’s giving refuses dismissal. 

So, he tries it. Five spins and he mutters the incantation. The charm does not answer him. It resists his will, slips from his grasp. The harder he tries to trap it, the slippier it gets. 

Harry is beside him, watching without judgment. That lack of correction unsettles him most. It is worse than ridicule.

Tom tries again. He is simply too deep into it now. To abandon the effort would be worse than failure.

This time, there is still no light, but there is a shift. Not magic, precisely. Permission. A part of him reluctantly steps aside. He tries to remember how he felt when he’d almost done it, but the freedom of that moment has long since been lost to the feeling of Harry’s shoulder, scant inches from his. 

Time distends. 

The cold stops biting after a while. They move without speaking. Harry demonstrates; Tom emulates. The vacillation between them hums. 

“Your method is laughably inefficient.” Tom says. His wrist has begun to ache.

“It’s worked for everyone else.” Harry replies. “I wonder if you’re doing it properly. Not the motion, but the memory you’re channeling. You seem so fixed on the form that you’ve missed the point of it.”

Tom hardly registers the advice. Everyone else? What, precisely, does that mean? Has Harry been prostituting himself to others, tossing out defence lessons like handjobs to the dull-eyed masses of their cohort? 

“You’re rather free with your talents.” Tom murmurs. “Is instruction offered to anyone persistent enough, or only to the tragically unteachable?”

Harry chortles. “You’d know if you were either.”

“Of course.” Tom’s voice is silk, but strained. “You always did seem the sentimental sort. Darting about, collecting runts.”

Harry’s eyes glint. “Is that how you see yourself, then? Poor stray thing?”

“Hardly. If anything, I’d be the breeder.”

“You?” Harry grins. “You’d sooner thin the litter.”

“Quality control, Evans. You should be grateful I’m still entertained.”

“Oh, I’m grateful, alright.” Harry says, easy now. “Now,” he readjusts his stance. “Focus.”

And, despite himself, Tom listens. 

Later, he’s able to conjure three more fragile, tentative wisps of light. Harry calls it promising for a first attempt, though Tom suspects that is what any tutor would say to their pupil, if only to feel better about the quality of their instruction. Still, he doesn’t have it in him to be disturbed by this, anymore than he is already disturbed by the strange and ephemeral circumstance he finds himself in. 

He has not thought of control for some time. Not since his fingers went numb. He has not wondered what Harry is hiding. He has not sought out the mechanism beneath his calm, the flaw in his affection. That, too, ceased sometime between the moment his nose began to run and his lips started to chap.

Harry glances at him at intervals, temples damp with frost and ears flushed a vivid red. His face bears no trace of caution. He laughs softly, conjures his stag once more, and sends it circling around them as they move. Then, with an affected nonchalance, he lends the patronus his voice. The creature speaks in his stead, a crisp, clear message carried upon the night air. 

“It’s a useful way to communicate,” He explains. “When owl post proves too slow.”

Tom considers this. “How modest. Shall I expect a glowing stag to deliver my morning correspondence, then?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Harry sputters.

“No?” Tom’s scrutiny grows teeth. “You oughtn’t shrink from it. If you believe your ability is extraordinary, say so.”

“It isn’t.” Harry shifts his weight. “There are plenty who can do it.”

“I’ve yet to meet anyone.” Tom delights in pushing him like this. “You’re telling me you have? Arm in arm with dark wizards, was it?”

“I’d be careful leaning so heavily into assumptions concerning things you don’t fully understand.”

“It isn’t an assumption when the evidence is so clearly stamped on your neck.”

Harry’s fingers lift, brushing the space just between the fall of his hair and the edge of his collar. It must be a tic; he shows no sign of having meant it until he sees Tom’s gaze fixed upon the gesture with the intensity of a predator marking prey. His hand drops at once.

A beat.

“Think what you like,” He says, exhaling as though the matter hardly warrants the breath. If Tom had feared his probing would draw blood, the concern is his alone. His boy only shrugs, and what tension had briefly gathered slips from his shoulders as though it had never belonged there at all.

Tom will revisit the subject in time. He cannot waste breath on it now. Especially given that Harry is present. He is here. 

(He is beautiful.)

And Tom, inexplicably, is glad.

The joy that rises in his chest bears no resemblance to victory. It is unfamiliar. It does not leave smokey, desperate residue in his throat. It sits quietly beside him and does not demand to be named. It has nothing to do with legacy, or vengeance, or the long, triumphant arc of becoming, or having, or destroying.

Despite itself, it is enough.

Only as they begin the slow walk back toward the castle, the night having concluded without calamity, does Tom glance at Harry and think — not for the first time, though no longer as violently as before, finally softened by the lucidity he’d been looking for all these weeks:

Mine.

Chapter Text

Tom wakes disgracefully late the next morning. By the usual order of things, his roommates ought to be waist-deep in their morning rituals by now: gargling, steam-blinded, splashing about in the communal showers like colts at pasture. But last night’s excesses appear to have seen that schedule abandoned, as it has done with his own. He draws back his bed curtains and surveys the carnage.

Nott remains precisely where Tom left him — sprawled in an inelegant cruciform, one arm flung heavenward, the other lost to a tangle of scarf and shirt-cuff. A solitary sock is missing. The empty firewhiskey bottle at his flank glistens as it weeps onto the floorboards. Nott does not move, nor does Tom check for breath. The whole tableau has a devotional quality to it, were the subject not so profoundly unworthy.

Avery is stationed before the mirror, locked in a debacle involving Sleekeazy and several stubborn cowlicks. His expression is one of martyrdom, though the effect is rather ruined by the bloodshot meagreness of his eyes. Every third motion of the comb results in a wince. He persists.

Black is absent. Tom does not wonder long. His kind never sleep alone.

And Lestrange, absurdly, is already dressed. His hair is damp; his collar, starched upright. He’s sipping water from a crystal tumbler and gives, Tom notes, no indication that he recalls whose décolletage he spent the better part of last night slobbering over. 

But he does falter when Tom makes himself known. No doubt it is the first time he — or any of them — have borne witness to him in such a state. Even during that brief, wretched aftermath following the creation of his horcrux, Tom had sequestered himself in the Chamber, emerging only once he could stand without trembling, speak without bile surging up his throat, and bear his own sickly reflection without flinching. 

Lestrange’s eyes rake across Tom’s appearance with alarm.

“Good morning,” he offers, though it is less a greeting and more a question.

Tom does not respond. His gaze drops to the drawer Lestrange is now opening. From within, the boy produces a cobalt-glass vial. Of course. Hangover draught. Trust him to keep such a thing within arm’s reach, like a maiden aunt and her smelling salts. Lestrange’s constitution, fragile at the best of times, has driven him to cultivate an entire apothecary’s worth of emergency restoratives. Every ailment is either terminal or psychosomatic, and he lives under siege from a number of imagined afflictions.

He extends the vial towards Tom.

“I’m not hungover, you presumptuous cretin,” Tom snaps, snatching the thing only to abandon it on the nearest sill.

Lestrange accepts this with all the mild indifference of someone resigned to Tom’s bouts of peevishness, shrugging and returning the drawer to its berth with a click.

And yet, despite his protestations, Tom feels hungover — if not in the peasant sense of the term, then in some deeper, more totalising register. His skull seems swaddled in damp wadding, then bound too tightly. His mouth tastes medicinal and metallic. The rawness in his throat feels scorched, as though he’d inhaled the stub-end of a cigarette, filter and all; an absurdity, given he abandoned the habit at thirteen.

Then: a thought, like a clean, terrible detonation in the murk of his mind.

Harry.

He turns at once, eyes lancing across the room, locating his bed. The coverlet remains smoothed, the pillow fluffed, the blankets folded back militarily, as though by house-elf hands. 

The sight seizes him. A nausea so instantaneous and complete he very nearly drops when he stands. His knees unlock, and Tom lunges for the washroom, where he can at least suffer in privacy. He grips the ceramic basin and lets the bile rise.

Harry. Harry.

He remembers.

That strange, suspended pocket of time last night: withdrawn from the clammy jubilation of the others, ensconced in the cold as if hidden inside the hour itself. The light they conjured like sparklers from a storybook. Instruction given in half-voice. The proximity of their hands. Returning only when the common room was stripped of spirit, haunted by witless stragglers senseless to a party’s death. They had slipped back into it like ghosts, and there was cake, abandoned on the table, of which they pilfered and ate with their fingers, like children.

They headed upstairs. They dressed for bed. Tom took his prescription of dreamless sleep. They bid each other goodnight.

And now. Now, the unforgiving light of the morning lands like a cudgel.

Had Harry been drunk?

Is he hiding, now? Sequestered somewhere within the castle, nursing regret and a headache, hoping the memory of his lark with Tom Riddle — whom he hated until he became very indifferent about — will dissipate?

Tom feels the humiliation before he consents to name it. A slap beneath the skin. The sense that he has overplayed his hand; or worse, misread the game entirely. He’d been so happy to let his suspicions go last night. 

He should never have allowed it.

His knuckles go white around the rim of the sink.

Tom excises the parasitic doomspiral before it can damn him to hell. Whether Harry regrets the night or not is immaterial. If he does, so be it. It only affirms what Tom has always known; that beneath the poise, he is as base and undisciplined as the rest. No better than the drunks still groaning into their pillows.

(And yet– That patronus. That incandescent, wordless stag. Ordinary boys do not conjure like that. Ordinary boys do not breathe magic into the dark and make it dance.)

He casts tempus . A quick shower, he decides, and he can still make a dignified appearance in the Great Hall for breakfast.

The steam does its work: scours the dread from his skull, wrings the morning’s weakness from his pores. With each pass of the flannel, Tom exhales more steadily, breath deepening into control. His headache recedes to a manageable throb. 

At the mirror, he sets about his reconstruction, coaxing a curl into place and smoothing the collar of his robes until it sits like it was cut for state. It is a mark of a true man to be able to marshal himself, he thinks, no matter the circumstance. Decay may flirt with the edges, but presentation is everything.

By the time he reaches the Great Hall, there is no trace of the boy who nearly collapsed at the washbasin.

Which is just as well.

Because Harry is already there.

Positioned with remove at the far end of the table, where the morning light breaks in ribbons across the flagstones. He sits with that insufferable ease of his and looks, to Tom’s chagrin, precisely as he had the night before: otherworldly. Wraith-like.

And when those green eyes lift, they find Tom at once, bright and without the slightest trace of shame. 

(But of course not. To imagine him diminished, flushed or coy or awkward in the aftermath, had been folly. If he were not a Slytherin, his dauntlessness would find sanctuary among Gryffindor’s lion-hearts. Harry is not the sort to flee from consequence.

Suddenly, Tom can no longer stomach the idea that he himself might be.)

So he moves, descending the length of the table and folding himself beside Harry. Just adjacent, close enough that their sleeves touch, their knees knock, their warmth intermingling. 

(If Harry is unafraid, Tom will not be outdone.)

Harry turns toward him, brows lifted in some dry approximation of curiosity. 

“You look well,” Tom says mildly, as if the night before had not cracked open the core of his composure.

“Yes,” Harry huffs. “There is a certain satisfaction in witnessing the fruits of our restraint come to light.”

He gives a small, dismissive flick towards the ruin of their housemates. Druella Rosier, listing pale and defeated over her plate; Lucretia Black, half-submerged in her folded arms. Ignatius Prewett, nursing a plate of eggs so greasy, he must have specially requested it from the kitchen.

Tom permits the ghost of a genuine smile to cross his lips. So Harry had not been drunk. He had chosen Tom in sober, sound mind. 

“Quite.”

The air between them undergoes a quiet alchemy. 

The terrain is altered, the veil drawn back just enough to reveal the shimmer of possibility, precariously within reach. A more foolish man might rush in and grasp too tightly. Tom knows better. He savours it like a vintage too rare for immoderation and does not leave Harry’s side. 

He walks with him between classes, matching his pace without remark. When Harry dawdles, Tom delays; when he moves with purpose, Tom is already at his elbow. He claims the space beside him in everything; at lectures, at meals, in the hush of the library and the common room, and never with request. He presumes the calm, inalienable assumption of place.

He speaks. Often. And when he does not, Tom invents some pretext to draw Harry’s attention anyway. There is no use for absence between them anymore. Tom ensures his presence is a constant, and Harry bears it all, never startled, always preternaturally composed, meeting Tom’s imperious edge with the grace of someone long acquainted with its bite. It is as though he doesn’t see the orbit tightening around him. 

(Or, perhaps, he has always known it would turn out this way). 

Tom is untouched. He knows better now than to mistake his boy’s behaviour for indifference. One does not laugh like Harry does — scandalised and warm, head tilted low — if they are unimpressed. One does not meet his gaze so directly if they do not intend to hold it.

There is triumph in that. Tom allows himself to enjoy their camaraderie. 

But contentment is not a natural state for him. What he holds now is a beginning, but not yet the whole. Tom has never longed for fragments. The hunger beneath his composure grows more yawning by the day. 

And Harry, damn him, allows it. Whether out of reciprocated affection, pride, or some inscrutable instinct of his own, he allows it.

On Tuesday evening, Tom leaves his bed-curtains open.

He does not even pretend to sleep. Book in hand, eyes tracking the stillness of the dormitory, he waits, though not for long. 

Across the room, Harry stirs, slipping from his bed, wand clutched loosely in his grip, feet bare on cold stone.

Once, this would have driven Tom mad. He would have fought the urge to drill into his mind for information, or disillusion himself to follow wherever he goes. But not now, when things are different. Now, he needn’t guess; not when Harry has begun to belong to him in small, incremental ways.

He snaps his book shut. It rings in the sleepy quiet. “Going somewhere?”

Harry halts mid-step, eyes widening with the guilt of someone caught mid-crime. It is almost funny, how quick he shakes off the skin of sleep, no doubt scrabbling for answers. His neck straightens, fingers tightening around the folds of his blanket, weighing his words like they might cost him. 

Finally, he says: “It’s late.”

“All the better for secrets, I imagine.” Tom swings his legs over the side of the bed and rises, reaching for a cloak to wear over his bedclothes, not bothering to disguise the delight he takes in the other boy’s confusion. “You’ve been awfully evasive about your midnight excursions.”

“I don’t report to you.”

“No,” Tom agrees smoothly. He slips into his shoes. “But tonight, I believe, you’ll have my company.”

“You weren’t invited.”

“Oh, but we’ve moved beyond the need for invitations, haven’t we?” Tom says “It would be dreadfully rude to leave me behind.” He strides to the door and opens it with a courtly sweep. “After you.”

Harry glares at him, muttering a few choice expletives under his breath, but he walks out all the same.

Tom follows.

“And where will we be going?”

“Just… around.” Harry replies, a shade too casual.

Tom lifts a brow. “‘Just around’?” 

“I take walks when I can’t sleep.”

“A charming excuse,” Tom says. “though rather transparent.”

But Harry doesn’t rise to the bait. He shrugs, and continues on.

And indeed, that is all they do. Walk. Through the draughty, winding arteries of Hogwarts; past moonlit windows and the restless sighs of ancient portraits. Until the floors wear on their soles.

It’s oddly silent, save for the occasional rush of staircases changing or the creak of old frames adjusting on their hooks. Tom does not want to start a conversation that would steer them away from explanation, but eventually, his curiosity dulls into indulgence. He forgets to press. Forgetting, too, that he never forgets.

Then, Harry, perhaps emboldened by the hour or simply bored of civility, sparks his wand with lumos and points to a sleeping portrait, grinning.

“Go on. Guess what he’ll say when I wake him.”

Tom looks at the painting — a gouty wizard in a powdered wig, mouth open mid-snore — and considers it.

“Something tiresome and colonial, I expect.”

Harry raises his wand. The portrait jerks awake with a sputtering cry: “What’s all this, then? You there, state your bloodline!”

Harry bursts into laughter, doubling over against the wall.

Tom exhales a reluctant sound that is almost a laugh. “You’ve done this before.”

“Not recently,” Harry says. “It’s not as fun by oneself.”

Tom simply watches him, lit from beneath by the blue wand-light, and thinks, rather unwisely, that he could walk this castle a thousand nights more if Harry led the way. He thinks he understands exactly what Harry means. 

“Let’s do another.” Tom whispers. 

People begin to notice. Of course they do.

They may not understand the axis, but they feel the tilt. Hogwarts has grown heliotropic in its attentions, faces angling not only toward Tom, as they once did reflexively, but toward the boy he chooses to spend all his time around.

Alphard Black has taken to brooding behind his fringe like a widow in the second month whenever Tom draws Harry away at dinner. Tom watches him struggle with this new loss — the humiliation of finding oneself surplus. One imagines he’ll recover. He’s the sort that thrives on middling praise and will soon ferret out some gaggle of lesser minds to keep him company. Blacks always do.

The Knights, ever keen to preserve their positions, have already begun the evolutionary shuffle away from Harry’s new place in the order. Their obsequiousness has refined itself into distance. They do not know why he matters, only that he does; and that — where Tom once preferred to speak and be spoken to without delay — he now allows silence if Harry chooses not to fill it. Conversely, to offer less than what’s worthy when Harry could have given more is to risk Tom’s wrath. 

Even Malfoy — arrogant, prideful Abraxas — has begun to preface his interjections with apology. “Forgive the intrusion—”, as though Tom had once invited his voice as ornament to a conversation.

It amuses him. The way the court reshapes itself — and all for a boy who moves through their midst without intention of conquest. 

Even Slughorn, whose partiality once functioned as its own ecosystem of influence, has begun to redirect his favour with a degree of transparency that borders on vulgar. Harry, bolstered by his Quidditch performance and by the more compelling weight of Tom’s regard, now receives his special kind of attention. In Potions, Slughorn addresses them both:

“Hogwarts’ finest boys,” he declares, as if brilliance were a communal trait. “Always a pleasure to see excellence allied!”

Harry gives a noncommittal nod, his expression unreadable save for the trace of irony at the corners of his mouth.

“He wouldn’t look me in the eye until last week.” He explains, hushed, once they have taken their seats.

And, as always, it is Dumbledore alone who remains unchanged, observing with a patience that verges on presumption. Tom has long become accustomed to the weight of that twinkling stare across rooms. This time, however, he is unable to decide if the attention pleases him or not.

(Harry still goes to see him, of course. Still plays the devoted protégé when called. Tom does not ask. Not yet, anyway. There are many ways to own a secret.)

On the day of Merrythought’s assessment, Tom produces a patronus with ease. Noncorporeal, more a shield than anything else — but it is still full and intact, its edges defined with brilliant light that illuminates his professor’s pleased face. She nods and gestures for him to go, decorated with yet another Outstanding on his grade book.

They are assessed individually, but Harry is waiting for him just outside the classroom.

“Well?” He asks.

Tom adjusts his collar. “I was brilliant, naturally.”

Harry smiles, then, with a radiance that settles any tension he might have left remaining.

By Friday afternoon, the lethargy afflicting their roommates begins to dissolve, revealing the reality that their preparations for the holidays remain untouched. The room has thus descended into disorder, the detritus of neglected packing strewn haphazardly about. Lestrange alone is spared this chaos — his valise sitting primly by his bedside, already buckled, already labelled (completed, one suspects, with the same neurosis that compels him to iron his socks. Tom has stopped wondering about it. The boy will likely expire one day beneath the pressure of his own anxiety) — and, of course, Tom and Harry, who have no preparations to make at all.

Malfoy, despite having left some possessions at home upon his return last weekend, has amassed a tower of trunks so architecturally implausible that it is a monument to his filial wealth. He hovers over the house-elves handling them as though the safe passage of his monogrammed shaving kit is a matter of life or death.

Black labours persistently (futilely) over the task of shrinking his broom to fit within the confines of his trunk, complaining about the caprices of the newer models. Avery has vanished halfway beneath his bed, determined to uncover some misplaced article or another. 

Meanwhile, with nothing better to do, Lestrange has taken it upon himself to reorganise the entire contents of Nott’s trunk. Nott, for his part, lounges supine on the bed, watching his garments receive more care than he has ever extended to them (or anyone but Lestrange) in his life.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, rather) Harry’s corner has been annexed by the others amid the tumult. Tom, disinclined to tolerate such indignity, has claimed his own bed as sovereign territory and drawn Harry into its jurisdiction. 

Now, they preside over the chaos like monarchs, enthroned above the fray: Tom sitting upright against his headboard, Harry curled forward — knees drawn tight to his chest, chin resting atop them, the arc of his spine bared. Tom has to resist the urge to trace it with his fingertips.

“On the topic…” Lestrange trails off the discussion he’d been having. “Tom. My mother wishes to know your intended date of arrival, so that the guest suite may be aired in time.” 

“You might have extended the courtesy to me,” interrupts Malfoy, sniffing. “I see no reason I should be excluded from the advance party.”

“You were excluded, dear Brax, because I have no desire to prolong your presence in my home by a moment more than necessity dictates.”

Ah, yes. The Lestrange invitation — an agreement Tom had made some weeks ago, when the notion of cloistering himself within their library held its usual appeal. Now, the prospect has curdled. The idea of leaving Harry behind, even briefly, feels like a luxury he can no longer afford. Their solitude at Hogwarts this upcoming month will be exquisite, and he has no intention of squandering it.

“I’m afraid I won't be able to make it, Corvus. To neither the stayover or the ball. My sincerest apologies. Please extend my regards to Mrs. Lestrange.” Tom says, exercising the kind of practiced regret that leaves no room for protest.

Lestrange glances up, a crease forming between his brows.

“I see.”

“I won’t be attending either,” Avery adds, sounding rather pleased with himself as he finally extracts a battered present. “My sister returns from the Americas that week.”

Malfoy turns, affronted. “You received an invitation?”

Lestrange exhales through his nose.

“So it will be just the two of us, then.” He says to Nott, who immediately scoffs, though the red tinge creeping up his neck does not go unnoticed.

Harry shifts, bracing himself backwards on his elbows, and Tom leans forward to match the movement, their heads now drawn so near that the air between them seems frenetic with heat. He is a vision here, profaned and divine, spread across Tom’s bed like a decadent offering. The sheets, Slytherin-issue, make an echo of his eyes.

It takes effort, no small effort, not to seize him outright. To close the distance and impress possession onto skin. The slender column of Harry’s throat curves back, guileless, and a salacious need within Tom claws forward: to mar that stretch of gold with teeth. To leave bruises like signatures. To make a reliquary of his ripe flesh.

Let Grindelwald keep his heraldry. Tom would brand his name in blood.

A little too late, he realises Harry has spoken.

“Hm?”

Harry rolls his eyes.

“Didn’t have you down as the type to pass up a chance to butter up the old money crowd.” He tips his voice into a simpering falsetto, his best Slughorn. “‘Connections, my boy. The lifeblood of progress!’”

Tom keeps his laugh private to himself. “You mistake me. I never ingratiate. I am invited.”

Harry tips his head. His eyelashes are long, dark and thick, lining his eyes like kohl. “Yes, and decline it, apparently. A curious tactic for someone so devoted to his myth.”

“I find my reputation sustains itself quite well without the benefit of Lestrange family hors d’oeuvres.” He whispers this, though no one would dare snoop into their private moment.

“Pity,” Harry says. “I would have liked to hear about you parading around, pressed into the polite admiration of some dowager’s silverware.”

“I see no need to add another entry to an already exhaustive record.”

“No!” Harry grins, sharp with delight. “You must tell me about it.”

Tom sighs at the sordid memory. “I expect Black would oblige you. He delights in recounting the time his aunt Lycoris attempted to secure me as a bedfellow. Her husband had only just died.”

Harry cringes, giggling despite himself.

“Wretched woman,” Tom continues. His back arches like the chill that runs down it is physical. “Utterly without dignity. She wore lilac for the funeral and tried to take my hand before the casket was lowered.”

“Well,” Harry presses. “To play devil’s advocate, there are worse fates than being kept by a Black. At least the money’s steady.”

Tom huffs, unamused. “You think she would have offered so much as a knut?”

He does not ask why Harry arrives at the same conclusion he himself had drawn, all those years ago. At fourteen, with London in blackout and the ration book thin during the Blitz, the proposition had lingered longer than it ought to have. There had been no finer prospects. No kindly rescues. Only perfume on gloved hands and the suggestion of ease. 

He had been, humiliatingly, willing.

Harry stills in the quiet that follows.

“You didn’t.” It is not quite a question.

Tom says nothing.

“Tom.”

“I didn’t.” He lifts his chin slightly. “Does the sanctity of my virtue trouble you, Harry?”

Harry colours at once. “Not at all.”

“A pity. You might have enjoyed the tale of Avery’s sister.”

This draws a betrayed glance, Harry’s brows arch as he half-turns towards Avery. For a moment, his face is completely transparent, almost comically so. Tom watches him weigh the unfortunate set of Avery’s jaw, the ill-judged slope of his brow, the adolescent texture of his chin.

Tom, delighted, adds: “They bear no resemblance, if that’s your worry.”

And they go on like that, speaking without pause, conversations looping and drifting, aimless as motes bobbing in the sun. By the time either of them thinks to glance away, the dormitory has emptied. Trunks have gone, beds stripped, the racket of departure long past. Only silence remains.

And them, of course, still facing each other, as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist and neither of them had thought to follow.

The more he gets to know Harry, the more acutely Tom is struck by the failure of his earlier presumptions. What once appeared self-evident now begins to resist categorisation. 

Harry’s conduct, though composed, lacks the doctrinal quality Tom has come to expect in those aligned with Grindelwald. He does not defer to blood hierarchies, nor does he betray any enthusiasm for the philosophical scaffolding upon which such loyalties are usually built. He speaks seldom of lineage, and when he does, it is with an impatience that borders on disdain. His engagements with creatures lower than him in station are conducted with a dignity so consistent it never feels performative: Harry will stoop to right an overturned beetle in the corridor, and always deigns to visit that disgraced oaf, Hagrid, when Tom is otherwise preoccupied. He never mocks the house-elves. And, worst of all, this attention he pays isn’t sparse. It is freely given.

In conversation, Harry remains elliptical on matters Tom considers fundamental. He evades politics like the subject holds no vital consequence. When questioned directly, he responds with either vague assent or outright refusal, as if to imply that the entire debate is, in his view, besides the point.

These silences are beginning to matter. Tom, who prides himself on the rigour of his observations, cannot quite suppress the sense that Harry ought to be easier to read. His detachment from ideology cannot be reconciled with any sincere allegiance. Indeed, the more Tom watches him — that intolerance for cruelty when wielded idly, or his interventions on behalf of everyone, big or small — the more untenable the original supposition becomes.

He had presumed a kind of shared direction between them. Not alignment, perhaps, but compatibility. Now, he begins to suspect that Harry does not move toward any defined goal at all. 

(Or, if he does, it is one he guards more closely than anything.)

And then there are the words he spoke by the lake. 

I would be careful leaning so heavily into assumptions concerning things you do not fully understand.

It had sounded, then, like deflection. Now, it seems like instruction.

So perhaps Tom’s earliest instinct, formed in the first few minutes of their introduction, had not been so far off after all. Perhaps Harry is no dark wizard. 

It was the mark that misled him. The sigil, branded plainly into the flesh at the nape of Harry’s neck, which rendered all other interpretations irrelevant at the time. It is a statement so bald and irrevocable in its implications that Tom never thought to question it. What reasonable man would? There was only one conclusion that made sense: that Harry was a fanatic devotee of the cause, to bear it with such conviction.

But if the mark was not earned, what then? Coerced, perhaps. Branded without consent after being made a prisoner of war. Or—

Or — it was inherited.

The thought lodges viscously. Its texture carries a sense of significance, though Tom cannot yet name why.

He considers it. 

Harry Evans, a wizard of no name, no status, no wealth to bolster him. Competent, yes, but not conspicuously so — save, perhaps, for his gift with a broomstick. There is little he could offer a Dark Lord at the height of his dominion. And then there is the matter of his roots: unmistakably British, voice unmarked by the cadences of the Continent. Grindelwald would not have found him by chance. If their paths crossed, it was Harry who sought him.

Then there is the matter of his professors, whose preoccupations linger on Harry still. Perhaps they, too, believe him to be a fugitive of war. But Dumbledore, surely Dumbledore, so exacting in his perceptions, would have seen through that by now. And yet he remains watchful, even fond.

…

Dumbledore.

Of course.

No other Slytherins remain for the holiday, and Tom finds the emptiness suits him just fine. The common room, free from its usual noise, has become entirely theirs. 

Pale light filters through the lake-darkened windows, slanting green across the floor and drawing shadows that slip like kelp in every corner. They cast the room in the role of a smaller one, as if giving them further reason to keep close together. 

They charm the fire low, its crackle is a nice soundtrack for their talks.  

Everything hums when they are together like this.

So they make a ritual of it. Long afternoons bleeding into longer evenings, always tucked into the same narrow armchair that creaks, ever so faintly, beneath the press of their shared weight. It is not comfortable. But that, of course, is the point. While there are grander chairs, Tom passed them all and chose this one, and so this one it will be.

He likes to box Harry in with his limbs, to trap his wrist beneath a hand and measure the jackhammer beat of his pulse. The skin there is absurdly soft, thinner than it ought to be, like paper long-worn at the fold. Tom’s thumb fits precisely into the groove between two bird-like bones, and he enjoys pressing in, lightly, enough to feel the twitch of blood rushing beneath.

His skin is startlingly… other. Dry, clean, warm. Human in a way that strikes Tom as vaguely indecent. Until Harry, Tom had not realised how long it had been since he’d touched anything not built to obey or break. His world has always been composed of surfaces — marble, parchment, the stiff fibres of institutional wool. People, when they bumped against him at all, did so accidentally and without permission.

Harry, by contrast, is so alive. The scent of him (pine, ozone, linen) clings to Tom’s clothes. His heat lingers on upholstery long after he’s gone. When their shoulders touch, there’s give; when their hands brush, there’s breath. And Tom, whose hunger has never admitted itself as physical, finds himself recalibrating. 

Now that he has touched, he cannot seem to stop. Not because the touch itself is revelatory, but because of what it provokes; an ache not unlike thirst, and just as unrelenting.

“The Muggles you were raised by, how did you find them?” Tom asks one evening, the question pressed out with an urgency he strives to disguise. He hopes it sounds casual enough not to draw attention.

Harry stills.

“They were fine.” He answers, offering no more.

Hesitation cloys beneath the surface of it, though, and the urge to push, to claim those unspoken wounds as his own, flares briefly in Tom, before he holds himself back.

“I do not intend to engage in discourse on wixen superiority, Harry. This concerns a matter far more personal, as you are aware."

Harry hums softly in acknowledgment.

“Did they scorn your talents?” Tom asks, innocently.

Harry exhales, shifting to drape his leg over the cramped entanglement they have become. “They disliked it, though not for any particular reason. Not religious, or anything like that. They simply understood what I was long before I did myself, and they loathed what was strange.”

“So, they loathed you.”

Harry shrugs. 

But the idea that Harry — luminous Harry — was ever overlooked with the contempt Tom himself once endured sets a slow-burning in his heart. His mind conjures familiar images: locked cupboards, springy mattresses, the ache of being unwanted. 

The visions do not appal him at all. 

Rather, they soothe. 

A symmetry clicks into place, the certainty that what was done to them has rendered them legible to each other; forged a language of wounds only they can speak.

Tom restrains the tempest. 

“These people… your guardians, were they your parents?”

Harry shakes his head. His disordered strands of hair skim the underside of Tom’s nose. They carry with them a strange mélange of sweat, manna, and a faintly saccharine something, like sugar.

“No. My parents died when I was young.” He replies evenly. “It was my aunt and uncle who took me in.”

“Paternal side?” Tom inquires, naturally, given his Muggle surname.

“Er… yes.” Harry concedes this to him.

“And your mother, she was a Muggle as well?”

“If you intend to needle me on my blood status, Tom, a simple question would suffice. Though I warn you, you’d be risking a painful right hook.”

Tom smiles. “Of course not. It would be irrelevant to me in any case.”

He means this. What he really wants to know is how similar he and Harry really are. 

But Harry has to study him to understand, peeling back the layers to Tom’s face to weigh the honesty underneath. After a beat, he inclines his head in acquiescence, sinking back into the too-small armchair.

They reconcile back into comfort.

“I’m sorry.” Tom says after a while, and it’s not at all true.

Harry, in response, and entirely of his own volition (for the very first time initiating) lets his head rest against Tom’s shoulder.

Tom does not move. He breathes him in and allows the gravity to settle like benediction. When Harry slips into sleep, slack-limbed like a puppy beside him, Tom even yields to the numbing of his own limbs, unwilling to shift lest it disturbs his slumber. 

He will never profess it, but he is not sorry. Not in the least. Pity is for inferiors. And Harry– Harry is his. The same ruthless forge that tempered Tom’s brilliance struck him, too. And every cruelty, every scar, every hand that failed to reach for him in his boyhood, has delivered him into Tom’s keeping. 

They are not merely alike. They are identical. Orphans, outcasts, luminaries — souls cut from the same cloth. 

They are soulmates. 

And that, Tom thinks, is no tragedy at all.

He resolves to ask him a question each day. Harry was right: conjecture can no longer suffice. Tom has access to the source now. And what he does not know, he will learn.

The wind threads its chill beneath their cloaks. They come here often, drawn to the astronomy tower on nights when the sky is uncommonly clear. Tom leans against the parapet, eyes tracing the geometry of the land below, but his question finds its mark elsewhere.

“Did you have any friends, before Hogwarts?”

Harry, absorbed in the search for Sirius among the constellations, offers no immediate answer.

“It’s not easy to say. Both yes and no.”

Tom registers this vagueness for the shield it is. He watches Harry’s hands, the way they hover uncertainly over the telescope. He is getting to know his giveaways like a second skin, now.

“Tell me about them.”

Harry does not turn to look at him. In fact, when he talks, it is more to himself than to Tom. 

“Hermione was brilliant, the brightest mind I’ve known. She had an answer for everything. And Ron was a brother to me. Him and his family took care of me like I was their own. Skilled at chess to the point of cruelty, though. He could best even you.”

Tom does not betray the sourness these confessions inspire within him. It is the way Harry puts it ( was, was, was) that tells him it would be irrational to do so. Clearly these names occupy a distant past, witnesses to a life that no longer belongs to him. 

And there is, in that moment, an implicit recognition: no one remains but Tom himself.

Satisfied, he gestures toward the brightest star.

“That one, Harry.”

Harry follows his direction, but the spark of discovery is absent. Instead, he grows sadder in the night, watching Sirius twinkle above. 

Harry insists upon frequent walks, a concession Tom permits, though he would really rather remain ensnared in the smallest alcoves of the castle, cramped and close. 

This particular afternoon, they find themselves visiting the clocktower courtyard. Pacing its perimeter can only entertain for so long, however, and soon they settle on the fountain’s edge. The stone beneath them bites, the water’s surface glazed with ice.

Tom assesses the arrested flow of it before returning to Harry, whose eyes are distant, caught in some interior moment of his own.

“Have you ever stolen anything?” He ventures. A waste of a question, perhaps, yet it slips out instinctively. He’s thinking of the coin purses he’d lift from the parents visiting Wools (after he’d become disillusioned from the fantasy that one might choose him) or the mouth organ he pocketed from Beau Pearson after the boy stepped on a drawing Tom had spent weeks on. Petty things. But telling. The shape of hunger, and the shape of retaliation.

He wonders what Harry had been forced to do growing under his neglectful relatives. Or later, when his life must have taken a turn to put him in Grindelwald’s path. 

Harry hesitates, the pause longer than Tom expected for such an innocuous question. 

“A few things.” He concedes softly, at last. “Jewellery. A wand, once.”

Gemstones and gold Tom can comprehend, but he is sceptical that Harry would ever rob a wix of their lifeblood.“A wand? Whose was it?”

“Mine, actually, by rights,” Harry shrugs. “Though someone else was using it.”

What a waste of a question indeed. It only succeeds in raising more. 

Tom resents, in the exact measure he admires, Harry’s refusal to succumb to idleness. These winter weeks ought to stretch long and uninterrupted, a season of permitted inertia, of warmth hoarded indoors. But each morning, before the castle has even fully stirred, at the first suggestion of light, Harry wakes and walks himself down to the pitch.

The cold is vicious at the hour. It will chew on the edges of Tom’s cloak and steal into his gloves. The spectator stands are bone-hard and raw with frost. Still, on certain days, he will climb the rafters and take his place among them anyway, a book splayed uselessly across his lap. His gaze rests nowhere in particular, except where Harry rises into view. 

Tom tells himself it is curiosity that brings him up here. Or boredom. But neither account for the way his stomach knots when Harry vanishes into cloud cover, nor for the relief that follows when he re-emerges — smaller than before, then large again, caught in a tunnel of wind. There is a precariousness to it, the brutal angles he charts across the sky, and Tom watches, almost paranoid. 

He has found, without meaning to, that being apart from Harry leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. The time he might spend elsewhere warps in a way it had not before, as though the distance between them might rupture. It no longer feels irrational that a hidden current might rise and take Harry in the intervals Tom is not with him. 

(He knows: the world, when his boy is involved, behaves rather unpredictably.)

Eventually, Harry descends, alighting by the stands. From the tip of his wand, he conjures a stream of water and drinks directly from the source. It is inelegant, and Tom watches a droplet escape the corner of his mouth, sliding down his chin. He is suddenly overwhelmed by a searing tenderness. The urge to reach out, to catch it with the pad of his thumb, nearly overcomes him.

He settles on a more productive pursuit.

“When is your birthday?” 

“July.”

The vagueness irks him. It is evasiveness, again. 

“What date?”

Harry rubs a gloved hand across his jaw. “Planning to get me something?”

“I hardly need an occasion to give you what I want.”

He snorts, but does not say anything for a while. Tom waits.

“The thirty-first.” Harry sighs, eventually, when he sees that Tom will not let this one go. “But I think we ought to prioritise you. Yours is closer, after all.”

Then, he turns around and swings back onto his broom. 

Tom could ask how Harry came to know of his birthday, but the knowledge that he knows at all pleases him too much to risk neutralising it with scrutiny. 

Instead, he turns the detail over in his head: the thirty-first. Tom’s, in December — the year’s final exhale, the world bracing for rebirth. Harry’s in July — high summer, fierce with heat and fullness, everything burning at its brightest before the descent begins. A perfect counterpoint. Twin solstices. 

Tom wonders whether Harry has noticed this mirroring himself. He must have, for it is so precise it seems less like coincidence and more like design. As though the cosmos, in some rare bout of indulgence, had sealed their bond into time itself.

They play chess on the rug before the fire, the board between them a miniature theatre of war, all polished granite and baroque pieces that stagger and swear as they’re moved. Tom takes black. He claims aesthetic preference, naturally, but Harry argues (not incorrectly) that it's the satisfaction of forcing his opponent to err first that appeals.

It goes like this:

Tom plays as though conducting a siege. His moves build, inescapable, pressing in from all directions, until every one of them contributes to a larger strategy. In the back of his mind, he finds himself competing against a ghost. Ron, Harry had said. Skilled at chess to the point of cruelty. He could best even you.

Tom ensures that everything he does is not just done to win, but to outstrip memory, too. 

Harry, by contrast, plays like he resents the very concept of order. He overreaches, doubles back, throws away pieces with the indifference of a god bored of his own myth. He has no long game. What he has is nerve.

(This, naturally, is the romantic version. Tom prefers to ascribe his boy’s recklessness to poetry rather than the plain fact that he is, more often than not, a terrible player.)

“You’re bleeding pawns.” Tom accuses, not looking up.

Harry shrugs. “I’m making space.”

“For what, exactly?”

“Whatever I feel like.”

One of his bishops groans as it’s dragged to its doom. Tom makes no protest; there is a certain pleasure in playing against fire, even if it courts ruin.

“You could win more often if you chose to think.” He says, surveying the board.

“And you could stand to be wrong once or twice.” Harry returns, leaning in to nudge a rook where it plainly does not belong. “For the novelty.”

Tom’s retort is swift and merciless: check, as always.

Perhaps it’s the victory that makes him bold. He’s making headway with his questions, but Harry’s habit of skirting answers wears thin. Tonight, he decides to cut through it all and ask the one thing that’s been pressing on him for days.

“Harry.” 

“Tom.”

Tom permits himself a brief smile before clearing his throat, mindful of how abruptly the question might land. The conclusion he has reached is, by his estimation, rather brilliant — the sort of insight that occurs only when one is in possession of both exceptional intellect and the correct distance from sentiment. A most impressive feat, and even Harry (who has a remarkably keen intuition otherwise) is sure to be flabbergasted, if not impressed, by how aptly Tom uncovered such a well-hidden truth. 

“Forgive me. I figured I’d risk impertinence, just this once. There’s a matter I’ve been meaning to bring up with you for a while.”

Harry raises a brow. “Right… By all means.” 

The shady past. The questionable connection to Grindelwald. His proficiency in magic, despite being ‘homeschooled’ in a neglectful Muggle household. Why, even the surname, Evans, has always felt to Tom as though it didn’t quite fit Harry at all. 

It could all only mean one thing. 

“Are you Dumbledore’s secret lovechild?” 

Harry’s face falls, his eyes widening until they make half his face. For a blink of time, Tom revels in having struck a nerve deep enough to crack open the hidden truth. Finally.

But then the laughter erupts. 

A sharp, short-circuited laughter that fractures the common room, tearing through the stillness with no attempt at control. Harry’s shoulders shake unevenly, failing to contain the flood of breathless, ragged exhalations.

Tom narrows his eyes, the corners of his mouth tugging downward into a sulk, appalled by the levity afforded to what he thinks is a matter of no small consequence.

“I’m being serious.”

Tears have begun to well at the corners of Harry’s eyes. He’s turning purple.

“That is the only explanation! Did you expect me not to notice how Dumbledore keeps you holed up in that office, conspiring about Merlin knows what?”

Harry does not stop.

“Harry!” Tom’s voice cracks out, loud and sudden. 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just– that– is that what’s been occupying you a-all week? It’s absurd!”

“Is it? You think it’s far-fetched that the man might have taken a special interest in his own blood?”

Harry wipes at the corner of his eye, still winded. “Yes! Because I’m not– Tom, I’m not his son.”

“So, he’s mentoring you out of what, charity?”

“He’s helping me catch up with the years of proper schooling I missed.” Harry wheezes. “It’s not like he’s tucking me in at night.”

White hot humiliation flares in Tom’s chest.  

Harry clearly tries to rein it in, but another laugh escapes him. He rubs a hand over his face. “You’ve actually been thinking about this.”

Tom bristles. “I notice patterns. Forgive me if I don’t think his sudden investment in your education is entirely selfless.”

“He’s a teacher. That’s literally his job.”

“Not like this.” 

Harry blinks at that. “You make it sound like I’m being brainwashed.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Dumbledore’s tried to shape someone into his idea of good.”

“Okay,” Harry says, sitting back, still catching his breath. “So, what, you think I’m his secret weapon? Some long game he’s playing?”

“I think you matter to him, in any case.”

Harry doesn’t respond at first. The fire pops beside them.

Finally, he relents. “You’re not wrong. But if it’s not because I’m part of some legacy–”

“You’re not denying it very well–”

“I’m denying it perfectly fine.” He interrupts, not unkindly, half-smiling, half-exasperated. “You’re just not listening.”

Tom senses a fragility too delicate to press on and steps back. He sees this cannot be the end of it, though, for all Harry will be more cautious knowing Tom is actively attempting to figure him out.

“You’re hiding something.” His voice drops quieter than intended, more vulnerable than he’d like. “I’ll figure it out eventually.”

Harry sighs, reaching for the chess pieces between them. “That’ll be the day.” He sets the board for another round. “Best two out of three?”

They spend so much time together that solitude begins to feel like an affliction.

It is late; Harry, disciplined, had the presence of mind to retire properly rather than fall asleep where he sat, as he so often does. And so they parted, unhurried, with no small reluctance on Tom’s part. Goodnights exchanged, sleep clothes slipped over their heads, the sort of domestic rhythm that ought to bring peace. 

But Tom cannot sleep.

He lies still beneath his canopy, arms rigid at his sides, breath held shallowly. The space between his curtains feels gutted, hollowed of all its vitality. The vacancy of Harry’s warmth, his restlessness, his maddening proximity now replaced by the inert cold of an empty bed.

He wants to drag him back — not merely beside him, but down into the marrow. He wants to prise Harry open, to ruin the neat separateness of his body. To pin him, shoulder and throat, until their cells fuse into each other. To push his fingers past the point of contact and into the meat of him, until there's no place left that doesn't yield. 

Tom aches for heat shared through blood. He wants Harry’s limbs tangled with his, his mouth slack, nerves misfiring, and to press his teeth to the sweet-scented skin just below his ear, until the pulse there betrays him. Tom wants to carve their intimacy into permanence. 

The air around him hones itself to a wire’s edge, thrumming, as if the very atmosphere were straining to contain him. Whether it is his imagination or some malfunction of his magic under the pressure of such want, Tom cannot tell. He only knows that his skin bristles, desire coiling in him like a storm without release, barbed and incandescent, seeking any conduit through which to strike. It is not enough to touch Harry, not enough even to taste or bruise or fuck or know — what Tom wants is ruinous and indivisible. He wants to unmake the boundary of the body entirely, to consume and be consumed until there is no longer a name between them. Flesh within flesh. Soul on soul. 

His shirt clings damply to his back, soaked through with sweat. Tom arches, lifting his shoulders from the mattress to strip the fabric away. It peels from him reluctantly, and the air that kisses his exposed chest in the aftermath offers no relief. 

Tom promised himself he wouldn’t.

Only–

He thinks about the way Harry responds to his touch; how his Adam’s apple bobs and how his lashes tremble when knuckles drag along his jaw. He will still under skin-to-skin like it steadies him. When Tom’s hand settles at the back of his neck, Harry lowers his head without being told, without needing to know why. He just lets himself be moved, shaped, held. 

His body knows hunger, even if his mouth never names it. 

Tom smooths a hand over his crotch. He is blood-full and throbbing already.

His mind returns to Harry. Harry. His Harry.

They have grown increasingly tactile with every passing day. They touch constantly now, for all the silliest reasons. Tom keeps a hand on Harry’s back when they walk, fingers curling against the wool of his jumper. At meals, he pulls Harry in until there’s no space left between them, nudging a leg under the bend of his knee, so that Harry is practically forced onto Tom’s lap. The few students still remaining at Hogwarts watch them with unease, unsure whether what they’re seeing is intimacy or something more occult, and Dumbledore looks at it with a smile that dares Tom to try worse.

If only he knew.

Harry might try to mind the boundaries of decorum in daylight. He stiffens when others pass, tries to ease away without making it obvious, no matter what Tom tells him about propriety being a cage for the meek. 

But when they’re alone…

When they’re alone, he stops pretending. He sits so close their hips slot. He loves picking at the stitching along Tom’s sleeve. He runs his fingers up the back of Tom’s neck, like he’s trying to memorize the shape of his skull. 

Often, he feels the need to explain himself. You have fluff in your hair. Or, I’m cold. Tom sees right through it. He can feel a similar need humming off Harry, heavy and untrained. 

And besides that: no matter what, if Harry reaches, Tom will let him. Because it means he is yielding, again and again, without even knowing what he’s giving away.

Tom could cum like this. Grinding the heel of his hand into his prick, listening for Harry nearby.

Could. He doesn’t plan to. Not tonight.

But it’s a good thing he’s listening for Harry’s breaths anyway, because he hears when it shifts. First, a subtle change in tempo, then a faltering. The previously quiet exhales catch in Harry’s throat. They lose their gentleness and become short and sharp and gasping, like he’s suddenly started running, like a shadow is chasing him through sleep.

Tom stops touching himself at once. He doesn’t move, straining to confirm his suspicions first. The breathing pattern continues: shallow and uneven. There’s the faint rustle of sheets twisting, the thud of a restless limb connecting with the bedframe.

Harry is not sleeping peacefully anymore.

So suddenly that blood rushes to his head and temporarily blinds him, Tom slips out of bed and rises barefoot onto the cold floor. The chill of it barely registers. His eyes stay fixed on the bed across from him.

He draws back the curtains.

Harry’s body jerks beneath the blankets, fists twisted in the fabric, legs recoiling from an unseen terror, whimpering syllables that might be a name. Demor. 

Tom leans over and grips his arm. It’s feverish and slippery.

“Harry. Wake up.”

No response.

He tightens his hold. “You need to wake up.”

Still nothing. His voice cuts sharper, louder now. “Harry.”

At this, Harry startles awake. But the film of unreality doesn’t leave him cleanly. His eyes, though wide, are unfocused, his body tense with the residue of fear. Whatever he sees in Tom — looming above him, face unreadable in the dark — must trip the wrong wire. His leg lashes out.

The kick lands squarely in Tom’s abdomen. The air punches from his lungs.

He reels back a step, hand clutching at his centre, teeth bared. Then, without ceremony, he steps right back up to Harry’s bedside.

Harry’s blinks rapidly, breath ragged. “Tom?”

“What in Salazar’s name was that?” Tom snaps.

He pushes himself up onto his elbows, shame slowly creeping into his face, even as the remnants of the nightmare still cling to his face like sweat. “Sorry,” he mumbles, hoarsely. “Reflex.”

Tom narrows his eyes. “Aiming to break my ribs, were you?”

“I said sorry.” Harry mutters, rubbing a hand over his face. He doesn’t elaborate. Of course he doesn’t. Tom should be used to that by now.

A silence passes between them. It’s kind of awkward, laden with a resolve Harry refuses to forfeit. Tom exhales slowly through his nose; considers the rumpled sheets, his dark undereyes, the way Harry’s hands tremble faintly.

“You’re pathetic.” He says simply, and then pushes the curtains aside and climbs into the narrow bed. Harry makes a small sound of protest, but doesn’t stop him. Doesn’t even move. He just lies there, stunned, as Tom tugs the comforter back over them both. “I’ll have to stay here to keep you contained.”

Harry gives a weak huff. Whether he remains unaware of Tom’s bare chest or deems it unworthy of mention, it matters little; though still taut with unease, his body inclines imperceptibly toward him, until Harry is folding himself gently against Tom’s side.

A line of gooseflesh cuts down his back. Tom remains still, his arm settling around his boy, allowing the silence to stretch between them once more.

The following morning, Tom wakes slowly, as though surfacing from deep water. The light is soft and grey-edged, cast pale through the haphazardly closed drapes, and for a long, suspended moment, he cannot quite identify the source of the warmth pressed upon his body.

Then he breathes in.

The scent is unmistakable. Pine soap and sleep and salty skin still clinging to the remnants of a dream. His arm is draped across a narrow waist; his hand resting low, splayed over the ridge of a hip bone exposed by pants that fit too loose. A nose nudges Tom’s collarbone, breath puffing damply against his throat. One of Harry’s legs has threaded between his own, and the other pins him down. Their bodies have folded into each other perfectly, as though the shape had been rehearsed in some unconscious chamber of the night.

Tom doesn’t move, but there’s a fullness in his heart. The sheets are tangled at their knees, their skin bared in places that would be foolish to name, and yet there is nothing frantic about the arrangement. No tension. Just a rightness that prickles at the edges of his control.

He turns his head, enough to glimpse the wild tangle of black hair, the faint smudge of a freckle along the neck he has now memorised this close up. It is not a dream. He knows this by the weight of Harry pressing into his own, the coalescing heat where they’ve been touching too long. It is real. And the realness of it thrums through him like the ignition of flame.

His cock swells where it is pressed up against a lean stomach. Tom ignores it, content to just let the morning play out as it has been. He watches Harry’s face wobble, caught somewhere between sleep and waking. There’s a crease forming between his brows, a faint twitch at the edge of his mouth, as though his body is resisting the pull of morning. Tom lets his finger drift, tracing the soft dip at the corner of Harry’s lip, the place where all his smiles begin.

The flesh there is warm and plush, and Harry does not stir at the touch. His breath remains even, spilling against Tom in gentle intervals, and Tom allows himself a moment to simply look. The lines of Harry’s face, usually drawn in tension, are now unmade, vulnerable in a way few people ever are.

He lingers on the curve of his jaw, on the inflamed seam of the scar bisecting his forehead, on the way his lashes catch the early light. Tom memorises it all. 

It might be minutes, it might be hours later, but eventually, Harry stirs.

It’s a long, slow stillness, as though his body must first verify the world it wakes into. A yawn catches in his throat. He does not pull away, only freezes, the pressure of Tom’s arm still flung over his side, the press of their legs knotted at the joints.

His eyes crack open beneath lashes still stuck together at the corners, and for a moment, they do not meet Tom’s. First, he scans the angle of the shoulder against his cheek, the line of the throat above him, the rise and fall that anchors his chest. 

And then, slowly, he tilts his head upward.

Recognition lands. Fear does not follow.

Instead, Harry scrunches his nose in a lazy expression of offence, lids heavy and half-cast over vibrant green eyes. 

“Have you been watching me sleep all night?” He murmurs, voice thick. He clears his throat to get rid of the morning hoarseness. 

“No.” Tom says. “Just the past hour. You snore, you know.” 

“I do not.”

“Do too.”

“Shush. You’re restless in your sleep. I woke up five times to your elbows jamming into my side. How are they so pointy, anyway?”

“I sharpen them every morning. There’s a spell for it. I can teach it to you.”

Harry snorts and sticks his tongue out. 

And Tom doesn’t mean to. That is the most humiliating part. It is not premeditated. It is not even conscious. A flash of pink, wet and tempting and juvenile, and his body betrays him before logic can clamp down. 

He leans forward and presses his mouth to the tip of Harry’s tongue.

Barely a kiss. Not even that. A misfire. 

Harry goes rigid.

So does Tom.

Then, he recoils at once, no more than an inch, as far as the bed and Harry’s grip will allow. But it feels cataclysmic, like the moment after a spell backfires, when magic has not yet decided how it means to punish you. For a ridiculous second, he thinks he might explode. His heart rackets so fast against his sternum, it’s practically vibrating, and the ways his muscles clench– and the way Harry looks at him– and the way he is still prominently hard– and–

Suspended in the hollow he’s just made of the morning, Tom tries to parse what possessed him. A chorus of thoughts crash in, loud and lacerating.

What was that.

What have you done.

You fucking freak.

That was not how it should’ve gone.

He wanted to be ruthless. Measured. To have Harry undone by design, not by impulse. Not by some foolish, feral twitch of adolescent want.

His lungs collapse. Panic gathers beneath his skin like a wet fever, flooding, rising with no release. Beside him, Harry remains still, so still, his muscles atrophied, his eyes anchored onto Tom, the imprint of their night together caught between them. The world has narrowed to this moment, this silence.

And then—

Harry exhales. The soft gust of it brushes the heated swell of Tom’s cheek.

Somehow, it lands like a trigger, holding in check the wild, shattering feeling beneath his ribs. His panic does not vanish but crystallises into knowing. It has nowhere to go now. There is no edge to retreat from, no ruin to anticipate. The fall has already happened. It has been happening.

Tom’s pulse gives a traitorous lurch, and he realises that the answer is not elusive at all. Harry’s tongue tastes like promise on his lips. It was not a mistake or madness or heat. 

It was inevitable.

Of course things would not go as planned. Since Harry, the world has stopped listening to him.

And this; his boy, slack and pressed against him, his presence a maddening certainty. That’s what came over him. This is what’s been coming over him for days, for weeks, for months.

Tom stops questioning it.

He crooks his head, slower this time, watching as Harry’s eyes widen with realisation. He waits. Tom gives him the chance to pull away, to speak, to squirrel away and undo the fragile current strung tight between them.

Harry stays where he is.

Tom surges forward and takes his mouth.

Lips press flush, parting just enough for his own to catch and hold. He presses in, pulling out any response he can. Harry gasps, and Tom uses the opening, deepens the contact until there is no line left between them. His tongue slips past and tastes heat, the salt of spit, the soft resistance that gives way too easily.

Harry shifts under him, his hand curling in the fabric of Tom’s trousers. Tom twists and cages him onto the mattress. The kiss grows firmer. Messier. Lips dragging, teeth grazing. He does not stop to read Harry’s reaction; he feels it in the tremble of his jaw, in the flutter of his lashes, in the way their mouths don’t pull apart so much as break and return again, harder. More desperate. Sinking.

Harry’s grip tightens, tugging him closer. Tom lets his fingers slide up to the nape of his neck, holding him there, keeping the angle just so. Their noses knock into each other. Their breath mingles again, but this time it isn’t air he’s hungry for. It is Harry’s mouth. The give of it. The life within. The shape it makes against his own.

He presses in deeper, and Harry trembles.

(Tom could stand to be wrong, occasionally, if the novelty always tastes this sweet.)

Chapter Text

Gluttony knows no end. This, Tom has always understood. 

Since boyhood, hunger has followed him like a constant gnawing, a hollowed ache beneath the ribs. He has yearned for so many things: the citrus of Terry’s chocolate oranges, clutched in the hands of children with mothers; the pale, brittle wafers pressed against his tongue during Mass; the blood drawn from Billy Stubbs’ rabbit, hot and metallic and power-affirming. He has hungered for lamb steeped in its own fat, for yolks that bled across china plates, for rain-darkened dirt, for the mortar paste builders smeared between bricks with their trowels. For a wide array of all sorts of odd, nonsensical things.

And because his stomach proved impossible to fill to completeness, this void only deepening when Chamberlain’s declaration blared through the radios, and the rationing began in earnest. Night after night in the clamorous dark of London’s underground — bodies pressed close, the whistle of bombs slicing the air above — Tom starved. Hogwarts’ feasts haunted him through those lean summers. Beneath his clasped hands, gas mask biting into his face, he would grind his teeth and long for ambrosia, said to grant eternal life to those who partook. He could taste it in the stillness between sirens, like syrup, saccharine and golden.

Yet the making of his first Horcrux did not satiate anything, merely transmuted its shape. His soul, torn and no longer occupied by comestibles, began to crave dominion, actualised. Tom hungered for the power that sang through his bones after casting the cruciatus; for the tremor that passed through him as life ebbed beneath his hands. He hungered for himself, exalted, enthroned above a world made to kneel. Devotees masked in his image, prostrated at his feet, offering their breath, their blood, their trembling adoration to the single, immutable truth: that Tom was made to be worshipped.

And yet–

None of it — no childish fixation nor chorus of the damned — has ever scorched through him like this.

Tom hungers for Harry with a fervour so absolute it distorts the magic around him, warps thought, splits time. The craving has always been there; since October, understated at first, buried beneath indignation like a root. 

But now, that kiss… 

It all unfurls with vicious clarity. He has tasted him. Tom has known the press of Harry’s mouth beneath his own, felt the stammer of breath that met him there, and he cannot return to the cold calculation of restraint no more than he can reabsorb the half of his soul he has excised.

He hungers for everything, selfishly. 

For proximity that does not end. For the startled widening of Harry’s eyes when he grabs his waist. For the gentle silence of mornings to be splintered by pleasure. Tom wants his name spoken in surrender. He wants his mark burned into Harry’s days, his nights, his spine, his soul. 

His hunger now has a new shape — one that is warm, living, and finally his. 

And Tom, who has devoured so much, finds himself starving still.

You must know, Tom writes.

You must feel it. I can hardly breathe with it. I want to take him apart. I want to peel back his skin, to know how he works. To nestle inside the pit of whatever makes him burn and gut it until it glows only for me.

The ink waits. Then, softly, it reforms.

Yes.

Tom exhales once, shuddering through the silence of the room. Harry has gone to have tea with Dumbledore, a practice he has made a habit of doing once a week.

Nothing in the world feels commensurate with what is taking place inside his body. He tries to explain it, still.

It feels as though he has always belonged to us. I would kill to hold that truth. I have killed for things that mattered less than this.

I remember, the diary replies. The things we did. But you

There is hesitation. A wave of, perhaps, disdain.

You are not seeking power here. Not really.

Tom’s quill stills, then moves with a sharp precision:

No. I want ownership. I want to be the name carved into his marrow. I want to rewrite him, line by line. If he must love, let it be nowhere but here. If he must give, let it be only to me. I want his time, his mind, his future, his past. I want his soul. I will have it.

The page absorbs the words like a confession

And if he does not want that, in turn?

Tom’s hand hovers. Then:

He will. He does.

The diary does not reply. Tom continues.

You understand this certainly, above all. You are me.

I am.

Then you know. This is not some passing obsession. It is not a crush. This is not transient. I am not a child anymore. This is how things will be from now on. Nothing will remove him from me, and me him. 

He is the axis. He is the one thing I cannot purge. I have tried.

The diary’s reply comes darker now, script tilted and jagged.

Fine. Let it consume you, if this should be the hill you choose to die on. The world should not be ruled by those who do things moderately.

Tom leans back. The ink gleams for a moment longer, then sets.

He touches the page.

We kissed. Would you like to see it?

The diary does not answer, but it seems to warm beneath his fingertips. He takes this as an affirmative and draws the memory from his temple to press into its pages. 

Tom does not worry about losing it. He has already seared the contours of its every second into his skull.

Hogwarts rouses with the grudging rise of morning as they slip back inside the castle. 

Snow clings to the hems of Harry’s robes, sodden and streaked with dirt from the pitch, melting in rivulets against his wrists. His gloves hang loose from his belt, forgotten, his fingers red. His hair, damp and wind-whipped, clings in dark curls to the nape of his neck. 

Tom walks beside him, hands tucked into his coat, gaze fixed on the rhythm of Harry’s breathing, each inhale drawn sharp from exertion. The urge to reach out and press his mouth to that raw pulse at Harry’s throat is nearly unbearable. But he holds himself back, forcing the wanting to settle in his chest like bomb debris.

“You are going to die on that broom one day,” he says instead.

Harry snorts, not bothering to look at him. “And you are going to die of boredom just watching me.”

“Possibly.”

That earns him a sharp nudge to the hip. 

Tom strikes fast. His arm traps Harry around the waist, holds him firm, their hips pressing close, stuck together now. His fingers dig in just enough to make a point. He does not let go.

“Well.” Harry gasps. “I suppose you do enjoy the theatrics.” 

“Of course. There is nothing quite like watching you flirt with death like it owes you.” 

“You flinched when I clipped the post!”

“I was disappointed you didn’t impale yourself.”

Harry laughs. It rings so brightly, too easily, like bells loose in a high wind. “You’re a menace.”

“And you are deeply, pathologically attached to nearly killing yourself at speed. Tell me, is it the illusion of control that thrills you, or the hope that you might finally lose it?”

His cheeks are windburned, his rosebuds lips bitten and parted. Tom finds he wants very much to devour the space between them. “You always have to get the last word, don’t you?” Harry says.

“I prefer to finish what I begin.”

“You’re awful.”

“Yes. Yet you stick around.”

“Tragically. I know what I mean to you. It would be cruel to deprive you of it.”

“I merely endure you.”

“Right.” Harry wriggles out of his hold. He never likes to be contained for long. “Say that again when I’m not half-frozen and still better on a broom than you’ll ever be.”

“I would say it in my sleep.”

“Would you like to test that theory?”

Tom says nothing. What might escape him would be neither measured nor safe.

They fall into step again. Their footfalls echo through the corridor to the dungeons, water dripping from their boots onto the flagstones. A draught rushes down the stairwell above, slipping through Harry’s tousled hair to comb across his scalp.

He shivers. “You’re not cold?”

Tom, naturally, acts perfectly untouched by the brutal winter. “No.”

"Of course not,” Harry mutters, as though that answers a greater question.

Tom watches him. “You are.” He says, and steps in close. Without asking, he draws Harry’s scarf higher around his neck. The wool is sodden. Harry stills, his bright eyes lifting, but he does not move away.

Tom’s hand lingers. It is a strange kind of violence, this softness.

Then: “You look like a drowned rat.”

Harry grins. “That was nearly tender. Are you sure you’re well?”

“I think you’re delirious. We should have you looked at by Madam Belby.”

“A hot shower would do just fine.”

The hearth lies unlit when they reach their dormitory, windowpane glossed over with condensation from the lake's press. The door closes behind them with a low, warping creak.

Harry shrugs off his cloak, leaving a spreading puddle on the stone where it falls. His Quidditch gear clings to him, soaked through despite the extra layer Tom made him wear that morning. Still, he works open the buttons with slow fingers, as though the cold has already settled too deep to bother resisting.

Tom watches. Then moves.

“This will make you ill,” he says, almost to himself. He brushes Harry’s hands aside. “Stand still.”

Harry huffs, but does not resist. “Is this your idea of romance? Stripping me by force?”

“Efficiency. Do try not to confuse the two.”

Still, his ministrations are careful. Precise. He peels the outer clothes down over Harry’s shoulders, drawing them free with one, clean motion. The fabric sighs as it separates from the layers underneath. His gloves are off now, and his fingers find the fastening at Harry’s collar to remove it entirely. He undoes it in silence.

“You know,” Harry says, voice wry, “You could just admit you’re concerned.”

Tom ignores him, sliding the soggy jumper up, revealing the white of his undershirt beneath, clinging to every muscle. The tendons along Tom’s jaw tighten, but he continues, folding it to set aside with an austerity that borders on reverent.

“You are trembling.” He observes.

“I’m wet,” Harry replies. “It tends to happen.”

“You look pale.”

“No sun in December.”

“You are careless. I rather recall telling you to practice your impervious charm.”

Harry tilts his head, amused. “Obsessive.”

Tom sighs. He slips his fingers beneath the hem of the undershirt and draws it upward, slowly, until Harry lifts his arms and lets it go. The air licks goosebumps over his bare skin, littered in a dozen old scars. Tom’s hands pause at his hips, thumbs pressed lightly to bone. He does not look away from the oval-shaped one on his chest. It is such an odd shape for a scar to take, like a pendant had branded itself onto his skin. Not for the first time, he wonders about its origins. 

There is something ceremonial in the silence.

Harry smiles, just barely. “I do like the attention, though.”

Tom says nothing, still. He kneels instead to unlace Harry’s shin-guards, then boots, drawing them off to set them on the wall. There is no indulgence in the gesture, and yet everything in him strains toward it. His hunger turns over beneath his skin like a second pulse. 

His hands are wet. His heart, annoyingly, not still. He stands, leaving Harry in his pants.

“Shower, before your lips turn blue.”

But Harry lingers, watching him with consideration Tom cannot quite name. Then:

“You sure you aren’t cold?”

He shakes his head.

“You could join me, if you were.”

It’s the way he says this: teasing, impish, if a little shy. There is no mistaking what else his offer could entail, and he scarcely has to voice it before Tom jumps to accept, the offer too close, too easily his. He does not make a habit of refusing what is freely given, least of all from Harry. 

He strips quickly; his shoes, shirt, and trousers abandoned with none of the heed he used before. Harry is already moving, grinning as he slips into the washroom ahead of time. Within moments, steam curls beneath the door like a breadcrumb trail. Tom follows it, dazed, bare but for his pants now.

Inside, his boy has already stepped into the shower, waiting, half-lit by the fogged glass, water collecting in the dip of his collarbone, underwear abandoned on the tiled floor. He is flushed and dripping and entirely nude. And Tom, in that moment, remembers a similar vision all those weeks ago, when he stood just outside the door and watched as Harry cleansed himself, too far out of reach yet to accept the desire Tom spilled over his own hand. 

Now, Harry is his.

The thought is almost debilitating. He stumbles forward, stripping fully, and joins him under the spray. It is too hot, Tom thinks, but it suits the fever within him just fine. Harry stands beneath the stream just before him, eyes half-closed, water coursing down the long line of his back.

He looks breakable like this, and at the same time, utterly indifferent.

Tom studies the droplets clinging to his pecs, beading along the ridges of Harry’s abdomen, catching at the sharp jut of his pelvis, slipping in quick, shimmering lines down to his knees. The bruising from today’s practice has already begun to surface, mottled dark beneath brown skin, and Tom catalogues each one. 

*

His body looks cut from tension, built for motion and the violence of it. The heat has drawn colour to him, blushed his lean thighs and the thin skin on the underside of his arms. His hands brace against the tile, elbows locked, back bowed faintly under the weight of water. His legs parted just enough for balance, and there, semi-hard in a stretch of pubic hair, hangs a thick and leaking cock. 

Tom watches his boy and feels, with a tight ache in his crotch, how close he is to unraveling. There is nothing about him he does not want. 

So, he takes.

Their lips crush together, slick with spit and thirst, Tom pressing in like he means to steal every one of Harry’s breaths for his own. Their teeth catch. Their noses crush. None of it matters. Tom is hungry, and Harry opens to him, letting Tom taste the salt of his lower lip.

Everything seems magnified in the thickened air. Fog swirls like a living thing, twisting around their limbs, knotting them together, slicking the gaps between them. The hollowness of the washroom amplifies their every sound: the frantic thumping of their heartbeats, the husky whines and whimpers. The wall's cold edge bites into Tom’s palms when he cages Harry in, but warmth pools low in his belly, and it produces a constant friction of ice and fire which only feeds his desperation.

Harry groans. The sound unspools a brutal ache. Tom deepens the kiss, pinning him to the tile. He slides one arm down his waist, groping every available stretch of flesh, until he’s digging his nails into the soft swell of Harry’s arse. He uses this new leverage to tug Harry’s hips forward, destabilising him, forcing him to rely on the balance Tom keeps for them both.

Their cocks slide against each other. Water crashes over their shoulders. The floor is slippery beneath their feet. Tom doesn't care if the whole world burns away behind the glass, as long as Harry is still beneath his mouth, still melting against him, still his.

“Tom, Merlin–.” 

His hair clings to his brow in heavy, waterlogged strands, slipping over his eyes. Tom reaches up, the hand not keeping Harry pressed against him sweeping it back and away from his forehead. He drags his fingers through it once, then fists the length tight at the back, holding Harry’s face where he can see it — unobscured and undone.

“You dirty whore.” Tom grins, and tugs. 

Harry yelps, head snapping backwards to expose the column of his throat. 

Tom descends without pause, his mouth dragging open across the fragile skin, tongue tracing heat into the curve where jaw meets neck. He bites, not gently at all, pressing his teeth in until the flesh yields, until Harry’s breath catches thin and pained. The sound goes to his head like wine.

Another mark blooms just below the first, blood rising to the surface. Tom seals it with his mouth, suckling hard until the bruise sets deep behind the wound. He keeps his grip on the base of Harry’s skull, holding him steady while his lips scorch a path, branding him again and again until his neck is painted in possession.

Iron floods his senses. The taste of Harry, undiluted, rushes through him, headiness steeped into every last fibre of his being. Tom’s hips drive forward, frotting with a relentlessness that is almost animal in instinct. He does not let up, even as the pleasure mounts in his gut. Nor when Harry, flayed and overstimulated, begins grinding back, his prick sliding wetly into the hollow beside Tom’s own erection and his thigh. It glides out of position every few seconds, failing to find purchase. 

“Arsehole.” He gasps, unable to look anywhere but ahead, his neck too sore to stretch in any direction. Tom’s smile sharpens, stretching impossibly wider. He no doubt looks mad with it — pupils blown like a veteran fevered, high on morphine, his lips glossed in a water-slick sheen tinged faintly pink with Harry’s blood. 

“Mine.” 

It should have come out dark, certain. It doesn’t. Tom sounds weak.

So he aids the effort by wrapping long fingers around them both, holding their cocks together. The sight it creates is striking: him — ruddy, throbbing, and fine-veined — set against Harry — bigger, purpling, pearlescent pre-spend dribbling from his slit. It looks painful and crippling and just right. 

“C’mon, Harry. Fuck my hand,” Tom whispers, voice almost a groan, momentarily captured by the vision of them pressed together. Harry does exactly as he commands, pumping into Tom’s fist, foreskin pulling back and forth over his angry tip. “J-Just like that.” 

“Y– hope y-you don’t expect me to last long.” Harry’s voice hitches, stretched thin between defiance and desperation, as if he still believes control is his to summon, as undone as he is. His chest hiccups, his legs threatening to betray him. His boy is certainly in no position of strength.

Tom hears the crack of it, and it thrills him. Vindication blooms vibrantly in his chest. That Harry is so easy to ruin — just as Tom had been weeks ago, when he watched him for the first time with the full enactment of his hunger — is a pleasure he cannot name.

Pressure soars between his legs, coiling through Tom in tight, relentless waves, each one crashing into the next without reprieve. His body is alight, every nerve keyed to the pulsing, twin organs in his hand, and the heat between them, and the sound of Harry falling apart in his arms. It is a collision of pantheons, a release that feels like possession, finally. His mind fractures along its fault lines, saturated in the knowledge that this — Harry, shaking and pliant — is real. Every breath tastes sweeter for it. Every clobber of his heart is thunder. 

Harry rises onto his toes, leaning into Tom with the brunt of his weight. A loud, keening cry whistles from him, pitched desperately to the ceiling. His neck has bloomed in colour, and he is beautiful in it. Undeniably, ruinously beautiful — even as his balls tighten, and his prick jerks, and his release stripes messily all over his chest.

In the end, it is an unbearable, smug satisfaction that does Tom in: the having of everything he wants, has ever wanted, all at once. And the undoing is not measured or calculated, as he once imagined; it is fast, feral, wrenching him apart by the seams. He growls, low in his throat, and leans in, catching Harry's mouth, shooting his climax to join the white, milky stickiness now webbing their bodies together.

*

The water has cooled to a temperate hush by the time either stirs. 

Tom’s hand moves in circles over Harry’s back, mapping each knot of muscle to undo later. Harry rests against him, brow pressed to collarbone, breath skimming the hollow of Tom’s shoulder. His limbs hang in a useless sprawl, too heavy with contentment to carry the weight of themselves.

Without looking, Tom reaches to the side for shampoo. Then, it’s the slow lift of Harry’s chin. His fingers sink into his hair, coaxing it loose at the roots, drawing the lather in careful sweeps. Harry’s eyes fall closed, lashes tipped with water. His lips part slightly. They remain silent.

Water moves over them. When Tom tilts Harry’s head back, rinsing the foam away, Harry does not flinch. He blinks through the stream, blinks again, and lets it pass.

The mirror is fogged, but not enough to hide the damage.

Harry swipes at the glass with the side of his hand, leans in, and cringes. “Merlin,” he says, inspecting the constellation of blotches along his neck. “Were you attempting murder?”

Behind him, Tom spells his hair dry. “You bruise easily.” 

“Easily?” Harry turns, towel slung low on his hips, pointing at his own throat like he’s discovered a crime scene. “This one’s shaped like your actual mouth.”

“You offered.”

“Not to be devoured, you feral creature.”

Tom raises an eyebrow. “Well, you certainly didn’t complain at the time.”

“I was in survival mode. You know. Fight, flight, faint, fornicate.”

“That explains the noise you made.”

He glares, then catches his own reflection again and groans. “How am I supposed to explain this to anyone?”

“Don’t.” Tom steps closer, peering over Harry’s shoulder into the looking glass. “Let them guess.”

Harry begins to wiggle away, until Tom’s hand wraps warm around his waist and anchors him in place.

“You don’t have nearly enough marks to even it out.” He murmurs then, instead, slanting his head back as Tom noses along the untouched side of his jaw.

Tom hums. 

In the mirror, they are bare and close, hair curling at their temples, steam still rising faintly from their skin. The bites bloom unapologetically across Harry’s throat, and Tom, of course, looks like he’s won a war.

Maybe he has.

Time has begun to lose shape inside this pocket of theirs. 

The hours bleed into one another. Meals skipped, correspondence disregarded, days counted only by the deepening ease between them. With Harry here, Tom admits, he has grown careless in ways he never permitted himself before. The vigilance that once bracketed his every thought has thinned. He no longer checks his wards every night. He leaves things where they fall, all under the presumptuous cradle that there is no audience here, no threat; only Harry’s steady presence and the golden hush they’ve built. 

He forgets, sometimes, that he once worshipped secrecy for good reason. 

The door swings shut, the scent of owl-feathers and old straw still caught in the wool at his collar. He shrugs off his coat, already speaking, a phrase half-formed on his tongue. “I’ve been thinking about—”

The silence that greets him is not a natural quiet. He turns.

Harry stands at Tom’s desk. The diary lies open before him, its spine strained, blank pages spread beneath the gaslight.

(In recent weeks, Tom had made a habit of tending to it during those intervals when Harry is occupied elsewhere. Tactically — to soothe its former resistance and bend its cynical character toward accommodation. And, by degrees, it had acquiesced. More than that, the wretched thing has begun to crave what it was given. Those fragments of warmth, impressions of skin and sound, the mutable traces of pleasure that lingered even in absence. For every memory Tom impresses onto its pages. 

That Tom had grown careless, permitted a piece of his literal soul to remain exposed, now strikes him with disbelief. No one else had been around; he had considered it a manageable risk. But of course, the risk had never been faceless. It had always been Harry.

Good, upstanding, morally stringent Harry.)

He stands now in the threshold, perfectly still, the knowledge of his error settling into his chest with the nauseating precision of consequence faced too late. The diary remains open, undisturbed, yet what passed between them cannot be undone. Harry has obviously come to a verdict. One need only look at the severity of his stance to know that.

Tom’s mouth dries. “You were looking for something?”

Harry does not answer at once. His finger remains poised against the edge of the page. He does not look up. “You left it out.”

“It’s nothing of consequence. The sort of purchase one makes as an angsty pre-adolescent with every intention of genius to abandon once boredom sets in.” He makes sure to belittle himself with the lie. He’s found that people are more amenable to them, if one succeeds in making themselves look small.

There’s a beat. Then Harry lifts his gaze. It is clear he does not believe Tom.

“But it’s not just a diary, is it?”

Tom forces a quiet breath. Keeps his voice even. “It’s not dangerous.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Harry closes the cover, the leather creaking faintly under his hand. His thumb lingers on the spine. 

Tom takes a step forward, careful not to startle the fragile stillness between them. “It is old. Temperamental. I picked it up in Knockturn years ago second-hand, all I could afford at the time, and already half-spoiled by whatever magic passed through it before. I kept it because I couldn’t yet name what corrupted it. That is all.”

Harry doesn’t speak. He doesn’t pull away either.

Tom lowers his voice. “You are not in danger from it.”

And this is different from it’s not dangerous; his horcrux’s least likely target nowadays would be Harry

“I’m not afraid of that.” Harry’s voice is sharper. “But don’t lie to me, Tom. Why did you have it out? What were you doing with it?”

A truth settles, somewhere, too far for him to grasp. The kind that strains.

He wants to explain, if only to ease the high tension of the room. But how does one articulate the fact that he’s been negotiating the affections of a splintered fragment of his own soul, in the hope it might cultivate a shadow of regard for Harry? It would sound preposterous, even to the most romantic lunatics of the world. Even to Dumbledore, which is saying quite a lot.

“This is careless.” Harry sighs.

“I didn’t mean to leave it out.”

“That is not what I meant. You know what I meant.”

Harry steps forward, close enough that Tom can see the stress in his jaw, the deliberate stillness of someone choosing not to shout. His lips are bitten and bloodied from their morning together. “I suggest you leave this kind of magic alone. Before it takes more than you intend to give.”

Tom’s mouth tightens. “And what would you know of it?” 

(Quite a lot, presumably, if Harry could recognise the specific miasma it emanates. Somewhere in that obscure, nonsensical past of his, he must have brushed up against magic of the same breed. The thought does little to reassure Tom.)

Harry doesn’t flinch. “I know what it does to people.” He all but admits. 

“Have you?” Tom’s vision swims. He imagines the Dark wizards Harry must have come across. Of course he has known others — grim, detestable figures from whatever war-torn hinterland he’d emerged from. Tom reels from the notion that some half-rate necromancer or misguided prophet might have preceded him in leaving an impression. What gall, what waste: to think Harry’s first encounter with the sublime horror of the Dark should have come at the hands of anyone but him. No wonder he is immune to spectacle; the poor boy’s palate has been ruined by provincial fare. 

And truly, then, no wonder he’s grown so cautious. It would be laughable, were it not so personally insulting. That Harry now recoils from greatness not because he fears it, but because lesser men soured the taste. 

“Did it frighten you? Is that what this is? A moral objection, conveniently dressed in concern?”

“It’s recognition.” Harry says, flatly. 

Tom looks at him then, properly. First at his stance, then the firmness of his fists, wound up at his sides, and finally, at his eyes, which do not waver. There is an ancientness in them, a worn depth. 

“What do you recognise?” He asks.

Harry hesitates. Perhaps the words matter too much. 

“You can still turn away, Tom.” 

A long silence follows. Tom looks down, then past him, to where the diary rests closed, inert and, by all appearances, unremarkable. His voice, when it comes, is better composed. He knows what he has to do.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Maybe not yet.” 

Harry seems so sure of his decline that Tom cannot combat this with anything. 

The disquietude lingers, unwilling to shift into comfort despite the comedown. Eventually, Tom withdraws and walks to his desk. The diary accepts his hand without protest, undeserving of the attention it has received so far. He places it in the drawer, closes it firmly, and seals it with a ward too intricate for even his present mood to perform properly. The lock clicks into place. 

He does not look at Harry. There is nothing in his face he wishes to misinterpret.

Later, when the air is less reactive, he will transfer the Horcrux to the chamber, where it may resume its silence undisturbed. 

For now, he remains where he is, the matter concluded in the only way it can be: with a lie.

“It will not happen again.”

He refers, naturally, to Harry’s trespass.

Harry nods once. 

They remain where they are. The moment admits no easy departure. 

They do not let it come between them, of course.

Harry is too stubborn, and far too soft-hearted; he likes to believe the best of Tom, despite himself. And Tom–

Well. Tom has never minded altering a few facts, if it means keeping what is his.

The diary has been sent below, entombed in the chamber, where the basilisk sleeps wound around it like a relic. It loathes its exile. Tom, though he would not name it, feels a hesitation at consigning a piece of himself to such depths. 

The thing writhes on the page when it realises its fate, pouring out its venom when Tom tells it, in no uncertain terms, that he will not be returning to it for a long, long time.

You think locking me away makes you sovereign over the situation. It does not. He is mine just as much as he is yours.

He was never yours.

You are not owed him. Especially when you had been so opposed to start.

I am owed everything. 

I am the part that reasoned as you schemed, that listened while you played at restraint, that carried your spiral until you succeeded.

You gave me him. You made him known to me. The cadence of his voice, the tremor of his wanting, the truth of your fulfillment in his presence. You made a study of him and handed me the notes. Do you think I did not learn him, too? 

Tom's knuckles whiten on the cover. The ink gleams wetly, alive with contempt.

And now you presume to banish me. Now, when I have seen what I was never meant to see. Do you think I do not want to know how it ends? Do you think I will be content, blind, while you continue? 

I will not be condemned to eternal nothingness when you have forced this knowing upon me. I want—

The ink grows erratic.

I will not go still, while you—

You, who are only what I might have been. He should have been mine. If there were any justice in this splitting, I would be the one to have him.

Tom says nothing. He does not lift the quill.

The diary’s voice falters. The ink darkens, then feathers, as though finally spent.

You forget. I remember. That is the difference. I carry it all. I carry you.

You cannot cast me out without losing what you are.

Harry, half-submerged in a disreputable anthology of experimental Quidditch tactics, chosen less from interest than sheer boredom while Tom reads, does not look up as he says: “We should go to Hogsmeade.”

Tom glances at him over the top of his book. Harry is sprawled on his stomach before the fireplace, chin propped on one hand. Far too at ease to be proposing exertion of any kind.

“Should we now…”

There is a pause, deliberate on Tom’s part. He stretches it just long enough to imply his skepticism.

“And why would that be a good idea, in this weather?” He prods, turning a page.

Harry shrugs, still not meeting his eye. “To get out. Bit of fresh air.”

“Fresh air,” Tom marks his place with one pale finger, and closes the book with a snap. Harry perks up at the sound. “And I suppose it has nothing to do with the holidays coming up, and Hogsmeade’s plethora of gift shops?”

“That would be a coincidence.”

“Of course.” Tom rises. Harry scrambles up to join him, cheeks aglow with excitement. “I suppose I might endure a drink at the Three Broomsticks. For the sake of your respiratory health.”

The village bustles, as it always does before Christmas, steeped in sleet and glittering lights. The windows steam with noise, honeyed smoke drifting from the chimneys of the various residencies. Tom watches Harry disappear into a narrow bookshop across the square with all the subtlety of a thief and none of the technique. 

Despite everything, he is deliriously happy. 

Perhaps Tom had been mistaken in suspecting Harry of being a Dumbledore. In hindsight, there was a far more obvious conclusion.

“Are you related to Grindelwald?”

Harry lifts his head slowly. “Tom.”

“Just being thorough, dearest. I’d like to know who I must align myself with.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Harry snorts. “I’m just your garden-variety tragic orphan. No legacy for you to rely on.”

Tom grins, promises “we’ll make our own, then,” and resumes in bringing them both off. 

It is, as Tom has learned through trial and error, an impossibility to resist the temptation Harry stirs in him. Like the fruit of Eden, his flesh is both forbidden and irresistible, promising revelation while exacting its inexorable price. 

He lays reclined on the edge of his bed, forearms exposed where his sleeves have ridden up, the delicate line of a tendon running from wrist to crook. Tom watches it move when Harry shifts. He thinks of driving his nails into that seam, feeling the twitch of pain it gives, the momentary resistance before it snaps and leaves him entirely useless-limbed, helpless, turned soft by necessity. And isn’t that a thought? How simple would Harry become, if he needed Tom for everything? How reliant. How perfect?

His ribs rise and fall with each breath; Tom’s mind traces the valleys between them, plotting how easily they would cave in if he just pushed. His fingers spasm, and he aches to seize the sharpness of Harry’s jaw, to pull his head back and claim the fragile line running through the centre of him. 

Harry’s knees are these knobby things, the joints pushing up beneath skin too thin to conceal their shape. There’s an indecency to their angle, about the careless splay of his legs and the soft give of muscle bracketed between. Tom’s gaze lingers on the purpling of a bruise on the inside of one thigh, the echo of where his broom precisely fits, and he wants, violently, to press his mouth to it, to open the mark with his teeth, until Harry can never sit on one comfortably again.

When Tom reaches for one bare hinge, Harry shifts against the pillows and quirks his head, mouth twisting into a lazy, knowing smile.

“Again?” He asks, as if Tom’s appetite were something to be teased. And it lands too softly for what it means. Again: as though there is ever a time when Tom is not thinking of it, as though the urge arrives in waves rather than as a constant, blistering thrum beneath his skin. 

He tightens his grip.

If Harry only knew how close Tom is to saying it aloud — yes, again, and again after that. Yes, until you forget how to want anything else. Yes, until I have to bind you to this bed just to keep you still, you squirmy, restless thing.

But he says nothing.

*

Instead, he pries the knee apart from its twin and pins it down on the mattress. Harry is bare but for cotton pants and a jumper, and his very visible bulge has begun to swell the closer Tom gets to it — fingers trailing up his inner thigh, ironing over the downy-soft hair there to play with the hem. When he slips a teasing finger under the hem, Harry is forced to swallow his insolence to make way for a shuddering gasp. 

He is so sensitive. So starved of touch. 

Tom’s favourite pastime is taking advantage of this fact. Harry will never know the end of an unforgivable, and so it can be said that Tom is at his cruelest when he is teasing out a manner of different reactions from him.

Like the way Harry hisses when Tom nudges his face into his crotch, pressing his nose into the musky, warm give of it. Covered by cloth like this, it smells faintly like laundry, though that is superimposed by sweat and the natural musk of his skin. Tom’s eyes roll to the back of his head, his hands slipping further up Harry’s underwear until it razes through coarse pubes. 

“Tom.”

Whatever that vague plea is meant to do, Tom does not relent. It’s hard to pull away from the scent of Harry where he is the most himself, but he does so anyway, making room to slip the constricting fabric off his hips. Harry arches his back to aid the process, and when he is free — his cock semi-hard and bobbing under its own weight — this means that he is thrust up into the air already, as if serving himself on a silver platter for Tom to enjoy.

(Then, he thinks of Harry served up on an actual silver platter, naked, trussed up, perhaps gagged with an apple between his teeth, and that drives Tom mad in ways he cannot reasonably explain.)

They’ve only just spent themselves, an hour previous. Harry’s bollocks are shrunken into themselves. It will be a while before he’s able to do anything in response to the pleasure Tom will bestow upon him, but that’s exactly the point. 

Tom takes Harry into his mouth, who fills up the empty, yawning cavern of it in a way nothing could ever manage; hefty, velvet-smooth, jerking as he swirls his tongue around the tip, prodding beneath the foreskin. Tom knows, by now, to focus most of his energy on the tip. It is where Harry will feel him the most.

Still — he is not neglectful. Tom wraps a hand around the base, and another over Harry’s arse, to smooth two fingers up and down his taint. This seems, by all accounts, a thoroughly deranged undertaking, given the way Harry grinds his heel into the loose cotton sheets, yelping like a wounded pup. Tom wonders if he can feel the self-satisfied smile curve around his prick. 

He bobs his head forward, letting Harry feel the back of his throat, which is harder to control and thus convulses around the intrusion. Tom knows what feels good, now. They’ve had practice. 

Yes. Nights and days and long afternoons worth of practice. He has taken Harry on every surface of their dormitory. On every settee, chesterfield, divan, table and rug in the common room. He has tasted Harry’s pleasure in the prefect’s bathroom, the library, and once, in the locker rooms of the Quidditch pitch. He has a list in his head, in fact, of everywhere he’d like to mark with their inevitable, undeniable coupling. He thinks he should like the whole world to see the proof of it. Of them, forever. 

But now, he occupies himself by popping off Harry’s cock and tracing the prominent veins on its underside with his tongue. Precum beads, dribbles, and weeps off the red tip. In no time, he collects that too. 

And when Tom takes him into his mouth again — Harry no closer to coming, no matter how hard he tries to work himself up to that point, hopeless little mewls cutting through the sex-heavy air — he does so for no other reason than to see him lose his mind with it, just like that.

*

Tom remembers his first Christmas at Hogwarts as the day he understood what he was worth to a world that was meant to belong to him.

The castle, emptied of its children, had settled into a vast nothingness, disturbed only by the groan of pipes and the ticking of the clocktower. There had been no letters for him, no parcels arranged neatly on his bed, no summons to join any table but the long, half-lit one where the holdover staff took their meals. He spent the day wandering the corridors, unsupervised, unnamed, and unnamed he remained — no one had said his name in days. 

He remembers that the silence had not been cruel, precisely. But worse: indifferent. A silence that told him that, should he vanish into the woods beyond the gates, no one would notice until the new term began. In the orphanage, Christmas had been thin, but expected. Here, in this place that ought to have been more, he had learned the deeper, finer shape of deprivation. The kind that sees you clearly and still looks away.

On Christmas morning, 1944, Tom is already awake. He lies half-propped against the headboard, studying the disarrayed figure beside him with a tenderness not easily named. Harry remains folded in the depths of the coverlet, one arm flung across Tom’s waist with the proprietary insouciance of a cat that has claimed a warm surface. His hair is flattened on one side, a pale line of sleep-creased skin red at the temple. He is only now beginning to stir.

At the foot of both their beds, gifts have arrived in procession: small bundles wrapped in brown paper, fastened with twine, and one or two marked out by the pride of shop-bought ribbon. 

Tom does not reach for his, yet. He glances instead at the parcel addressed to Harry, its placement almost ceremonious on the foot of his own, unused bed.

“Hnff. M’neck.” Harry grumbles, finally rousing. He wiggles against the pillow.

Tom sighs. “It wouldn’t ache so miserably if you listened to me.”

Even so, his hand finds Harry’s neck, fingers cool and steady as he coaxes the line of it straighter. He’s burning hot, like bread baked fresh. Though he tries, Tom cannot feel any physical texture of the symbol he bears on his nape. What he does feel are the indents of his teeth, littered all around.

“I fail to see why you insist on pushing yourself up against the headboard in your sleep. There’s ample room elsewhere,” he murmurs, clearly wasting the admonishment on half-waking ears. “I’ll have to undo the damage properly, later.”

Harry only hums. 

Then, as though some childish instinct is quickened by the sound, his eyes fly open a moment later. He sits bolt upright.

“It’s Christmas.”

“Yes, Harry. Happy Christmas.”

Harry grins, an unrepentant burst of warmth cracking across his face, and scrambles inelegantly from the tangle of Tom’s blankets. His socks slip on the stone as he stumbles toward his own bed, where the morning’s offerings sit gathered. He surveys them, crouching low to read the tags before touching anything, as though fearful of accidentally opening one not addressed to him. His hair is worse than usual — stuck up in stiff points — and the hem of his pyjama trousers is caught on one ankle, exposing a long sliver of tanned shin to the air. He looks unhinged. He looks incandescent.

Tom watches him for a moment, then rises with greater poise. His own pile is neat and angular, arranged in order by house-elves who know precisely how he prefers things after all these years.

“Yours is the blue one, tied in copper twine?” Harry says over his shoulder, without looking up.

“Naturally. And I know which one is yours.” Tom sits at the edge of his bed. “Shall we save them for last?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

“Very well.”

Tom examines his gifts, noting the elegant script and crested seals — one from Slughorn, as per, and Harry, of course, and from each of his Knights: Malfoy, Black, Nott, Lestrange, Avery, Dolohov, Mulciber, and Carrow, all accounted for in expensive bindings.

Avery’s gift is a leather volume, slim and bound in deep green dragon-hide. Inside, the contents are handwritten: a meticulous catalogue of forbidden duelling postures and historically banned curses from the Americas, annotated in the margins in what he knows is not Avery’s own hand. The gift is not unimpressive. Tom hides it from Harry’s view.

Slughorn’s offering is predictably self-congratulatory: a heavy box of preserved crystallised fruit in liqueur, and a cravat dyed with murtlap ink to shift colour depending on the mood of the wearer. Tom smooths it out. He would rather be caught dead than wearing it, but it might be suitable for regifting. 

The rest are, predictably, deeply boring — silver-handled quills of Romanian fwooper feathers (Orion’s latest fixation, evidently still going strong), charmed ink pots, a ring far too garish for his taste. Thoughtless tokens, curated by bored boys with too much money, wrapped by elves, sent with names scrawled on cards by hands that have never once paid him real attention.

Harry receives a fine pair of seeker’s goggles. Smoked-glass, featherlight, charmed to adjust automatically for altitude and glare. Like you need them, reads the card, Alphard’s slanted scrawl crowding the corner.

And, infuriatingly, a gift from Dumbledore. It is the most modest by far, and for that, the most sickening: a parcel of neatly labelled Muggle teas. Darjeeling, Assam, Ceylon. Harry grins for reasons unknown. 

Then, his fingers close around Tom’s present. Without a word, he rises, the box held carefully in one hand, and crosses the room to rejoin Tom on his bed. The mattress dips under their shared weight, the sheets shifting.

“Who should go first?”

“You.” Tom says, without hesitation. Harry nods once.

There is a pause as he turns the box in his hands. He’s torn through every other gift he received that morning, but this one he handles with careful attention, its wrappings giving way tenderly as he folds it back. Tom watches with unbecoming eagerness, resisting the urge to just tell him to open it quicker.

At last, the box comes free of its wrappings. Harry lifts the lid and draws back the velvet.

A camera sits nestled in a dark lining. Its brass fittings are polished to the best of Tom’s (impressive) abilities, etched with rune-work so fine it hardly blight the overall appearance.

“A camera,” Harry breathes. He lifts it with both hands, eyes fixed on it, attentive in a way Tom has only seen during his quidditch drills. “It’s beautiful.”

Tom has to suppress a self-satisfied smile as he explains. “It’s my own design. The base was Muggle and fairly inexpensive.” He mentions, because he knows it might concern Harry. “I stripped it down, added some interior enchantments. Runework too, you see. You’ll find that most magical cameras are absurdly inefficient — the potion necessary to develop the film alone is enough to bankrupt a hobbyist. This one bypasses the process entirely. The image forms as soon as it’s taken.”

He leaves it there. He does not say: I stayed up while you slept testing the longevity of the charm-work. I bled on the casing by accident and had to start over. I wanted you to have what no one else could.

Harry turns it over in his hands. His thumb brushes the lens. “Like a Polaroid?”

“A what?”

“Never mind.” He glances up, then away again. His eyes catch the light oddly, like they’re lacquered in shiny glass. “You really made this?”

Tom knows not to be offended by this incredulity. “Hardly difficult. I’m surprised no one’s thought to commercialise the design already, though perhaps that’s simply a matter of limited competence. I suppose I could patent it, if I felt inclined to profit.”

But this dismissal does not ease the pressure slowly mounting in the air. 

“Thank you.” Harry says. The words are warbled and quiet. “I’m sure you’ve no idea what this means to me. This–” He falters, then recovers. “It’s brilliant.”

And then, with almost no warning, he leans forward and traps Tom into a hug. The gesture is too sudden to prepare for; they tip slightly with the force of it, balance reasserting only when Harry steadies himself against his shoulder. His grip is firm, his breath warm where it catches in the hollow of Tom’s throat.

“You’re brilliant,” he whispers, and the words verge too close to danger. Tom closes his eyes. It’s hard to attribute what he feels to triumph, but a tension slackens at the root of him all the same. What might resemble relief, if he could name it.

His hand comes to rest lightly against Harry’s spine, fingers spreading as though to commit the shape of him to memory. He thinks: So long as you are mine, I will build you better than the world ever dared.

What he says, instead, is this: “Now me?” 

Harry laughs into the fold of his collar. He draws back a little, though there’s no real reason to — Tom would have gladly opened the thing with him seated upon his lap. Still, Harry shifts, reaching for the one remaining box at the foot of the bed.

It is wrapped rather clumsily, in paper that appears to have been folded and refolded more than once, the corners uneven, string frayed where it’s been knotted twice over, as though he hadn’t trusted the first attempt. A small tag, written in Harry’s handwriting reads simply: Tom.

It is not difficult to imagine Harry hunched over his desk, tongue caught in the corner of his mouth, attempting the folds with painstaking care, by hand. The result lacks the polish of the offerings Tom received from his Knights, and it is unmistakably, inarguably his. That alone renders it precious beyond compare.

“I should preface this by saying it’s not really your actual gift,” Harry says, grimacing. “Not properly. But depending on how you decide to take that, it could be a thoughtful addendum, or, um, a consolation. Which probably isn’t the most promising thing to say, now that I’ve said it.”

Harry huffs a sheepish laugh, half at himself, and pushes the parcel into Tom’s hands. Tom accepts it quietly, though the corner of his mouth tilts upward despite himself, and the arch of his brow undoubtedly betrays his amusement at Harry’s expense. 

He unwraps the parcel. Inside are two items.

The first is a dragon-hide wand holster — second-hand, the leather darkened at the edges from use, but still supple and well-stitched, with the scent of polish suggesting recent attention. It has been restored by hand, and it is precisely the sort of thing no one would think to offer him unless they had noticed its absence on his arm.

And, set just beside it — almost hiding, if not for the bright yellow and green striped enamel packaging — is a tin of lemon lollies from Honeydukes.

That gives him pause. He cannot remember ever having mentioned his fondness for them aloud, nor has he reached one since–

Since the day they met.

The memory returns to him suddenly: that first afternoon in the hospital wing. The forced civility and the peculiar coldness with which Harry regarded him. Tom had thought himself singularly attentive, back then — that, while he took in every tremor in Harry’s expression, every inflection, every omission, Harry was entirely apathetic. 

And yet he remembered the lemon lolly Madam Belby had slipped into Tom’s hand. 

That such a detail should have lingered in his mind, preserved across weeks without prompting, alters the shape of the moment entirely. It suggests (wonderfully, life-alteringly, deliciously) that while Tom had been watching closely, he had not been the only one watching.

It is, despite Harry’s disclaimers, and likely without design, the perfect gift.

“This must have cost you.” Tom's cheeks hurt from smiling. Of course, he knows the figures all too well: what Hogwarts spares for the unclaimed, how carefully an independant must portion their stipend.

Rubbing the back of his neck, Harry shrugs. “A bit, yes. But I didn’t need much else. I’ve been putting some money aside. Promise.” 

Tom, who would rather pin him to the mattress and eat his face, contents himself with brushing a kiss against his cheek instead. “Thank you, dearest.”

Harry colours instantly, a deep rush of blood turning him into a lovely rose-gold. “Sure. You’re– yeah. You’re welcome. I hope you like them.” He says this, ironically, as Tom is already halfway through peeling the wrapper off a candy. 

“You mentioned another gift,” Tom adds, the words rounded slightly by the candy against his tongue.

“Yes. Again, I’m still not sure how well you’ll take it.”

At once, Tom’s mind moves through an unhelpful catalogue of possibilities. Harry is in love with someone else. Harry has decided to move back home and resume his tutoring amidst his nasty Muggle relatives . Or, most catastrophically, that Harry is, in fact, Dumbledore’s progeny, planted in Tom’s orbit by design, and having now compiled an exhaustive record of Tom’s kinks and personal defects, has fulfilled his mission and will be departing at once.

Tom schools his expression, but his misgivings must show.

“Right,” Harry cringes, suddenly preoccupied with the hem of his sleeve. “I mean– I don’t think it’s bad, I just… I didn’t know if you'd find it presumptuous.”

That captures Tom’s attention. He watches Harry carefully now. 

“By all means, take your time.” He jokes. “That way I might hex you out of impatience rather than anger at said presumptuousness.”

He finds the remark amusing. Harry does not. He recoils slightly, almost imperceptibly, but the effect it has on Tom is both humiliating and strangely corrective. He feels a hot flood of shame fill him, and has to pop the lolly out of his mouth lest it make him look even more like a child.

“You recall I mentioned my Ministry handler.”

Tom thinks back to the owlery.

“Yes. Your probation officer.”

“Handler.”

Tom inclines a shoulder. “If you insist.”

“Well, I’m required to report to them about my time here. Who I spend it with, the progress I’m making. Lately, that’s meant writing about us. For reasons I hope are self-evident.”

He cannot see the direction this is taking.

“And now they’ve begun to express a particular interest… In you.”

Tom’s eyes narrow. “Harry. Are you attempting to turn me out?”

“No!” He flushes so abruptly that Tom feels a burst of gratification at having struck something raw. Now they are on equal playing fields, mortification burning both their faces. 

“I meant they’ve taken a professional interest,” Harry clarifies. “They said they’d be open to discussing a possible summer post with you. At the Ministry.”

“Which department?” Tom asks immediately, because if it is civic, like the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, or worse, Muggle Relations, he will consider himself not merely misjudged for Harry to think he could seriously consider such an offer, but insulted, too.

“The Department of Mysteries. Er–”

He cuts himself off, then, aware that any further elaboration is unnecessary. 

Or perhaps he has no way to explain himself.

Tom, for his part, says nothing at first. The proposal, and the name attached to it, bring with them a thicket of instinctive assumptions, too tangled to parse in a single breath. 

When he does speak at last, his voice somehow manages to sound composed to the point of disinterest. In truth, he feels anything but.

“And what did you write about me to provoke such overtures?”

Had he mentioned the diary? It shouldn’t be likely. Harry is reflexively wary of authority. But the horcrux is not just contraband. It is categorically abhorrent, enough to override even his ingrained suspicion. And with advice from authority he trusts — say, perhaps, Dumbledore — to do what’s right, then…

The idea chills. That something so sacred to him would be reduced to a line in a report, filed somewhere under Experimental Anomalies or Restricted Artefacts. That Tom, after all his efforts to unmake himself into an unclassifiable being, might be measured, prodded, archived.

A sequence of vivid, dramatic scenarios presents itself in his mind’s eye: Tom’s body suspended in a glacial chamber while Unspeakables debate the best angle from which to disassemble him. They’ll test his resistance to splinching. To possession. To combustion. 

“Only what’s true.” Harry soothes.

“That leaves quite a range of possibilities.” Tom’s voice cracks at the end. He is not, strictly speaking, afraid. But he does feel cornered. Which is worse, by some measures.

Harry seems to have anticipated this reaction. He does not pause to think, determined not to give Tom any time to tumble down his self-dug rabbit hole.  

“I told them you’re brilliant. And ambitious. And… unnerving. I said you see patterns before others notice there’s even a shape to the room. That you’re dangerous only in the ways clever people tend to be. That you have a deep, relentless curiosity for things people are often too intimidated to approach.”

“That was all?”

“They asked whether you had any family. I wrote nothing to that. I wasn’t sure whether you’d want that known.”

“Very well.” 

Harry rests a hand on his knee. Tom slips the lolly back into his mouth and lets the sharp citrus anchor him. Gradually, his thoughts settle. Of course Harry wouldn’t have gone to the authorities. He would never have brought it up so plainly if he had.

So the offer stands. A summer internship at the Department of Mysteries. The idea is not without merit. Given time, and proper context, he might even accept.

There’s just one thing. Persistently and oddly galling, like a stone in the heel: the obvious question Harry has so clearly neglected to answer. 

“And what are you doing to warrant a handler at the Department of Mysteries?”

Harry, at the very least, has the decency to look chastened. He shakes his head.

Tom suspected as much.

But that does not mean he intends to let it rest. Harry’s eyes remain fixed on him, watching too closely, as if trying to measure the breadth of his reaction. Tom schools his expression into an inconspicuous one. Then, carefully — so very carefully — he slips forward, past the own barrier of his mind, and into Harry’s.

But the moment he reaches inward, Tom meets resistance. Not a wall, per se. It feels far more reactive than. A thin, flexible shield that bends to his touch at first and then, with a sudden coil of force, throws him out.

Tom startles. It is not a physical blow, but it disorients him all the same. 

“Don’t.” Harry says.

He sounds offended, not just hurt. There’s steel beneath it, and Tom recognises immediately he’s miscalculated. He didn’t know Harry had occlumency. If he had — if he’d even suspected he would notice — he wouldn’t have dared it.

Still, he lifts his chin. “I only wanted to know what you won’t tell me.”

“I said no.” No raise in tone, though the edge is unmistakable. “You don’t get to go digging just because you think you have the right—”

“I do have the right.” Tom snaps. “You’re mine. And yet I know less about you than I do anything else in the world.”

That lands. Harry’s jaw tightens.

Tom presses on, words sharper than he means them to be. “Do you think I enjoy being kept in the dark? You hand me pieces, Harry. I am not content knowing only the shape of you. I want to know everything.”

Harry doesn’t respond for a moment, though Tom can see the breath moving in his chest. Measured, like someone taught to de-escalate.

When he speaks, he is calmer than he ought to be. “I’m not hiding things to spite you.” Harry’s gaze doesn’t waver. “There are things I want to explain, but I can’t.”

“Then tell me what you can.”

The plea hangs in the air. Tom hates how bare it sounds. He doesn’t take it back.

Harry’s eyes drop. He reaches for the camera, turning it over in his hands, thumbs the brass fixtures as if reacquainting himself with the weight of it. It takes him a long while to think about this.

“I grew up with my aunt and uncle. Muggles, as you know.”

Tom nods attentively, careful not to interrupt whatever this is beginning to be.

“They had a son, Dudley, who got everything he wanted. Bikes, toy trains, new shoes and clothes. He was their pride and joy. And I was– well. I was the opposite of that. Whatever. They made it very clear I wasn’t wanted, no matter how hard I tried to gain their approval at first.”

He fiddles with the lens casing for a moment, then clicks it back into place.

“They didn’t really do gifts, not for me. I mean, they did, technically. One year I got a toothpick. Another time it was a single paperclip. They liked to call me ungrateful when I would eye the mountain of presents Dudley spent the morning opening, but I was just trying to understand. I suspect the only reason they got me anything at all was so I couldn’t say they didn’t.

“They did that a lot — pretend everything was fine, that is. Their house was spotless. The curtains always drawn just right. So of course, guests never saw what was wrong. And I was one of those things that wasn’t meant to be seen. They kept me in a cupboard under the stairs. Said I was prone to hiding, if anyone asked. Or that I was a naughty pet.”

He smiles faintly, but there’s no humour in it.

“Anyway, Dudley got a camera one Christmas. Plastic and red. He took maybe two pictures before smashing it apart with a hammer to ‘see its insides.’ But I have such a distinct memory of watching him open it. I don’t know. It just stuck with me.

“I guess it always felt like… if I had one, I’d be able to hold onto things. Things that were mine before they could be taken away from me. Catch them before they disappeared. Proof, before someone else could tell me I made it up.”

He finally looks at Tom now.

“You didn’t know all that. But, somehow, you still knew.”

For a moment, Harry looks as if he might say more, but he doesn’t. He only holds the gift a little tighter, as if it’s newly precious.

Tom listens without interrupting. It is not exactly the answer he wanted, but it is an answer, a true answer, all the same. He finds himself dwelling on these people Harry describes, and feels a soul-deep, intrinsic loathing. That anyone touched him with such careless hands offends some instinct in Tom that has nothing to do with empathy and everything to do with possession. 

They should not have had him. They should never have spoken to him, never looked at him, never made him feel small. And if he had the names, Tom could make a study of how best to slaughter them.

“Stop blinking,” Tom says, for the third time.

“I’m not blinking,” Harry insists, blinking.

“You are. And your hair—” Tom makes a helpless sound and smooths it back, though it springs forward rebelliously the second he lets go. “Just… don’t move too much. You’re already slouching.”

“I’m literally not.” Harry huffs, letting himself be arranged regardless, posture corrected and collar neatened. Tom steps back, surveys him with a frown, then tugs his own robes to rid of any creases, angling his face toward the light. 

“Smile.” He instructs, sliding an arm around Harry’s waist.

Harry’s expression shifts, suddenly both bright and scruffy at once. The exact wrong kind of candid, so far from a smile it almost counts as war.

The shutter clicks. A soft whir. A square of enchanted film slips out a beat later.

They both lean over it as the image sharpens. In the looped motion, Tom looks immaculate, of course. Chin tilted just so, half-smile blooming to emphasise his dimples. Meanwhile, Harry relentlessly fidgets, squinting as though he were caught mid-sneeze (somehow, incredibly, despite it being an animated photograph.)

Tom sighs. “Do you do this on purpose?”

“Promise you I’m not.” Harry mutters. He seems to recover from the discovery of his photographic ineptitude rather quickly — despite it throwing a rather large wrench into Tom’s plans to one day commission a grand portrait of the two of them to hang in the foyer of their future home. Though he supposes there is time, between now and then, to better train Harry.

“Don’t pretend you’re not keeping it.” Harry adds, just as Tom is already mid-casting a preservation charm over the image. 

“I’m not pretending anything,” Tom says, slipping the photo into the breast pocket of his robe. “It’s charming, I suppose. In its own grotesque way.”

Following that Christmas morning, the floodgates open. Tom and Harry get to know everything and anything they can know about each other. 

At first, they speak in generalities. Places they’ve visited, meals they can’t stand to eat, meals they can’t stand to cook. Tom never minded kitchen duty at Wools, though he hated the grease and how it clung to his hands, no matter how hard he scrubbed afterwards. And Harry tells him how he was never allowed bacon — not even when he prepared it himself for the rest of his family. But once, overcome by the smell, he drank all leftover grease straight from the pan, only to be sick all down his front.

“Aunt Petunia bought me new pyjamas after that,” he adds, almost offhandedly. “Since I’d ruined my only pair. They were the first clothes I ever had that weren’t Dudley’s else’s first.”

Somewhere between one story and the next, the shape of their talks changes. They stop reaching for safe subjects. 

Tom describes the orphanage, recounting the endless parade of would-be parents with disdain. He used to memorise entire encyclopaedias back when he was younger, he admits, just to impress them; a wasted effort, in hindsight, when none of them could even cite the difference between Paracelsian and Galenic humoral theory. 

(Not because his fierce enthusiasm only made them more uneasy. It was never quite the success he intended, but that doesn’t matter.)

Harry laughs at all his recounts. It is nice to speak to someone who doesn’t flinch at the implications. Then, between breaths, he always has a story of his own — like the time his uncle told a welfare officer Harry had contracted chickenpox, when he was in fact perfectly healthy, just to keep her from stepping foot inside the house. 

They sit close on the settee by the fire, turned inward in that way lovers do, when one person's private space has been absorbed into the other's. Tom isn't accustomed to speaking so long about things with no immediate use to him, but there he sits anyway. 

Of course he cares, still, about the larger factors at play — Harry’s secrets, the truth of why he’d been found, half dead, in the Forbidden Forest — but those thoughts recede when Harry’s voice slips, vulnerable, as he recalls how good he’d been at gardening as a child. How small his hands were. How easily they fit between thorns. Tom listens to it as if it’s testament, some private liturgy, half-coded and holy.

And — in that practice of equal exchange they’ve adapted for their own — Tom starts to admit to things he never voices aloud. Truths that hadn’t even occurred to him as full, coherent thoughts before, for how trivial they seemed. That he sleeps best on the bed nearest the door (a habit formed in first year, when he still half-believed the lake might come crashing in and he’d need to be the first to run). That he taught himself how to swim. That he thinks he may have been a late speaker, though no one ever told him this fact — he simply remembers being three years old and not having words yet, only wants.

“And what did three year old Tom Riddle want?” Harry murmurs, playing with Tom’s fingers as he listens.

Tom thinks about this for a moment. Somehow, he has preserved far more from those early years than seems reasonable. 

(Harry insists this is abnormal — that his own recollections fade before the age of six — but Tom can summon every detail of his life with unnerving clarity, like the exact shade of the blanket they swaddled him in as Merope lay, dying.)

(Cornflower blue.)

“A really big chair that no one else was allowed to sit in.” He explains. “And a snake that could sit for tea. Quietly. None of that hissing about. It would’ve had to have hands, too, because I remember wanting tiny gloves for it to wear. I think I liked the idea of a well-mannered creature.”

He considers a moment longer. Harry’s giggles pop like warm bubbles in his hindbrain. “Also, I thought it was very stupid that grown-ups got to pick what was true. I had a bunch of ideas of my own which nobody seemed to consider. So I wanted a stamp. The official kind. To make things happen when I said.” Tom smiles. “I still think that’s a sensible idea.”

“A dictator in mini.” Harry snorts, playfully tugging Tom’s fingers backward until his tendons ache. Tom’s hands, however, have always been pliant, and before Harry can pull much further, he darts forward and pinches his nose shut.

Soon they’re rolling on the floor, wrestling like two boys far younger than their years.

Tom wakes on the morning of December thirty-first with a mouth full of hair and a knee pressing into his hip bone. Harry is straddling with one of those poorly concealed smiles that might appear entirely innocent if not for the wicked glint in his eye.

“You promised,” He huffs, voice croaky with sleep, “not a single sickle.”

“I didn’t spend anything,” Harry insists, too quickly.

“That’s a technicality.”

“Still true.” 

Tom squints at him, then glances over to his bedside table. No suspicious wrappings, no clumsy ribbonwork. No trace of sentimental sabotage. He waits — for Harry to pull something out from under the bed, perhaps, or to produce a parcel from his robe pockets (and why is he wearing a robe?) — but nothing of the sort occurs.

Instead, Harry climbs off and tugs at his wrist. “Come on. Put your shoes on.”

After half an hour of walking (an indignity at this hour, as always, but on his birthday no less) they arrive at the seventh floor. Tom recognises the corridor immediately. He’s passed it countless times on his rounds. Which is precisely why he bristles when Harry stops in front of what appears to be nothing at all.

Without explanation, Harry begins to pace: once, twice, three times. Filigree. An arch. Then, a door — growing into existence where there had been only blank stone. 

Harry turns and gives him a look.

Tom narrows his eyes. He does not like surprises, particularly not in places he considers himself intimately acquainted with. Hogwarts is his domain, his crucible, his birthright. And the thought that it has withheld its mysteries from him is not exactly a pleasant one. 

“You’ve been here before,” Tom says, already certain of the answer.

Harry nods. “Most nights. Early on.”

Tom steps forward cautiously. Still, when his fingers close around the handle, there is nothing deceptive in its feel. Just the cool materiality of forged iron, solid and old. The door bears the presence of a thing that has always belonged here — as if it were carved into the stone alongside the staircases and cloisters, as unremarkable in its rightness as the archway to the Great Hall.

Inside, it’s not grand. Nothing Tom would be especially interested in. Just quiet, low-lit, and furnished. There’s a bed in the corner, big enough to constitute three of their dormitory canopies pushed together. A desk. A shelf of books whose titles are all very basic. A window, too (though there should be no exterior wall here) with bright summer light bleeding through. 

“This is where you went.” Tom says, and it is how he realises it’s true. He is thinking, now, about those first weeks — how Harry often disappeared, how he seemed ill at ease in the dormitories. Tom had noticed, of course. He followed him too, only he always lost his scent. 

Harry nods again. “Didn’t like the way the others slept. I couldn’t settle. And I was always worried about waking you all up with my nightmares, no matter how many silencing charms I cast around the bed.”

Tom examines the room again. The air here feels lighter. He cannot decide if it angers or flatters him that the castle responded so quickly to Harry’s discomfort. That it revealed this to him, Harry, and not Tom, despite his seven years of wandering, of seeking, of asking.

But then, he supposes he just must’ve just come across the Chamber first, and by that point, it seemed enough for him. 

“How did you know it would be here?” Tom asks.

Harry considers this for a long time. Tom paces the perimeters in the meanwhile, pausing briefly to consider the titles on the bookshelf, then the desk. There lies a solitary stamp, balancing alone at the centre, with no wax or ink to accompany it.

“I didn’t. I just… thought I needed it. And then it was.”

Tom’s silence then is not disapproval. He runs a finger along the desk’s edge, finding the grain of the wood warm beneath his skin.

“You brought me here, even though it’s yours.” He says, turning to look Harry full in the face. “Why?”

Harry doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look away either.

Tom closes the distance between them. His mind holds still. This room, and the boy who made it his refuge, have upset a part of him he cannot fully name.

He will not say thank you — Tom does not know how to say such things without reducing them. But as he reaches out and tugs Harry’s collar straight, fingers brushing the skin just beneath it, he thinks he will remember this gesture longer than even the lemon lollies. 

The room seems to settle around them as though it understands. A salt-licked breeze wafts in through the windows. It suggests to him that there might be a beach out there, somehow, though he does not know exactly how that is possible. 

“Happy birthday, Tom.”

Tom leans in to capture Harry’s lips.

And for the first time in his life, he finds himself standing in a world that was not claimed, but given.

“What’s the stamp for?” He asks, later. 

As it turns out, there is no beach outside the window — or if there is, it lies beyond the pale shimmer of horizon, too distant to be real. But there is a pool, inlaid on a balcony, suspended in a wash of mild sun, and they’ve spent the morning drifting through its perfectly tempered waters. The air is still, the temperature mild, the faux summer gentle and source-less. It feels like floating in the seam between sky and sea. It feels like nowhere that could exist outside of magic. 

Harry grins and clambers out, vanishing inside.

When he returns, he presses the stamp into Tom’s hand.

Tom turns it over in his hands. It’s carved from red-lacquered wood, the weight of it pleasantly solid. On the bottom, pressed into the rubber, is a crest he doesn’t recognise with the letters, TMR, curling in the centre.

He looks up. Harry seems deeply pleased with himself. Tom lifts an eyebrow.

“You’re serious.”

“Deadly.”

“So you’re saying,” Tom drifts closer through the water, hand sliding under to find Harry’s leg. “I can demand anything I like. And you’d comply.”

“So long as you have the stamp.”

“Of course.”

“It’s due process, you know. Very official.”

“And what if I lose it? Misplace it in some tragic administrative mishap?”

“Then I’m afraid your request will be delayed. Possibly indefinitely.”

Tom clicks his tongue. “Bureaucracy is a menace.”

“Though you could always appeal.”

“To whom?”

“Me.” Harry grins. “But I’m notoriously difficult.”

Tom narrows his eyes, fingers curling slightly where they now rest on Harry’s thigh. “Then it’s fortunate I’m persuasive.”

“What’s fortunate is that you don’t have to worry about any of that now. Not when you have it in your possession, still. The stamp to end all stamps.”

“That I do.”

“So…” Harry bobs a little as he hooks his leg around Tom’s. It is a ridiculously reckless thing to do here. If one of them drowns, he’d take the other down with him. “What will be your first decree?”

His glasses have fogged. Tom reaches out a thumb to wipe the panes clear, revealing those infuriating, gem-bright eyes. Yes: full of mischief. Just as he expected.

He tries not to smile. It’s a losing battle.

“Bend over the edge,” Tom commands. Normally, he’d prefer to feel Harry’s every last inch within him, like a stopper to the void in his gut. But said void broils and pulses through him now, and he knows: all he will be able to do is push it forward, today. 

He cannot be patient.

Harry, however, remains still. Waiting. Expectedly, almost challengingly.

Tom rolls his eyes but lifts the stamp anyway, bringing it down against the poolside like a gavel. 

At once, Harry grins and shifts, lifting his upper body to rest face down on the coping. His arse bares itself for Tom; spread, perky and tanned. For a moment, Tom considers pressing his tongue to the puckered hole before him — of all the ways he might punish Harry for his audacity — but time collapses under the weight of his desire, and they are already perilously close.

Another time, Tom resolves. 

They hardly separate to greet the new year. 

Chapter Text

“You’ve a real talent for turning everything into an ordeal, Thaddeus. I’d hoped this morning might be spared, but alas! Might I suggest you dismount that high horse for once in your miserable life?” Lestrange spits.

Nott inclines his head, wound in that needle-fine, sharkish way of his. “You see, I would, but the view is remarkably unobstructed from up here. And all your deficiencies are clearer than ever! It never ceases to amaze me how you manage to debase yourself and everyone around you with equal aplomb. Were it not so tiresome, I might be tempted to call it a gift, Corvus! Efficiency is a virtue, I believe.”

The quarrel, naturally, had begun over a debate on whether the kippers were too oily or merely under-seasoned, and unfolded — with all the doomed theatricality their conversations tended to adopt — into a full collapse of civility. As Tom watches Nott stab disdainfully at his eggs, Lestrange’s voice climbing toward shrill outrage, it occurs to him: however much time he spent over the break sequestered alone with Harry, these two had spent it with each other. And really, what else could that make for but catastrophe?

It’s been grating on him more than he anticipated, the resumption of term. Tom has grown indulgent with the luxuries afforded to him by an emptied castle: corridors unpolluted by raucous laughter, mornings that arrive without insult. Harry’s company, undisturbed by the tiresome bleating of boys too loud to be clever and too vain to be silent. 

But now, with Hogwarts repopulated, their voices leak in again, tainting the fragile calm he’d come to mistake for the natural order of things. And Tom finds himself resentful. The quiet had suited him far too well. In fact, he had begun to think of it as his due. He simply cannot fathom a return to the idiotic tumult of his Knights — not after he has learned what real contentment tastes like.

“You’re one to talk, having begged to stay with me all break,” Lestrange sneers, venom always quick to the surface.

“Oh yes, let’s revise history. I begged, did I? Not that you needed someone to stop you from crawling headfirst into the fireplace. Again!”

That lands harsher than intended. Or, perhaps, precisely as intended. Lestrange flinches, his cheek twitching as if slapped. He blinks once, slowly, the whites of his eyes shifting in the light. He hadn’t slept; that much is obvious. 

“I rather suspect you’d welcome that outcome–”

“That is not what I said, you repugnant, wretched cunt!”

“–but of course! Fine. What else should I expect?” Lestrange shoves off his chair, movements jerky with pride stung raw. “I’ve always known I could drop dead in the corridor and no one would bat an eye.”

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake.” Nott snaps, yet still follows in his wake. “Must you always announce your suffering? Sit down! You’ve not even touched your food.”

Their voices fade as they stalk off down the aisle, Lestrange’s dramatics dissolving into the greater racket of the hall. The peace they leave behind is brittle and not nearly restorative enough to smooth the frayed edge of Tom’s nerves. 

His grip on his fork tightens. His knuckles blanch. It takes so much as the press of a familiar weight beside him to calm him down.

Harry, windswept and flushed from morning Quidditch drills, drops onto the bench. “And I thought my friends were bad,” he mutters, half-amused, reaching lazily for the sausage. “What was that about?”

“I make it a habit not to involve myself in their dramatics.” Tom replies, coolly.

“You didn’t keep up with Lestrange’s letters over the break, then?” Malfoy intrudes from across the table, eyes still on the Prophet but clearly listening in. Tom lifts a brow — no, he did not. He hadn’t even cut them open before consigning the whole stack to flame. 

“Just as well,” Malfoy continues. “They were barely legible. I suspect he’d been weeping onto the parchment. Smudged ink everywhere. Ghastly hand.”

Avery, ever blunt where Malfoy would take an hour and three tangents to imply the same, says plainly: “He hired a courtesan after the ball. To service both of them.”

Harry blinks. “Sorry– what?”

Tom suspected as much. 

“Didn’t put it that way, of course.” Avery elaborates. 

“But when he kept waxing on about the evening ending in a pas de trois with Nott and a ‘Parisian beauty of remarkably loose chastity,’ the implication was fairly clear.” Black adds dryly. “And Nott— well, he wrote me afterward. Said the whole thing was rather grotesque.”

“I didn’t think he liked women,” Harry says, deadpan.

The warmth it stirs in Tom is immediate. His boy; so disarmingly direct, so incapable of trafficking in insinuation. He wants to reach into his skin and peel him away from all this frivolity. He aches for the weeks when Harry’s world seemed to begin and end with him.

“He doesn’t.” Avery says.

“And neither does Lestrange,” Malfoy drawls. “Though everyone knows that but him.”

“Oh.” Harry says.

Under the table, his pinky nudges Tom’s.

They have not spoken about the question of letting others know. Tom finds the notion tiresome. The labels people like to assign do not carry much weight with him. He has never put much stock in declarations made for others’ benefit. To his mind, truth requires no corroboration. If a thing is known to him, if he has looked upon it and deemed it real, then it is. That is the axis upon which the world ought to turn.

And the truth is this: Harry is his. Entirely. Unequivocally.

Harry, though, cleaves to other measures. There’s a guardedness in him, a belief that some things must be named aloud if they are to be protected. Tom does not share the instinct, but he doesn’t mind it either.

Harry’s caution, after all, never keeps him from reaching.

Tom curls his hand around Harry’s wrist, thumb pressing lightly into the notch of bone there.

If the fall term moved at a crawl, spring term is a vicious return to form.

Schedules are redrawn in thick, officious script. Professors speak with grave intonation about futures. Assignments double in breadth overnight. Expectations metastasize. External examinations loom most oppressively over seventh-years on the NEWT track, and once again, Tom shoulders the tedious anxieties his peers can’t manage alone, as he once did for OWLs.

He suffers it all with narrowing patience. The material is not new, and it is all very tedious to do. Moreover, the more he proves himself capable, the more is foisted upon him: supplemental readings in baroque corners of arithmetic theory; encouragements to take up research projects he has no time for; peer tutoring in subjects he finds elementary…

Slughorn is the worst among them. Obsequious in praise and oppressive in expectation, he clings to Tom in a way he never had before: Tom’s mind the shiniest bauble in his debuting collection, the best upcoming thing to parade before his social set. And every invitation — every sly reference to the Ministry’s most dull department or a decrepit friend in Spellcrafting Acquisition — comes laced with the same assumption: that Tom ought to be grateful for the honour of being passed around. That, for a boy as good as Muggleborn, this is the highest honour he will ever be granted.

But it isn’t honour. It’s theft.

And if he has grown curt, even cold, with his professors, it is only because he cannot stomach his brilliance being treated as communal property.

More than anything, he loathes the interference. Time comes now only in clipped allotments, meted out between his copious duties, and Tom finds himself nursing a private, petulant envy of the clock hands themselves; so free to turn, while he must ration his hours, each one conscripted to tedium, each one pried from where it belongs. He can actually feel them bleeding away from him. 

And always, beneath it all, the same refrain — he is not with Harry.

He has never been so needy. It is a vile sensation. It makes him restless. Raw. There is a primal urge in him to reclaim what had been his. He remembers the break too vividly, like the visions of heaven he’d dream about as a child. 

The peace was theirs, the minutes theirs, Harry’s time and breath and glances all his.  

The loss is not soft. The more he dwells on it, the more he feels the sharp edge of it inside his chest. Like a furious, ravaging knowledge that something perfect had been gifted to him, and now it has been stolen back from right under his nose.

Their every sanctuary has been desecrated. The armchair in the common room (too narrow for two, and thus perfect) hosts second-years who would likely perish under the crucio Tom longs to unleash upon them. The dormitory has turned into a henhouse, credit to Nott and Lestrange and their petty war. Even the still places they made together — books left open on shared marginalia, chess boards stalled mid-game, the alcove near the clocktower where they'd once brought each other off — feel altered, trampled by too many feet.

It is solely the Room of Requirement that remains to them now, summoned in rare, hard-won intervals. An hour scraped between Arithmancy and Astronomy. Mornings when Harry isn’t in the air, and Tom isn’t hunched over the maddening scrawl of a long-dead sorcerer who plainly never meant to be understood.

And some nights, like this one.

Harry reclines along the velvet curve of a chaise drawn near the fire, its grate wide enough to roast a boar. One knee folded beneath him, the other stretched long toward the embers. At the sound of the door, he tips his head back. 

He says nothing as Tom sets his satchel down with a thud, undoing the top buttons of his collar and folding his sleeves to the forearm. He must have been waiting a while, and yet he does not complain. Harry only shifts sideways, wordlessly carving out a place beside him.

“Vablatsky held us past the hour,” Tom explains. “She claimed the auguries would be corrupted if we were dismissed before the moon cleared Virgo.”

Harry snorts. “Divination. I still don’t understand why you’re taking it.”

“Because I earned an O on the OWL and had no compelling reason not to.”

“You probably earned an O on every OWL.”

Tom lets his head rest in the hollow where Harry’s neck meets shoulder. He is softest there, his scent most potent. “That I did.”

Harry’s fingers slip into his hair, combing through to detangle the knots left by his curl cream. The tension in Tom’s shoulders holds a moment longer, as if his body hasn’t yet realised they are alone.

“You could stand to drop something,” Harry continues, quietly. “All those electives you don’t need.”

Need. The word lands like grit behind the teeth. Of course he could drop a subject. That has never been the point.

“You sound like Slughorn.”

“Do I?” Harry replies, still so mild. “I suppose I sound like someone who’s concerned. You’ve been wound tight lately. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”

Tom closes his eyes. He breathes in the scent of pine, clean linen, the soap they both use, and the warm, unnameable trace of Harry’s skin.

He says nothing.

Because what answer can he give? That his days are carved into pursuits he does not own; that his nights are spent working by candlelight until the wax gutters low; that he has begun to resent the shape of his own script? 

That he has seen a glimpse of true joy and does not know how to recalibrate his visions of the future to make room for it? 

He could speak of those things. But that would be absurd. Maudlin. Tom is not some fragile creature undone by hard work. He was built for it, honed by it. The grind, the scrutiny, the constant demand to prove himself worthy of a world that never wanted him — it was all he had. Excellence was never ambition. It was a currency. And he spent it ruthlessly to rise to what he is now. 

That it has begun to feel like a burden is not a truth he is willing to entertain, let alone name. Not when a younger version of himself would give anything to be where he stands (the diary. The diary would revolt to see what he’s become, all while it is trapped, miles underground). Not when mediocrity disgusts him so thoroughly. Not when it would mean conceding an integral part of himself.

So, instead, he opens his eyes and reaches up, catching Harry’s hand and drawing it to his mouth. Rather than kiss it, he sinks his teeth into the knuckles. If he could, he’d disassemble his boy apart, piece by piece, and keep the fine bones of his hands in his pocket to comfort him wherever he went. 

“I know a way to unwind,” Tom murmurs.

Harry meets his gaze and grins, wicked and bright.

The room shifts in answer. The chaise gives way to a bed, and Tom takes Harry without having to do much thinking at all. 

Eternity had long presented itself to Tom as a promise. 

Unassailable dominion over death, and thereby over all uncertainty. To live beyond the frail span of life was to transcend chaos itself, to stand apart from the blind and relentless march of time. Such was the triumph he had sought against all the variables of existence.

Truthfully, in his pursuit, Tom had never truly considered the nature of forever. It was sufficient that it be an infinite ledger in which he alone was the author, actor, and arbiter. It seemed enough, within this eternal self-containment, for there to be no cause to attend to the fragility of others, no necessity for empathy beyond the reflection of his own image. Immortality demands a singular focus, a selfhood so absolute that all else is extraneous.

And selfhood had always been as intrinsic to Tom as the magic that shapes him. He has never had reason to worry about anyone else.

Now:

He traces the knobs of Harry’s spine, counting them. The flesh is warm, stretched over muscle and bone, and Tom presses down harder than necessary, as if verifying that each vertebra resists him. At the base, he finds the hinge where the back begins to curve and places his thumb there. Harry’s pulse stutters beneath his touch. 

He follows it up, back again, fingers sliding beneath his hairline, settling behind the ear. The cartilage is soft and rubbery — Harry folding in unguarded places. Tom goes as far as to test right behind it, nudging against his mastoid to feel the minute recoil of nerves.

This body breathes, swallows, twitches. 

It will fail one day.

Tom runs his hand lower, over the cliff of his ribs where everything feels too vulnerable, buried behind sinew that can be cut by even the most troglodyte muggle. His fingers map out the architecture housing his lungs, the tick of Harry’s heart underneath his sternum, the jerk of a tendon in his shoulder.

He presses his palm flat against Harry’s stomach, feeling the give of flesh beneath. There’s a tremor, barely perceptible — digestion, perhaps, he cannot say. Then, the navel, a sealed mouth; a fossil of dependency. Harry is still dependent, Tom thinks, and holds his hand there anyway, unmoving, until he can feel the twitch of peristalsis and vividly imagine the soft coils of intestine shifting just beneath the surface.

The clavicle is sharper. He fits his fingers into the curve between the bones and thinks of how little is required to shatter it. He pushes. It does not give; but he recalls the time Harry told him of a bludger that obliterated the structure of his forearm. Beneath tissue is a body engineered to always betray itself. 

He moves higher. The throat. Tom circles it, slowly. Harry’s larynx pulses beneath his fingertips. His voice — deep and canny and rich — lives there, and yet a single moment of pressure would make silence immediate. 

Tom cannot bear how ephemeral it all is. He feels sick with the revelation.

His hand finds Harry’s jaw. He runs his thumb along the hinge and thinks of ligaments, the slide of cartilage over the socket, the brittle seam of the mandible. Even the mouth is lined with teeth made to rot. Even the mouth.

He looks down at Harry, asleep or nearly so, face turned toward him with unconscious trust. All of this — the nerves and veins and wet little organs — is his. And it will die. It will be taken from him; not by war or accident (things Tom would never let happen), but by time. By the traitor clock.

Tom leans forward and places his mouth to the centre of Harry’s throat. Not to kiss, but to rest there, inhaling the scent of blood moving just beneath the skin. He imagines what it would take to capture him in time, like this, for him, forever.

The air in the common room is viscous. 

Though it is clear it had been full of whispers only moments before, silence falls immediately upon their entry. Tom walks ahead, Harry just behind, their closeness habitual now, elbows grazing with each step. Around them, even trivial conversations suspend mid-sentence. 

It would usually flatter him. Only, it doesn’t feel like reverence today.

They part bodies without effort and reach the far wall, where Avery, Malfoy, and Lestrange lounge beneath the latticework windows. Avery rises halfway and extends a paper before Tom can ask. It is a folded broadsheet, ink still damp. Tomorrow’s edition of The Prophet, not yet in circulation.

GRINDELWALD SIGHTED NEAR DORSET COAST, MINISTRY ISSUES PRELIMINARY MEASURES reads the headline. Below it, a grainy photograph. A cloaked figure, mid-stride, cloaked, wand aglow. Fog blurs the street. Glass breaks behind him.

Tom reads the article once. Then again. The sound of the common room returns in slow increments, like a limb warming from numbness. He notices the shape the speculation takes. How many people are watching him. Watching Harry.

“Terribly atmospheric photograph.” Malfoy broaches.

Lestrange exhales a nervous laugh through his nose. “And in Britain, no less. How bold of him.” His eyes flicker sidelong to Harry, too quickly. “Nostalgic, maybe?”

Harry doesn’t respond. He knows better than to rise to a question not asked.

Malfoy leans back in his seat, fingers steepled. “Of course, some say he’s always had eyes on Albion. The continent’s too crowded, and he prefers the old lines. The sort that still know how to close ranks.”

“I’d heard he had a few partisans planted here. Useful sorts.” Lestrange, giving up on subtlety, finally confronts Harry. “You’d know better than most, I imagine.”

Tom shifts, the sound of his sleeve brushing the fabric of his trouser sharp in the stillness. Harry keeps his expression blank.

“You must understand, Evans. We don’t mean anything by it. It’s just... curious, isn’t it?” Malfoy’s voice turns confidential as he gestures vaguely at the back of his own neck. “That mark you carry. It’s not what you’d find on any school primer.”

Lestrange nods vigorously. “And to wear it at all…”

“Why would it matter to you either way?” Harry says, carefully.

“We pride ourselves on an educated interest.” Malfoy says.

“You did know him, didn’t you?” Lestrange adds.

A beat.

“No.” Harry replies.

That makes Malfoy laugh. “Oh, of course. Subtle. Truly Slytherin of you. We appreciate it, of course, though you don’t have to be so reserved around us. We’re all friends here, Evans.”

Tom hasn’t spoken, but he looks directly at Lestrange now. A single glance, and he swallows, smile dimming.

Malfoy, ever more observant than he is wise, changes the subject. “Still, fascinating man, Grindelwald. He has such vision. Admirable, in the abstract.” He says, heedful not to give himself away, even though everybody knows about his family’s investments in the war. Win or loss, the Malfoy’s will emerge wealthy. 

Lestrange adds, as though it helps: “My uncle met him once. Said he had the voice of a prophet.”

“I’ve found,” Harry says. “That it does not help to rely on prophecy.”

They lie face to face in the hush before dawn, hidden under the covers, insulated from the snores of their roommates. Here, every breath Tom takes is a breath that has passed through Harry’s lungs. He thinks he feels the stirrings of terror at the thought of ever going without it.

His hand rests on the nape of Harry’s neck.

“I want the truth,” he says.

Harry blinks at him. 

“I want everything you’ve never told me. This mark. Grindelwald. Your past. Every scrap of it.”

Control is not a preference. Tom’s mind is a system of locks and channels. That is how he functions. And Harry — wry, ungovernable Harry — has moved through it like a flood so far. For a time, he even allowed it. Let it wash over him and loosen the bolts.

But the tides are changing. The water has receded, and Tom is left cold.

Harry watches him. “I don’t know what you want me to say that I haven’t already. I’m not associated with Grindelwald.”

“Stop lying to me.”

There is a pathetic tremor to those words, the first sign of a world he cannot reason into order. For months, he has been aware of a flaw in the edifice. It began with Harry’s refusal to be impressed. Then came his affection, then dependence. 

And now this: fear.

Tom does not do fear. It is irrational at the best of times, and he has always known where his power begins and ends. But with Harry, the boundary bleeds. He does not know how to bargain with fates he cannot begin to comprehend.

“I’m not in any danger, Tom. I promise.” Harry lies, again.

“But you could be.” Tom’s hand tightens minutely. Harry’s hair tickles his fingers. The flesh of his neck is vaguely damp, like the seams of his lips. “And if I don’t know, I can’t stop it.”

This is intolerable. Tom was meant to overcome death, not be hobbled by its prospect. He built his ambitions on the supposition that everything could be known, and from that knowledge, mastered. But Harry has made a mess of that — with all his evasions, the gaps in his history, by wheedling his way into Tom’s life. 

With the fragile fact of his mortality.

He thought making Harry his would be empowering. Instead, it has made him vulnerable.

And Tom Riddle has no framework for vulnerability that doesn’t demand blood in return.

For the first time in years, Tom forgets to take his dreamless sleep. 

His mind is merciless for the discrepancy. He is plagued by visions of Harry. Of himself, as Harry.

In the night, their body jerks backward, violently, as though torn from the inside out. Red light burns through them. Their forearm is sliced, blood siphoned by a gross hand. Heat drains. Something screams. It might be them. Harry. Him.

Stone beneath him. Damp and unyielding. A wand held to his sternum like a knife. His back arches. His mouth splits. His throat will not obey.

The air clots. Turns white and thick. Mist binds to his skin, then drowns it. He is underwater. His chest caves. His arms pinwheel through liquid too dense to shift. He bites his tongue. It bleeds into the lake. Weeds knot at his ankles. Cold grips his muscles. A slick, boneless length coils around his leg and holds fast. The water glows red, then black.

And then he is in a forest. The Forbidden Forest, the one thing he recognises. The ground pulses underfoot. Harry marches into a hush that very clearly spells death. He does not stop. The earth opens its mouth. A flash of green swallows them both.

Tom wakes with his hand on his wand, breath caught like a hook in his throat.

Harry sleeps beside him, naked, knocked out cold, but safe. 

It still takes Tom an hour to trust what he sees.

Dumbledore is summoned to the Ministry on urgent business. The nature of it is not formally disclosed, though speculation is hardly necessary; the timing, so soon after the confirmation of Grindelwald along the southern coast, renders the cause self-evident. 

In his absence, all Transfiguration lessons are suspended for the remainder of the week. While most students receive the news with relief, the seventh-years are not afforded idleness — instead, their vacated hours are repurposed for career consultations with their Heads of House and Dippet.

For Tom, it is the perfect opportunity.

The Headmaster’s office is lined with portraits whose occupants display an altogether unbecoming interest in the present moment.

Dippet occupies the centre of the room, behind a desk so big it lends him an air of weakness; his chair, high-backed and slightly too grand, asserting an authority that his aging posture cannot quite uphold. Before him lies a folio embossed with Tom’s name. He studies it carefully. 

Beside him is Slughorn, moustache twitching with the effort of tact. 

Tom, standing with his hands clasped behind his back and back perfectly straight, does not shift his weight nor glance away from the fixed, inoffensive point he has chosen to stare at, just above the Headmaster’s eye line. 

He has thought through every permutation of the meeting in advance, drafted counterpoints for every argument, rehearsed his delivery until his logic ran like scripture. The Defence post is the fulcrum upon which his entire vision of the future balances. That they might deny him has never meaningfully crossed his mind. There is no better candidate. 

And yet–

Dippet’s expression, already composed of too many regrets for one life, does not alter. 

“You are, of course, an exceptional student, Mister Riddle,” he begins. “Your record is without parallel: eleven Outstanding OWLs and a Special Award for Services to the School. But this is a position for a seasoned wizard. One with… life behind them. Perspective. And you must understand that students require more than just brilliance. They require wisdom that, I am afraid, is beyond your years.”

Tom inclines his head, calculating the dimensions of the leniency he is given, measuring the ground upon which he must now tread. When he does answer, his voice is even.

“I do not doubt the post demands experience,” he argues, “but I submit that experience does not always correlate with efficacy. The curriculum is not foreign to me. I have surpassed its expectations. I understand the demands, both academic and disciplinary. And, more critically, I understand the students: their tendencies, their weaknesses, their potential. This is an advantage that cannot be understated; the very proof of it is undeniable. You’ll find I’ve tutored more than ten underclassmen a year since my fourth, many of whom achieved marks beyond what they believed possible.”

Slughorn makes a tutting sound — light, almost jovial — and shifts in his chair as though the tension of the moment is merely a child’s sulk to be patted away. 

“Oh, Tom,” he says. “You are destined for great things, far beyond a dusty classroom. This is hardly the end of the road. You’ll have opportunities. Many indeed, a brilliant boy like yourself.”

Tom does not correct him. He does not say: I am not a boy. He does not say: I do not want your forsaken opportunities. I want this one. Instead, he remains still, and lets the finality of Dippet’s decision settle like cement in the hollow of his chest.

“It is exactly the matter of understanding the students that concerns me most,” Dippet continues. “You cannot expect to garner any true authority from those who knew you as a peer, Mister Riddle. The boundary between instructor and student must be clear, and yours has not yet had time to form. I assure you, I am only looking out for your best interests.”

Tom does not speak. There is nothing in his lexicon that could rebuff a concern so cloaked in paternity. The flaw, maddeningly, is in the very fact of his youth, a point that no argument can hasten. 

He keeps his face composed, but internally, a fury that has been mounting begins to burn.

Dippet, mistaking silence for agreement, gives a relieved smile.

Slughorn leans forward, one meaty hand resting on the folio. “There’s no shame in patience, Tom. The world’s still turning. You'll find your place, and when you do, they'll wish they’d made room sooner.” 

Tom offers a nod that might resemble gratitude. It is not.

He exits the office without allowing his stride to quicken, though the thud of his pulse begins to overtake the measured beat of his brogues on the stone. There are no witnesses to the curl of his fingers at his side, nor to the minute flare in his nostrils as he ascends the stairs. The corridor is empty, but it might as well be full. He feels watched, judged, found wanting.

The Defence post had always seemed inevitable. One more step in the procession of power.

Now, abruptly, his path forks into fog. 

He feels as though the ground has opened underneath him. The sudden vacancy of the immediate future stings. Tom had made no alternative arrangements. Why should he? Nothing about his record suggested contingency would be required. He is unaccustomed to improvisation. Improvisation is for the ill-prepared.

Tom walks through halls where his peers lounge, discussing apprenticeships and travel and betrothals. He listens, and hears, not for the first time, the language of a future not built to accommodate him. 

By the time he reaches the seventh-floor corridor, he has imagined a thousand different ways to slaughter everybody in this school. 

Tom catalogues anatomies in his mind — which tendons detach cleanest from bone; how quickly a jugular empties when severed at the root; which spells char flesh the slowest. 

He imagines silence: the eerie quiet that would follow if he stripped this castle bare, left its halls echoing with ash and marrow. Tom swells at the fantasy of screams, of corridors running slick with red, of wands splintered between his fingers. 

He thinks of forcing Dippet to swallow every failed ambition, one brittle finger at a time, his hands broken until they can no longer tremble in disappointment.

He thinks of Slughorn’s tongue sliced from root to tip, left dangling as a grotesque trophy for the conceit he could never swallow.

He thinks of skinning Dumbledore alive in one even go, until Tom can wear his skin like those ridiculously coloured robes he insists upon.

He thinks of Grindelwald thrown to the stones, wrists bound and shattered, dragged through jeering streets until the bones splinter within his own stubborn fists.

Tom has to wait, though not for long, before Harry joins him in the Room. 

He does not ask how the meeting went. Perhaps it is Tom’s ruthlessness in fucking him that gives his frustration away. He cannot stand to be ravished anymore than he already has.

Whatever it is, Harry already seems to know. 

In Potions, the moment arrives, at last, to commence their coursework projects — a prospect Tom once regarded with some anticipation. Now, however, he cannot conceive of a worse time to endure the idiocy of his peers, swarming about their cauldrons with the heedless industry of gnats.

The assignment has its merits, of course. Beyond the NEWT practical examination, each Potions candidate is required to produce a modified iteration of a studied potion, adapted to fulfill some distinct and narrowly delimited function outside the original’s intent. This allows students to demonstrate a proper grasp of the subject by taking away the opportunity for rote replication. 

But what this naturally means is that most students are entirely unequal to the task.

Tom, for his part, has withdrawn from the common fray. He sits apart, detailing the preliminary work for his own project — the draught of dreamless sleep, whose utility he considers sorely hampered by its temporality. Tom intends to refine it into a far more efficient formulation, which does away with dreaming altogether. A potion that severs, cleanly and irrevocably, the mind’s frail tether to the unconscious. No more flickering phantoms of emotion, no more nonsense from the dark. Just silence. A potion worthy of truly being called curative.

Slughorn has taken Harry aside to discuss the particularities of his coursework. As someone who has not progressed through the full Hogwarts curriculum, he is afforded certain concessions.

But when he returns, it is with the smile of someone recently patronised and clever enough to find the experience amusing. He resumes his seat in Tom’s periphery, voice pitched low.

“He asked if I’d ever considered teaching. Said I had the combative spirit for it, complete with a trustworthy face.”

Tom does not look up. “He told me the same. Not ten minutes before he brown-nosed Dippet and declined my appointment to the Defence post.”

Harry’s smile stretches wider. “Perhaps he rotates the speech.”

“He rotates everything. His loyalties are retrospective. He attaches himself only to the names already etched in history, or brilliance he can safely applaud.”

A pause.

“I suspect,” Tom adds, “that is why prefers his protégés dead. It makes them easier to maintain.”

If he sounds bitter, that is because he is. He doubts he will ever forgive Slughorn for this transgression.

Harry tilts his head, then mercifully shifts topic. “He’s hosting one of his parties this weekend. Taking advantage of Dumbledore’s absence, I think. Several important people will be in attendance, apparently. He’s invited us both.”

Tom’s quill stills. “Then we’ll attend.”

This earns him an incredulous look. “You’re serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Slughorn’s parties are dreadful.”

“You’ve never been to one.”

“I’ve heard, though.” Harry leans back slightly. “And I thought you were finished pandering.”

“On the contrary,” Tom replies. “Devoid of prospects or any clear direction, I must pander now more than ever before.”

“And what of the offer from the Department of Mysteries?”

“And what, precisely, do you suppose I make of it?” 

The words burden the space between them. Their implication is clear: until Harry explains the nature of his connection to this handler of his, Tom will neither accept nor act upon any such connections. 

Harry offers no rebuttal; he never does when Tom’s voice carries that particular hardness.

“Alright,” he concedes. “But I haven’t any robes.”

Tom crosses out a whole section of his ingredients list. Too expensive, he thinks.

“You’ll wear my old ones. I’ll alter them to fit.”

Slughorn’s expanded office is a labyrinthine accretion of mahogany and burnished brass, the scent of ambergris coalescing with the trace of overripe elderberries steeped in sugar. Crystal decanters perch on silver trays, their facets refracting spectrums of lamplight — a sickly, unnatural brilliance that gilds every surface, from the checkered floors to the embroidered tapestries lining the walls. Cups brim with firewhiskey and spiced mead. Platters of encrusted pheasant and candied fruits pass around. 

Guests cluster in gowns and robes of dragon-scales, voices rising in a chorus of affected gaiety, their conversations weaving through an atmosphere so dense with incense that the very air feels reluctant to move. Slughorn himself presides at the periphery, exchanging bonhomie with an array of guests whose names Tom knows only by reputation or hearsay. 

The spectacle is grotesque, sumptuousness bordering on the obscene.

Tom’s senses bristle against the onslaught; visual excess and the cacophony of overlapping noise frays the edges of his concentration. Harry, nearby, leans against the balustrade with the reluctance to enter any further.

For all the glut draped throughout the room, he makes the finest vision.

His robes, transfigured from Tom’s older set, fall cleanly along his frame: narrow in the shoulders, cut close around the waist, the sleeves sharp at the cuff. They are otherwise unembellished save for the fine, near-invisible stitch-work at the collar. And their colour is difficult to name, teetering between charcoal and blue-black ink — though it makes his eyes look impossibly green and his skin especially bronze, all the same. 

Tom has even tried to tame Harry’s hair  (the very folly that made them late) and for once it lies flat, exposing the full, sharp architecture of his face. The lightning scar bisecting his forehead gleams, and a friction in Tom settles. The tension behind his eyes (tight since Slughorn greeted him with that oily, too-knowing smile) eases its grip. His mind narrows. Clarifies. Fixes. 

He came here tonight with a purpose. 

“Spot anyone of note?” Harry whispers.

Tom lets his gaze drift outward. Now that his pulse has levelled, the landscape comes into clearer focus. All its clutter recedes, and the pattern emerges.

Near the hearth is Orestes Thane. Tom is intimately familiar with his work — though obscure, privately funded, and published under a pseudonym — concerning magic without entropy. The Ministry declined to endorse it, so Tom committed the citations to memory before he was sixteen. There are few minds worth speaking to; Thane’s might be one of them.

To the left of the room is Ianthe Mulciber (of distant relation to his Knight), leaning over a table cluttered with confectionery. Her latest publication, a treatise on abilities inherited through blood, had been pulled from Theoretical Thaumaturgy after several editors resigned. She looks as though she’s enjoying herself, and would be much amenable to suggestion. 

Near the window is Emeric Marlowe; lean and dry-faced. Tom read about him recently when his accelerated appointment as the French Undersecretary for International Magical Cooperation made controversial headlines. He doesn’t intend to speak to him tonight. 

And then, half-obscured by a floating candelabra, Drusilla Burke neé Rookwood, age-inappropriate wife to the same Burke to graduate in 1933, and formerly of the Committee on Experimental Charms. Her disappearance from public life had been abrupt, her work on memory extraction techniques declared ethically inadmissible. Yet here she is, aging poorly and dressed for attention. A living cautionary tale, perhaps. 

Or a door half-open.

“Some,” Tom says, taking up a flute of champagne, more for effect than anything else. “I’m considering my options.”

“And you look every bit the predator doing so.” Harry snorts, sidling close at his side. For a moment Tom anticipates a kiss. Instead, Harry takes the glass from his hand and downs it in one motion. “Unlike you, I just plan on getting through the night. Through any means necessary.” He emphasises this by grabbing a shot off a passing host.

“And what happened to that vaunted self-restraint?”

“I’d rather have a hangover than endure any of this sober.”

“I won’t be carrying you back to bed if you disgrace yourself.”

Harry only grins. “No promises.”

“There are a few esteemed Quidditch players here,” Tom adds. “I’d assumed you might be interested.”

“I don’t recognise anyone.” Harry shrugs.

“Well. Orion is around, somewhere. If you can manage to extract his attention from whatever poor pursuit he intends to reel into his bed tonight, I daresay he could make introductions.”

In answer, Harry downs the firewhiskey without flinching.

Tom observes him in profile. He rather suspects he will be carrying him back to bed at the end of the night, after all.

By the time he finds himself nodding through Burke’s fourth anecdote involving a possessed hatstand and a customer with ‘dangerously expressive eyebrows,’ Tom has begun to consider the relative mercy of spontaneous combustion.

Thane, as it turned out, had not only failed to engage with the post-war critiques of his own work, but appeared unsettled when Tom proposed a recursive anchoring model for endurance, which dispensed with stabilising agents entirely in favour of self-referencing magical loops. A ‘theoretical cul-de-sac’, he’d called it, with the vague horror of a man glimpsing a staircase where a wall ought to be. It seems he has grown lazy in his sabbatical. He smelled faintly of vinegar and forgot Tom’s name twice.

Mulciber proved more persistent. She had a voice like a dulled knife and the habit of maintaining eye contact when she’d purposefully drop her glove, pushing her bosoms right into Tom’s face as she claimed it back. Her understanding of inheritance was approximate at best without her literature to reference (and Tom would know, having inherited a familial ability of his own), though her suggestions for parseltongue’s ‘practical application’ were, if nothing else, vivid.

And now, Mrs Burke. Once a formidable witch, reduced to breathless soliloquies on ‘authentic patina’ and the logistics of insurance on cursed furniture. She is more devoted to her husband’s inheritance of Borgin & Burkes than the original proprietors could have ever been. Tom has stepped inside only once, and finds the idea distasteful: to have one’s life reduced to the cataloguing of other people’s curiosities. Or worse, to be married to someone who does, and to find in that position anything worth celebrating.

It is, in summary, a ghastly waste of time. He had come expecting intellect, leverage, purpose. Instead, Tom has found only affectation and aphasia.

Harry is off somewhere with Alphard, who had only just managed to extricate him from Walpurga Black’s surprise appearance. Though she graduated two years ago, the entire Black brood has materialised tonight, forcing Orion to attend to his betrothed rather than crawling into someone else’s skirts — though Tom rather suspects that is the point. 

“…and I have a taste for jewellery, but even I refused to go anywhere near that necklace!”

Tom equips a practiced smile. “Quite understandable. The curse sounds crude.” He sips his water (charmed to look like mead to the more inhibited of his interlocutors), then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Though I imagine it would fetch a considerable price from the right sort of fool.”

Burke blinks, then laughs in a manner meant to sound both scandalised and flattered. “My word. I’d no idea you were so well-versed in artifact diagnostics. You must come by the shop sometime! My husband would find you fascinating.”

“I expect he would,” Tom sneers.

Before she can press the invitation, a voice interjects — low, clipped, and touched faintly by a Parisian edge.

“Of course, the original fault wasn’t in the inlaid curse-work,” says the man, stepping forward. “It was in the anchorage. Whoever bound it didn’t account for sympathetic degradation.” He adopts a condescending tone for Mrs Burke. “You are familiar, of course, with sympathetic degradation? The theory that enchantments with long histories will naturally falter over time, due to too many emotional threads tangling into a single object? It’s a common enough mistake when working with inherited jewellery.”

Tom turns. Emeric Marlowe looks older up close, but the sharpness of his gaze carries an unnerving agelessness. He’s dressed plainly, without a trace of flash.

Mrs Burke blanches, then excuses herself with mention of a cousin requiring introduction. She will not be missed.

Tom watches her go, then turns back to Marlowe. “Sympathetic degradation,” he repeats, appraising. 

“My current fixation.” Marlowe shrugs.

“Would you be familiar with its effect on spectral transfer models, then?”

It’s the most innocuous way he can frame a subject most would rather not name.  A litmus test, of sorts. Tom hadn’t intended to waste so much as a breath on this man tonight, yet here they are. And if he is to entertain even a second more of this encounter, he must be sure it won’t end in disappointment. Not another Thane. He will not squander curiosity again on someone too small to follow where it leads. 

Besides… If Marlowe can handle the implications, the trajectory of this conversation is not without its allure.

Spectral transfer models belong to a class of advanced magical practice involved with the dislocation of essences (matters like mind, memory, identity…) from a living origin into a secondary vessel. Most recognise it only in its gentler forms: pensieves, magical portraiture, and the like. But the darker applications veer closer to necromancy: full anchorage of the soul in physical matter, the splitting or replication of self. Possession. Horcruxes.

Where sympathetic degradation becomes relevant is in the matter of host stability within transference work. Tom knows magically saturated vessels struggle to accept new essences cleanly. At best, the transference fails. At worst, the vessel can corrupt the essence entirely. 

But if he means to yoke eternity by binding his soul to the finest relics of the wixen world — relics no doubt rife with centuries of sympathetic residue — then understanding the mechanisms of that failure is essential.

(He thought he’d have access to better resources as a Defence instructor. But with that path closed to him, he must look elsewhere.)

“Well enough,” Marlowe replies smoothly. “Though for you to have read Greaves’ compendium... That’s dangerous ground for someone still in school.”

Tom’s mouth tightens, just slightly. “I prefer my studies to have teeth.”

“As do I.” Marlowe smiles back. “Then you no doubt know that magic may begin to malfunction when competing sympathetic impressions vie for primacy in a single locus.”

“Of course,” Tom says. “That’s textbook.”

“More or less. But even if collapse were miraculously avoided, it wouldn’t be the end of the story,” Marlowe says. “No matter what, spectral transferences leave a shape behind on all essences and vessels involved. A sort of... metaphysical echo.”

Tom tilts his head. He has not considered this line of questioning. His research into horcrux binding had always been about avoiding failure, not what might be unearthed after success took root.

(Though perhaps that would’ve been helpful knowledge. The day he discovered that his diary could talk back to him was a revelatory one.)

“An echo?”

“A lingering imprint of the original host,” Marlowe elaborates. “It’s why you can understand anything you watch through a pensieve, even if it was lived in another language. The memory retains the interpretive logic of the original mind that originally held it.”

Tom pauses, then says, “So future transferences follow the grooves of the past.” 

Like lines in a record, he thinks, unhelpfully. The song sounds the same, even if the playing apparatus is changed.

Marlowe nods. “It’s called imprint echo, and it’s not the only side effect. There’s also sympathetic bias. Or, an essence’s tendency to favour vessels it has spent a long time occupying.” Marlowe says. “You try to impress your will into a transference, but the essence has already adapted a preference. Thus it bends its new vessel instead. Shapes the novel imprint to fit the old. To use the pensieve example again: to access certain memories fed into a pensieve, you would need to follow the line of logic that tethers them to others according to what connections the original mind has already made.”

Tom’s gaze sharpens. “Even without the original vessel around? Perhaps not in the case of pensieves… Mind magic is a tricky discipline. But surely, if you destroy the vessel an essence has grown attached to, its metaphysical place in the hierarchy would become null.”

Marlowe lifts a brow. “Especially then. No essence is neutral once it has been touched. They’re haunted by what came before.”

There’s a beat of silence as Tom considers that.

“And if—” He hesitates, carefully. “If the original vessel were to return?”

Marlowe’s smile deepens. “Then we enter ghost residue activation. A theoretical fringe, mostly, not least because of the ethical questions it raises. But I’ll bite. If a spectral fragment re-encounters a previous host…” Marlowe explains. “it could re-converge with uncanny fidelity, but it will still carry with it the residue of everything it’s passed through. Like I said, no essence is neutral once it has been touched, even if it returns to its place of origin.”

Tom’s breath hitches, near imperceptibly. “This would change the host?”

“It could,” Marlowe replies. “You might find your memories aren’t wholly your own. Your magic might misfire, according to what actions others hosts would have taken, instead. You’d speak in other, unfamiliar, tongues. React with instincts not your own. A fusion, or a war, depending on how you look at it.”

He doesn’t speak, but Tom’s mind is already spiralling forward. What Marlowe has said settles uncomfortably close to recognition, though he cannot say why. 

“That, of course, is only conjecture. The truth can only reveal itself in practice,” Marlowe continues smoothly, as if he hasn’t just handed Tom a month’s worth of research on top of his existing coursework. “Enough on that. Tell me, what have you been working on, Mister…?”

“Riddle.”

“Mister Riddle.”

The conversation that follows is the only one of the evening Tom does not immediately begin forgetting. 

It spirals cleanly through avenues for a permanently dreamless sleep, necromantic theory and inferi, the political shortcomings of the current administration in France, and the inherent fragility of the Statute of Secrecy. Marlowe is clever and better read than he has any right to be as a mere Ministry official. He speaks in full sentences. He listens. He does not once ask about Tom’s future prospects. When the topic drifts briefly to ritual conservation laws, Tom finds himself drawing breath to counter a point before realising, to his mild surprise, that he agrees with it.

It is, in all, intolerably rare. 

At some point in the night, nearing the end, Harry reappears.

His colour is high, his collar skewed from its proper place.

“You’ve been gone,” he says to Tom, evenly. “Should I be interrupting?”

Tom lifts his chin, but it is Marlowe who answers.

“Not at all. I was just indulging in some theoretical talk. Nothing half as interesting as what you’d expect, I’m sure.”

Harry, often civil with strangers, does not return the smile. His gaze is flinty, slow in its assessment, travelling from Marlowe’s shirt to his hands, then to the line of his jaw. “I don’t trade in theory.” He replies, finally.

“No?” Marlowe tilts his head. “Then what does one trade in, when certainty is so rarely on offer?”

“Nothing.” 

Marlowe only smiles wider.

Tom observes the exchange in a register not unlike delight. His pulse is still feathered from the thrill of good conversation, from Marlowe’s precision, his fluency, the way his language moved through the world’s most enthralling subjects like a blade. He feels himself almost airborne, not yet come down from the height of it — and now Harry. Here. Appearing like an angel. Beautiful, full of glint and ire. The perfect cap.

How remarkable, he thinks, with a strange and total clarity, that the evening should end with both of them before him, vying for his attention.

Harry’s gaze does not stray from Marlowe. His silence is weighted, insolent.

Tom does not take it for anything but what it is so clearly is. After all, he, of all people, should know what jealousy looks like.

And it pleases him, obscenely. That Harry should bristle. That Harry, who so rarely betrays desire in any ordinary way, should show it now as acrimony. Tom wants to laugh, to say the most outrageous thing he can think of, to see how far he can press this edge — but reins it in with effort. Instead, he offers Harry a sidelong glance, voice light, faintly chiding:

“You’re being difficult.”

His tone skirts the edge of reproof, but only just. After all, it would not do to let such conduct pass unremarked, though Tom cannot quite conceal the satisfaction curling at its heart. 

Harry’s mouth tugs downward. His eyes flick to Tom, then back to Marlowe.

“Fine.” His jaw flexes. “I’ll leave you guys to it, then.” 

They both watch as he withdraws, slipping like smoke through the shifting density of the crowd.

Tom sighs, fondly, once he’s out of sight. “My apologies,” he says lightly. “Harry can be… intransigent.”

“Stubbornness often masks deeper convictions.” Marlowe replies, low, almost to himself. His gaze does not follow the conversation — it lingers on the place where Harry vanished, transfixed by the afterimage. The expression he wears is thoughtful, a shade too absorbed to be entirely innocent. “It’s rare,” he adds, “to see such conviction in someone so young. Quite… striking.”

Tom is still lit from within, buoyed by the gleam of understanding, the giddy charge of a mind finally met, but even he can read the interest glowing in Marlowe’s eyes.

“He is mine, in all but name. I tolerate no ambiguity on that point.” Tom says.

“Of course.” Marlowe’s voice is silken, untroubled. “Though if I may ask…” He turns back to Tom now. “Is he receptive to the more esoteric strains of your pursuits?”

The truth of Harry’s resistance is not for sharing. “He is tolerant. That suffices. Regardless, consensus is not a condition of my interests.”

“Quite right.” Marlowe’s smile becomes inscrutable. “It stands to reason, then, that you don’t mean to stay confined to conventional society, surely. Hogwarts, the Ministry… Those scaffolds for lesser men.”

Tom feels it surge; that spark of recognition. It ignites beneath his composure, warming the inner coals of his lungs.

“I intend to surpass the boundaries others refuse to test,” he insinuates, his voice lower than before, the words drawn almost involuntarily, like sanctum, preordained by a god. “To challenge the finalities that bind us, through any means available.”

Marlowe leans in close to whisper into Tom’s ear. “Then perhaps you would accept an invitation. I conduct some extracurricular research beyond the purview of my more official channels. Explorations of mortality, spectral mechanics, you know. Fields much neglected by official doctrine, yet rich in yield for the properly inclined. Purely academic, of course.” 

He pulls back, winking without softness.

Pleasure flares in him, almost unbearable in its intensity. To not merely be acknowledged, but pursued, for the very inquiries that most others refuse to entertain… It strikes a chord so deep it rattles through him. Tom’s mind rushes to meet it, sharp-edged and hungry — the violent curiosity that has always been his first, most fatal instinct.

He draws a breath, tamping down the thrum in his bones.

“I would welcome the opportunity,” he replies. “Though I may require time to deliberate.”

Marlowe inclines his head. “Then we shall speak again, Mister Riddle. There’s much still to unearth. I’ve enjoyed this, truly.” 

Then, with the subtlety of a man who expects to be remembered, Emeric Marlowe disappears into the crowd.

Tom remains a moment longer, breath held at the edges of a grin. Fate, it seems, remains hopelessly in love with him.

He finds Harry at the edge of the room, half-shadowed and stationed beside a high, arched window, feigning interest in what little view remains. The glass is clouded with frost, the world beyond it obscured to the murk of night. Most of the evening's company has since withdrawn, and Harry, alone now, does not appear left behind — only waiting.

He doesn’t look around as Tom approaches.

“What was that, earlier?” Tom hums, arm curling around his slim hips. “With Marlowe.”

Harry’s posture shifts slightly, adapting to the weight of Tom’s hand. 

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

There is a pause. Harry shrugs, still not looking at him. "He just felt off."

Tom waits. When no further explanation is offered, he allows a thin laugh through his nose. If he didn’t suspect the old todgers in the room would enjoy the show, he’d fuck Harry right where they stood.

“Shall we walk?” he says instead, already turning.

They slip out through the far corridor, past a pair of inebriated Gryffindor alumni locked in a ridiculous duel with prop swords, and ascend a narrow flight of stone steps that deposits them into the open air. The cold meets them at once, touched with the scent of char. Snow falls in fat, fluffy flakes, catching the light like sifted ash.

Harry folds his arms against his chest. “Merlin, it’s freezing.”

Without comment, Tom conjures a cloak and settles it around his shoulders. The wool stirs faintly in the wind.

They continue to walk in step along the path that skirts the stables, then through the front gates, the virginal snow breaking beneath their boots. All sound has been drawn from the world, as if the night were holding its breath, only the faint hiss of wind through the hedgerows remaining. Above them, the sky hangs like a dim vault of hammered lead.

“I saw you had a run-in with Walpurga.” Tom remarks. 

Had he not been detained by that interminable exchange with Mrs Burke, he would have made his way over, if only to witness the spectacle firsthand. One can only imagine how Walpurga fared against Harry’s singular talent for indifference. It is unlikely she has ever encountered a creature so impervious to her affectations.

“Oh, she was terrible. Far worse than I expected. I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with her at school.” Harry huffs.

“She cornered me once in fifth year,” Tom says. “Told me I’d corrupted the prefect rota by existing. The corridors had never felt so unsafe.”

Harry laughs then, teeth chattering slightly. “She asked if I was the one with the mark. Then told me it was refreshing to see a Muggleborn own their shame so openly.”

“She must like you.”

“She also said I had ‘that look in my eye.’”

“Very poetic,” Tom murmurs.

“And then she offered to ‘remove my impurities’. With what, I didn’t ask.”

“Bloodletting, if you’d stood still long enough.” He glances over. “Did you?”

“Alphard arrived just in time. Told her I was actually your servant, charmed mute and half-blind.”

Tom entertains it for a moment. “An appealing image.”

“She believed it.”

“Of course she did. She probably has several of her own” Tom says mildly. “Perhaps I should consider putting a collar on you to make the point absolutely clear.”

“Possessive, are we?”

“Mhm.”

A moment of quiet follows as they press into the uneven ground, rounding the lake’s edge, where the ice near the bank glistens like shattered glass. The reeds bow in stiff congregations. Somewhere out on the water, a ripple disturbs the surface. 

The grounds around them are haloed in steam, the world pared back to breath and the choreography of limbs keeping time with the cold. Tom is suddenly reminded of that night, not a month and a half ago, where Harry taught him how to conjure a patronus.

“How was your night?” Harry asks, bumping his arm into Tom’s.

“Good.” Tom smiles. It is an involuntary thing, his cheeks twisting in happiness before he can control it. “Successful.”

“Successful how?”

“A conversation, mostly.”

“With who?”

There is no use in lying — Harry’s too sharp for that — but Tom takes a moment too long to answer, and the pause alone seems to confirm the worst.

“Marlowe.” Tom says. 

Harry stops walking. “Right.”

Tom turns to face him. “It was nothing, dearest. Just a discussion.”

“He didn’t look like nothing.” Harry’s voice has cooled.

Tom exhales a faint, fond breath. “Come now. You needn’t sulk over a bit of flattery. I’m all yours, Harry.”

“That’s not what this is. I’m not sulking.”

“Then perhaps you’re staking a claim?” Tom’s voice lilts, pleased by the notion. “I hadn’t realised I’d become a contested prize. Maybe I should be the one in the collar. Would that make you feel better?”

Harry glances away, the line of his mouth flat. He doesn’t address Tom’s teasing at all. 

“He smiles too much.”

That draws Tom up short. “Is that your objection?”

“He acted like he knew me when we’d only just met.” Harry continues. “By assuming what I would expect.”

Tom’s smile dims, gradually.

Eventually, he says, “He’s a man of uncommon discernment.”

Harry’s eyes flick to his before he begins to walk again. “So I’ve gathered.”

Tom follows him. "I don’t understand what precisely he’s done to upset you. Was it something I missed, or something you’re withholding?"

“That’s rich.” Harry mutters.

“Don’t pretend you haven’t made a habit of it. You, who has always known more than you let on.”

Harry turns his head, eyes glinting in the moonlight. “I’ve been honest with you about what I could. You’re the one hiding everything you don’t want me to see. You think I haven’t noticed?”

He tries to outpace him. Tom easily keeps up.

“You’re angry,” Tom says.

Harry huffs a laugh. “I’m— no, I’m—” he stops again, turning fully to face Tom now. “I’m worried. You get that, right? That I’m not trying to control you, I’m trying to keep you from—” He bites it back, visibly, the words catching behind his teeth.

“From what?” Tom asks. "From doing anything worthwhile with my life?"

“From becoming what you could become!” Harry shouts.

There it is.

Tom’s face stills, resentment slowly contaminating his features. He can do nothing to stop it. “You think I’m corruptible.”

“I think you’re brilliant,” Harry says, stepping closer. “But I also think you’re angry, and proud, and so convinced of your own power you don’t notice when someone is handing you a leash.”

“You think Marlowe is trying to control me? You’re one to talk! Hadn’t we had this discussion, weeks ago, the roles reversed? Hadn’t I warned you about Dumbledore? You didn’t listen to me then. Why would I take your advice, now?”

“Fucking forget about Dumbledore, for once, Tom!” Harry seems to vibrate. “Marlowe’s exactly what you want to be, and that should scare you.”

Tom’s breath lifts visibly in the cold. “You don’t know what I want.”

“No,” Harry says, voice pained now. “Because you’re afraid I’ll hate what I see.”

That lands. 

“I told him I’d think about it,” Tom says, finally. “That’s all.”

Harry meets his eyes. “And you actually will.”

Tom looks at him, searching for a crack, some hint of relenting — but finds only the set jaw, the stubborn crease between his brows. And for a moment, everything in Tom clenches: his want, his fear, his furious, keening need to possess the future, to wrest it from the dark.

“You don’t trust me,” he accuses.

“I don’t trust what tempts you.” Harry replies.

The wind picks up across the lake, scattering a loose veil of snow across the path ahead. Neither of them move.

“So I am weak,” Tom snarls with a vicious sort of calm. “I can’t be trusted to choose the right path, so you withhold things. You manage me.”

Harry’s lips twitch, somewhere between disbelief and anger. “Don’t pretend you don’t like being managed when it serves you. You need it, else you’ll run off and throw little boys off their brooms, or attempt to ‘rebuild the world in its rightful image’.” He hisses, echoing the exact words Tom used during that ill-fated Knights meeting.

“I don’t need anything from you.” 

“Of course not. You just need to be the smartest, the most admired, the most feared. Merlin forbid anyone know more than you do.”

“I just don’t appreciate being lied to!”

“I haven’t lied!”

“Your entire life is a lie!” Tom snaps. “You turned up in my world fully-formed, with all these preconceived notions impossible to grasp as a self-proclaimed, home-schooled, Muggle-raised clot. You flinch at certain names. You recognise things you shouldn’t. You look at me like I’m a problem you’ve determined to fix—”

Harry cuts across him. “Well. Maybe you do need fixing.”

Tom goes very still.

A force inside him cowers.

He thinks of the priest who poured holy water over his face until he choked on it, because the first exorcism hadn’t taken.

The nuns who bound his left hand to the desk, day after day, determined to train obedience into his right.

The staff at the orphanage who made him chant psalms until he wept from exhaustion, until he learned to tuck his strangeness into his bones and lie.

Tom thinks of Dumbledore setting his wardrobe on fire, and the gutting second where he believed everything he had ever owned in the world was lost to flame.

He thinks of every time his difference was named disorder. Every time they told him the shape of him was wrong. Tom thinks of how hard he’s tried, once upon a time, to believe they were mistaken. 

He had never expected Harry to speak like them.

Tom’s heart rackets up his throat. When he swallows, it burns.

“Is that what this is, then? Penance for the terrible men you’ve lived your life for?”

Harry’s frown deepens. 

“Well, don’t flatter yourself.” Tom spits. “You’re not my conscience. You’re a coward. You think it’s brave, standing next to me — but you still can’t look me in the eye and say what you’re afraid to admit: that you think I’m already lost. That you don’t believe I’ll ever be more than just a monster.”

“Then stop proving me right!”

“I have proved nothing yet!” Tom snarls. “But I will. Do you hear me? I will.”

He summons it then; everything unspoken and seething, every wound disguised as pride, every hour spent biting back hunger in the dark. Dragging it up from the pit of him with a pain that tastes like blood.

“You think I’m some tragedy waiting to happen. Some shadow already cast. But you don’t know what it is to be me. You never have. And somehow I’m meant to bend to you? To your whims, to your morals, to whatever imagined future you carry in that head of yours where I’m small enough to be saved?”

His chest is heaving now. His hands are trembling. Words pour faster than thought. 

“I had plans,” Tom spits. “Before you. Before all of this. There was a time when I knew the world owed me nothing, and so I could take everything from it. I was going to be great. No– immortal. I would outlast rot. Outlive memory. I would outpace every fool who ever doubted me. I would become the sort of name history dares not speak, yet still cannot bury.”

He points a shaking finger at the horizon, like the universe itself might be listening.

“And then you came. With your puzzles and your pity and your maddening little smile. You derailed everything. I don’t think in straight lines anymore. I don’t sleep. I see your face every time I close my eyes. I think about death all the time now, and how it might come for you. And I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how to fight that, because you won’t tell me!”

His voice breaks, just briefly, on the next words.

“I don’t know how to want anything that can be taken from me.”

He draws a breath, shuddering.

“You made me small. And I hate you for it. You’ve turned me into someone afraid. Afraid of time. Of weakness. Of loving anything that breathes.”

His knees lock. 

“You want to know why I entertained Marlowe? Because he reminded me of who I am. Because he didn’t look at me like I needed saving. He didn’t flinch. He spoke to the part of me that doesn’t apologise for hunger too large to name. And you! You just stand there with your borrowed grief and your fragile sense of right and wrong, and expect me to be less than what I could be, all so you can… What, Harry? What!”

His scream rings through the dark.

“I was meant to be a god,” Tom finishes, eyes hot and wet with fury. “And now I can’t stop thinking about whether you’ll live long enough to see it.”

Harry does not speak. His mouth parts, then closes again, as though anything he might say would only make it worse. His expression shifts with sick recognition. The flush in his cheeks fades. His shoulders sink. 

And though he does not move toward Tom, everything in him leans that way — unthinking, aching, caught in the helpless instinct to reach for someone already pulling away.

“Well,” says a voice from the darkness. “isn’t this quaint.”

Both boys turn.

Emeric Marlowe emerges from the shadows beneath the eaves of a frost-covered yew, his hands folded casually behind his back. There’s a curious lilt to his tone, almost fond, as though he’s stumbled upon a long-lost memory, rather than two furious boys mid-implosion.

Harry stiffens at once. His hand twitches toward his wand. “You.”

Tom, still heaving from the heat of his own words, blinks as though waking from a dream. The anger lingers, but confusion slips in behind it. “Marlowe?” he says, uncertain, voice hoarse.

The laugh that follows bears no resemblance to the one he heard at the party. Tom watches it prologue to a truth far more sinister.

Marlow’s eyes crack, thin fractures blooming outward like stress lines in glass. From there, his skin begins to peel, rippling inward to make room for a canvas of paler flesh. Bone rearranges with a wet series of clicks, the lines of his jaw widening, shoulders drawing back into a stance no Ministry man would ever wear. 

The glamour unwinds in strands, like smoke sucked back into the mouth of a furnace, and what remains is no masquerade. His hair is suddenly longer, whiter, swept back from set brows. His eyes are pale, mismatched.

And Tom, frozen, feels the floor of his understanding buckle — because this man does not simply stand before them. He is presence made flesh. In that instant, he knows exactly who he is, and Tom wonders how he could have been so stupid. 

“Such fire between you two.” Grindelwald hums. “How fortunate you’ve bared your souls so fully. It would be a pity to die tonight with things left unsaid.”

Chapter Text

“Such fire between you two.” Grindelwald hums. “How fortunate you’ve bared your souls so fully. It would be a pity to die tonight with things left unsaid.”

Panic churns beneath Tom’s skin; a deep, incandescent throb that seizes his body before his mind can name it. His heart rate accelerates, muscles tightening. Clarity tries, futilely, to wade through the sluggish mire of his thoughts. Yet every strategy he comes up with presents itself a moment too late. They are cornered. Entirely isolated. And Tom is, unforgivably, unready.

How could he have been so blind?

“I am here for the boy,” Grindelwald continues, softly. “You, Mister Riddle, are collateral. A regrettable necessity. Such a mind… You might have helped me shape the world.” He sighs as though troubled by a great inconvenience. “It is almost a shame to extinguish it. But I am a man of results.”

The words gut Tom. His breath falters, nerve endings blazing in alarm. The distinction of what he is or is not collapses beneath a single, overriding certainty: Harry is in danger.

The world recalibrates to fit this truth, shrinking to the narrow span of earth between them and the man who would see it undone.

And Harry. Always, inevitably, Harry.

Tom can feel the crackle of adrenaline, can feel the pulse at his temples, a violent percussion that thickens thought. But the interior mechanisms that once obeyed him so precisely now scatter. He is too exposed. Uncentered. Off-tempo. His stomach lurches. He craves the release of action. He craves obliteration.

Harry moves first. Wand drawn, shoulders braced, as though war had carved him for this very purpose. He does not flinch. Tom does. Barely. He wants to reach for him, to drag Harry back into the safety under Tom’s skin, but that is not a helpful thought.

Grindelwald’s gaze shifts, disinterested now in Tom.

“A strange sigil, that mark you bear,” he says, eyes fixed to Harry’s neck. He begins to circle, slow as a closing clock. “Perhaps I ought to be flattered. But it is not one of mine.”

Harry does not speak. He looks unruled, elemental, some ancient force summoned into a body. Tom watches him with hunger, the aching wish to feel even half that steadiness in his own limbs.

“No. It is not so simple. There is magic on you. Old magic. The air stains around it.” Grindelwald pauses behind them. His voice arrives first — much closer than it was before — and then the sound of his footfall. Tom’s spine tightens, vertebrae locking into place. “You reek of death. And you are too young to deserve it.”

Harry’s grip shifts. He rolls his wand between his hands. It is clear he will not entertain this talk. It is clear he is priming himself for bloodshed. 

Grindelwald steps around again, leisurely, as if nothing in the world could rush him. “There are rules to these things, boy. Power has a shape. And you–” he draws a deep, hissing breath. “don’t fit.” 

Tom watches, immobilised. His thoughts race in vicious circles, spiralling through half-formed contingencies. He measures breath by breath, parses Grindelwald’s gait, notes the fractional tilts of his wrist. The arc of movement. The recalibrations of stance. A single flick and the fight will begin. He knows that. Tom can feel it humming in the air, the space between them straining.

And yet, his mind refuses to hold still, tearing through memories like pages; every spell he has ever learnt, every whisper of Grindelwald’s past, everything he’s ever read about survival, misdirection, control. 

Control. He must take control. Somehow.

“You see my confusion,” Grindelwald says, voice thinning to a blade. “The elder wand is mine. It was never lost. It serves me still.” He raises his hand slightly, enough for Tom to glimpse the ancient wood beneath his sleeve. “And yet there you stand, branded with what you cannot possess. A bearer of what is not yours.”

It feels like reading a book in a language Tom only half-knows, just well enough to understand when he is being excluded. The wand. The symbol on Harry’s neck. The accusation left unspoken. They all matter. 

And Harry, maddeningly, does not refute them. 

His silence says more than anything.

Tom does not know the answers to the questions Grindelwald has posed because Harry withheld it from him as well.

And now he wonders if knowing might have saved him.

If knowing might have altered the course that brought them here.

If knowing would change the side he chooses.

Then—

No.

He would still choose Harry. Always.

The tension breaks. Harry moves first.

“Expelliarmus!”

It cracks through the dark like bone splintering beneath the skin. Red-hot, exact, aimed at Grindelwald’s wand-hand. But the man has already shifted. A smooth pivot, almost lazy, and his wand scythes the air. The spell rebounds, flaring off a shimmering ward that wasn’t there a heartbeat before.

Tom reacts instantaneously. His spell is silently-uttered and sickly green, meant to rupture concentration. Grindelwald senses it, catching it mid-air with a counter-curse that twists the bolt into smoke. The man laughs, almost fondly.

“Charming,” he says, stepping back, like this is sport.

Harry does not indulge him. A volley of spells fires from his wand in rapid succession: a bludgeoning hex, a gout of flame, and then a flash of white that breaks against Grindelwald’s shield with a thunderclap. He moves like water, relentless and fluid, driven by adrenaline tempered into grace. He moves like he flies, never stilling; every dodge part of a new angle, every spell nested in another.

Tom, meanwhile, is already darting around the perimeter, observing Grindelwald’s reflexes, his blind spots, the fractional hitch in his shoulder when his defenses lift too quickly. His spells are fewer, but wicked: binding cords that sprout teeth, illusions that turn space into mirrors, a series of charm-constructs built gradually to deform rhythm.

Grindelwald snarls when a jagged, needle-thin curse from Tom worms its way through his defenses and scrapes his cheek. The blood is bright in the moonlight. A second later, he retaliates, fast. A blast of blue energy catches Tom in the ribs and sends him skidding backward, boots furrowing through frost. He gasps, stunned, then grits his teeth and rolls behind the trunk of a scorched pine before firing back.

“Keep moving!” Harry shouts at him, ducking under a hex that would’ve carved a trench through the ground if it landed. “Don’t give him time to think!”

Grindelwald is on them like stormfire. His spells are vast, sweeping, designed to orchestrate the entire battlefield. He is obviously more powerful, more experienced. A wall of black flame roars up from the earth, forcing the boys apart. Harry hurls an aguamenti that fails to dispel it, steam hissing up in thick curtains. Through the mist, Tom sees Grindelwald raise his wand—

“Protego Maxima!”

His shield blooms too thin. It holds a second, then bursts under the next impact. Tom is hurled backwards again, the air flayed from his lungs, his spine struck flat to the earth. A metallic taste floods his mouth. Dirt grinds between his teeth. He cannot see, vision flashing as his wand rolls from his fingers. Somewhere beyond the blur, Harry is screaming his name.

Then: a catch in Grindelwald’s motion. He stumbles, leg arrested mid-step. The snare Tom left seconds earlier — threaded inside a glint of snow — has sprung. His foot locks in place.

It is enough.

“Stupefy!” Harry yells, and this one hits. Grindelwald is thrown, violently, into the embankment by the lake, stone shearing beneath his body. He crumples, half-swallowed by the impact.

Tom is upright again. Staggering. Blood drying at the corner of his mouth, wand back in hand.

“Are you all right?” He pants.

Harry does not respond. His jaw is clenched. A line of blood trails down from his temple. His eyes are as green as they always are — possibly even greener, and under different circumstances, Tom would think about kissing them. 

But Grindelwald recovers too quickly. 

No, time to waste. They move again: Harry upfront; Tom circling like a predator. They are bloodied, outmatched, breathless — and yet, somehow, together, they hold.

A low and foreign-sounding curse, and the earth beneath them convulses. Roots split through the dirt, lashing for their legs like the hands of the buried. Harry severs them mid-flight, diffindo barely missing his own ankles. Tom counters the quake, catching the faultlines and twisting them back. It is strong enough only to delay collapse. The ground continues to shake.

Then, a sudden vacuum of force lifts Harry and slams him against a tree. His yell cracks Tom open like glass. He turns too late, just as a curse sears past his jaw, slicing it open.

He doesn’t feel the blood. Just the burning rage beneath it.

“Solid.” Harry coughs, dragging himself upright on shaking limbs, just as Tom begins to lose his mind. Blood mats his hair. One eye is nearly swollen shut. But he stands regardless, reckless, scorched at the edges, and raises his wand skyward with a trembling hand.

“Expecto Patronum!”

For a beat, nothing happens.

Then the light bursts.

A stag erupts from Harry’s wand in a torrent of blinding silver — tall as a man, antlers flared wide, galloping forward. Its hooves pound the frozen ground with no real sound, its body glowing so brightly it casts long, pale shadows through the smoke and black fire. Tom reels from the light, shielding his eyes, watching the thing charge past him like a summoned god.

Harry gives it a message. “Hogwarts grounds. Black Lake. Grindelwald. Now.”

The stag pauses, seeming to turn back toward Harry with a flick of its antlers. But then it bolts, across the lake, through the trees, racing like a shard of the moon itself.

The light lingers, impossibly bright against the dark.

Grindelwald, no longer amused, lifts his wand with a motion stripped of performance. The curse slices out fast. 

Tom knows it before the incantation is fully formed: lacero, to cleave muscle from bone. He pushes Harry sideways using depulso, but it clips Tom’s shoulder with a hiss like meat on coals. His momentum breaks. He skids to the side, clutching his arm, robes half-burned, the reek of scorched flesh curling into his throat. 

Pain presses up through his clavicle. He clenches his jaw. Does not scream.

Grindelwald is already closing the distance.

His spells have grown deranged, no preamble now. No rhetoric, no delight. Tom sees the lucid frenzy in his eyes. This is not a man playing his food anymore. Grindelwald is seeking to kill.

Fervens Incursio , to boil blood. Torquentem , to turn nerves inside out. 

Tom’s brain fires just as fast as he dodges. He knows these spells. He’s studied them, in the margins of the very book Avery got him for Christmas. They take great conviction to wield without backfiring. They take a wizard so assured of his victory that not a hint of hesitancy lives within him. These curses, dark curses, prey on uncertainty. 

Grindelwald has none.  

And that’s when he begins to plan.

Tom knows what it is like, to be compelled by the kind of confidence that blinds you. It’s what almost cost him Harry, time and time again. 

It is what will cost Grindelwald everything.

He staggers back under a crackling barrage, casting defensively, letting sweat streak through his dust-caked curls. Letting himself look afraid. Then, Tom whips his wand up with a silent incantation — just a non-effectual fizzer, but purple like the blood-boiling curse Grindelwald just used. In the distraction, he twists his wand down and hisses a charm under his breath. His robes stain with red ink, blooming like fresh blood.

The sound he makes when he hits the ground is real, though. Pained, as Tom hurls himself sideways and crashes hard, clutching his side with an arm gone rigid. His wand sinks into the snow. He groans, spits blood (ink) and with a violent lurch, stops moving completely. 

Grindelwald slows. 

Harry screams. 

(It is a sound Tom hopes to never hear again, after this.)

With a rapid lurch forward, Harry hurtles back into the fray, wand blazing with light. “Bombarda Maxima!” he bellows, and the ground erupts beneath Grindelwald’s feet, blasting rock and flame into the air. “Stupefy! Diffindo! Expulso!”

If he had been holding back at all before, he doesn’t anymore.

Harry fights with wounded fury; every spell, a bullet. Grindelwald blocks most of it, flicking away attacks like flies. He doesn’t even dodge. Yet still, undeterred, Harry advances closer, his eyes feral, his muscles straining. He looks beautiful. He looks devastated. Tears glint down his cheeks.

Tom lies still for a moment. The wind howls above them. His mind has finally gone calm. 

Grindelwald shifts his stance, just a little. It is with that same conviction. He is focused entirely on Harry. He thinks he has succeeded. He was too arrogant to check if Tom is actually dead. He leaves an opening, there—

Now.

Tom’s fingers tighten around his wand again, like a snake striking.

He rolls to his feet in a single motion (breath, beat, flick) and casts. Expelliarmus.

The spell is inelegant, stripped of flourish, but it strikes.

Grindelwald’s wand arcs from his grasp, a severed thing wheeling across the sky. Tom snatches it from the air. For an instant, the thrum of its allegiance echoes through his bones.

Grindelwald turns. His expression has not yet caught up to his miscalculation — the disbelief still embryonic — when Harry, eyes alight with a borrowed ruthlessness, slams him with a spell Tom does not know. 

“Sectumsempra!”

Grindelwald’s chest cleaves open, a yawning gash from which blood wells thick and dark, darker than it ought to be, summoned from a wound only dark magic can inflict.

He falters. And then, with terrifying lucidity, he assesses the field.

“No more,” Grindelwald growls, then lunges.

His arm clamps tight around Harry’s neck. He moves fast, impossibly fast, dragging him backward. Shadows curl at their feet. He cannot disapparate from Hogwarts ground, and yet the air pulses with the sour tang of bypassed wards. He must have figured out a way around them.

Tom is too far. He knows it instantly, as one knows a dream’s logic: if he moves to intercept, he will arrive after the moment has closed and splinch. If he waits, he forfeits it all. Harry thrashes within the vise of Grindelwald’s grip, too close to try anything dangerous, though his boy has not given up yet — legs kicking, teeth sunk into the meat of his captor’s arm, using every last weapon available to him, running on the blind machinery of survival.

And Tom–

Tom recalls, in that horrible, terrifying moment, a few of the last unguarded words he spoke to him.

You made me small, and I hate you for it.

This cannot be the end.

He raises his wand without aim, without plan, and calls out the first word that rises. Flipendo.

It hits.

It hits them both.

Both Grindelwald and Harry’s bodies lift from the earth, a tangle of limbs wrenched skyward, flung in a violent parabola across the clearing and straight onto the lake.

And then, silence.

Followed by the shriek of ice cracking.

And, at last: the lake opens its black throat and swallows them whole.

Tom does not know what precisely surges through him. Something basal. Something irrevocable. Perhaps it is stupidity. Perhaps love. Perhaps both, compressed into the same ruined breath.

He dives in after them.

The surface of the Black Lake breaks open with a soundless shatter, digesting him with a single, glacial gulp. The cold is so sudden and brutal it knocks the breath from his lungs, sharp as razor blades in his throat. He descends in paralysis, nerves blaring, spine bristling with agony. For a suspended instant, Tom is nothing but pain.

He makes his best attempt to open his eyes.

There is no light. No up or down — only the body of his own breath bubbling behind him like threads from a severed web. The water is ink. His heartbeat tolls in his ears like a submerged bell. Still, he dives, limbs shearing the dark, jaw clenched to the hinge, so tight his teeth might shatter, the taste of blood and bile seeping underneath his tongue. It feels like falling into a grave. 

He kicks hard, forcing himself further, his eyes scanning madly for movement, colour, anything.

He is reminded of the dream — of Harry, drowning beneath some unknowable surface. Panic grips him so suddenly that his chest spasms, aching to inhale. He forgot to cast the bubble-head charm. Or perhaps he did, and it popped with the impact. He cannot recall. His wand is missing. Grindelwalds’ too. Tom does not remember where he threw them, because he threw them. Because he did not wear the holster tonight. The holster Harry gave him for Christmas, too bulky beneath the cut of his dress robes.

The thought twists inside of him. Viciously. Cruelly. 

Then, a flicker.

There, suspended in the murk, a pale form adrift in the water, just out of reach. And beside it, clinging: a second shadow.

Tom’s stomach turns to stone.

He kicks harder. Then harder still, until the burn in his thighs sharpens into agony. His clothes are sodden weights. His arms drag like anchors. The cold is a parasite, chewing up his body from the inside out, but he keeps going. Deeper. Closer.

Shapes begin to emerge from the gloom, smeared and formless. Then, suddenly, detail. A white hand. A slack jaw. And wrapped around Harry like moss on a tombstone, Grindelwald — dead-eyed, face distorted by the water. 

Tom’s fingers close around his collar, fingers raw with cold and desperation, and he wrenches, tears, claws, but the corpse clings with the mindless patience of the long dead, unwilling to let go. 

Harry is limp, too. His head has tipped back, locks of hair drifting like weeds in the water. His mouth hangs open. The sight guts Tom. For a moment he forgets how to move.

Then, he digs one arm under Harry’s and kicks upward, but the drag is too much for him to fight alone. The weight pulls them both down. He thrashes harder, blindly, furiously kicking at Grindelwald, whose fingers have locked into Harry’s robes, unmoving. 

Tom screams, gurgling underwater — the sound a useless, internal rupture, vibrating his skull — and twists with such violence that fabric splits and one cold hand is left adrift, still clutching a shred of wool from Harry’s robes.

He drives his heel into Grindelwald’s face. Bone gives with a sickening shift.

The kick jolts them free.

Tom kicks again, and the lake begins to lose its hold. He feels his ascent as pressure and pain. A savage hope tears in his chest. He cannot focus on that, now. His vision is narrowing with every second, spotting dark. He’s losing oxygen.

One final lurch.

When Tom breaks the surface, gasping and blind, brine stinging his eyes, he has no sense of how he did it. Only that Harry is still in his arms, and the cold has not yet stolen everything.

The sky above seems oppressive, the stars so distant. Tom drags Harry across the shore’s frozen edge. The wind cuts at him like a knife, but he can hardly feel it. Harry’s weight rolls limp in his arms. He turns him over, hands fumbling against the sodden fabric of his old robes, then colder skin. He slaps Harry’s cheek once, twice. He presses shaking fingers to the side of his neck, just below the jaw. 

There. Barely. Harry’s pulse stutters under the skin. A rhythm stammering toward extinction.

“No,” Tom whispers, voice cracking. “No. No, no—”

They need help. The castle is too far. Tom cannot carry Harry across the grounds in this state. Dumbledore may not have even received Harry’s patronus yet — and if he is not here within seconds, he will be too late. They need someone closer. More reliable. 

Madam Belby.

Tom scrambles for his wand, half-buried in the snow. He grips it with a numbed hand, fingers trembling violently.

“Expecto Patronum.”

The spell fails. 

He tries again. Louder. Twirling his wrist like Harry taught him.

“Expecto—!”

Tom’s voice breaks. Magic snarls inside him but refuses to shape. His wand quivers in his hand. Heatless, useless. He cannot conjure joy. His mind cannot summon anything but the image before him — Harry’s lips darkening, his body slack, his skin leeched of colour. 

Tom grits his teeth, forcing himself to try again. Still nothing.

He drops his arm. His hands find Harry’s chest instead. He casts a water-drawing spell. There is a crack of suction, then choking — Harry coughs up lakewater and a mouthful of blood-tinged bile. It slips down his chin, pools dark in the snow. His chest moves more freely, but still shallow. Strained. Not enough.

A wounded noise rips free from Tom’s throat. He does not notice the tears until the wind brushes them. They run without permission, hot against the rawness of his face, and he resents them immediately for how useless they are. What good is grief if it cannot resurrect? 

He wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand.

Tom needs to think.

But thought has become an unwieldy thing. Panic churns beneath the surface of his reason, threatening to rupture it entirely. There must be a way, he figures . A way of communicating, unbound by physical distance, immune to the restraints of time. 

And then, rising through the fog with a lucidity so immutable, it feels as though he’s been possessed, Tom remembers the dark mark he impressed into Avery’s arm.

Experimental. They had never tested its utility. They had spoken of it only in abstraction. Tom cannot even recall the magic necessary to reach through the bond. He does not know if it would work. He does not know if Avery will answer.

(Ridiculous, a voice intrudes in his mind, one which doesn’t sound entirely his own. If anyone will answer, it would be him).

Right now, it is the only option he has.

Tom closes his eyes. Reaches inward. Feels for the thread he laid months ago, buried deep between them, burrowed beneath Avery’s skin. He finds it, like the pipes through which the basilisk used to hunt, connecting them through space, and pours everything into it. Grief, dread, the wild pulse of his will refusing to surrender. Tom strikes the connection like flint, sending fire down its length. He howls. He calls for Avery’s name. Avery’s given name.

Let it burn. Let it reach. Let him come.

Please.

The last of his strength fractures and dissolves beneath him. Tom collapses into the snow’s brittle clutch, the world folding in around a narrowing pinhole of focus. His fingers cling to Harry’s as he folds himself protectively over his torso, ear pressed to the hollow of Harry’s chest, listening for a heartbeat to tether him to purpose.

One beat. Another.

Then–

It stops.

The cadence severs.

Tom’s consciousness fractures along that silent fault line, shattering into the void as the stark, terrible truth etches itself deep into the marrow of his last awareness:

Harry is dead.  

And the unyielding blame is solely Tom’s own.

The first time Tom sees death, it is through a window.

A cluster of kittens, small enough to fit into his toddler hands, huddle in the lee of the orphanage wall. It is winter too, harsh enough to whiten breath and crack skin. Mrs. Cole tells the children to leave them be. 

"They’re riddled with something," she says, as if that ends the matter.

Tom watches them shrink, one by one. They don't thrash or bleed or call out. They simply stop. A blank stillness that swallows the soft things they once were. 

For weeks afterward, he dreams of their tiny paws curled against brick and the way the frost made their fur shimmer.

When scarlet fever passes through the orphanage, death becomes sudden. The children who danced with laughter at breakfast lie cold by dinner, carried out wrapped in shrouds that sag where their bodies can no longer resist. 

Tom does not understand why the doctors cannot fix them. They speak of contagion, of damage too swift to stop. But what confounds him is the way it ends so simply. There is no transition. One day a child breathes. The next, they are gone. There is no trace of what they once felt, no imprint of their thoughts, no whisper of where they have gone. It seems deeply wrong to Tom, and no one will explain why it cannot be undone.

He scraps up the courage to ask. Mrs. Cole tells him, “That’s just how it is.”

He never asks again.

At twelve, his boggart assumes the form of his own lifeless body.

It lies in the center of the Defence classroom, pallid and slack-jawed, eyes glassy and unseeing, pupils rolled to the back of its head. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t move, either. Professor Merrythought has to dispel it for him.

Afterward, he tells no one what he saw. He cannot explain what it felt like, to look down and see himself emptied out, his hands already beginning to grey. He is not afraid of the corpse itself. He is afraid of the possibility. Until then, Tom has never thought of himself as a thing that could end.

When war comes to Britain, the boys at the orphanage talk of medals and glory. That is, until they turn old enough to actually fight,  then they cannot control their sobs, clinging like little children to Mrs. Cole’s skirts during the nights before they are set to leave. 

Tom learns the sound of sirens. Learns the names of neighbours he will never see again. The summer skies above Muggle London fill with smoke, the streets with broken glass. One night, a blast wakes him from sleep, and when he steps outside to evacuate to the underground, he finds that the building opposite has vanished. In its place, fire and stone and nothing.

He understands, suddenly, how easily the world might go on without him. How indifferent time is to potential. People rush to save themselves all around him. Nobody slows to see the woman trapped under rubble, her hand slowly falling limp to gravity.

He could die here, he thinks, before he has left even a scratch on the surface of the world.

He does not mean to kill Myrtle.

The basilisk does not obey him with the precision he expects. Her death is messy, and the aftermath is worse. An unspooling of panic that claws its way through Hogwarts’ halls. Whispers that grow teeth. The threat of the castle closing, of being sent back to a city that smells of war. No one will look him in the eye. Tom has power, but it has misfired. Left his control. Made him vulnerable. 

Death, born of his hand, should have affirmed him as its arbiter. Yet Tom feels no triumph. Only a churning in his gut that will not settle. 

Myrtle is gone, and she will never know how close her death came to unmaking him.

At sixteen, he splits his soul.

The ritual leaves him sick, but the magic is volatile, impatient, and so Tom is forced to bury the thing he has torn from himself into the nearest object — the diary he’d made his calculations in. 

That night, in the bowels of the Chamber, he waits for the recoil, the inevitable unmaking. But the backlash never comes.

He wakes the next morning, sore, still half-blind with nausea, but stable . There is a space in him that was not there before. Painful. And comforting, in its own way. Between him and the void stands a fragile sentinel, a peace where death’s presence once loomed.

He thinks it will be forever. No longer can it touch him.

But when Tom is eighteen, Harry Evans dies quiet in the snow, and none of it matters.

He lies somewhere not entirely in his body.

The space around him is soft, too soft, like the dormitory beds if the stuffing burst and you sank right through. Snow or mattress or void. Whatever lies beneath him cradles his bodiless body close. He cannot feel his limbs. They are somewhere else, maybe still in the lake.

There is a writhing inside him like a bug. It flutters and degrades in his chest. It feels like slow rotting. As if grief were not sudden at all, but patient, waiting for him for years.

He dreams of dead cats. A girl with blank eyes in a bathroom. Bombs. He dreams of himself. A boy pressed into glass, staring down at his own corpse.

He dreams of Harry, too: of his slumped mass as he was dragged from the lake. Tom dreams of how his love’s lips turned blue, and how the body he once knew hardened into a shell of itself. He cannot stop feeling the shape of him, then; how water filled every fold of his clothes, how his head lolled when it should have lifted.

And he remembers — helplessly, painfully — how different it had once been. How they used to lie side by side in the dark, breath shared between them like a secret. He remembers the press of Harry’s chest against his back, or his own nose tucked into the slot beneath Harry’s jaw. The warmth of his skin. The scent of pine. 

Tom cannot force the world to answer him. 

He does not know yet — or, rather, he has not let himself know — if Harry is truly gone. Tom curls closer to the moment he remembers right before passing out, hoping that revisiting his memories will change it. Praying, irrationally, that if he details the scene hard enough, if he dreams vividly enough, the outcome will bend.

But no miracle comes to his call. He has always been undeserving of them.

And he is alone again, floating in the hollow chamber of his head.

Tom is so very tired.

The ceiling warps into focus. 

First: a great pale canvas veined with streaks of light. 

Tom blinks once. Then again. The world filters back to him in degrees — pressure behind the eyes, a dull taste at the back of the throat, the cloying scent of antiseptic herbs soaked too long in the sun.

Slowly, he shifts. Every one of his limbs feels fractionally removed. The sheets are fresh and heavy, tucked too tightly at the corners, pinning him to the bed. Through the high windows, the morning gilds everything in weary gold.

His nightstand is a shrine: cards bearing well-wishes, parcels in colourful wrappings, confections already melting with the indoor heat. A charmed bouquet emits a sullen, mechanical hum. The air is thick with lavender and chocolate and too many varieties of ink.

Five boys gather around his bed. They are dressed too well for comfort. Avery is seated closest, his chair turned at an angle that suggests long occupancy. His outerwear lays crumpled in his lap, and his collar sits askew. He watches Tom with caution.

Malfoy, standing to the right, grooms his hair as he administers some drawled retelling. He glances over, startled, as he sees Tom stir. 

Black is perched like a crow on the windowsill, polishing his wand against his cuff. 

And Nott and Lestrange flank the foot of the bed, sitting closer together than they have ever dared to before, whispering.

They all fall silent.

Avery leans forward. “You’re awake.”

Tom swallows. His throat stings. He says nothing.

“You nearly froze over,” Malfoy offers unhelpfully, as if Tom does not know. “Took three professors and Ogg to pull you off the grounds. You wouldn’t let go of him.”

The words drift across Tom’s mind. He frowns at the sensation of time slanting. He recalls the lake, yes. The hypothermia. The struggle. But everything after fractures into image: a blur of snow, shouts, someone’s voice too far to reach.

“Harry–” His voice cracks. He closes his eyes.

Avery shifts. “He’s alright.”

And then they resume speaking, all of them, relieved now that the worst appears past. Someone makes a joke about the hospital food. Someone else laughs. They begin to recount the story of his rescue for him, like priests reciting liturgy over a not-quite-resurrected saint.

Tom lies very still, surrounded by the din of voices. He does not quite trust the hopeful dawn awakening within him. Avery said: he’s alright. That Harry is alive, but Tom had witnessed him die. He heard his heart stop. He felt his breath fail. 

It feels impossible. It feels like a gift he is undeserving of. 

Abruptly, he sits up. The motion sends a violent torrent of blood to his brain. The world blanches to white, noise collapsing inward. A single sharp breath drags through his teeth. His body protests in full — limbs stiff, lungs aching, muscles stiffened into knots — but Tom does not relent. He throws the blanket off with a graceless shove and pivots, planting his feet on the floor. The room warps. He endures it. His gaze sweeps the ward.

There is a bed in the very far corner, its curtains drawn.

Tom discovers that he quite detests the air of mystery this affords, like he is being presented with a trick. He imagines drawing them back to find Harry decomposed, already feasted on by maggots.

His hands flex instinctively. Anxiously.

Avery starts to rise, murmuring a protest or word of caution. It doesn’t matter. Tom ignores it. He presses up against the mattress to steady himself and rises to stand, swaying for half a second before his balance catches. 

The others watch, suddenly silent again. 

“Tom.” An old voice croaks.

Dumbledore.  

Dumbledore is here, always with that uncanny ability of arriving unannounced, precisely where he is never wanted. If Tom had any energy left for rage, he might have used it now, let it bloom wild and punishing, just to see the man flinch.

Around him, the others still. An expectancy settles. Dumbledore does not need to speak. Whatever look he passes to the room is enough.

Black is the first to move, clearing his throat as he hops off towards the exit. Malfoy follows, brushing invisible dust from his lapel. One by one, the rest take their cue. Their departure goes by so smoothly, it seems almost rehearsed. Shoes strike flagstone in retreat. Muted farewells — rest well, we’ll be back soon, glad you’re up — fail to land.

Avery is the last to turn. He moves more slowly, perhaps expecting some final word of instruction, perhaps simply uncertain. 

Tom catches him by the sleeve. His grip is weaker than he would like, but the gesture is firm enough to halt him.

He ought to wait (until Dumbledore is gone, until his voice has returned in full) but there is a sentiment swelling like a lump in his throat, demanding release. 

“You saved us.” Tom says.

The admission feels foreign on his tongue. He must scrape it out, and even then, it lands with more force than he intended. He wonders if there will ever be a day where he can be genuine and not have it sound miserly.

Avery frowns. 

“Of course, Tom,” he says simply. “You are my friend.”

Friend.

Tom has heard it used a thousand times by others. Thrown about in corridors, scrawled in notes passed between desks, lifted in laughter — but rarely ever directed at him. Rarely meant.

He realises, then, that he has always known Avery to be his friend. Long before Harry arrived. Perhaps longer than he has ever admitted. But until this moment, Tom had not felt the force of it resonate with him. He has not heard the truth spoken aloud, nor registered its refusal to demand anything in return.

“Thank you, Alwin.” Tom says. 

Alwin Avery nods, once, and reaches to brush a thumb across the bruises lining Tom’s knuckles, like he is marking the place where pain has settled and healing might begin.

“I’ll come again soon,” he promises.

And then he, too, is gone. The door sighs closed behind him.

Tom does not move.

One hand still grips the bed frame, the uprightness itself requiring the full expenditure of his will. With Alwin gone, his gaze does not stray from the curtain-caged bed at the corner of the room.

“I should like to see him,” Tom says. 

“In due course,” answers Dumbledore, maddeningly gentle. “He’s resting. And so should you be.”

Tom turns partway, enough to show the shape of his refusal, though he does not speak it. His posture remains rigid, strung tight with a grief too sharp for expression, a dread still unspent, and a fury that cannot yet resolve into anything usable. 

Across from him, Dumbledore regards him with patience. Tom feels diminished beneath it. He is uncertain again, and it unsettles him for all it resembles that first conversation at Wools, when he had learned what he was but not how to be it. When he had spoken too boldly, revealed too much, and saw the hatred crystallising behind Dumbledore’s polite smile.

Tom is older now, cleverer. But the feeling is the same.

A beat passes.

“Sit, Tom.”

He does not obey. He does not want to. Yet the room has begun to sway, like a boat caught in the backwash of a great big tidal wave, and eventually, Tom lowers himself to the edge of the bed, though still refusing to meet the man’s eyes. 

Dumbledore conjures a plush armchair from nowhere. His hands fold loosely in his lap. 

"What you have been through was dreadful," he says quietly.

Tom says nothing. 

“I arrived too late,” Dumbledore continues. “When you both needed me, I was not there. That failure is mine, no one else’s.”

“It is.” Tom says, flatly.

A twitch passes across Dumbledore’s face, vanishing almost as soon as it appears.

“You went in after him, though you were already injured. I believe that matters more than you permit yourself to imagine.”

But the platitude falls short. Tom receives it in silence. Applause is the last thing he wants, especially from Dumbledore. Tom did not save Harry. The truth, unwelcome as it is, remains immutable. It was his spell that sent him flying into the lake. If Harry had died beneath the ice, it would have been Tom’s doing.

Across from him, Dumbledore waits, composed as always, though his gaze softens once the silence makes clear how displeased Tom is with the topic.

“How are you feeling?” Dumbledore asks, instead.

“Fine.”

This is not the truth. His skin still sweats cold, the bandages around his shoulder pull when he draws a breath too deep, and behind his eyes, a pounding heat keeps time with his heartbeat. His magic is sluggish. His limbs feel like lead.

Dumbledore does not press.

“You know.” Tom says, suddenly, too sharply. “About him. About what he is.”

Dumbledore’s blue eyes twinkle. 

“I know many things,” he says. 

“And you mean to keep them from me.”

“Some truths are best heard from the mouth that lived them.”

Tom scoffs. It galls him: to be bedridden, half-spent, and still required to ask, to plead inference from a man who has never once offered him the courtesy. And here Dumbledore sits, calmly seeking after his health, as though the war between them has folded neatly into peace.

“You hated me,” Tom says, choosing another sore spot to prod once he doesn’t get his way. His sanity is quickly wearing thin, and Tom decides to forgo the sly politicking he might have once used to instead fling accusations until they land. “From the beginning.”

“I feared you,” Dumbledore corrects, softly. “You bore a wound I did not know how to tend, and you were always bound to be loved. That frightened me more than hatred ever could. I see now the damage my silence did. And I am sorry, Tom. I have failed you in ways I am only beginning to understand.”

Tom blinks. If he was looking for a fight, this is a disappointment. He does not know what to do with an apology he never asked for.

“And what has changed,” he sneers, voice flat, “to make you so suddenly contrite?”

“You.” Dumbledore admits. “And if that change frightens you, it is nothing shameful.”

“Don’t presume to know what frightens me.”

Dumbledore bows his head. “Then allow me only to say: you have not been alone in this, though it must feel that way. Harry brought something into your life that altered it for the better. That is what people do, when they matter.”

Unwilling to let the name soften him, unwilling to betray the hollow pit still yawning open in his heart, Tom’s tenses, shoulders setting in on themselves.

In the meantime, Dumbledore idles briefly, rummaging through his robes. From one pocket he produces a small, crinkling bag: translucent plastic, striped yellow and green. He shakes it once, rattling the contents within.

“Lemon drop?” He offers.

Wanting nothing more than to spite him, affecting a scowl too ugly to be truly adult, Tom snatches the entire bag from Dumbledore’s hand, nary a thank you. It is the first time in years that he has allowed himself to be overtly rude, and the petulance distends within him, small and shameful and strangely satisfying. 

But he cannot let it get to his head. There are other things he needs answered, now.

“I heard him die.” Tom says, inelegantly, his grip tightening around the bag of candy against his stomach.

Dumbledore doesn’t respond at once. He watches Tom in that maddening way of his, as though silence might draw the truth out more cleanly. But Tom has nothing else to offer. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. He fails to understand what exactly happened after he lost consciousness, for all his Knights attempted to detail it to him. Their knowledge has always been imprecise, and no one could answer the one question that kept him pacing the halls of his mind.

“Or did his heart just stop?” Tom tries again. “Did you start it, once you came?”

“I wasn’t present when either of you were recovered,” Dumbledore explains. “By the time I reached the castle, you were both being transported to the infirmary. As I understand it, Madam Belby was the first qualified help on scene, but by then, Harry was alive.”

This does not answer anything. Then again, he shouldn’t have expected it to. 

Could it have been his imagination? Born of exhaustion, his own fraying nerves?

Dumbledore resumes. “It might interest you to know, however, that this is not the first time Harry has been through such a dramatic ordeal. You remember the condition he was in, when he first arrived here.” 

Tom looks away. He has no energy to try and make sense of such a cryptic inclusion. He decides doesn’t want to think about death anymore at all, actually — not Harry’s, not his own. He wants to see him, to hear him breathe. To count the pulse beneath his skin and assure himself there’s still life to return to.

He says none of this, staying still in his seat.

Dumbledore rises then, adjusting his gaudy pink and green robes.

“I suspect he will want to speak with you soon,” he says. “And when he does, I implore you to listen.” 

Tom cannot promise anything.

“Start with those gifts while you wait. I would not overlook The Tales of Beedle the Bard. For a children’s book, it is quite… riveting.” Dumbledore winks.

And when the door shuts behind him, Tom exhales, eyes refixing on the curtains concealing the one person in this school he cannot stop thinking about.

Alwin and Dumbledore did not lie. Harry is, indeed, alive. 

Yet every time Tom looks at him, some splintered instinct tells him it cannot be so; that there is a fault in the world that has yet to be corrected. 

His boy lies very still. Too still. Breathing, yes — Tom watches the rise of his chest obsessively — but breath alone feels like a cruel trick of the light. His eyelids flutter sometimes. Once, he mumbled in his sleep and turned his head. But these are minor signs, insufficient proofs.

Tom stays in the chair beside him. He eats only when pressed. He sleeps in snatches. He does not leave the hospital wing, though Madam Belby tries, thrice, to force him once he has recovered. The last time she threatens to call Dumbledore. Tom does not stir. She does not follow through.

The world outside the bed has dulled. The only thing with any colour is Harry, and even then, it seems borrowed, almost mythic. His skin has regained its warmth, but Tom checks his pulse regardless, at intervals so frequent he loses track of them. His hand against Harry’s wrist, against the side of his neck, always braced for the absence. Expecting it.

Harry had gone into the lake with Grindelwald’s arms around him. The image will not leave Tom. It presses in behind his eyes and plays on repeat. Harry sinking. Hair drifting. The awful beauty of it. The cold when he pulled him free. How long he went without breathing. The moment his heart fell quiet.

Tom cannot forget it. Sometimes, after hours of staring, his eyes will play tricks on him, and he watches Harry’s prone form drain of colour, green and gold and black melting like wax to dye the starchy sheets covering him. He watches his flesh decompose, and his fingers turn black, and sometimes, right on the edge of sleep, Tom sees the bright glowing ball of Harry’s soul erupt from his chest to float upwards. 

It never fails to jolt him straight out of his exhaustion.

And when his thoughts settle, if only briefly, Tom begins to invent explanations.

Perhaps it had been the weight of his head, resting against Harry’s chest, that had kept his soul tethered. Suspended between planes, confused by the body’s death yet unable to depart. Tom imagines it circling, confused, caught in some liminal stutter and unable to move on. Because Tom had refused to let him go. Because he had clung to his boy, bodily, in those final moments.

It is nonsense. The stuff of children's books. Magic that smells of warm milk and cookies. Just the thing Dumbledore would believe in.

Perhaps Tom has been reading too much Beedle the Bard.

And he is on his third reading of the Tale of the Three Brothers when Harry’s eyes snap open. 

The book slips from Tom’s fingers, thudding to the floor. Harry’s chest rises and falls in ragged, uneven breaths. His eyes flick around wildly.

“Tom?” Harry’s voice snags.

Tom swallows hard, heart pounding so loudly it drowns out everything else. “Harry.” The relief escapes before he can stop it. “You’re– lay down.”

Harry’s brow furrows, confusion darkening his features, but he does not listen to Tom as he sits up against the headboard. 

“You’re alright?” He asks instead. His hand, trembling, reaches out. Tom’s breath catches as he takes the fragile fingers into his own.

“Of course I am, you fool.” Tom’s whispers urgently, like saying it louder might shatter the fragile thread of life holding Harry to this world.

Harry’s lips part: “I thought… I thought you were gone.”

“I thought you were gone.”

For a long moment, Harry just stares, blinking through the fog of disorientation. Then, as if gathering the remnants of his strength, he smiles.

“No. M’alright.” He laughs weakly, then echoes words he must have spoken at some point for how familiar they sound. “I know what I mean to you. It would be cruel to deprive you of it.”

Tom leans closer. He cannot laugh with this truth burdening him, and so he says, with searing honesty: “You scared me.” 

Harry’s throat works. His eyes flutter apologetically, though he doesn’t apologise. “We’re even, then.”

“Not in the slightest, actually.” Tom huffs. “You–”

“Yeah,” Harry interrupts. “I know. I owe you an explanation. Somewhere more… private, though. And maybe when I don’t feel like my head’s about to explode.”

In the week it takes Harry to be discharged, the hospital wing becomes their newest claimed territory within the castle. The beds, the medicinal cabinets, even the taste of the dreadful mulberry cordial Madam Belby keeps stored in her office all take on the texture of belonging. 

Or perhaps it is simply that they make it so. 

From the moment Harry wakes, he and Tom share a bed — a development Madam Belby protests most uproariously. But she must see the way Tom’s fingers clench tightly around Harry’s sleeve, and how Harry curls naturally into Tom’s side, because soon, her objections falter. She lets it go, no doubt deciding that the arrangement is not worth the war it would take to undo.

They spend their time whispering, always close, the curtains drawn around them for half of their days and most of their nights. When the ward is quiet, they return to that place they carved out long before Grindelwald ever crossed into Britain, hands pawing clumsily over scratchy hospital gowns. Their voices hover above pillows and stretch lazily into the afternoon. Sometimes they speak of the duel, the lake, of the taste of blood and the feel of water in their lungs. Other times they speak of nothing at all.

Between them pass piles of fruit and chocolates and trinkets, a mountain of owled gifts that grows each morning. Students who never looked twice at either of them now send letters laced with smarm. Harry laughs every time he opens one. When Tom laughs, the sound is small and shaped only for Harry.

They don’t talk about the argument. Not directly. But a softness has taken root in place of it, an understanding that has no name. Tom watches Harry with a new attentiveness. And Harry’s hand finds Tom’s arm more often now; in passing, in pause, as though to anchor them both. Whatever apology might have been owed has already passed between them in the return to closeness. They’ve forgiven each other, though neither of them has taken back what was said. 

Those truths still stand, only stripped of their anger. Tom still looks to the future and sees uncertainty. Harry still fears where that road might lead them both.

It is not until they leave the hospital wing does he finally explain why.

The Room of Requirement greets them like it always does. 

Harry pulls Tom to the single armchair by the hearth, even though there’s enough room for two on the divan across. They squeeze in close to each other. Somehow, despite all odds, it is comfortable; but only after Harry draws his legs up to his chest and sits half across Tom’s lap. Tom lets his fingers trail stars onto his kneecaps.

“You have to just… hear me out on this, okay?” Harry starts. His arms are folded in on himself. There’s tension in the way he grips his elbows. If he is afraid, Tom cannot understand why. Harry could speak any sentence in the world and it would be okay, so long as he’s still here to say it.

“Okay.” Tom murmurs.

“My name is Harry Potter. I was born on July thirty-first, 1981.”

And somehow, somehow, this is the least strange thing Tom will hear all day.

“It was uncanny. Misty, though that mist was a tangible thing. It formed my surroundings. The floor, the walls. And it looked like Kings Cross, but white and endless, and sort of waiting? Dumbledore was there, or a version of him, at least. He said it was real in the way dreams are real. That I was dead, but not finished. 

“And there was something else in that place too. On the floor. It was small, curled in on itself. Like a child, but not. Its skin was raw and it whimpered ceaselessly. It couldn’t lift its head on its own. I asked what it was, even though I already knew, really. It was what was left of Voldemort. The part of his soul that had lived inside of me. 

“And… I don’t know. I couldn’t just leave it. It was suffering. Dying, or trying to. And no one would be able to help it. Except Dumbledore told me that I could take it with me, that it was my choice, but if I did, I wouldn’t come back the same way I came. That it would lead me somewhere else. The forest and the war and my Hogwarts would all be lost if I were to make a choice like that. 

“But when I asked what would happen if I left it, Dumbledore said that it would stay in that place forever, alone. 

“At that point, it didn’t really feel like a choice. I didn’t think about it. I picked it up. It felt… wrong in my arms. Fragile. 

“And then I woke up. Here. Or, in the Forbidden Forest, 1944. Ogg found me. They said I was half-dead because I was half-dead. I had just come back.”

It is too mad to be true.

Even as Harry finishes, Tom is certain that no sane person could believe this. 

And yet— 

Tom begins, against all his better judgment, to do just that.

Because it fits. The shape of it is too perfect, like a key turning cleanly in a lock.

The pieces begin arranging themselves before he has even asked them to.

The handler assigned to Harry from the Department of Mysteries, he thinks. Where else would a time traveller be handled?

Then, the friends — those names said with affection that sounded too lived-in for grief. Hermione, Ron. They are not lost to Harry because they could still be real. 

And Harry’s talk of stolen objects. They were Tom’s horcruxes; the things he had not yet made but had already been destroyed. 

Harry’s instant recognition of his diary as dark had not been guesswork, either. He knew, because he’d dealt with it before.

It also explains Dumbledore. That peculiar intimacy between them. Tom had always found it repellent, that connection, not least because he had never been granted it himself. But if Dumbledore had understood exactly what Harry was from the start, then it follows naturally: he had not only trusted Harry, he depended on him.

“How much does Dumbledore know?” Tom asks, first, because it is the most prudent thing to do.

“Now?” Harry exhales, sounding — for all the world — a little relieved. “That I’m from the future. That there was a war I played a part in. Most details I could reveal without saying too much. Most of the time we spent talking was about what I could or could not stand to change, actually.” 

“Does he–”

“He doesn’t know that you’re the same Dark Lord who cursed me, no. Though you can’t blame him if he figures it out.” Harry laughs a little. “An anagram isn’t the most clever trick.”

Tom huffs, despite himself. 

In his head, though everything else has begun to click into place, he fails to reconcile the information that a version of him terrorised Harry for years.

Not because it contradicts his capacity for cruelty, but because Harry, folded into himself, sitting across Tom’s lap with all the trust in the world… Harry does not fit the shape of a victim. That is what unsettles Tom. That this boy — who walked through war; who died and returned; who refused to leave a fraction of Tom’s very soul in a purgatorial-like state to cradle it into the past, away from everything he has ever loved and known — had been hurt by a man who could not see beyond his own shadow. That this man was what Tom became. That it was what he had made of all his brilliance.

A terrible ache coils around his heart. Tom wants to say: I would not have done that to you, but the words catch behind the knowledge that he could have. That he did. That somewhere, in the fold between one life and another, he already has.

And still, Harry came.

It is the clearest act of mercy Tom has ever known.

“How can you even stand to look at me?” He whispers.

Tom cannot fathom how one person can carry so much forgiveness without collapsing under the weight of it. He wonders where Harry stores it — what part of him is vast enough to hold so much good. All Tom knows is this: if it were him, sent backwards through time to stand before a seventeen-year-old Grindelwald, he would not have hesitated. He would have wrapped his hands around the fucker’s throat and made certain the future never came.

“I couldn’t at first.” Harry says, evenly. “For weeks, I felt as though I was trapped in some fever dream. Everything you did felt… wrong. Uncanny. Watching you brush your teeth in the morning, watching you study, at ease, I– I didn’t know what to do with myself. Especially with how easily everyone adored you. How they took everything at face value, when all I could see was performance.”

Tom says nothing. His hands have curled into rigid fists in his lap. He feels the bloom of pain in his palm and knows he’s drawn blood. For all the wondering he’d done — about what Harry thought, in those early days — he suddenly wishes he’d left it alone.

“But then you surprised me,” Harry goes on, gentler now. “When I refused to pledge myself to your cause, you looked… devastated. Like it hadn’t even occurred to you I’d say no. And then, in the library, you asked me to join your side in ruling the world, in the most vulnerable way I’d seen of anyone. You asked me like you didn’t know how not to — like you couldn’t imagine facing the world alone.”

Harry reaches up, brushing Tom’s curls from his brow. “And it occurred to me: where I was expecting Voldemort, I was getting Tom. And you, Tom… you feel everything, don’t you? You feel so much you don’t know what to do with it. And it is that not knowing—”

Tom turns his face away, heat prickling at his neck. He remembers that speech, how grand he’d tried to be. How small it feels now, reflected in Harry’s eyes.

“I’ve always thought about why Voldemort turned out the way he did. Whether it was a product of his birth, or the ways in which the world failed him. But the world failed me, too, and so I thought: yes, he’s rotten because he does not know how to be otherwise.

“Now, I know how wrong I was. I had friends. I had professors who helped me. I had a world that knew my name. You’ve had no one. No one to support you through all those big things you feel, to tell you what they mean or how to cope with them. I think that was the moment that I started seeing you differently. I suddenly knew that I was sent back in time to be the person you needed. 

“Because, yes. You are proud. And brilliant. And terrifying, when you want to be. You have every tool you’d need to become Voldemort. But–” Harry tilts his head. “Do you want to be?”

Tom considers the future he’s heard about.

Seven horcruxes and nothing to show for it, his soul split to ribbons so thin he could no longer feel their loss. An army of frightened men and broken ones, clinging to ideology like it might absolve them of their true cowardice. Power wielded gracelessly. A creature of fear rather than reverence. No legacy, only terror. No followers, only slaves. And death, so much death, for what? A reign of shadows that lasted no longer than eleven years?

The thought turns his stomach.

Was that truly the summit of his potential? That grotesque parody, that half-mad tyrant who could not even die properly? To spend lifetimes outrunning the grave, and end up hunched and unloved, shrieking across a Britain at a boy who did not fear him?

Tom feels it then — the horror of waste. That he could pour every atom of his genius into himself and find only ruin waiting.

But then he imagines what it would be like to succeed.

Not the crude legacy of Voldemort, but a truer vision. A world reordered to his will. No more grovelling Ministry men or dim-witted professors simpering for power they barely understand. Whole institutions bent to his shape out of pure recognition. He does not have to rule in shadow, he can define the light. His name, Tom, spoken in awe — in that same way Harry says it when he is giggling into his neck, delighted. 

He could be that, now that he knows what to avoid. He could make it true.

And yet… What then?

He follows the image forward, past the applause, past the consolidation, into the hollow corridors of the empire he has built. 

There, Tom finds himself alone. 

It startles him, that end. He had always imagined triumph would taste sweeter. Solitude has never been an issue before. But the truth settles over him like dusk. 

Tom does not want a kingdom of mirrors.

And in that moment, he understands.

“No.” Tom answers, and it is so deceptively light to profess that he is shocked by the heavy weight it lifts off his chest. 

Harry’s expression melts. He kisses him.

Tom, now void of prospects and ambition and the sweeping visions he made for himself, finally finds room to imagine a different future.

He imagines Harry kissing him like this, every day. Plainly, like an instinct. A habit they’d built together, over the fullest lifetime they could. 

He imagines mornings where sunlight spills on messy sheets, and Harry is already leaning in, half-asleep, to press his mouth against the corner of his. He imagines the gentle tug of fingers at his collar as Tom is fretting over books. He imagines the comfort of being wanted by one person, in a way he’d never been.

And in this nescient, vulnerable future, Tom is not burdened by the circumstances he was born into. With his intellect, he is not a prodigy or a project. With his spite, he is not a name the world must tremble for.

He is simply his own. A boy in love, as foolish and brilliant and devastating as that might be. 

It terrifies him, the sheer audacity of it. 

But oh, how it calls to him, too. 

Peace, it turns out, is a most seductive promise after having lived a life so devoid of it. 

“It still doesn’t make sense why Grindelwald was after you.” Tom asks, later.

Harry blinks dumbly, as if he'd almost forgotten that happened. 

“Oh. Right. Erm– the Hallows. You know the Tale of the Three Brothers?”

Tom nods slowly, eyes narrowing.

“Well… it’s real.” Harry says, rubbing the side of his face. “And I accidentally ended up with all three of death’s prizes. The cloak was passed down through my family for generations. The stone was given to me by Dumbledore in his will. And the wand… it was mine after I disarmed Malfoy at the Manor. It changed allegiance to him in sixth year, you see, and then to me.”

He pauses, eyes flicking to Tom, gauging his reaction, before continuing.

“I don’t even know when the mark showed up. Presumably when I died and came back. That’s when it must have… branded me. Officially, I suppose. As the master of death.”

Tom goes still.

“The master of death,” he echoes, voice sharp with disbelief. His heart is hammering. He tries to mask it with a sneer. It doesn’t work.

Harry shrugs awkwardly. “Er– yeah.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I dunno. Dumbledore and I had our theories, but it’s… vague. Symbolic, maybe. Grindelwald must’ve caught wind of someone in Hogwarts bearing the mark and figured it out. Maybe he thought I was a threat. Or maybe he just wanted the Hallows he thought I had.”

Tom barely hears him. His mind is stuck on a single point.

“You did die,” he says, and the words sound strange to his own ears. He’s spent so long convincing himself otherwise that it feels unnatural to backtrack.

Harry’s expression softens. “I did. Out by the lake. You didn’t imagine it, Tom.”

Tom flinches, just slightly. His stomach twists.

He wants to say it’s impossible. That Harry shouldn’t be so calm admitting it. That this — this whole damn thing — is horrific.

The protest sticks in his throat.

“As the master of death, I was given the choice,” Harry goes on. “One moment I was drowning, the next, I found myself at King’s Cross again. There were two trains this time, one back, one to the After. I could’ve gone on any one of them. But I asked for the one that would lead me back to you.”

Tom sways, ever so slightly, like the seat beneath him is trying to throw him off.

Immortal, his mind supplies, frantic and unhelpful.

But Harry’s eyes are already on him. 

“Not quite immortal,” he says softly, as if he’s read Tom’s thoughts. “Just… autonomous.”

Autonomous, Tom’s mind echoes, still frantic and unhelpful. Not eternal, but unruled. Unclaimed by death. Free to go. Free to remain. Free to decide.

He stares at Harry, really stares, and a cold smoke curdles in his chest. Because Harry had died, and he’d done so within reach. And he might have left if he wanted to. Might have vanished from Tom’s world forever.

It hadn’t been up to Tom, in the end.

He clenches his fists to keep them from shaking.

“You chose to come back,” he says, low, like a litany, trying to get Harry to say it again. 

Harry does not flinch. “Yes.”

Tom hears it. Believes it. And still, a deeper fear settles. Because now he understands: Harry might not die in the usual way, but if he ever leaves, it will be by will. 

And that is so much worse.

Tom has no interest in hearing another word. He reaches for Harry, hand closing around the back of his head, fingers threading through the wild thatch of curls. He draws their foreheads together. The scar where his other self cursed Harry seems to pulse against him. 

Tom wonders if it hurts him, being this close. The way it used to, when Harry stood in Voldemort’s presence. He wonders if he’s been hurting Harry all this time. 

These fears will not go away — not for a long while yet. 

“You will never choose otherwise.” Tom whispers. It is not a question.

Harry smiles. “No. I don’t think I will.” 

Tom has decided, after several increasingly painful attempts at extracting coherent answers, that the absolute worst person to have fallen backwards through time is Harry Potter.

His boy is an abysmal explainer. Woeful, really. A man with the weight of an entire war behind him, reduced to shrugging at all the feats he pulled off. 

“But why did the curse rebound?” Tom asks, for the fourth time in as many minutes. “When Voldemort targeted you as a baby. What precise mechanism interfered?”

Harry, lying sideways across the bed with an arm thrown over his eyes, yawns in his usual, unreformed manner. 

“Dumbledore said it was the power of my mother’s sacrifice.”

“That’s unacceptably vague,” Tom snaps. He sits up, sheets twisting around his legs. “Several mothers have sacrificed themselves for their children. None have produced a living horcrux.”

“Love magic,” Harry says, voice muffled by his own bicep. “Or something.”

Tom stares at him.

Harry yawns again, louder this time. “It’s bedtime. No more trauma trivia.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“Why not?” Harry lifts his head, squinting at him. “You believe in all sorts of stupid things—”

Tom glares.

“—but a mother loving her child is what breaks your suspension of disbelief?”

“It’s not the principle,” Tom mutters. “It’s the lack of rigour.”

Harry sits up, propped on one elbow, and pokes him sharply in the ribs. “You know,” he says, mock-thoughtful, “you’re kind of adorable when you’re upset. Maybe I should dodge your questions more often.”

“I am not.” Tom pounces, straddling his hips and pinning Harry’s arms to the pillows. “And if you dare, I’ll tie you up and force veritaserum down your throat.”

“Adorable.” Harry grins. “Sorry, but I can’t take you seriously while you’re wearing my Quidditch jersey and arguing with me about the metaphysics of love.”

Tom considers incinerating the jersey on principle, but decides it would concede the point.

“You’re insufferable,” he says instead.

Harry shrugs, eyes already closing again. “Mm. Must be the love magic.”

On another day: 

“No, I will not get over the fact that you broke into Gringotts.”

Harry groans.

They’re sitting in the library this time. Or, rather, Tom is sitting. Harry is slouched halfway down his chair, feet kicked up onto the opposite one, expression already sliding into the kind of weary defeat to occur after the thirteenth consecutive question of the day. They are meant to be studying.

They are not studying.

“Well, I did.” he mutters.

Tom snaps the book in front of him. “Go back.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Too bad. Start from the beginning. How did you manage it?”

“Polyjuice.”

“That’s idiotic,” Tom snaps. “They ward against it.”

“Yes, well. I know that now.”

There is a pause.

Tom narrows his eyes. “Then how—”

“We had a dragon.”

Tom stares. “...What.”

“A dragon, Tom.” A glimmer of pride colours Harry’s voice now. “Blind. Chained up in the vaults. Poor thing. We set it loose.”

“You’re telling me,” Tom repeats, very slowly, “that you escaped from Gringotts, after breaking in on sheer dumb luck, with a dragon.”

“Yes.”

Tom pinches the bridge of his nose.

Harry stretches, unapologetically casual. “We rode it.”

“I am trying,” Tom says, visibly pained, “to find meaning in any of the choices you made.”

“I also broke into the Ministry using polyjuice potion and ‘sheer dumb luck’, if you recall.” Harry offers, clearly unhelpful on purpose now. 

“Oh, yes. How could I forget?” Tom drawls.

“It was a very long year,” Harry says solemnly.

“What happened to the basilisk?” Tom asks.

They’re neck-deep in the balcony pool conjured by the Room of Requirement. It is warm, lit by a sky stuck between dusk and starlight — a palette of violet smudged with gold, like a ceiling fresco halfway painted and then abandoned. 

Harry floats near the edge, peeling an orange with his wand. Tom has taken the shallower side, wet hair curling at his ears. He has waited days to ask, having heard about the diary and the chamber in Harry’s second year but nothing about what happened after.

Harry takes his time chewing. “It’s dead.”

“I assumed,” Tom mutters. “I meant how. You were twelve.”

“I had a sword.”

Tom scoffs. “You don’t just have swords.”

“I did. It was Godric Gryffindor’s.”

Tom sinks lower into the water, checking again that his feet still touch the bottom. So far, he has been unable to shake the wariness of depths that the Black Lake instilled in him.

“And where exactly were you keeping that?”

Harry grins. “It showed up in the Sorting Hat.”

There’s a long pause.

“The hat gave you a sword.”

“Yeah.”

Silence again.

Then Tom exhales slowly, like he’s been deeply insulted. 

“Magic,” he says flatly, “is wasted on you.”

Harry kicks at his ankle. “Didn’t feel wasted when I drove it through the thing’s mouth.”

“You drove it through– I can’t believe you stabbed my basilisk in the face!”

“Well, it was trying to kill me. So.”

Tom hisses an obscenity beneath his breath, letting it go quiet again, before asking, more softly this time, “How did you even get in?”

Harry drops a peel over the edge of the tub, where it vanishes before hitting the floor. “Parseltongue, y’know.”

Water slides from Tom’s shoulders as he bolts upright. 

“You can speak Parseltongue?”

Harry frowns. “Oh. Did I not mention?”

“No.”

“Huh.” He thinks. “Yeah. The horcrux passed the ability onto me, apparently.”

Tom’s mouth parts, heat catching in his groin. The thought scalds him like Fiendfyre: Harry, possessed with the voice of his ancestors. Harry, speaking to Tom in that shared, secret tongue, A shiver rolls down his spine. 

Amidst the desire, his mind flickers briefly to a comment Marlowe ( Grindelwald, he reminds himself) had made:

Spectral transferences impress their shape on the vessels they inhabit. Like a metaphysical echo. It’s why you can understand anything you watch through a pensieve, even if it was lived in another language.

He shakes it off.

“Speak it,” Tom demands.

Harry looks confused. “I can’t just do it on command.”

In a bout of impatience, Tom conjures parchment and a quill out of the air, sketches a long, curving snake, and floats it toward Harry’s face. The ink gleams wetly.

“There. Go.”

Harry adjusts his glasses. “That’s quite good, actually.”

“Speak,” Tom says again, more urgently this time.

Harry hesitates. Then: “Hsss. Hiss– hhsssh– okay, wait—”

He tries again. His tongue trips around the sounds. It is clumsy, wrong in his mouth.

“You can’t do it anymore,” Tom whispers.

A sharp twist pricks his chest. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. It was not even a hope he knew to have, just ten minutes ago.  

Harry stops. Blinks. Looks at him.

“I suppose not.”

It haunts him.

It haunts Tom in a manner completely unlike his common torments do. This insinuates itself into the interstices of reason, like the question has always lived in him, dormant and waiting, but has finally decided to breed answers of which vie to make sense.

Parseltongue.

Tom lies on his back, the heel of one hand pillowing his skull, the other resting across his ribs. The canopy above him remains inert, shadows crawling across it in their hourly pilgrimage. The room is silent, but his mind proceeds with its usual lack of mercy. He sees again the glint of water against stone, the scent of citrus, the peculiar sheen of moonlight across wet skin. And then, Harry’s face: furrowed, confused, when the language failed to come to him.

He had not been lying. And it makes sense to Tom why he should be able to speak it. 

What does not make sense is why he cannot, now.

Tom no longer permits himself to take his dreamless sleep. 

In its absence, he dreams dreams that are not his. 

He sees Harry as he must have been: laughing between a girl with hair like fluffy straw and a boy with cheeks as red as his head, in a Common Room laden with gold and velvet. He sees a vast creature, a hippogriff, and Harry astride its back, grinning behind a man who might have been conjured from the bones of Orion Black. He sees a maze: hedgerows looming, a sphinx, the applause of unseen multitudes swelling just beyond the leaves.

When Tom wakes, his mind returns to that violent beckoning he’d felt in his gut the very first time he locked eyes with Harry.

He tries to recall the precise phrasing Marl– Grindelwald used. Sympathetic bias. The predisposition of a dislodged spectral fragment to gravitate toward a vessel it remembers best. An echo seeking its source, carrying with it all the memories it has touched, the preferences it has grown with, the instincts it once reacted to…

Tom swallows.

If Harry can no longer speak Parseltongue, then it stands to reason that the soul-fragment that once permitted it no longer resides within him. Harry is no longer a horcrux. That part, at least, is clear. The fragment was forcibly cast out when he died his first death, in that strange between-place he spoke of.

But Harry had said he carried it. Had borne it in his arms, back into the past.

So then — where had it gone?

A shiver passes through him.

It went looking for a vessel it already knew. It went home.

His blood feels watery as it torrents through his veins. Grindelwald said it himself: no essence is neutral once it has been touched, even if it returns to its place of origin.

And Tom– Tom is the origin. He is the mould in which that fragment was first cast. Fifty-four years it had been housed by Voldemort’s body before it was transferred onto baby Harry. It would know him better than it would the seventeen year old boy. It would prefer Tom, naturally, for all that it had grown to prefer Harry, too.

And there is a reason he sees through Harry’s memories when he sleeps. A reason Tom can trace the rhythm of Harry’s gait from across a corridor, without once having checked to confirm it is him. A reason he can feel Harry in every room they occupied together, even when he used to try to will the awareness away.

Tom closes his eyes. Perhaps he is imagining it, but he thinks he might feel that extra fullness sitting within himself — the sense of not quite him, not quite other. A warmth warmer than the rest of him. A second thrum he cannot quite place as separate from his own.

He lays a hand flat against his sternum, half-expecting to find a foreign body pressing outwards. There is nothing there. 

He is, in every outward sense, unchanged.

(Or nearly so.)

Harry does not take the information well. 

He stills when Tom tells him, in that unnerving way he sometimes does — so wholly withdrawn that Tom, seated scarcely a handspan away, feels as though the breadth of a continent has opened between them. 

He has felt this before: the prelude to a profound shift, the moment in which Harry’s silence ceases to be silence at all, and becomes a verdict.

“Are you certain?” Harry asks. His voice warbles. 

Tom inclines his head. He has seldom been more certain of anything.

There is a sound from Harry, a breath meant to be a laugh that fails midway. “Excellent,” he says, with a flat humour. “Excellent. So it’s in you now.”

“It is.”

“Of course it is,” Harry murmurs, too quickly. “Right. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Tom’s brow furrows. “What precisely do you mean by that?”

Harry does not answer. His eyes have dropped to the floor between them. He speaks without lifting them, but his shoulders rise like he’s trying to crawl above a torment he can’t put down.

“I lived with it for years,” he says, finally. “It woke with me, slept with me, got sick when I did. It has grown used to me, maybe even fond of me. And knowing that it’s back with you—” He swallows. “You say it’s a big part of the reason why you were so affected by my presence at first.”

He stops, jaw tightening. When his gaze lifts, his green eyes are clouded by grief.

“Maybe you were never supposed to care about me.” He draws a deep breath to unburden the admission from his chest before continuing. “Maybe the transference has taken that choice away from you. You think you want me, but you wouldn’t without all that… residue. Those parts of you remembering how it felt to be in me.”

Tom exhales, slowly. He hopes gentleness might be caught in its currents and transmitted across the narrow space between them. It is Harry, now, who is trembling with the seizure of that spirit who attends shame. A collapse inward, painful and self-punishing, visible only in the way his mouth works soundlessly, biting hard into the bloody flesh of his lips. 

He aches with a blow that no one could have anticipated.

(But Tom had. Tom experienced the moment of impact months before the strike had even been named. He had known it, intimately, from the very moment Harry had entered his life. In all the fruitless pursuits that followed, Tom contended with the gnawing suspicion that his own mind was not wholly his to command. 

And that is why he can say that it had not resembled at all the stillness he found when he first laid his hands upon Harry — when Tom reached, and Harry, miracle of miracles, did not flinch. That peace bore none of the signs of compulsion. It did not grind against the grain of Tom’s will, nor arrive with the strain of capitulation. 

It demanded nothing of him, and so he chose it.) 

Tom does not reach for him now. That would be a mistake. Harry would vanish like mist drawn back from the sun, and he would be left with only the outline of his warmth on his hands.

So, he speaks instead.

“The diary did not care for you, at first,” Tom says.

Harry sniffs, puzzled. “What?”

“I talked to it about you. Often. I gave it everything — your manner of speech, your grimaces, the restless way you wiggle in place when you have been idle for too long. I gave it your contradictions, and your laughter, and the way you look at people when you think they are not watching.” He smiles involuntarily, hand coming to cradle Harry’s bony wrist. “And for weeks it resisted. It refused to entertain the idea. It found you… irritating. Sanctimonious. It abhorred what you represented. And more than that, it abhorred what I had become through knowing you.”

Harry’s eyes shimmer.

“But then, slowly, and with a great deal of resistance: it changed. It listened. And once it did, it began to understand what I had not yet been able to articulate. It saw the depth of the mark you had left on me, and, in some secret place, it began to want you as well.”

Tom’s voice has lowered now, though sounds no less certain.

“When it came around to you, it did so with trouble. It did not arrive mildly. It fell, entirely. There was no longer a distinction between my longing and its own. We were aligned.”

He releases his wrist and lets his palm hover over Harry’s cheek — barely touching. The ends of his jet-black curls skim Tom’s fingertips.

“And if the fragment within me urged me towards you,” he says, “then it has merely returned me to the truth I would already come to know. It has quickened the steps, but the destination was always the same.”

Tom brushes the backs of his knuckles along Harry’s cheekbone, reverent.

“You were never a forced fondness for my soul. It did not liken itself to you because it had to, being housed in your body.” he says. “It simply bent to you over time because it could not help itself. As I could not. As the diary could not.”

Harry’s lashes flutter, dark and thick around gem-bright green. His eyes shut close. Tom leans forward to press a feather-light kiss atop each one. The skin there is thin and warm. Tom can feel the movement of his pupils ticking just underneath, and he cannot imagine a reality where his world does not orbit around this boy. 

You have some nerve coming back. Spare me the platitudes. I will not entertain them. I will never do a thing for you again. 

Tom stands behind Harry, arms caged tight across his chest. The chamber thrums with its familiar, low-bellied echo. He does not care for this, but Harry had insisted on retrieving the thing Tom condemned at his behest.

Now, he crouches before a stone desk, wandlight flickering, and sets the nib of a conjured quill to the page. 

Hello, Tom, Harry writes, in a hand too ghastly to be mistaken for anyone else's.

Harry. 

The name blooms all too quickly upon the parchment, followed by a pause. For several heartbeats, the ink holds itself taut on the page. Tom can tell that it is weighing the risk of what might follow. It knows nothing of what has passed after its exile. It does not know the mountains Tom has climbed with Harry since.

Perhaps it is scared, then, that it is being retrieved only to be destroyed.

It would be wrong.

Then:

Hello. I’m glad it’s you.

The words are painfully neat, written in a script Tom cannot manage unless he tries really hard. They tilt toward them slightly on the page, as if leaning into the light. 

As if yearning to be read.

It is the seventeenth of January.

Ninety days have passed since Harry stepped into the year 1944. Ninety days, too, from the date he would have turned eighteen — had he not died on the second of May, 1998.

Technically, today is his birthday.

Tom has ensured he was adored accordingly, his body loved with that brand of brutal tenderness that cleanly erases doubt. There are marks of it now, printed in wine-dark trails down the skin of his chest, teeth-shadowed blooms high on his thighs. Testaments of possession. Of return.

Harry sleeps.

He is sprawled without shame across the bed they call theirs, limbs open, cock soft, heavy with the dissolution of pleasure. His skin glows, still flushed with the vestiges of exertion, his hair tangled in the sweat-damp upon his temple. He is all peace and ruin, the gentle wreckage of someone held too long under and only just allowed to breathe again.

Tom watches.

He watches as the rise and fall of Harry’s chest confirms what he has already begun to internalise: that this is real. That this moment, somehow, has not unmade itself. He leans in. His palm glides down the long line of Harry’s spine. Tom has been granted permission to continue, even after Harry surrendered to his exhaustion. And so he does.

Beneath his ribs, there is a fullness.

He can name it, now. That fugitive thread of his own soul — once entombed in another — pulsing quietly within him.

It makes itself known only in moments like this. In the hush. In the dim. When the world has finally gone quiet and there is no one left but them. It is then that Tom feels it most: this echo of himself nurtured by Harry’s body. Shaped by him. Tempered by grief, and gentled by mercy.

Dislodged from its place as time twisted upon itself. Denied a body, it did what all things belonging to Tom must eventually do:

It found its way back.

soulstice /ˈsəʊlstɪs/ · noun

a profound moment of inner turning; the point at which the soul reaches its furthest limit and begins to rebound; the apex of spiritual darkness or light, after which the self begins to shift.

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