Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

mudlark • /ˈmʌdlɑːk/ • noun

a person who scavenges in river mud for objects of value.

When Tom is small and the orphanage’s meagre library has exhausted all its curiosities, he takes to walking the river.

The Thames is never beautiful. Its waters shift between pewter and tar, a skin of oil spills gathering the sun in fractured panes. The air is damp with the sourness of wet rope and horse piss sluicing from mews, and on windless days, the stench of the tanneries collects beneath the bridge, heavy enough to taste.

But it is changeable. For his purposes, this is enough. 

Where others recoil from the rank wound it carves through the city, he prowls its banks. In time, he learns its tempers: the eddies that wash the bargemen’s spit, the tides that peel back each dawn to bare the foreshore. 

Beneath the sucking mud, the river stores its hoard—centuries of discards half-swallowed and preserved. A brooch chipped to the enamel, a dog’s rotted femur, the rogue shoestrings off a pair of boots. Sometimes it coughs up farthings enough to tally a pound, though so scabbed with rust they are worth less than the powder it would take to clean them.

The dysfunctional things Tom keeps in a box beneath his bed, hidden from the greedy paws of children. He does not count himself among them, naturally. The orphans’ know only to bleat like creatures too weak to master themselves, of which he is far above. And the schoolboys who descend upon the Thames in summer—decked in clean clothes and secure in their parents’ affection—show no greater refinement. Tom sees it plainly when they tire of chasing the coins tossed by indulgent passers-by, turning instead to the buried prizes he considers his by right of labour. Scuffles on the mudflat are not uncommon. 

He judges them all alike, the orphans and the schoolboys both. London breeds its children in soot no matter their standing, and all their gracelessness is only the echo of its own. 

Smoke stacks choke the sky, mingling with petrol fumes as motorcars jostle along the streets. Rain pools in gutters choked with newspaper and vegetable peelings, passing boots sending the filth leaping up the legs of his too-short trousers. Shop windows buzz dimly under electric bulbs, fogged from the heat of bodies pressed close, while hawkers call and trams clang and a factory whistle skates the hours. Even the light, when it manages to break through the clouds, is a sullen grey that flattens buildings, compressing everything onto itself.

It is different for him. While the city grinds everyone to mediocrity, he alone remains clever, enterprising, shining, brilliant. London must see this—as ancient and stubborn as it is, it simply cannot ignore his worth, because instead of dragging him down to its poverty, it rises to meet Tom. The Thames carries its secret heart to his hands, like an artery of treasures that he alone is judged worthy to handle. 

This is no small achievement, he knows. He makes sure each discovery has its own place in his box. But even those he parts with are special to him, serving as proof that he can bend the world’s small fortunes to his will. He sells what he can, and with the proceeds, Tom plays-pretends at an allowance granted by his austere but indulgent father, who has sent him to spend it as he pleases.

Adults, petty and bitter as ever, resent his genius. Though he imagines he could purchase the world with a handful of copper coins, they rarely trade for more than a stale loaf. Tom contents himself with this injustice by eating it in the streets, letting the crumbs fall where starving babies grope for scraps, delighting in the small, unspoken proof that he has made more of himself than they ever will. 

He supposes he cannot be too upset at anyone for their cheapness. The scarcity whets his skill, magnifying the triumph when he uncovers something rare. Like on one temperate March afternoon, when—after hours of digging with half-numb fingers—Tom comes upon two thimbles and an intact serger needle. He knows their worth and plans carefully how to press it to extract more than usual. All it takes is the right sort of fool. 

So he goes from door to door until, at length, he finds a harried mother, with whom he exchanges the lot for a single torn page from The Little Engine That Could.

That very evening, the younger boys’ dormitory dimmed to a soft shadow, Tom lies on his narrow cot and smooths the page against his knee. The paper is tender at the edges, worn thin by the hands that held it before his own. Yet the colours blaze against the uniform grey of his pyjamas—pink and blue and orange, all sorts of hues that do not exist in the real world.

His soot-stained nails trace the faces of the characters, the painted eyes that do not blink nor shy away. He mouths the words beneath them again and again, lingering on the margin where the story runs out, imagining what might come before and after. When Mrs. Cole calls for lights out, he tucks the page into the lining of his pillowcase, feeling that it is too precious for the box.

In truth, it is a foolish thing to value. But in the orphanage, where so little can ever belong to anyone, Tom resolves to claim whatever he can, entirely.

1948

The taxonomy of Borgin & Burkes’ clientele has not varied in the three years since Tom first started as an employee. 

He might even be called an expert in their habits—if one were to recognise expertise in a profession whose most exacting art is the ability to say, Quite rare, yes, with convincing enough passion. This, he has perfected—not from any spirit of generosity, but for the pleasure of knowing he can be useful in ways others cannot. It affirms what has always been true: that his competence is singular, his judgement unchallenged, and that even in obscurity, he is the axis around which lesser minds turn.

The morning trade belongs, invariably, to widows. They come convinced they are doing the shop a kindness by sharing the detritus of their long-dead husbands. Tom knows exactly how to receive them: a tilt of the head, a boyish smile, a moment’s indulgence of their nostalgia. They sigh, remark upon his cheekbones—like a Greek statue, dear!—and in the end surrender their children’s inheritance for whatever sum happens to lie conveniently in the till.

By afternoon, the Ministry men creep in, brief and absurdly discreet, as though anyone cared what they were doing. Tom knows no one in the Department for Magical Transportation would blink at the pawning of an illegal portkey—most have done the same themselves—but he does not mention it. They never take well to references of their crime. Instead, he listens gravely, points out the neat anonymity of his ledger, and savours how readily they rely on his silence.

And then there are the purebloods, untroubled by any surplus of shame, who come unabashed in the night, when Knockturn is at its busiest. Former classmates, prematurely careworn, greet him as though nothing of consequence has transpired since school. They comment on the dimness of the shop, or on the difficulties of procuring a house-elf unafraid of disciplining the children. Concerning the artefacts (of which they seek only to buy, never to sell), they speak with the same misplaced confidence they have always brought to conversations on Dark Magic: earnestly, and with very little comprehension.

In their way, they are admirably consistent, for their treatment of him has never once wavered. Not even after the revelation of his lineage, and so certainly not now. It is clear they believe his present circumstances represent some sad inevitability. That they are standing on the customer’s side of the counter, while he is behind it, seems to them rather conclusive.

He lets them prattle. Their ignorance is his opportunity.

“You really do look rather ill, Tom,” Alphard observes for what must be the fourth time. His idea, perhaps, of recompense for having dragged Tom through three unendurable hours in pursuit of a wedding gift for his sister.

Having just graduated Hogwarts, Orion Black is to be married without delay—a match arranged by their parents before either could learn to shit on their own, and celebrated by all as a most felicitous union, despite the very evident dislike in which each holds the other.

Tom might almost approve of the affair—there being a certain public benefit in Walburga’s permanent withdrawal from society—were it not for the task of procuring her gift. He neither knows nor cares what pleases women, so the business of discovering it proves tedious in the extreme. By the close of the third hour, illness seems the more desirable option.

“I’ll be sure to catch up on my supplements,” he assures, falling flat. Tom does not possess said supplements, nor the faintest notion where to even begin, there being far too much wrong with him for such an undertaking. Before Alphard can blunder further, he steers the conversation away. “In the meantime, I trust Walburga will be delighted with her hand mirror.”

The hand mirror in question is cursed to exaggerate every flaw subtly enough to pass for honest reflection. Tom rather hopes the horrid cunt will one day catch sight of a wrinkle not previously there, and find herself so undone by it that she kills herself. At least that would justify the day’s exertion.

Alphard, naturally, had seen nothing amiss when he peered into it, fool that he is. After all, only a fool would go trawling for a wedding gift in a shop that exists solely to ruin people.

“I doubt it,” he exhales through his nose, glancing at his wristwatch. Tom follows the gleam of pure silver, greedy as a magpie, catching on the ticking craftsmanship beneath its glass. The numbers are set in fine sapphire, the metal charmed to warm against the wrist when an appointment draws near. He has held it before. Just once, when the desire overcame him: Alphard sprawled insensible in his own sick from too much Ogden’s, the watch—his seventeenth birthday gift—abandoned on his nightstand. In Tom’s hands, grasping the most expensive thing he’d ever touched, it had seemed to glow. 

Even now, it glows at him, taunting, and the want takes him with almost physical force. A low, whining heat that bloats in his gut and climbs, cramping and wet, to the back of his throat.

“I imagine there’s nothing more she would love now than to see Orion’s head on a pike.”

“How romantic,” Tom forces himself to look away, returning to his task of fastening a neat ribbon bow around the box. “Do pass along my warmest wishes.”

“Of course. And you—ah, you will take care of yourself, will you not?”

How ridiculous, Tom thinks. He has always taken care of himself. Indeed, it may be the only meaningful thing he has ever done.

“Good day, Mr. Black,” he replies with an inclination of the head, resting upon Alphard through lowered lashes, up until the door jingles closed.

Tom leaves the shop a quarter past ten, the floors swept and the anti-burglary wards resealed, as per routine. 

His lodgings reside above a contraband potions shop; a cramped, squalid room with a single window facing a fouled alley. The air there is saturated with aconite and the syrupy sweetness of crushed belladonna—odours that once struck him in their illicitness, now clinging to the plaster with a cloying permanence. The stale perfume of a life that has failed to quicken, as integral a part of his existence as his magic. He wonders if he smells like it, too.

The flat itself offers little comfort. Tom’s nightly regimen reflects as much. Supper is a miserly portion of boiled tripe, seasoned with the last of the herbs he once stole. It tastes foul, but the gaminess forces him to chew longer, a silly trick against the hollowness of his stomach.

For company, he eats with the long shadows smeared onto the walls by candlelight. It is difficult not to think of Hogwarts then; to the heavy tables sagging under roasts and puddings, the goblets refilled without his asking. He swallows the terrible longing those memories wrench from him, reminding himself of the ceaseless din, the laughing children, the petty jostling of a world he had already outgrown, just to settle. 

(Still, the hunger lingers, greater than any food could soothe.)

After, he scrubs himself quickly in the bath, ignoring how the water clouds into grey the longer he sits. 

Some nights he will reach for a book from the stack beside his bed, but even reading betrays him now. The dim light burns his eyes; the more he reads, the more his head aches, until he drops it aside altogether, retreating instead into an airless sleep, heavier than he has ever known, lying face down into his pillow, naked beneath threadbare sheets. 

Tonight, he does not bother at all. The pleasure has worn thin, and besides, he has been saving a different diversion. 

For weeks, there has been a rat scurrying in his walls. Tom has allowed it to live unmolested so far, letting it homemake and feed, fattening on his scraps. Patience makes the eventual harvest sweeter. He imagines it much like the farmers who spare their beasts from fear, knowing terror will sour the meat.

Now, at last, the time feels ripe.

He lies perfectly still until the wily creature mistakes him for asleep, venturing through the loose floorboard in search of food. Then—

“Ha!” Tom springs, seizing it bare-handed. The rat convulses in his grip. He tightens to feel the rapid thrum of its heart flutter against his palm. It excites him terribly. Blood rushes hotly to his cock. 

Summoning bonds to fasten it to the floor, he jabs his wand to its belly.

“Filthy little thing,” he hisses. “Crucio.”

The curse spills sluggishly, dredged up from disuse, tearing loose some vital fibre with every second it burns. His vision prickles at the edges; Morfin’s ring glints in the red light (for he still thinks of it as his uncle’s, despite the fragment of himself embedded within). Even so, he shivers with the righteous knowledge that cruelty still answers to him, however dearly it also makes him pay.

Under the curse, the rat contorts, spine snapping backwards. It turns upon itself, gnawing at its own tail in a gross mimicry of the ouroboros. Tom watches, sweating, a thin smile tugging at his mouth. How fitting, he thinks, that even the emblem of endless renewal should be so thoroughly corrupted in a place like this. 

He goes to sleep feeling better about himself. 

“Tom! Is that you?” Burke’s voice carries from the back when the bell above the door gives its joyless ring.

Tom does not answer. He steps past the counter, which has somehow managed to collect dust in the scant hours since he last cleaned it, and halts at the threshold to his office. There he stands, solemn and submissive, hands clasped behind his back.

Behind the desk, Caractacus Burke stoops over his prized ledger. At Tom’s arrival, he looks up, his beady eyes conducting a slow, sweeping survey from head to toe.

“I do not suppose,” he sniffs, “that you own a proper set of robes?”

Tom glances down at himself: pressed black trousers, a clean white shirt, and a waistcoat lying flat against his chest. A Muggle’s uniform, tailored enough to pass for neatness, but nothing more. Since leaving Hogwarts, he has had neither the means nor the excuse to purchase robes. Moreover, Muggle salesmen, unlike their wizarding counterparts, are far less vigilant about Confundus Charms, and therefore easier to rob. 

“No, sir,” he replies.

“Ah.” Burke leans back in his chair, squinting. “That will have to do, then.”

“To do… sir?”

“I received an owl for a house call this morning.” Burke unlocks a drawer and extracts a folded slip of parchment. “For reasons that escape my comprehension, the newly appointed Lord Peverell has requested you for his estate’s appraisal.”

So far, Tom has never been so slow-witted as to mislay an object under active curse, nor gullible enough to fall for the so-called “practical jokes” of rival establishments—contrived to leave their victims quite dead. He has avoided the fate of that singularly ill-starred clerk who tried to haggle over a piece whose provenance lay with the buyer’s family, and he has never once been caught pilfering from the stockroom, nor bungled an exchange with a patron whose temper proved every bit as volatile as the wares they coveted.

It is on account of these small but notable triumphs that Tom has managed to hold his post at Borgin & Burkes longer than any clerk in recent history. Yet for all this, his work has never risen above the level of glorified errand-boy. House calls are generally entrusted to the senior staff, whose good sense and discretion may be counted upon when dealing with those bearing heirlooms by the cart-load.

Stranger still is the title of the sender. Lord Peverell. 

Strange, yes. Tom has encountered the name before, though only in the pages of genealogical books, where its line is recorded as having ceded centuries ago. That it should now be claimed anew strikes him as most peculiar.

And that the claimant should know of Tom himself—

Well, it is not beyond possibility. His reputation at Hogwarts had been secure enough, and among certain circles (namely, older witches) word of Borgin & Burkes’ handsome young clerk travels freely. He allows himself the suspicion that his beauty—spoken of often enough—might have inspired curiosity. Or perhaps there is a vulgar motive; if so, at least he has the experience to meet it. It would not be the first time an overconfident customer mistook him for a cheap whore. 

Most likely, this so-called Lord Peverell is merely a lonely, aging aristocrat who, having heard whispers of an obliging shop-boy in Knockturn Alley, fancies an easy indulgence.

Besides, there is a certain appeal in the prospect. A house call promises a rare escape from this squalor, and would afford Tom the even rarer satisfaction of departing with more than he arrived with.

He smiles.

Burke passes him the summons.

The Peverell Estate, Elderhurst Manor, Ashdown Forest, The County of East Sussex

Tom Apparates into a stretch of heathland that might have been stolen from the pages of a fairytale—though that is hardly a compliment in his mind. 

Heather spreads in dense sweeps, its purples and roseate pinks brazen in their bloom. Tall Scots pines rear darkly above him, while between them a ribbon of pale, wet track threads into a shifting pall of mist. The air tastes sharp and mineral, clean in a way he hasn’t smelled since the Highlands, since Hogwarts. 

His brogues sink into the softened earth with a squelch, leaving a breadcrumb trail should he wish to retrace his steps. Fog clings to his face and collar; his hair, subjected that morning to the barest ration of Sleekeazy’s, already curls rebelliously in the damp, fluffing over his ears and temple. It makes his jaw tense, and he spitefully resolves to extract more from Peverell’s hospitality than he might have claimed otherwise.

He wonders whether this summons may itself be an act of malice. Perhaps, in some imperceptible sliver of their unseen history, Tom has offended the man, and this is his notion of vengeance: to have him trudge through the bracken in a state of disarray.

If that is the intention, it is a pitiful one. He recalls Abraxas, languid upon the pillows beside him, remarking that Tom wears such a state exceedingly well.

The path widens at last, revealing the adder stone landmark mentioned in the letter. He pauses before it and speaks the watchword:

“Tria capita.”

At once, the fog stirs and recedes, the pine-dark world unpeeling to admit a brighter one. From the vacancy ahead, shapes start to emerge slowly: the pitch of a gable, the ascending angles of chimneys, an unkempt lawn tangled with wildflowers, a balustrade carved in white stone, windows catching the sun’s reflection.

Then, finally, a wrought-iron gate, which swings inward of its own accord.

Even the sky within the premises seems altered—the blue deeper, more vivid, and the damp forest scent thinning to nothing.

Tom advances forward, footfalls soft on the path, and raps upon the front door three times. The sound echoes oddly in the stillness, lingering longer than it ought. Usually, a house-elf would answer in a heartbeat. 

Silence continues to stretch. Unoccupied, he glances down at his attire once more. A proper robe certainly would have compelled a measure of respect. For a fleeting moment, he considers transfiguring his waistcoat.

But respect is not what he needs today, he decides. Better to be taken for less than he is. A man underestimated walks freer, with pockets far heavier when he departs.

Suddenly, there is the patter of footsteps. 

The door swings open to reveal not the expected figure of a house-elf, but a man.

A rather dishevelled looking man at that, rough-hewn and untamed, hair jutting at unruly angles like storm-tossed brambles, shirt hanging loose over sturdy shoulders. There is a rawness in his gaze, beyond the bloodshot haze clouding their whites. Tom cannot tell whether they borrow their hue from the verdure around them, or whether the green is their own by right.

There is simply too much to process at once. Tom hurriedly maps the open fall of his collar, down to his hands, then back to the eyes set upon him. A current of cold has settled beneath his skin, leaving him naked to it, unarmed against a nature both alien and innate as it seeps past the edges of comprehension.

He sucks in a deep breath. 

This cannot be the Lord Peverell. There is not a hint of the commanding air Tom has learned to recognize from men of their sort—those whose presence bears the weight of title, as he has often felt beneath Lord Septimus Malfoy’s scrutiny.

“Good morning, Sir...” Tom ventures.

The man blinks, before naming himself quietly: “Harry.”

“Harry,” he repeats. How common. “I’m Tom Riddle.” 

“Of course you are,” comes the reply, vague enough to mean very little and everything at once. Tom pauses, expecting him to continue. He does not. 

“I have come at the behest of Lord Peverell to conduct an appraisal on his estate, as arranged through Borgin & Burkes.”

“Right. Yes. Er, come in,” Harry steps aside, motioning him inward awkwardly. “That was me.” 

The interior is handsome, as expected—foyer caving to a hall swathed in heavy damask. Yet the grandeur is a grandeur in abeyance. Unlike the pureblood estates Tom has been to in the past, there are no portraits glaring down at him from the walls. The long history of the house appears suspended, its former glory subdued beneath the long absence of its masters. Most of the furniture lies entombed in white shrouds.

Still, the bones of the house are impeccable. The arches, the proportions, the sweep of the stairs and gallery… His mind turns instinctively to what might be accomplished were it in worthier hands—his own, naturally. 

It stirs in him a savagery so primal it verges on loathing. To see such a place languishing in neglect, its capacity squandered, is nearly a personal affront. That Peverell can move daily through these chambers without feeling the full reach of their potential is proof enough of his unfitness to possess them.

Tom turns to the imbecile. 

“In your letter, you mentioned an intention of parting with several antiques to Borgin & Burkes. If you would be so good as to retrieve these, I would be most happy to examine them.”

Peverell hesitates. “It’s… a little more complicated than that. There’s a lot I don’t want.”

Perfect. The more he wishes to part with, the less likely he is to recall the particulars. A handful of well-chosen objects would be risky to pilfer, but a great quantity could be arranged to conceal any number of omissions.

“That is quite alright,” Tom smiles. “If you are willing to take me on a tour of the premises, we might proceed room by room.”

“Yeah. Sure. It’s a big house though, so it might be a long while.”

“I assure you, Mr. Burke has been most explicit. Your affairs are my chief priority, even should they require several days to resolve, Lord Peverell.”

“Right…” 

Peverell scratches the back of his neck. He appears ten years Tom’s senior, the skin around his eyes bearing the thin creases of age. Yet, in his manner, he retains a youth Tom has never possessed. His movements are loose—careless, even. The unruliness of his hair especially, though flecked with white, grants him a boyish quality that time cannot altogether dispel.

“You sure you don’t have anything else to do?” He asks. “Anything planned after this? You must have engagements. Friends, or… hobbies.” 

Tom presses his teeth together—imperceptibly, he hopes. No, he has no engagements. His life is presently grim, dismal, void of occupation, and not in any romantic sense of the word. And he resents, acutely, that this Peverell fellow should continue to force the matter into his consciousness.

“No, sir,” he replies, bowing his head to get his servility across, since words do not seem to do the trick. “Please, it is my pleasure.”

Peverell’s lips tighten and his brows draw together, head cocked just long enough to unsettle. Tom has not been subject to this particular regard since last he stood before Dumbledore, and the resemblance is clear enough to name it for what it is—suspicion. He knows that look far too well. 

What he has done to warrant it, he cannot imagine. But the scrutiny is entirely unwelcome. How is he to be discreet in the removal of a few choice valuables under this degree of observation? In Tom’s experience, his clients like to remark only upon the wastefulness of such a perfect face, and otherwise ignore his existence entirely—an arrangement he’s discovering he vastly prefers.

Eventually, Peverell sighs and reluctantly shuffles down the corridor, coming to a stop before a closed door.

“We can start here. This is the library, I think.”

He thinks. 

Were it not for the promise of a sales commission significant enough to keep him housed for the coming year, Tom would make short work of this man.

The door swings open, revealing walls swallowed by shelves, packed floor to ceiling with heavy tomes, their bindings ancient, reminiscent of the thickest volumes housed in Hogwarts’ most restricted sections. Like everything else in this place, it is marred by a suffocating layer of dust. A wave of nausea stirs within him. It is not because of the stale air.

Peverell fumbles at his waistband. Tom’s eyes narrow, wary.

But he only draws forth his wand, muttering Sorry about that, as he waves it once. Immediately, the dust dissolves, lingering briefly as drifting motes in the shafts of light. In its absence, the room seems to come alive, deadened space newly suffused with magic. The sensation draws Tom sharply back to Hogwarts—a fist closing over his heart—except…

Except here stands a trove he would have dared to dream of as a boy, one he would have moved heaven and earth to claim. He still would, even now. Yet the opportunity is not his. It lies neglected, all while Peverell readily admits that he has scarcely set foot within.

He casts a sidelong glance, only to find green eyes already fixed upon him.

“You like reading?” Peverell inquires, a hint of unease softening the lines of his expression, as if finally conscious of the splendour surrounding them. Perhaps he has divined the bitterness lurking beneath Tom’s composure.

“Yes,” Tom clips. Courtesy is difficult when he is this upset. He scrambles for any anchor that will keep him within its bounds. 

His sights set upon the jagged scar etched across Peverell’s brow, a violent slash like a lightning bolt that couldn’t have been left by any ordinary quarrel. A curse scar. 

Here, then, stands a man of valor. Reckless, he judges, a rogue the world has left unbridled. Tom understands these types well enough. They flourish upon the nourishment of their own egos, sated by the recognition of their triumphs and transgressions alike. 

He allows a subtle warmth to inflect his tone, leaning into the observation. “Though I grant it is not for every man. Some perceive the world by other, more exceptional means, as you yourself, no doubt.”

It doesn’t work. 

“Reading’s safe,” Peverell shrugs, dismissing the flattery. “Though apparently not always, as I’ve found out.” He gestures towards the crowded shelves. “That’s the trouble with these. Come here—I’ll show you.” 

He withdraws a volume at random. Tom catches Gaelic lettering on the cover just as Peverell cracks it open. Instantly, the pages spring to life, latching onto his forearm and exuding a viscous, paste-like substance. Without flinching, a pulse of wandless magic snaps the binding loose, and he laughs, rubbing the residue from his skin.

“It gets worse,” he explains. “I would read more if my books weren’t trying to devour me, but as it is, I’m keen to have them gone.”

Tom sweeps the several hundred that fill the room. 

“All of them?” he breathes, lightheaded. Thrill blooms as a plan forms itself.

Price the collection slightly below its true worth, and Burke will believe he has purchased fewer books than in truth he has—allowing Tom to abscond with the surplus without truly stealing at all!

This man, this Peverell, in his candour and remarkable neglect, has unwittingly made Tom’s enterprise far too easy. Indeed, were he any more accommodating, Tom might well contemplate carrying off the entire house itself.

“Well,” Peverell concedes with a wry smile, “the ones that don’t bite, at least.”

As it transpires, a large portion of the collection does bite.

Tom’s method of appraisal alters little from the one he employs in the shop. He begins by requesting provenance, a scrap of documentation at the very least, to confirm the object’s value. Predictably, he receives the most impoverished reply imaginable: “I don’t know. It just came with the house.”

With no paperwork to guide him, he has to examine each piece himself—turning them over, inspecting marks of manufacture, gauging weight and composition. For books, this means charting origin by font, language, or subject, all while diagnosing whatever curse has been grafted to the material. 

Not wanting his brain to boil out through his nose (a very real possibility might he touch the wrong thing) he charms the volumes open with his wand in all his assessments. Peverell, by contrast, handles each one with bare hands, a sloppiness Tom can hardly credit. One book fires a volley of needles; another grows steadily hotter the longer it is held, burning skin clean from the palms. It is a miracle the man has survived this long. Tom says nothing, harbouring the hope that should Peverell finally perish, he will be present to enjoy it.

Every detail Tom logs meticulously, calculating just how much he can undersell without raising suspicion. The private list of volumes he wishes to abscond with grows steadily. He cannot resist. This library embodies the glory an ancient Wizarding estate ought to possess: shelves crammed with treatises on forbidden magic, manuals on vicious curses, works of occult scholarship. It is regrettable that most are centuries behind the newer editions Abraxas once smuggled him from Malfoy Manor, but that is neither here nor there. 

As he works, Peverell seems constitutionally incapable of silence. Tom doubts he realises his presence is entirely unnecessary for this part of the job. 

Or worse, he knows, and chooses to linger anyway—whether from boredom or surviving suspicion, not yet put to rest.

“You’re rather good at this,” he observes, lounging against a shelf. “Has this always been your dream job—antiques? Or are you just at Borgin & Burkes for now?”

His questions are plainly intrusive, and their careless manner does nothing to dampen this truth. A snappy reprimand hurtles to the tip of his tongue, but Tom forces it back. He refuses to expend any genuine attention on this scum, keeping his eyes forward as he speaks. 

“Nowhere else would I be afforded proximity to the particular strains of history one finds in the shop. That has always appealed to me, sir.”

What he does not address is whether the post is temporary. Obviously, it is; though in recent years the honed edge of that conviction has worn down. The clerk’s desk has a way of breeding inertia, transaction settling more dust upon his ambitions. He guesses the Horcrux constantly fitted about his finger does little to counteract this also.

“What exactly is so fascinating about it?” Peverell asks, and the laugh that follows is hoarse, a little disbelieving. “I can’t imagine spending my time poking and prodding at these little terrors all day.”

He lifts the cover of a volume Tom had placed among those marked for purchase. Immediately, the paper edges become blades and carve a clean line down his palm. Peverell quirks a brow, studies the injury, then wipes the blood on his trousers, looking at Tom as if to say, See?

“It is not solely the artefacts themselves,” Tom blinks, though the words come too fast, spilling before he quite knows what he intends. He sends an early German cosmology to the ‘no’ pile with an unnecessary flick of his wand, buying a moment, vaguely flustered all of a sudden.

“The people, then?” Peverell ventures, stepping closer.

Tom hates this sense of being herded into corners he did not choose. The truth is that the customers bore him, their patterns so tediously predictable he could map their thoughts before they are spoken. Peverell, however, unsettles that order. He wanders from expectation, pressing in ways Tom has never been pressed. Unwelcome though it is, that deviation forces him to think.

This present interview has been the first breach in monotony for three years. Maybe if he says as much—if Peverell feels unparalleled—he may take the bait and preen, rather than persist with questions Tom has no intention of answering.

“Take it this way. I can say that you are, without doubt, the most interesting of them all,” Tom concludes, glancing up from his work just long enough for the words to take root.

This seems to have the desired effect. Peverell’s shoulders ease, scrutiny slackening into amusement. Of course, it is precisely the sort of praise men find irresistible. Tom allows himself the smallest satisfaction; in dealings such as these, the true artefact of value is control. Now it is safely in his possession.

Then Peverell speaks again, and the illusion shatters.

“They bore you, is that it? You enjoy the intellectual superiority of being an expert in the very services they seek?”

Tom reels. The gap he opens is immediately claimed by the man. 

It is not the answer he would give, if anyone succeeded in prising the truth from him. He does not endure the banality of Borgin & Burkes for any paltry pleasure in condescension. He remains because it is the likeliest place for fortune to deliver what he seeks. Fragments of a soul as sensational as his cannot be lodged in cheap baubles. His vessels must be objects touched by legend, rare enough to match the singularity of their master. And what could hold greater value than the relics of Hogwarts’ founders, the castle being the only home that was ever worthy enough for him? 

The Grey Lady confessed to having hidden her mother’s diadem within an Albanian tree hollow. For such a treasure to be abandoned in foreign dirt only confirmed what Tom has always known: the greatest prizes emerge from the most unassuming of places. He learnt it combing the Thames as a boy, and he embodies it himself: a marvel raised in an orphanage, overlooked until he could no longer be denied.

Borgin & Burkes, with its steady influx of the forgotten, offers the best chance of uncovering the rest.

Yet—

Yet. 

Peverell’s claim is not without its sting of truth.

“Of course not,” comes out thinner than he intends, warbled by the diminishing space between them. Peverell is close. Too close—the toe of his oddly-fashioned shoe meeting Tom’s own. It's the breadth of that chest hemming him in, warmth spilling across the narrow divide, which sets his nerves alight in ways he refuses to name.

He clears his throat, draping his oldest mask across the fracture. “I do not imagine myself above others, Lord Peverell, and certainly not above our clientele. You are correct—it is the people. I enjoy hearing their stories. They grant me glimpses into lives I might never otherwise live.”

The performance is neat enough. He had wielded it often with Slughorn, who drank up the tale of the poor, gifted orphan, forever cheated of the comforts handed freely to his peers. It always begot concessions and special favors. Tom wagers it might work again here, to deflect the man’s scrutiny by inviting his pity.

And indeed, Peverell takes a step back. Relief sluices through him, though it comes threaded with another, less welcome tide—the loss of that proximity, the retreat of heat and solidity he had only just begun to register.

“As I said,” Peverell muses, unreadable, “you’re rather good at your job, Tom.”

The sound of it—of Tom—sends a jolt down his spine. Peverell says it as though it were his to possess, and how strange it is that so commonplace a name should acquire significance when shaped by his voice. 

“It’s okay if you admit that.”

“I never denied it, sir.”

“Good. I prefer honesty.” Peverell smiles, cleaving a dimple in his left cheek, emphasised by the coarse shadow of a stubble. “Would you like anything to drink? Tea?”

“Tea would be perfect, thank you,” Tom blurts, hurriedly bending over his ledger. The sooner Peverell leaves, the sooner the air will be its own again. 

Maybe then his stomach will cease to feel so tight.

The books occupy the better part of the day.

Tom takes the tea and incrementally vanishes it each time he brings the cup to his lips. Yet even this is hard to get away with. Peverell’s gaze—keen, unblinking, and yes, as green as it had appeared in the daylight—pins him in place until he finds himself enduring the most intolerable of conditions: to be studied without cause. 

At least Dumbledore had always made plain the grounds of his suspicion. Here, Tom moves without anchor, unsure of the script expected, and he despises this improvisation foisted upon him. Despises that it is even necessary, most of all. He should be able to murder anyone who makes him feel this way. 

By dusk, he has composed two distinct harvests: a stack for the shop to purchase, and another list of books he intends for himself. Burke’s custom in these matters is to postpone payment until the cataloguing is complete and the objects extracted. Tom relays this arrangement.

“Great, yeah, sure, whatever,” Peverell murmurs distractedly. His attention veers instead toward Tom’s meticulous notes. He tilts his head to inspect the columns, interest fixed—not on the artfully depressed totals (arranged to excuse the theft of six books, which was a bitter compromise, though the most he could likely get away with)—but on a far less conspicuous detail. 

“Why’d you underline certain titles?”

A hot prickle of irritation flares in him. Even if the cause for Tom’s underlining is, in all fairness, highly suspicious, it ought not to be presumed so—least of all by the likes of Peverell, who so eminently deserves to be robbed!

“They are valuable editions,” Tom grinds his teeth, “which may command a higher price than I have marked. A reminder to consult Mr. Burke when I return this evening.”

An outright lie, of course. They are the volumes he means to keep.

Peverell hums, still looking at the parchment. One blunt finger hovers near a particular entry: De Regimine Animarum et Ultima Transitus. Involuntarily, Tom takes measure of that hand; big, scarred, masculine. Against the image of his own, narrower one which once rested where the page now lies, he finds himself conducting a rapid and most unwholesome calculation as to how greatly the disparity in size might be, were their hands to meet. 

From there, it unspools itself, grotesquely enticing. How wide would it span across his wrist? How far around his neck? His thoughts slide into an unbroken chain of vulgar corollaries. That hand clamping his arms overhead, pinning him to a wall, while the other roves lower, dragging over his chest, tugging at his nipples until they sting. It would slide to his waist, callouses kneading the thin stretch of flesh, testing its give, painting bruises across pale skin. And then lower still, dragging between his thighs, parting him, forcing Tom open on the full stretch of those fingers.

His cock stirs in his slacks. 

Then, abruptly, Peverell withdraws. He plucks a volume from the pile and thrusts it before Tom. The Latin lettering swims before his eyes. To his astonishment, it is the very book Peverell had been pointing at.

“For your good work today, Tom,” he says, grinning as he extends it forward. “Have this one for yourself.”

Tom, who fancies himself an expert in all things, discovers in that instant how utterly inept he is at responding to gratitude. A low snarl whips loose as he steps back, desperate to deny both Peverell and himself the suggestion that he might be won over so easily. 

It must be a trap. His gaze darts to his notes; that same volume had released a storm of shadows the moment he charmed it open. Tom had only escaped their onslaught by the remarkability of his trained reflexes.

“Oh, right. Of course,” Peverell laughs, coming to the same conclusion. He draws his wand and flips the cover. Black masses shriek out, surging through the air, only to be ripped away in a single act of nonverbal magic that slams them against the far wall. It collapses to dust under their impact. “I’ll fix that later,” he shrugs, then presses the volume into Tom’s unwilling arms. “There you go. Not so scary now.”

The sudden weight staggers him. His knees buckle, and he hurries to straighten himself upright, expelling a short, affronted breath to lay all blame for his indignity upon Peverell. Not his own strength—and certainly not his acquiescence to generosity that might be a move against him. 

“Thank you… Sir.” Tom grits, for he is not convinced that this isn’t some cunning trick. 

Even if it weren’t, the condescension of the gesture does not escape him. As if Tom were incapable of seizing the book for his own, had he been given the time! 

“Reading’s safe,” Peverell repeats. 

Utterly unilluminating. 

Upon returning home, Tom resolves to disregard the gift. On principle.

He rams the volume beneath his bed, sealing it away from sight, and then tears the suffocating clothes from his body. His skin burns, his loins throb, his nerves riot ungovernably, and there is nothing (nothing at all!) he needs more urgently than the shock of freezing water to temper his body and impose order upon his mind. A mind that, to his infinite outrage, has not been rid of Peverell since the instant he left Elderhurst.

Peverell—with his unruly hair and his big hands and his insufferably green eyes.

Tom twists the faucet savagely, water screaming into the tub.

Peverell—with his sprawling estate and his dust-laden library and his cursed books.

He lowers himself into the ice, breath shattering into rapid huffs.

Peverell—with his endless suspicion and his puzzles and his intolerable manner of being. Bastard. Smug, prying cunt. Dogged, insufferable fucking oaf.

And still Tom cannot wrench him loose. Peverell, everywhere at once: beneath his skin, in his cock, in the pulpy wrinkles of his brain where he least permits intrusion.

Damn him. Damn him.

Seated in the bath, his thoughts marinating alongside him, Tom hacks the day apart, cracking it open with the zeal of a bludger on a child’s soft skull. Chief among his torments: Peverell’s gift. De Regimine Animarum. Why that volume and not one of the others he had marked? A trap? A hint? A smug display of foresight, as if he had already sniffed out Tom’s plan to rob him and sought to neuter it before the attempt?

He should have read it. Tom should have torn it open at once, bled it dry of every secret. Perhaps its contents would’ve granted him some insight.

His teeth chatter with the cold, body subdued, mind flaring brighter for it. Impossible to erase is the image of Peverell dispatching the curse with revolting ease. Tom had assumed he was a simpleton, too timid to abide dark magic within his walls; he had even invited him to think so! Lies. Every bit of it. In the end he drew the shadows out like it was nothing, cracked them like twigs, hurled them away, and then dared to offer the book as a gift—harmless now, by his own design. 

He wanted Tom to underestimate him.

The arrogance of it! The gall! That charlatan—that two-bit conjuring fraud, that bloody poof, that jumped-up wretch—what game is he playing at? Why feign distress if he possesses such power? Why summon Tom at all? And why, most maddening of all questions, sell the books when he can so handily subdue them!

He did not appear interested in the price they would fetch him—and why would he be? Wealth has clearly been his inheritance and he has done nothing with it. In fact, Peverell’s habits are nearer those of a pauper than any pureblood lord Tom has yet encountered. If he did not know better, he would think the man had never been one at all; but then, by what claim did he attach himself to the long-extinct line?

Tom cannot shake the suspicion that the title itself is of little consequence to him. Not when his very first exertion of authority was seeking Tom’s services out. Thus the matter reduces itself, once again, to its most intolerable point—Peverell’s impertinent interest in him. 

He plunges underwater and stays there until his lungs protest. When at last he surfaces, breath cleaving from him, his hair slashes across his eyes in a heavy, wet mass. He needs a haircut. He needs, too, to write to Abraxas.

But Abraxas won’t write back, so he condescends to address Alphard instead. 

The choice is not made lightly. Their last encounter had cast Tom in an unflattering role, bowing before Mister Black across the counter. And while he will not call the episode humiliating, he cannot ignore the shame of now appearing needy where he had made no effort to maintain their acquaintanceship since school. A sudden letter would betray far too much. 

Thus, with admirable ingenuity—or so he tells himself—he presents the whole affair as a mere matter of professional correspondence.

He writes it immediately upon emerging from the bath, half-naked over his desk, skin still damp, hair dripping onto his forearms, towel slipping precariously at his hips. A charmed candle sputters its light across the page:

Mr. Black,

I trust this finds you in good health, and that the wedding preparations are coming along with that refinement for which your house is so justly esteemed. On behalf of Borgin & Burkes, I am writing to enquire whether the hand mirror you procured for your sister has proved satisfactory. Our establishment takes pride in the quality of its acquisitions, and it would be gratifying indeed to learn that Mrs. Black’s tastes have been properly met.

Since I write, and in the spirit of thorough service, I beg a small indulgence. The appearance of a Lord Harry Peverell upon the scene has occasioned no small amount of speculation amongst our clients. Rumour, as you will appreciate, circulates cheaply in Knockturn Alley, and is seldom to be relied upon. However, your family is most advantageously situated to discern fact from invention, possessing as it does a seat within the Wizengamot, and might perhaps supply some clarity as to the foundation of his claim, as well as the reception which his sudden appearance has received.

You will forgive this presumption, and consider it in the nature of professional diligence. Our clientele have a keen interest in the standing of old houses, particularly those risen from the dead. It is the business of Borgin & Burkes to be properly informed.

I remain, 

Tom M. Riddle

The reply arrives sooner than expected. One of the innumerable Black eagle-owls comes battering at his window at such an indecent hour that, upon casting a quick tempus, he finds it to be two o’clock. Tom rises, his bedcovers gathered about his shoulders against the night air, and unlatches the pane to admit it in.

The creature coos ingratiatingly as he detaches the letter from its leg, transparently angling for a scrap of food. If it had reached London so quickly, then the journey home would hardly tax it; let the Blacks trouble to feed their own spoiled brute. Tom shoos it towards the sill.

It shrieks in such a way it reminds him of Walburga. He snaps—“Piss off, you bestial thing!”—lifting a hand. The owl takes flight before he can strike, but not without beating its monstrous wings directly in his face, ruffling the hair he only just washed. 

Damn it. Damn it to hell.

Tom races over the letter, every word stoking his anger until sleep escapes him completely:

Tom,

Your letter took me by surprise, though it is always a pleasure to hear from you. Allow me to reassure you on one point at once: the mirror proved most unsatisfactory. That wicked bitch smashed it the very instant she caught sight of her own reflection. She then threatened to slaughter me most graphically with the shards, which you must not take too personally. It is impossible to satisfy her under any circumstance. 

As for this talk of a Lord Peverell, I confess myself at a loss. I asked both father and Uncle Arcturus—no such gentleman has presented himself before the Wizengamot, nor have I heard the name in any respectable quarter. I suspect that your position in Knockturn Alley renders you too susceptible to the vapours of gossip—quite literally, perhaps, for the air there cannot be good for one’s constitution. You truly did look ill the last time I saw you. Have you been taking care of yourself, as I said? Watch what you let in, won’t you? It would be quite the tragedy if a mind as fine as yours went and wore itself out on speculation.

At any rate, we must plan to meet soon. Perhaps a drink, somewhere more respectable than The Leaky Cauldron. We might still find some of the old conviviality between us, if you can spare the time. It will be different, with Abraxas no longer around, but you should not let it discourage you.

Yours in friendship,

Alphard

And damn those rotten Blacks, too.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Tom sets out armed for Ashdown.

His hair is charmed against the damp, his shoes the mire; and having forfeited sleep to moisturise and practice his posture in the mirror, he emerges convinced that no man has ever faced the English countryside in finer form. It is no less than a first-class vengeance upon yesterday, when the trek and the weather caught him unawares. Even the obstinate flush of his cheeks—ruddy, uneven—lends a certain youthful beauty he is willing to forgive.

(Or so he tells himself, when the spells to subdue it fail.)

Upon reaching the adder’s stone, he utters the watchword and waits as the manor emerges from the mist. 

Peverell answers quicker this time, on the second knock. The breathlessness of his greeting (“Tom!”), struck in the intimacy of the fledgling hour, is almost vulgar in its familiarity, like the warmth one reserves for a long-lost friend. There is in it a casualness, a generosity, that announces the world belongs only to the singularity of their encounter. It upends every expectation Tom had brought to the morning.

The man himself appears more composed than the day before. Night has rinsed the weariness from his face, lending a wetness to his eyes that heightens what limited charm his plain, unworthy shirt can claim. Just the sight of it awakens every doubt Alphard’s letter had sown. There is a falseness to his lordship, one that even the estate—alive in every meticulous detail—cannot disguise, and that he cannot suppress curiosity long enough to ignore. 

Nothing so seamless could be honest; Tom, of all people, would know.

He should be irked by the threat. Instead, a strange gratification rises in its place. That Peverell has gone to such great lengths to set up this trap for him—him, singled out by name!—means he recognises in Tom a quality worth pursuit. Where the world presumed his greatness dormant, here stands proof to the contrary.

The thought sets his belly ablaze. Tom tells himself it is vigilance; yet that conviction falters almost as soon as it is formed, leaving behind only the heat of being wanted.

“Lord Peverell,” he bows, eyes fixed on his face. There, he notes arrogantly, a deep flush and hesitant twitch of his lips—proof that Peverell is as affected as he is.

“Alright?” Peverell asks, stepping aside just enough that Tom must pass close. Their sleeves brush, so brief it might mean nothing, and yet ignites a restless awareness. With his back turned, his vulnerable position occurs to him only once he is in it: his spine, his shoulders, the nape of his neck are completely open, all possible points of attack. 

He tenses, strung up in a tremulous panic, alive to the possibility of movement behind him. Peverell is perfectly placed to pounce. Of course, Tom could repel him if he so chose, he knows it, but the knowledge only heightens the moment. 

He waits, unwilling and fascinated, to be touched.

Nothing comes of it. He turns back around. 

“Quite.” 

“How’d you like the book?”

To lie, or not to lie. In truth, the gift remains as he received it, unopened and gathering dust—but to admit it would certainly offend, and Tom has long perfected the art of gratifying his patrons. Indeed, had it been any other man, he would have already summoned the indulgences: yes, it was invigorating, yes, your generosity overwhelms me, how shall I ever repay such a kindness.

But this is not any other man. If it were, Tom wouldn’t have received the book at all.

Which gives him pause. Peverell is not who he claims to be. As of yet, everything he does is for an unknown purpose. And Tom knows better than to unravel his web for him; a single concession might see him drawn further into the man’s clutches. He simply cannot let it happen. 

“I haven’t read it,” he replies at last, watchful of the expression he provokes. Credit where it is due: Peverell barely stirs, only the dark curve of an eyebrow rising.

“No? Busy night?” This is offered eagerly, too fast, driven by a bestial curiosity Tom didn’t mean to provoke. Infuriatingly, it puts them right back onto the course he had resolved to avoid in the first place. More questions.

He backtracks. 

“No, sir. I assure you there was nothing more diverting occupying me. I only live a regimented life, and found no time to afford the book its proper attention. I hope to visit it on my next free day.”

“Oh, don’t flatter me, Tom,” Peverell cuts, far too lightly, as he starts towards a shuttered room. “Or I’ll see you stocked so well you’ll never have an evening to yourself again.”

Unbearable cunt, with his inexhaustible talent for escaping the bait Tom attempts to lay. The rage Peverell elicits is unparalleled, and made infinitely worse in that it never comes alone, joined always by a hotter, more insidious reaction. Just the mere idea—the carnal, mortifying, utterly irresistible idea—of being occupied in ways that leave no corner of himself unsatisfied… It makes Tom’s gut twist in pleasure he cannot own. 

But that is a dangerous path for his mind to go down.

“I would not dream of it,” he lies. “One gift already stands beyond the proper claims of a man such as myself.”

The room to which he is ushered proves a vast parlour, its furnishings veiled in heavy white shrouds. Though the space has been softened into anonymity, like the contours of a corpse beneath a burial sheet, traces of its former character remain: walls washed in ivory, panelling edged in brown, and here and there a thread of blue or gold lending a sombre elegance—more mausoleum than anything. Beautiful, but bereft of life.

“A man such as yourself, huh?” Peverell huffs, as if to stave off a private joke, before gesturing broadly around them. “I’m not actually sure Borgin and Burkes deals in items this size, but these are cursed to hell, so I figured I’d show you anyway. If you’re interested.”

“We accept the occasional piece if it is rare enough.” Though in truth he cannot guess what the shop might value, veiled as everything is.

“Well, I refuse to go near them myself, so I couldn’t tell you.”

“That is perfectly fine, Lord Peverell. As I mentioned yesterday, my time is yours until you have no further use for it. I may begin my diagnostics and later inform you what would be of worth to the shop. Little more is required on your part.”

“Oh, no. Nonsense, Tom. I’ll help you do it.”

The protest rises naturally (But you just said you would not go near them.) Tom stifles it, marking down the inconsistency in his head. He is sure it will serve as further kindling when the time comes for confrontation, however that may end. 

Outwardly, he inclines his head. “Whatever you wish.”

“Great!”

Peverell limits his exertions to helping Tom pull dust covers from the furniture.

Of course, they might’ve employed magic to far greater effect. That they do not only confirms Peverell’s pleasure in watching Tom struggle. The coverings, heavy with neglect, leave him sweating and red. Each one sends a cloud of dust into his face the moment it is disturbed—wherein the clothes he’d so carefully chosen for refinement (black on black on black) become the bane of his existence, providing a contrast which parades every speck of grime. 

It is ugly work, unbecoming, and Tom knows precisely how unbecoming he must look.

Peverell, stupid oaf, fares differently. Though not spared the discomposure, he—regrettably—wears it well. His sleeves have fallen back to reveal taut forearms, muscles flexing temptingly. His hair is only more unruly, which should diminish him, but does not. Sweat reddens his sun-kissed skin, making him glow. Overall, there is an ease to him, a bodily confidence that refuses to falter even in coarse work. 

Tom cannot stop staring, particularly at the veins of his hands—swelling and receding and thickened up with blood. There is a base and living power in that pulse. It maddens him to notice it. He hates how his own heartbeat feels ungainly in comparison, and most of all, hates the heat it feeds—stretching him thin between envy and want, disgust and the compulsion to look again.

He throws himself into the work instead. 

The parlour is a formidable undertaking. Impossible to imagine it was ever meant for polite company, everything bears a curse impressed into the very grain of its wood.

An ottoman scurries across the carpet whenever he approaches, like a hound resisting the leash. The centre table multiplies objects set upon it—until one cup becomes four, and four an unmanageable twelve. The curio cabinet yawns open regularly to exhibit a ghastly procession of shrunken heads, which groan theatrically before snapping its glass doors again. And the mantelpiece adds its own melancholic contribution, whispering the final words of the dead whose ashes once rested above it.

Tom nearly shatters a mirror that spews insults at him—“Gain more weight, you look like a twig!” and, “Your eye-bags truly are dreadful. Are you ill?”—wand already raised, when Peverell whisks a shroud back over the frame, laughing.

“I am glad you find it so amusing,” Tom snaps, unable to hold his tongue.

“It is funny,” he insists. “It’s a mirror, what does it know? It yells at me all the time.”

Tom resists pointing out that whatever it finds lacking in him, it is likely right. There is a lot the man could stand to improve. 

“You shouldn’t take it to heart,” Peverell adds. 

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Certainly seems like you did. Never seen anyone glare at an object quite like that. Are you really that invested in your appearance, Tom?” He tilts his head. His manner borders on roguish, his amusement ill-concealed. 

Tom has never been more rattled, and does not understand why. He has been teased before, incessantly, almost ritualistically. At the orphanage, the other children christened him a freak and took delight in dropping their nail clippings into his soup. During his earlier years at school, Slytherins found endless delight in mocking his accent, his threadbare clothing, his manner of speaking; all symptoms, in their eyes, of his squalid birth. Even those older boys who styled themselves his friends—and who so condescendingly ‘guided’ him until they graduated in his third year—never tired of their little jests at his expense.

Yet Peverell’s brand of it insinuates itself under his skin, like a maggot feasting on flesh. Tom feels examined in ways he would rather not be, not knowing whether to ascribe the attention to cruelty, ignorance, or a salacious species of interest. 

(And, most troubling of all, uncertain of the shape his own response might take.)

“No,” he says. There is nothing to treasure about his likeness to a father he despises. 

Hoping to change the subject, he gestures distractedly toward the nearest shielded shape, whose silhouette resembles a settee. Peverell takes hold of the fabric as if the matter means very little to him.

“You should,” he shrugs offhandedly. It ought to pass for a compliment, though it carries too much irony to land as one. “There are worse things to be proud of.”

“Worse?” Tom bristles.

“Oh, you know. Blood status. Family. Name. That whole circus.”

For a moment Tom believes he must have misheard. Surely the words had been lost in the rush of air. Yet when he raises his eyes, he finds Peverell watching him intently, and that intensity admits no mistake. 

They stand opposite one another, almost equals in height.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it,” Peverell continues, “what people build whole lives around. Stuff they never picked, that doesn’t prove who they are or what they can do.”

His pupils have dilated, a wild focus that makes his green eyes look black despite the abundance of light. A strange energy vibrates up Tom’s chest, not unlike dread, not unlike exhilaration. He cannot say how he himself appears. His face is numb, his mind overrun.

“Don’t you think?” Peverell presses, still holding him there, drop cloth tight in both their grips. Tom is overcome by the absurd impulse to pull and upset Peverell’s balance, so that he may topple forward over the armrest. 

He frowns instead. “You shouldn’t dismiss it so easily.”

“But it is easy. People who cling to it are just… what’s the word… coasting.”

At once—involuntarily as always—he thinks of Abraxas, who learned very late in life that being a Malfoy required more than just glutting himself on whatever his gold could purchase, or loftily scorning the world from the vantage point of his gleaming hair and polished shoes.

In their fifth year, when he’d still been haughty and vain and intolerable, but eager enough to curl his long fingers around both their rutting cocks, the boy had bared his pale, narrow neck to him, and Tom had wasted no such occasion. He sank his teeth deep into the jugular, drew blood enough to stain their shirts and require a replenishment draught from Madam Belby. Though he complained about a lot of things, Abraxas did not dare speak up about that. He had seen the vindication in Tom’s gaze, recognised the challenge in the scarlet slick across his lips: Not so blue-blooded after all.

He sneers at the memory.

“Some rise by it,” he counters.

“They hide behind it. There’s a difference.”

(Abraxas, unhappily married, a child on the way, locked in that gilded prison of a manor. The colour of one’s blood no longer matters when it will never be drawn again.)

What could this cur possibly want from him? Tom will not stoop to recite the pro-Muggle platitudes drummed into him by todgers like Dumbledore. Not now. He can’t. Peverell has pinched a nerve so deep, so primal, that Tom feels his ego rising within him like a basilisk, baring its slimy teeth. To whom it seeks to prove itself, he cannot tell; only that it grows intolerable to hold his tongue. 

There are all sorts of things he longs to express, things he’s kept stifled for the past three years. It is not just my handsome face alone, when I am superior in every other respect too. I take pride in my existence, for my very being is exalted. I was sent into this world as a gift, and though you cannot yet discern it, one day you will.

Rather, he hears himself say, far quieter than he likes, “Names hold power.”

“If you’ve got nothing else, sure.” Peverell returns. “Though it’s a pretty sad hill to die on.”

Tom has decided. He shall murder this man. He will return as Lord Voldemort, in what he determines is the very near future, and press his wand to Peverell’s heart. He shall carve the life from his chest and mark these abandoned walls—walls that have borne the ridiculous farce of his meekness—with proof of his supremacy. He shall desecrate the bed in which Peverell sleeps, slit him open on silks, leave him gutted among the ruins of his idle wealth.

The tarp falls from Peverell’s hands. His expression remains insufferably casual as he surveys the way Tom’s knuckles blanch. 

“You’ve got a chip on your shoulder about this stuff. Funny, considering.”

His heart stutters. He cannot mean what Tom thinks he means.

“Just what are you implying?”

“Only that you shouldn’t hold these things so deeply, Riddle.”

Riddle. Riddle. Peverell has always called him Tom. Always, until now, until this precise moment. And it lands exactly as intended—not some slip of the tongue—barbed and shredding at the careful armour he wears. The sheer audacity flashes through his bones. How dare he, insolent scum—to even point it out at all! To suggest Tom should resign himself to circumstance, to his filthy fucking blood, to content himself with the stain his parents left on him—

Outrage crashes over him in relentless waves. He cannot contain it, but to speak would spill the inferno onto the floor. So he trembles, tight-lipped, a sickness of fury thrumming through him. He is above it. He will be above it. 

The fire still rages.

“Is that what you tell yourself?” he hisses. He means Peverell’s indifference to all his wealth and influence, and the apathy with which he inhabits every gilded corner of this manor. Easy, too easy, when he has never known what it is to wrest even a shred of the world to his grasp. What could he possibly comprehend of the intricate cunning necessary to make the most of one’s meagre lot? He has no right to criticise Tom for any of it.

“Huh?”

“Look around us!”

“Oh,” Peverell says, taking it literally. His mouth curves in a near-smile when he peers around the parlour. “Er—No. Not really. I don’t need to tell myself anything, actually.”

And it’s like being pushed into cold water. Tom’s anger suddenly gutters in a hollowing rush. The effort to express it, to shape the enormity of his rancour, collapses. Nothing could carry the cruelty dormant within him, the magnitude of potential he feels he is wasting. Even if there were, Peverell will not be moved. The man remains unshaken no matter the circumstance. 

A small part of Tom wishes he could say the same. 

He finally loosens his hold on the drop cloth, casting a look toward the settee. It appears entirely unremarkable. There is the desperate thought that the sooner his task is done, the sooner he may quit this place. 

Against his rule to never touch things with his bare hands, he pokes the cushions with a finger.

The softness trembles, recoiling like an upturned belly on a dog, too closely resembling flesh that has been disturbed. Tom blinks at the surrealness of it, yet nothing happens.

Until everything is happening, all at once. 

Fibres lash forward, winding around his wrist with a strength wholly disproportionate to their gossamer fineness. A lance of panic sears through him. Tom claws at the threads with his other hand, only to have it seized as well, both wrists dragged together in a silken ligature. 

The settee stirs, waking up to the thing in its clutches. Fabric splits in a noise that cuts against the thunder of his pulse. The fibres drag his joined hands across to the other side, forcing Tom over the armrest and down upon his front. The seat buckles underneath, spilling out more threads, which surge over his back and bind his torso to the cushion. His legs thrash, the textiles answer. They coil around his calves and wrench them upwards, folding his knees beneath him until they stand at a right angle. 

Only when he is completely bound in place do things seem to settle. The last cords tighten so that his wrists are pinned before his face, his chest pressed flat down, his hips raised.

Rapid little puffs of breath dampen the cuffs of his shirt. Tom feels his anger slinking beneath his skin, lost and sluggish, like blood gone rotten—alive, but dulled, muffled by flesh too thick to let him feel it cleanly. It is there, he knows, but the knowing is all that reaches him. He is too numb with disbelief to think beyond the single, frantic conviction: this cannot be his fault. He would never stoop to such a moronic error. 

It was Peverell. It must have been Peverell—lying in wait, scheming, bringing his guard down with debate and watching for the smallest fracture through which to strike. 

To be pinned like this would be humiliation enough. But with every futile jerk, his wretched, animal body mistakes the pain for pleasure, spilling the carnage into his groin. His pulse stiffens, there, just between his legs. His cock, uselessly eager. 

His disgust at himself is absolute.

Tom writhes again. He must get out before the moment solidifies itself. And yet, is Peverell not already looking? He can feel the weight of merciless eyes upon him. He despises him for it, despises him so utterly that the hatred folds inward and feeds upon itself.

“What is the meaning of this?” He hisses, neck straining to glare up at the man standing just on the other side of the armrest.

Peverell’s expression is not as expected. He blinks once, twice, like a stag caught in a beam of light, slack with delayed shock.

“Fuck,” he then rasps, stumbling back half a step, though his gaze still lingers far too freely. It travels from the furious flush of Tom’s face to the tight arc of his spine, and then higher—up to where his hips lift from the cushions, arse indecently exposed. He does not look smug, nor proud at all for that matter. Which is when Tom recalls it had been his suggestion to examine the settee next, there being no reasonable way Peverell could have planned for that.

All the same, there is the faint, unmistakable twitch in his trousers, shadows lengthening where he gives himself away in the most human of betrayals. Regardless of whether or not he meant for this to happen, Peverell’s mirrored arousal is as much of a proclamation of guilt as any. Tom, horrified, feels his throat constrict dryly. 

“Release me at once,” he commands, though his voice fractures on the last syllable. His wand lies beyond reach, and his raw magic is too volatile without a conduit. One false impulse, and Tom might tear himself open.

Peverell makes a rough sound of assent and drags his palms against his trousers, leaving streaky sweat-marks in the dust. The liquid of his eyes ripples doubtfully when he turns again toward Tom’s prone form. Tom reads the question in that minute convulsion, and the idiocy of it only complicates the mortification of the moment.

“Do what you need to,” snags onto the sharp rims of his teeth. The rest of him revolts with a raw, mechanical life: jaw shuddering, chest tight with the pressure of unshed motion. Blood batters its passage through too-narrow channels, forcing walls of flesh to stretch and leak sweat. Tom tries to shed it, to crawl free of his own casing, but the skull is a prison, and the grey matter inside it flails. Move, it insists—slip the trap, retaliate, kill, vanish, do anything but invite the approach of danger, you impotent animal. Move!

He shuts his eyes to soothe himself.

Useless. Useless. It's a vain effort. He is too attuned to that heat—scorching heat, thunderous heat, much hotter than his own—as it creeps down his sides, supplanting the air behind him once Peverell makes his way around. Tom feels that and far too much more. The hair on his neck standing; moisture collecting between shoulder-blades; warm slick spreading into the hollow of hips; knees lodged into the couch springs; hands locked over the armrest; wrists so taut the tendons stretch; everything yearning to collapse onto itself.

And yet he cannot, cannot, cannot, because that heat has found him, twined around him, pressing inside, and he is every nerve and every vessel and every trembling organ, every inch of meat alive with the paranoid knowledge of how close the other man is behind him

So he twists his head, chin to shoulder, and forces himself to observe. Peverell wedges one knee into the narrow span between Tom’s bent legs, bracing his other foot on the carpet, shifting so that his weight hovers almost astride him.

Their eyes meet. He blinks once before dropping it.

Then, he slips his hand to cradle Tom’s knee. 

The tension fractures and ricochets as his calf is nudged from the cushion. Sticky warmth blooms where the shock of contact fizzes through him: the materiality of another’s skin, the blunt firmness of a palm, and—most ruinously—the way that touch sinks to the very root of Tom’s desire. His cock gives another interested lurch.

But it’s perfunctory. Despite the very visible bulges in both their trousers, Peverell only touches him insofar as to complete the task at hand, pressing his wand to the threads binding Tom’s leg. He’s maddeningly careful, muttering charms under his breath. The fibres resist separation, requiring persistent, careful work, layer by stubborn layer—and so the moment allows no easy retreat. 

Though Tom wills his limbs to stop trembling, his mind does not listen. Their positioning is impossible to ignore. He, trussed and displayed like a bitch in heat; and Peverell, kneeling, chest brushing up against his haunches, straddling his legs. A mere inch or two stands between them. 

Tom cannot help the thought: were they naked, would he still linger at the fringes of caution, or would Peverell give way to wanton claim? What does he think of their situation now—of Tom’s erection, posted so prominently against his leg?

Likely nothing at all. When he speaks, it is as casual as can be:

“You’re right, in a way,” Peverell says, just as the final threads pinning Tom’s right calf break. He alternates seamlessly to the other, shuffling closer in the process. “The house is beautiful…” A pause. “And I hate to see wasted potential. That’s why I summoned you.”

Tom turns unseeing eyes upon the room. He draws in three steadying breaths, willing away the half-carnal, half-murderous visions. His customer service persona is easy to reach for, despite his earlier outburst. Easier, at least, than any other of the complicated feelings warring inside him. It floats at the very forefront of his brain, amidst all the floss and static.

His voice is smaller than he intends, a wheezy thread of sound. 

“I shall do my very best sir,” he whispers. 

—then stifles a grunt when Peverell accidentally bumps into his behind.

In the end, it takes a quarter of an hour to free him. 

Tom watches those minutes grind laboriously in their orbit on the grandfather clock nearby. Four-thirteen to four-nineteen stretches forever, four-nineteen to four-twenty-eight even longer. 

Halfway, he is beset by a most irrational fear: that he shall never leave this room at all, that a curse is sewn into its walls, warping time so eternities could pass with its residents none the wiser. Already his joints ache, and he suspects that he has aged significantly, condemned to live out his immortality in this house, Peverell’s corpse the lone companion of his ruin.

His misery isn’t much aided by the silence. Neither of them have anything left to say, and in that wordlessness, the air clots oppressively. 

Once Tom’s legs are free, Peverell crouches on the floor to cut through the seams binding his upper body. But again, the layers do not yield without space to reach their breadth cleanly. Thus, he is compelled to worm his hand beneath Tom—much as he had done with his knee—to make room for the spell to strike clean.

Caught in the tight space, it sears broad and hot against his chest. Tom can make out every line, every ridge, every callous through the thin cotton of his shirt. The pressure drives his ribs inward. Pleasure drips into his belly, spreading lower, nestling into his loins, hauling his mind into woolly, chaotic need. And it is exactly that which undoes him

Yes, that, and not the cast of Peverell’s features, which in their concentration have become unreasonably handsome. Because, when the tip of his wand accidentally grazes the over-sensitive part of Tom’s waist, the brief contact has an effect it shouldn’t have. 

Immediately, Tom’s stomach convulses, his legs scramble, his newly freed hips seek friction by rutting into the cushion, and a cracked whimper chokes from his throat.

Peverell is suddenly very still beside him.

Tom squeezes his eyes shut, refusing to even acknowledge it. The drum of his heart is violent, frantic, and he is tortured by the knowledge that the man must feel its every beat.

But after seconds, he says nothing, resuming quietly. 

His wrists take the least amount of time. This may be owing to Peverell’s haste—in a turn that would be ironic were it not so maddening, he is cursory with the very part most at risk of injury. Still, Tom will not cavil at the quickness. 

The instant he is loosed, he rips himself gracelessly from the seat and retreats as far as space will allow. His prick heaves painfully, refusing to soften. It is the most he can do to tug the wrinkles from his waistcoat, sniffing indignantly to save face. 

The settee groans. Another ripping noise, and the mass of fibrous cords withdraw into the cushions, weaving into the upholstery until it looks brand new. If Tom’s skin was not so sensitive and rope-rashed, he might have been able to convince himself nothing had happened at all.

“Well, that’s convenient,” Peverell quips. “Think the shop would buy into something like that?”

It will not travel a mile from this place before Tom consigns the blasted thing to flames.

“Perhaps,” he answers, though his face must betray him, because he’s met with a laugh.

“I won’t make you do that,” Peverell glances toward the clock. “Huh. Time flies. And look at that—we’re almost done.” Left are only a few trinkets for Tom to assess, things that might be dispatched within half an hour. “I’m starved. Let’s say I make us an early supper as an apology, and then you can be on your merry way?”

He appears no more ruffled than on any other occasion, aside from the conspicuous bulge in his trousers. Tom studies him for a very long moment. The day has leeched more from him than he cares to admit, forsaking a hunger that has nothing to do with food. More than anything, he longs to go home and tear apart a poor living creature with his bare hands. 

But to give that away… Oh, the scandal of letting Peverell glimpse the turbulence within. There is still much more to be lost. And truly, appearing more affected than the other man would cost him everything. Tom must salvage his dignity. He must reclaim the power that has slipped from him, to impress that it belongs to him alone. 

He is great, he is clever, he is powerful. He is the most transcendent being in existence, cursed furniture notwithstanding. 

Wordlessly, he nods, trailing after Peverell to the kitchen. 

It is the most inhabited quarter he has yet seen. The floors are paved in dark stone, walls densely arrayed with jars, crocks, and tins. A great hearth-oven, blackened from past use, dominates one side, well-seasoned copper pans hanging above it. At the room’s centre is a heavy table, wood worn smooth and irregular.

Peverell directs him toward a chair. Spitefully, Tom elects to remain standing, though the man is oblivious to this resistance, already moving through the space, reaching into cupboards and hauling down ingredients. 

At one point Tom discerns an cool pantry stocked to excess—greens, fruit, and covered leftovers, provisions varied and more colourful than any he has seen since leaving Hogwarts. His own kitchen has been exhausted of fresh food, rendering this morning’s breakfast a measly toast and tea. He silences his stomach before it can growl. 

Deprived of voice, his hunger becomes easy to ignore as he observes Peverell, who barely acknowledges him at all—even though Tom might, at any moment, be justified in severing his head for witnessing his earlier debasement. 

And yet, that impulse falters. Not for lack of pride, nor out of forgiveness, but because Peverell does not comport himself to any code Tom has ever known. His self-possession, though unmistakable, carries no scent of being built on competition. If he recognises power, he refuses to orbit it, moving according to some inward law that excludes the rest of humankind. It is this that stays Tom’s hand more effectively than fear or pity ever could—curiosity. 

Tom imagines how differently the same scene would have unfolded among his old schoolfellows. They would have made a spectacle of it, no doubt, out of that reflex which valued humiliation as social currency. Nott would have laughed himself blind; Lestrange would have histrionically preserved the tale for future amusement; and Mulciber, ever the sycophant, would have smiled his slow, knowing smile—content to feel owed for his discretion, all while quietly nursing the belief that Tom was beneath even his scant regard.

Such levity, such idiocy, he has always been obliged to correct. Even Abraxas learnt as much, and swiftly, during their first time together in a broom cupboard, when Tom came almost immediately in his pants. It was clear the blond meant to hold that over his head, so Tom coolly threatened to slice his cock off before he could. 

By contrast, Peverell offers nothing. He did not laugh when the settee sprung up on him. He did not even appear to care. He only offered his assistance and dismissed the incident as soon as they’d gotten out of it, leaving Tom unnerved by the sudden tangentiality of rules he once survived by. No admonition is required here; no threat must be levelled. Peverell has, in effect, done that work for him.

Of course, he will not ascribe generosity where foolishness may suffice; more likely, the man has embarrassed himself so often, he can no longer register another’s shame.

Except—

Except, now he prepares food for both of them, by hand.

Tom keeps waiting, certain he will eventually grow bored of the performance and summon a house-elf to do the rest. But nothing of the sort happens. Peverell sees it through to its end, moving between skillet and pot easily, attention divided yet never strained. The kitchen soon fills with the scent of cream and herbs, deepened by the ripeness of tomatoes.

He knows not one well-born wizard who can do that. In Tom’s experience, even the act of stirring a cauldron is regarded as servant-work. He adds this to the growing inventory of Peverell’s incongruities—those maddening things that refuse to be reconciled with the role he means to play.

About this, however, the matter is ordinary enough. Tom needs only to ask.

“Do you enjoy cooking?” 

As soon as he utters the question, he cringes. He has never initiated small talk himself, and he feels ridiculous for even needing to. He should force Peverell against the oven, threaten to bake his skull until it cracks, demanding every one of his secrets. That would be worthy of him. That would be natural.

Though, for some reason, he cannot summon the appetite to do just that. 

Tom consoles himself with reason: greater horizons await. If he suffers this absurd charade a little longer, he may be granted more house calls by Burke, and with them greater potential access to what he truly seeks—Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin’s relics. Once secured, he will visit Albania, claim Ravenclaw’s diadem, then do whatever he pleases with his life. He may abandon this drudgery of clerking and become at last what the universe meant him to be.

But to murder Peverell now—to even provoke his displeasure—would jeopardise everything.

“Erm—no, not really,” Peverell mutters, and with a wave of his hand, the water drains from the pot in a hiss of steam. “It’s just what I’ve always done. You cook, you eat. You don’t, you starve. Simple as that. Don’t you?”

“I do,” Tom thinks of the tasteless scraps of tripe he forces down daily, and further back, to his turn in Wool’s kitchens, stirring cabbage stew thinned near to water, crusts of bread floating like soggy islands. The only meals worth remembering had never been of his making: those served at Hogwarts. 

And now, perhaps, this. 

“Though I would prefer not to,” he adds.

Peverell glances over his shoulder, lips twitching. “Yeah, that tracks.”

Tom blinks, unwilling to accept the dismissal—surely his point is quite clear. But Peverell simply turns back to the stove, as though the matter had been resolved. 

Gritting his teeth, he swallows the frustration of having to press the question plainly.

“You would?”

With the saucepan coaxed to a simmer, the air grows so seasoned, so bright, Tom’s eyes sting.

“I may not like it,” Peverell shrugs, “but I wouldn’t want anyone else doing it for me.”

“But a house-elf would be happy to. It is their nature.” This emerges too like the drawl of his Hogwarts companions. However, though intolerable, at least they understood the first law of power: hierarchy governs all. Every being, by their very station, exists to confirm the merit of those above them. The world functions by no other measure, and Tom, able to bend everyone to his will eventually, is sure he was born to occupy the apex, no matter where he started.

“Maybe. Doesn’t change much, though.”

“You’re unused to their service?” He pries.

Peverell shakes his head. “It’s just a bit awkward, don’t you think? Ordering someone around when your hands work perfectly well.”

“Not at all. Everybody serves something.”

That makes him pause, one hand on a jar, the other hovering, as if he had lost the thread of the task. Then, without turning, Peverell asks, “Do you?”

“In a way,” Tom answers, not without consideration. “I serve myself. I kneel to nothing that does not give me what I want.”

“That’s… Stupid. And kind of contradictory. It’s still servitude.”

“Not at all. As I said, everybody serves something. Mine is only the most tolerable kind,” Tom argues. “To serve that which is already one’s own.”

There is silence for a time, punctuated by sizzling and the rasps of a scraping spoon. Tom watches the line of Peverell’s back. He ought to find it contemptible. He does not. Instead, his focus cleaves to the flex and release of his biceps as he stirs.

Hunger gnashes through him. He pictures fastening his canines into that sturdy, living flesh, reaching for a pulse to meet him on his tongue. He wants to see Peverell’s strong body thrash with pain, to hold it steady under the violence, to witness the surrender and then soothe what he has made raw, take it wholly into the emptiness he carries. Wholly and without censure, Tom believes that it might finally seal the bottomless reach of his desire—the submission of an indomitable man. 

The vision thrums in him so vividly that, for a moment, he feels his maw is already wet with blood.

Peverell’s interruption breaks him from this reverie—

“Yesterday I asked why you’re at Borgin and Burkes. I’ll have you know, I didn’t quite like your answer.”

—only, his heart continues to misbehave. The sensation is kin to that glorious rush he got when the fat rat ate its own tail, or when his father’s drugged body dropped dead. It is nerves, yes, but nerves whetted into euphoria. Tom feels he has stumbled to the brink of a precipice and must now jump, solely for the pleasure of falling.

“Oh?” He sounds breathless. He is breathless.

“Surely it was a lie.”

And there it is, the point beyond retreat.

“It was,” Tom confesses. He swallows hard, leaning indolently against the table. How long has it been since he’s been honest in this way? He cannot recall, nor can he fathom why Peverell, of all people, should draw it from him now. 

Still, the words come with an ease he finds intoxicating. He even smiles as he goes on. “In truth, the clientele are lame-brained scum. I can hardly endure a minute in their company.”

Peverell grins. He continues stirring the pasta into its sauce, but cooking has plainly lost his attention. 

“That must kill you, then. Being patient with them.”

“Yes.” Exhilaration scalds his lips. “Yes, it does.”

“Then why do it? What’s in it for you?”

Before Tom can answer, the clatter of porcelain against wood detonates through him. Peverell sets a bowl onto the table, filled generously with pasta coated in an orange sauce.

He had been prepared with a reply, perched thoughtless on his tongue, eager to barrel forth like the ramblings of Slughorn softened by port. But the punctuated question drags him from that perilous ease. It is ice dashed down his spine. He bites the inside of his cheek, straightening consciously, gaze fixed first on the steaming dish, and then on the man across from him.

Peverell has already seated himself with his own portion, eyebrows raised.

And Tom remembers—with an abrupt, terrifying ferocity—how little he knows of him. Nothing of his origin, motive, or what impulse drove him to strip bare in his presence. For a fleeting, exquisite instant, every long-practiced inhibition he had ever built around him dissolved; he existed purely in his own essence, Tom Riddle, carved down to the softest, most quivering pulp of himself. 

It was freeing. 

It was harrowing.

Such abandon cannot be suffered again. Not until he can return it in kind, watching Peverell bleed his secrets into the flagstone.

“I might ask the same of you,” Tom settles for instead. He sounds congested, veritably ill.

Peverell chews slowly. His jaw bone is cut cleanly beneath skin, the skin itself tanned. He must have taken a razor to his face this morning, for the cragginess of yesterday’s stubble has given way to a crop so neat it does not even cast a shadow.

“I told you already, Tom,” he swallows. “I only hate to see wasted potential.”

The food is good. Comfortingly good—zesty upon his tongue and warm on its way down. Though the pasta is a shade undercooked, the chew allows him to savour without appearing eager or grateful. He cannot complain. Tom’s stomach distends with a fullness he has not known in years, and with it, his mood drastically improved. He wonders how many more of his tempers might be tamed by the simple provision of a well-prepared meal.

It occurs to him midway through, after minutes of quiet. His mind has been running in contrary circles, both overworked and curiously idle. And just as he is recalling the tally he has kept of Peverell’s faults, Tom finds it ready at hand, served as neatly as the bowl had been. The lock turns in the door of his curiosity, that restless tenant housed deep in his gut since yesterday.

“You’re not a pureblood,” he hears himself say, without even considering it first.

Peverell nudges a single grain across his bowl. “No,” he confirms, without further comment.

Tom scoffs, forgetting the information he wrung from Alphard last night. 

“And the Wizengamot still permitted you to claim the Peverell heirship? How gracious.”

“They didn’t,” Peverell explains. “It just became mine when the house revealed itself to me. All that bureaucracy and politicking is just a courtesy, Tom. Magic doesn’t exactly wait around for an answer from the government.”

It’s hard to think under the flood of envy drowning him. The Gaunts, in their endless degeneracy, squandered all they had, leaving themselves nothing but filth. What could have been, had they preserved even a shred of dignity? Tom pictures himself in Peverell’s place, bending a centuries old legacy to his will after sending his boorish uncle off to Azkaban. 

The injustice of it burns. That another can pluck treasures from the air, while Tom, infinitely more deserving, must claw his way upward from dirt…

He does not finish his food. 

His flat gapes at him, inert and fetid as ever, steeped in the narcotic odour of aconite. 

Today, Tom doesn’t so much as lift his wand to air it out, as he would usually do upon his return. Instead, he collapses to his knees by the bed, digging up from underneath it the book gifted to him by Peverell. Spiderweb glints across the cover. He brushes it aside with a trembling impatience and pries the pages apart.

Latin lettering overfills its insides, like little necrotised intestines knotted together, writhing in tongues he knows instinctively. It practically radiates ancient knowledge; all at once, he is struck by the sacrilege of what he means to do. The wickedness burrows into his pores, a corrosive unholy ecstasy which flays away the stupor he has cocooned himself in. He is all sinew and bone, skin shucked and left to rot somewhere in Peverell’s dusty home. 

And in this, he is more himself than he has ever been. 

His mouth waters. The words breed upon the page, a living contagion, sweeping into him until his thoughts run septic and reality blisters. He aches to consume them whole, to press his face to the spot where Peverell had coaxed the shadows forth, surrendering to that raw, preternatural longing, neither entirely alive nor entirely mortal. Already his tongue pricks for the taste of vellum, lips to fasten upon the binding and suck. 

He unbuckles his trousers, dragging them down his thighs, underthings pulled with them. His cock swells half-hard already, meeting the air with an eager leap. Tom trails his fingers ritualistically up the underside, watching it twitch with a malignant awareness of its own. Traitor thing, he thinks. If more pressing matters did not demand his attention, he would see about an apt punishment.

Alas. 

For now, he crawls over the book, curling so he may latch sights upon his own body. His stomach clenches. How powerful he feels, how monstrously naughty. Peverell ought to be here instead of this inert witness, forced to face the full measure of Tom’s arousal, face-to-prick.  

He grips himself with a clammy hand, squeezing hard around the root to pump blood upward. Soon, his length rises to life. Veins marble and tauten up like inverted blue tributaries. Prespend beads precariously within the sheath of foreskin. He holds his breath to better witness the gathering weight—until, at its brink, it leaks upon the book below.

Newly wetted, the inked letters smear together into a slick, glistening conflation. Tom swallows tightly, screwing up to prevent coming too early at the sight.

Hold. Be disciplined.

Then: hard and fast, and faster still. 

Each dry motion catches skin against itself. The pain slices straight into an ecstasy so acute it borders on mania. Tom grunts, teeth grinding the inside of his cheek. His bollocks clap against his wrist. His hole pulses greedily around nothing. His hips rut into his fist. When at last his cock begins to chafe, too raw to handle without lubricant anymore, he gathers fluid from the tip and drags it roughly down. 

His visions splinter into frenzy.

Peverell is there beneath him, hair sweat-plastered and tangled, strong arms tied cripplingly to his sides. His face, so usually adorned in amusement, is rather undone in need, slack mouth open wide. Tom sees himself plunging down that throat, pinching his nose shut to smother him purple, the scent of fear smoking his lust. He gets off on these imagined things: Peverell choking on spit. Tears blurring his cheeks. Brawny chest shuddering for air. Hips bucking. Cock fat and useless, meant only to please Tom. 

Yet it is green that undoes him, in the end. 

He envisions green, and his release blows in thick spurts, striping the pages with milky white. The book is profaned. But he imagines it is Peverell instead. Peverell’s eyes that are soiled, lashes clumped, scleras reddened, eyelids glued helplessly shut as Tom’s seed blinds him.

He pumps himself through the aftershocks. Afterwards, when they ebb, Tom polishes his cock of any adhering cum. This, he brings down onto the spread open pages, wiping further filth on filth. The vellum stains darker as it absorbs it all.

The satisfaction is fierce. His body thrums, spent yet over-brimmed, the act leaving behind a spirit too large to be housed in his architecture. Tom raises his hand without any sober recognition of himself and presses it to his mouth. Metallic and musky and salt-dense; he tongues ridges and hollows, sucks every finger and laves the webbing in between, revelling completely in the world he has made.

Below, the book gapes, scabbed and dark where he has marked it. As Tom rises to take his bath, he resolves to let it fossilise that way.

His smile curdles as he considers. Perhaps he should return it. A gift, made richer for the intimacy of its corruption, passed back into Peverell’s ignorant hands.

Yes. He rather likes the thought of that.

Chapter Text

Tom rises with the sun.

In sleep, the coverlet had twisted itself about his neck, which his perversely industrious mind had taken for the cursed settee and its seams, stitching him into their grip once more. He cannot swear he did not also dream of Peverell’s hands crushing his throat, or the Thames sealing him under its oil-slick skin, or of a locomotive labouring fruitlessly up an endless slope.

Those images, half-imprinted onto the dry films of his eyes, shutter as he drags himself through the flat. Tom suspects he may not have yet woken at all. Everything seems infused with the same, inimical unreality as his nightmares. Dawn—neither yellow nor blue, but a diseased alloy of both—lays its lurid fever across the walls. 

Uneasy in the glare, he stumbles. His toe strikes the corner of De Regimine Animarum, discarded where he had left it on the floor. The opened pages are puckered, surface streaked in cum residue dried to a brittle glaze.

Gross.

As usual, there isn’t anything substantial to eat. In substitution, because he must, he gulps three glasses of water. They slosh coldly in his stomach, accomplishing nothing except to amplify the hag next door. She is already in the midst of her morning devotions—a rasping litany of laughter and coughing that reverberates through the walls. 

The sound unsettles his gaze; unsteadily, it arcs across the room, eyes tilting and rolling like cups nudged off balance. Tom takes in the home he reluctantly calls his own, which is really no home at all. He did not notice it before, but the wallpaper has blistered in several places, bubbling and peeling where the pipes are prone to leak. 

Wools returns to him, then. 

Namely, that little dormitory, annexed once it proved too hazardous to leave him with the other children. At the time, Tom had been proud—tremendously proud—that he alone merited such a rare concession. A room of his own, while the others were left to lie clustered together like worms underground. Granted to no one else, and all because he had surpassed them in menace and in cunning. 

Tom had luxuriated in his separation from the herd, and in the small cruelties that secured this privilege.

But pride could not conceal the truth forever. In the end, it was still a room in an underfunded orphanage. The cabinet would not close, the floorboards swelled with seepage, and the sheets itched until he shredded them to ribbons in his sleep. At twelve, his feet dangled beyond the edge of the bed; at sixteen, his knees no longer fit beneath the desk.

Then came Hogwarts, and with it the revelation of all that he truly deserved. Long tables where elbows did not collide, all the space in the world for his books, a big cotton-soft mattress that held him without sagging, and laundry that smelled of fresh summer air. He remembers how clean the floors felt beneath his bare feet, the warmth from the banked hearths, the high-ceilinged quiet that made his thoughts sound important, and the windows where he could watch the snow settle without ever getting cold. 

The room at Wools never changed, but he had. And for every summer Tom was forced to return, the shame squashed harder upon him. He would lie awake within those dirty walls and feel his body revolt against the confines that once contained it. What disturbed him wasn’t the squalor itself, but the memory of his own compliance—the way he had borne it all, and happily too. 

Wools had been small, yes, but Tom had been smaller; grateful even for the meagreness that told him he deserved nothing more.

Now the same awareness stirs, faint at first, then gathering shape. I want more. I have always wanted more. Yet when did he last speak those words to himself? Once they filled his waking hours, morning and night, the very pulse of his ambition. 

Borgin & Burkes was never meant to hold him. Only… it felt quite clever, at the time, to linger there under the guise of patience. And now the days have multiplied without his consent; three years have been consumed, yet he cannot distinguish one from the next. Three years, and he wakes to the same cracked basin and tired customers, who bring him no closer to what he seeks. 

Tom has advanced nowhere. 

The enormity of it hurts, monstrous in its quiet accumulation. He, who spat upon idleness, has lain fermenting in it. He, who once clawed at every boundary, has grown fungoid in the dark, embalmed in his inertia. What is self-reliance, when so much of it is staked on fortune? The Founders’ relics, they said, stashed in the coffers of Britain’s bloated gentry. And he believed them! He wagered everything on whisperings. Whisperings! 

Why had he made no other arrangements? Had he truly spent all this time, idle and expectant, waiting for the relics to tumble into his hands?

You told yourself you needed no one, when really you were praying to be found. 

It strikes him like a jinx to the chest: he is still that child, pressing to the window, gripping the sill, watching for someone that would never come. He is still in his pitiable little room, and the void inside him travels farther than he ever has. 

Only now there is nowhere left to wait.

The book lies a few feet away, taunting him. Last night, Tom felt liberated in spilling himself over its pages. 

What a joke. 

A choked gasp rips from him. His skull throbs as blood knots in its hollows. The room quivers with his unmade self. He feels as though the floor might split beneath him, exposing the vacuum where his future ought to be, that emptiness he has done nothing to fill. 

Before it gives way, Tom sprawls to the ground, back pressed to the wall, raking fingers through his hair. His mind convulses into motion, dragging panic into the shape of purpose. Already it begins to reckon: what to acquire, who to coerce, how to expand his influence so that this abyss will not open under him. The very machinery of his cunning slashes for purchase, fastening itself to the wreckage.

He must have a plan. 

At once, Hogwarts rises before him. Always Hogwarts, cradle and crown of his making. The only place that has ever known him in full.

The Defence post is still vacant, he thinks—and though it had once been denied to him, that was for want of years, not merit. Too young, Dippet insisted. But no longer. Now Tom is not that same precocious boy, but a man grown, seasoned by years of commerce with the darkest artefacts. 

Restored to the castle, life might resume its rightful pace. It has similarly saved him before. Little god, gestated in her womb, wherein he was taught to forge his first hunger—taken in again, unspooling from the entropy of his failures and poised to reclaim divinity. Only in that living magic might he slough the husk of this desiccated self and emerge anew. 

If he must, he will instruct snot-nosed fledglings in the art of warding away terrors they could never comprehend; it is likely no different than the fools he contends with at Burkes. Tom will endure their inanity if it means he can walk her halls once more, visit the sleeping Basilisk, hide his horcruxes in the Room of Hidden Things—where perhaps he might reclaim his greatness—before making the world his. 

Yes. Yes. And Slughorn could be the means. Epicurean patron he was, forever aching to lay claim to Tom as his prize. He’d been so mortified when his most brilliant pupil refused the gilded chains of the Ministry. Surely, he would readily trumpet his return! How sweetly he could whisper in Dippet’s ear, eager as he ever was for candied bribes. 

Slughorn would welcome him.

All he needs to do is reach out. 

The notion dissolves the instant he picks it up. 

How is he to begin? What could suffice, after years of obscurity? Shall Tom abase himself, grovelling in sweet nostalgia of their time as teacher and pupil? Shall he stoop so low as to suck the wheezing parasite’s cock for one last crumb of regard? 

He actually entertains it, very briefly, before wincing. Too vividly imagined, too plausible. It is like the Professor’s hearty, moist laughter spills over him in that instant, geniality slicking the air like bath oils. And Tom dreads what he already knows he would endure, as he had done before—the suffocation of being pitied, until he could no longer tell whether he wished to kill the man dead or crawl further into his blubbery warmth.

Worse still: the risk that, in their years apart, Slughorn’s ear has been filled by Dumbledore’s poison, that any letter Tom sends might be dissected and gossiped over, turned into a cautionary tale. To have to court favour again—when favour had once been his natural right! 

He would sooner retch.

But it would go that way with anyone, the terrible truth says. And he cannot deny it. He has let all his connections decay. The only men of consequence with whom he has recently talked to are Alphard—useless as any Black, despite his eccentricities—and Burke, whose tolerance extends only to days he makes more than fifty galleons. Then of course, there is Peverell—but—

Peverell.

His attention, wandering in agitation, snags to a single point—the book, suddenly acquiring a terrible gravity. Not for the first time, Tom finds himself unsettled by the gesture. The excess of it, to bestow a gift upon first acquaintance, implying that he might be bought, even then, before he could have been understood at all. 

Lodged like sand in between his teeth is that deep and infuriating voice: Do not flatter me, Tom. Or I’ll see you stocked so well you’ll never have an evening to yourself again. 

His hand twists at the Gaunt ring, still loose upon his finger, stubborn against every attempt to resize it. There’s an idea on the edge of thought. He tries to dig for it.  

And then—clarity. The fog lifts, his blindness burns away, and he sees. 

Of course. Of course. 

Peverell is not just any proprietor. He is not another nuisance to be rid of, or a carcass to make. 

Peverell is the cosmos’ correction. The universe itself tore him from its own entrails, chewed him up and spit him out onto the fulcrum of Tom’s stagnation. And all his gnarled edges are only toothmarks, little indents of providence, proof that it has bent and bled its own laws to deliver this anomaly into his path. A house of magic, an uncontested name—his riddles make no sense because they are not made for understanding, only to coax Tom from the lethargy threatening to devour him whole.

Hadn’t he sensed it, if satirically, on that very first day; that if Peverell had been more obliging, he would consider carrying off the entire house? And to think he almost overlooked it, content with stealing a few books, when instead he might take everything.

The revelation occurs to him with a near-violent relief. Indeed, nothing is beyond him. Tom has always excelled at deference where it suited him. It was what secured his ascendancy as student, prefect, then Head Boy, adored by Professors who granted him indulgences no other could dream of. Every door had opened because his tongue was so well-trained. 

The same art will serve him now, more exquisitely than before. Peverell is rich, lonely, and, by yesterday’s evidence, already compromised by desire for Tom. His house yawns open, large and unpeopled, dependent on an heir who has no comprehension of how to use the privilege bound up in his name. 

No comprehension but this: to heedlessly pour it into the hands of the first man to pay him any attention. 

Tom smiles. He understands now why the urge to kill him never took hold yesterday. 

He must’ve known it deep down already: Peverell is worth infinitely more alive.

Twilfitt and Tattings occupies the busiest corner of Diagon Alley, where the early-morning bustle is yet to rise. 

Tom considers himself singularly fortunate: the shop has not yet opened, and the witch attending the displays is entirely at his disposal. With a smoothly cast Imperio, he compels her to produce the finest off-the-rack robes, before assuming his station upon the fitting platform, standing superciliously as she tailors it to his figure.

The fabric cinches perfectly around his waist, pronouncing his broad shoulders flatteringly. When the exquisite work is complete, he Obliviates her, but not before allowing a moment to linger over his reflection. The image pleases him so thoroughly, not even the reckless employment of an Unforgivable in broad daylight is enough to trigger his paranoia. Peverell is bound to take him before the day concludes, and in that, provide Tom with all the protections wrapped up in his wealth.

His early start affords ample time for other refinements, too. 

Another bath, for one, where he submerges himself in water so scalding his skin blazes pink, timing it precisely so that not one pore might be left unpurged. Not for naught, it certainly makes the epilating charm less painful when he rids his full body of hair, including his crotch. 

He thinks he has the right to be so presumptuous, looking as handsome as he does. And so, Tom applies moisturiser with equal fervour, massaging it into his arms and thighs, conscious that at any moment he might be undressed, inspected, touched.

Then, the last of his Sleakeazy is spent upon his hair, drawn into the same style he has defaulted to since Abraxas once complimented it, a glossy curl left hanging over his forehead.

When he checks in at Borgin & Burkes at seven o’clock, Burke’s brows leap so high, one wonders how they do not vanish into his thinning hair. Tom takes this to mean he has done an excellent job—though the old man mutters only, “Finally come to your senses about those hideous Muggle rags then, ay boy?”

Peverell does not greet him with the same admiration.

“Ah,” his eyes travel contemplatively down Tom’s person, “you look different.”

“Yes,” Tom breathes, expectant, already poised to receive the inevitable compliment. Yet none comes. He allows a few beats to pass in silence before cutting his losses, unwilling to appear supplicant. “It did please Burke, at least. He claimed my new appearance would be less likely to frighten away customers.”

Peverell only shrugs and moves aside to admit him. Tom, following yesterday’s example, closes in—near enough that the fragrance he has daubed on his neck cannot be ignored. What he does not intend is the awareness the proximity elicits in him in turn: the memory of last night, bent in the dark, masturbating to the thought of this man.

But then, no. It had not been to Peverell, but rather to the glorious vision of his undoing, which is an altogether separate thing. Tom has always done it that way, lacing pleasure out of pain and misery, ever since his earliest discovery of the act. 

If Peverell’s presence now excites him, it is only because the boundary between victim and fantasy has grown inconveniently narrow.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Peverell says as they move further in. “I liked the suits.”

Today, Tom finds his susceptibility to insult remarkably well-suppressed. He is, after all, perfectly convinced of his own elegance, thank you very much, his vanity playing only its appointed part. To charm Peverell into an infatuation that loosens pursestrings, Tom must accommodate every caprice, however woefully misguided.

So he files the note away in memory, already planning a venture into Muggle London to relieve Selfridges of its choicest waistcoats.

“How was your morning, then?” Peverell continues, unthinkingly, leading him past the library, the parlour, the kitchen—the whole of the ground floor. He stops by the banister. Apparently, today’s amusements are upstairs. Tom follows without real interest. He cannot scrap up the motivation to care about anything else but the greater prize before him. Already, the idea of work feels superfluous, a temporary humiliation soon to be remedied. If matters proceed as he intends, he might resign altogether, and quite soon.

“Hungry,” he murmurs, lowering his gaze to let his lashes do their work. The effect, he suspects, is devastating. No gesture is beneath him if it might serve the cause, and so he adds—plaintive, artless as a child—“I don’t really have much to eat at home.”

He braces for the tender response. Again, none comes. Peverell only regards him, eyes narrowing suspiciously. 

It is not an unfamiliar sensation. He has been chastised in this way before: his first night at Hogwarts, when Dumbledore caught him prowling the corridors after curfew, too restless to sleep, and dismissed him with a grave warning never to be found out of bed again. Years later, Tom accepted the badge of prefect chiefly so he might break curfew nightly, with impunity, just to spite the old maggot.

To be caught out in this manner is not a welcome feeling, now that it is back.

They hold one another’s gaze, neither yielding, until Tom allows a faint fracture into his voice, perfecting the part. It is almost pitiable.

(But if pity is the road to indulgence, then pity he will provide in abundance.)

“My salary is meagre. It is house calls such as yours that keep me afloat. So if you could let me know what I’ll be working on today, I—”

“Cut the shit. I know you could very well steal a meal, Tom. You’re a capable boy.”

He could, of course. Tom is all-powerful, and he has stolen far greater things. But to expend his talents on mere sustenance—or to prettify that wretched flat, or conjure himself finer clothes for the sake of it—has never tempted him. What triumph is there if it remains unseen? If no one bears witness to his superiority, the effort is wasted. He is immortal, after all, and appetite is for those still bound to decay.

Hunger, by contrast, dignifies him. It marks him apart from the soft-bellied, easily-satisfied creatures who act according to their animal whims. It was hunger that roused him from his long torpor at Borgin & Burkes this morning, hunger that reminded him he was not made to live among the dregs. Had he filled his stomach or softened his bed, who knows how much longer he might have endured.

Glancing around the house, he feels a tremendous ache for this instead. Grand and beautiful, an unassailable trophy of supremacy. It is all that ought to be his.

(Because Tom has never desired the meal itself, only a place at the table at which it is served.)

He shakes his head. “Theft is dishonest. I would not dream—”

“Oh, shut up. Come on.” Peverell interrupts with brisk impatience, shouldering past him into the kitchen.

Tom grins and follows, inwardly exhilarated. Just that small surrender is enough to keep him going. He is newly certain his efforts will not end in vain. Peverell doubts his act, yet cannot prove otherwise, and so must concede eventually. Grudgingly-movable object, meet unstoppable force. 

Indeed, Tom has summoned every subtle skill in his repertoire. Even the curl of his shoulders is done to affect helplessness. And is that not a gift? Who would not take pleasure in the role of saviour, in standing taller than the man before them? Few could resist it, but Peverell is—unaccountably—insistent on resistance still. 

It only inflames his determination.

In the kitchen, a platter of pastries waits on the table, kept warm in stasis, with pots of jam and butter arrayed beside it. Peverell gestures vaguely toward a chair before drawing out the kettle and busying himself at the stove. Tom lowers himself onto the seat. The scones in particular part easily beneath his fingers and dissolve saltily on his tongue.

He chews in silence, watching Peverell, who waits for the water to boil.

“I read your book,” Tom lies.

“Your book,” Peverell corrects him, without so much as a glance.

Tom inhales deeply, forcing a flush to his cheeks and biting his lip in a gesture he’s studied before the mirror countless times, conscious of the pretty colour it brings to his mouth. He does not even have to fake the uneasy tumble of his stomach, though of course Peverell cannot divine what his organs do beneath his skin, so that is useless.

“Yes—yes, I suppose it is mine,” he murmurs, barely above his breath. “I remain grateful for your generosity, Lord Peverell. I love reading above all things, yet I have encountered nothing so enthralling since I left Hogwarts.”

“What kind of stuff did you read at Hogwarts?” Peverell asks, cocking his head, assuming that tone of his. Direct and interrogative, carrying an age he scarcely shows otherwise. Like a man well-practiced in command, and Tom wonders—again, as he does often—from what place it issues, what hidden world informs it.

“Oh, you know. It is rather embarrassing.” He smiles bashfully to better avoid addressing all the dark magic he feasted upon as a teen. 

“I think we’re well past the point of embarrassing.” 

The look Peverell sends him makes it plain he refers to the settee.

Which is the worst thing he could have said—Tom thought it buried. Fury rushes to him in an instant, a vein popping at his temple. He grits his teeth, forcing himself to breathe slow and deep for several moments, all discipline bent upon containing his temper.

And Peverell—infuriating man—watches him, smiling. The gall. 

By the time Tom composes himself, the tea is ready. Peverell dips a sachet into his own mug, lifting and lowering it, hyperfixated on the deepening shade of the water. He seems fine to abandon the inquiry. However, Tom, still intent upon pleasing him, cannot relinquish the chance. 

He swallows his resentment and reaches for the nearest, undamning truth, hoping that a genuine admission might gleam persuasively.

“Books on table manners,” he admits. “On French and Latin. On land ownership amongst the purebloods. Genealogies too, so that I might know who was related to whom. Which turned out to be everyone, to everyone.”

Peverell chuckles, distracted, apparently uninterested in the implication—which suits Tom perfectly. There is nothing glamorous about the long evenings spent alone in the library, poring over pages, practicing his vowels so that they rang correctly, arranging spoons until he instinctively knew which to use for soup and pudding. It is, in fact, lamentable. For a time, Tom truly believed that mastery of such trivial things might be the sole impediment to his belonging. 

Of course, it was not. His fellow Slytherins saw right through him. Their advantages ran far deeper than etiquette, and whatever it was, it had been plainly written on his face. 

He has never forgiven it.

Still, he makes it useful. How remarkable he is.

“Pickings are slim when you’re so fixated on blood status,” Peverell ribs. 

“It is a shame,” Tom purrs, letting his hand fall on the table, scant inches from the other man's. “They do not know what they are missing.”

What fragile ease he had so carefully nurtured collapses. Peverell leans back, brows knitting into a frown. Suddenly, Tom is the one made to feel ridiculous, again. 

Does he not wish to be flirted with? To be offered Tom Riddle’s attention—more flattering than the attention of a god—is the greatest gift one could bestow, and he dares to shrink from it!

Tom’s fingers twitch upon the table. Set beside Peverell’s, they look too pale, too narrow, too… unmarked. Which is surreal, given they had not always been that way. He remembers how soot would lodge stubbornly in his nail beds, refusing to wash from the creases no matter how fiercely he scoured. By contrast, all his pure-blooded peers, given wands since the cradle, possessed the hands of infants. 

From the moment Tom gained mastery over his magic, he resolved his own would never betray him again: no callouses or scars, nothing to prove that he had once laboured like a Muggle. Now, his resemble theirs.

Peverell’s do not. His knuckles are littered with shallow cuts, paler than the rust of his skin, and the pads are hardened against wear. They are not the hands of an aristocrat, but ones that have worked and fought. They may well have belonged to an Auror, or even to the bargemen Tom used to observe along the Thames’ edge. 

And seeing this—

For some inexplicable, grating reason, Tom’s hatred softens, crumbling under the familiar weight of curiosity. His temper, ever volatile, flares only to dissipate when opportunity presents itself. Already, he considers how to broach it.

“What did you do, before all this?” he asks, resuming his performance as if no hitch had occurred. His wrist drifts closer to Peverell’s, brushing the fine sweep of arm hair. Tom shivers inwardly.

Peverell blinks, slow to parse the rapid change in tension. He scrutinises their proximity for a moment. Then, when his pea-sized brain finally catches up, he answers, “Travelled, mostly. I came a very long way to be here.” 

“I would like to travel. I have never left Great Britain before,” He lets his voice warble, just slightly—enough to suggest that confession costs him shame. Surely the man will hear the invitation in it, the little plea to lift a bright, brilliant boy into the world. I hate to see wasted potential, he’d said.

But he offers no response. 

The silence is intolerable. “Have you ever been to Albania?” Tom ventures. 

Peverell presses his lips together. “Albania? That’s it? That’s the dream? There’s nothing there but trees you could find anywhere else.”

“So you have been.” 

“Once. I’d recommend Portugal or Morocco instead.”

“I don’t fare well in heat.”

He snorts, unguarded, a dimple creasing his cheek. Tom feels the ground tremble beneath him, the cracks in the earth all settling into alignment.

“No, I can’t imagine you do. But the snow’s just as bad to deal with, out there in the Albanian wilderness.” Peverell rises as he speaks, and the mass lodged in Tom’s throat calcifies, threatening to choke him. “I suppose it wasn’t all for nothing, though. I picked up some things on my travels there.”

Tom stands too, seeking to recover the advantage of his height. He is taller, yes—but Peverell looks down at him regardless.

“Want to see?” Peverell offers, with that same easy insolence.

Yes. Yes. At last, it is working.

He nods—too eager to fake—and follows before the moment can cool. His pulse clatters in his ears. Sweat clings to his palms; he wipes them gracelessly on his stolen robe. Peverell’s back is broad ahead of him, and Tom’s anticipation gathers behind it like static. The promise of setting sight on special treasures (of being shown them) unseats a tender and ridiculous yearning in him. Absurdly, he feels almost like the spoiled child he was never permitted to become, conducted up to his playroom at last.

They leave the kitchen and mount the grand staircase, their steps clicking in the sacred quiet. There is a small sitting room on the landing, which actually bears traces of the man who lives here, not merely haunts. A book cracked open on the arm of a chair, a pair of slippers half-hidden beneath it. Tom files these details greedily, noting what he can use to better curry favour later.

They move on. The corridors tangle endlessly, and though he loses the order of turns—left, then right, then right again—his mind hoards the rest. It seems the Peverells favoured one precious metal above all else. Gold glitters everywhere. It rims the ceilings, streams down the mouldings, and winks from the hinges. Light catches and rebounds in every direction. Tom traces the refractions restlessly, dazzled. 

Finally, they reach a door swathed in wards. The pressure ripples outward, droning and buzzing in a way that makes his teeth clench. Peverell stands close enough that his heat bridges the space between them. Tom could almost lean in, let it soothe the goosebumps mottling his skin. Perhaps, if they coalesced into one—their flesh fused, cells ruptured and absorbed, bones splintering like the branches of a warped tree—the potent, territorial magic would relent, no longer branding Tom an intruder but as kin to its maker.

It’s a silly thought. Useless, too. The wards soon ease. The door creaks open.

A study lies beyond, its curtains drawn, walls and furniture steeped in deep shades of mahogany. Peverell lifts a hand, and one by one the candles kindle, first outlining his shoulders as he crosses to the desk, then silhouetting the planes of his face, particularly the gnarled scar that mars his forehead.

Nothing happens when their gazes clash. 

He looks to be… waiting. For what, Tom cannot say.

The hush is sobering. In this silent dark, it is as though Tom’s been suddenly plunged in oceanic waters, drowned where light dies, where oxygen cannot reach. And there, not far away enough, stalks the even blacker shadow of a killer fish, scenting his blood. Instinct hisses in his mind; immediately, his eyes wrench away from Peverell’s, obeying that knowledge older than reason: never meet a predator head on. 

Yet the compulsion grates his ego, dragging awareness onto itself. No sooner has it taken hold than Tom compels himself to cast it aside. No, he thinks—Peverell is not the predator. Tom is. If he so pleases, he could slash open his broad chest and eat the viscera that spills out. He could seize the whole manor and torch it to cinders. 

He repeats this to himself sternly, letting the mantra suffuse through the cold wood of his wand as he caresses it, disciplining himself back into composure.

When he drags his attention back, it catches abruptly—snagged on something he had failed to notice before. Not Peverell, but the shelf just behind his head.

Four objects hover there, each suspended in its own halo of conjured light. Tom startles. Peverell does not trouble to turn, and in that lies the taunt: these are the treasures he has been brought to witness.

A sword of silver, its hilt dressed in rubies that burn like dragon’s eggs. A name gleams beneath, though he is too far away to discern what it says. He does not need to, in any case—he knows well enough whose hand once held that blade. 

Next, a cup, modestly sized in comparison but entirely gold, two handles wrought on either side. Upon its face is an engraving of a badger.

Then, a diadem, delicately fashioned to fit upon a brow, its sapphire proud in the centre, another gem dangling beneath the widow’s peak.

And lastly, the locket. Heavy, golden, its chain arranged as if about a neck, green stones set in a serpentine S. Salazar’s—he names it instantly, unlike the others, which were accompanied by a numb disbelief. Tom’s chest tightens, as though a lasso had snared the prongs of his ribs and drawn them inward, knotting his breath with each tug. A bell tolls in his numbed skull, so loud he might liquefy in the sound and fuse into the charged air itself. 

His fingers twitch. He cannot hold himself. Nothing but a single word occurs to him: 

Mine. 

Peverell tilts his head. The absence of a smile is almost indistinguishable from the presence of one; he looks impossibly smug, just the same. 

Tom’s eyes dart between him and the relics. His wand leaps into his hand. He inhabits his body in a way he hasn’t done in years, suffering with every agonizing heartbeat. Heat licks at his skin and he despises it—would much prefer the cold he is used to. It would allow him to think. But his magic clamours too, singing to him, urging him to steal. And then, there is that orphan boy, loud as ever, who could never keep his hands to himself, crying for the same. The only buffer he has, the first thing he ever learned at Wools: hurt, take, keep. 

Mine. They are mine. He brought me here because he knows I want them. 

Fire fills him, furious that the path to power has been barren until this instant; that Peverell, of all men, should stand between him and what is rightfully his.

Tom pounces.

The curse that lashes from him is wild and destructive, drawn from the darkest place he knows. Peverell swats it aside like it were no more than a careless Expelliarmus, shattering the windows. He does not flinch—only steps closer, his voice calm, amused.

“Thought you might react like that.”

Rotten little cunt. Feculent, godless wretch. Putrid fucking mongrel of a man. He ought to be wetting himself in fear. Even Tom’s own muscles have seized up, reactive like the cords of a guillotine, straining to hold his skeleton together while sharp, reckoning magic dices his organs into disarray. He could snap this very room in half. Does Peverell not comprehend the dangers of standing within reach?

Evidently not. He does not even return Tom’s desperation. The bastard moves with a precision that belies the chaos he feels, and in a single motion Tom finds himself slammed to the floor. His skull makes a sickening crack on impact, air fleeing so brutally it rattles the discs of his spine. His wand skitters out of his grip, but the sound is swallowed by the roar of bloodrush. 

Peverell’s weight bears him flat, shoulders flattened under thick biceps.

Tom thrashes, elbows twisting, legs kicking, a graceless flail that accomplishes nothing. His fingers claw at the floor, scraping lines in the polish, but the effort betrays itself. It only draws more of Peverell’s strength onto him, the other man anticipating every move and pressing harder, guiding Tom’s struggle into futility. 

A mortifying heat blooms where bruises have yet to form. The world pulses to the rhythm of his failure. For the first time since he was eleven and his wardrobe went up in flames, Tom has to reckon with the raw scale of another’s power. 

He pushes the thought away—must, as always—but it snaps back. He had allowed himself to forget: the same hands to free him from yesterday’s predicament and cook for him afterward had also stripped a centuries-old curse from a book without a word. 

He forgets, too, that this situation speaks to its own measure of competence. Peverell has the Founders’ relics, and Tom does not. 

There is pointed pressure at his neck, just below the chin. He breathes, and Peverell’s wand drives further into the sensitive flesh. Struggle becomes necessary, then useless, then irresponsible. Tom falls slack to the floor. All that remains is the red mist staining his vision, denying him any clear reading of his opponent’s intent. Were he less undone, he might be able to twist Peverell’s self-assuredness to his own advantage. But he is not himself. Reason has deserted him entirely. His life may hinge on this moment. 

Tom surrenders.

They are both panting. Peverell finds his voice before Tom can gather his own.

“There we go. Easy does it, Tommy.”

The smallness of that diminutive peels away what little composure he had managed to summon. His anger is fresh and violent and hot enough to blind him. Tom should rip him apart. He should buck free and split the earth and claw his eyes out. 

And yet he remains in place, disbelief holding him still. Just how is Peverell so unmoved, when only moments ago he’d been assaulted in his own house?

The answer comes by degrees, his senses stitching back together.

Because he foresaw it. He brought you here for this very reaction.

“I am calm,” Tom hisses.

“No need to pretend,” Peverell smiles. “We can stay like this until you are, alright?”

Only then does Tom register the ways they fit together. Peverell straddles his hips, knees braced on either side, warmth pooling where their bodies meet, crotch-to-crotch. His forward lean dangles his mouth perilously close, so that Tom must inhale whatever he exhales, the air stirred to life by mint and pine and a cleanly human scent. 

Their breaths catch on that tempo, shallow and tangled. Soon, Tom cannot tell which belongs to whom. Calloused hands travel slowly upwards and settle where his collarbones hinge to the sternum. The exposed skin there feels perilously thin, tender like fruit flesh—which is not at all conducive to calming him down. 

It ought to humiliate him. It does humiliate him. Yet the humiliation carries a more unwelcome countercurrent; aberrant and pulpy in the cavity of his abdomen, an exigency that demands recognition. There is power in the way Peverell’s body cages his own, in the raw physicality of being held. Tom does not wish to acknowledge it, but his cock leaps all the same.

The Founders’ relics wink in his periphery. Above all else but survival, above even the ignominy of his position, one thought refuses to be displaced. Tom must have them. They must be his. Otherwise, the years will collapse completely, three revolutions of the sun eroded to ash, spent bending before Britain’s most shit-stuffed simpletons, spurning every well-meant hand extended to him, all for the singular principle that he could achieve greatness on his own. 

All for nothing. All for this.

It had been wrong to strike. Too many variables, not enough preparation. The world had surged against him, and he had been caught off-guard. Simple. It wasn’t a personal failure, merely a failure of strategy.

And strategy he still possesses. The plan upon which he has always relied remains inviolate: gratify desire, and soon, the hand that feeds forgets it is being bled.

He will give Peverell whatever he wants—for now. And only when the man is melted, drained of his dense and calloused shell, will Tom claim everything. 

First, he must steady himself.

He closes around the thought that has never failed him: Hogwarts.

Hogwarts. The name alone assuages his rage, like a cool hand smoothing the fever from his brow.

He remembers the first footfall he laid within its grand halls, when the stones themselves bent in recognition, resonant with a welcome he had never received anywhere else. The castle accepted what there was nothing else to recommend, not even a name worthy of mention. Tom knew this to be true, because no other could claim as instinctive a dominion over its halls. From the outset, he had been the natural heir. Hogwarts had been forged in expectation of him—for him to perfect his gifts, to grow his magic to full maturity, to prepare the world for Lord Voldemort’s dominion. It was predestined, practically marked from the moment his greatest ancestor joined the rest.

What does Peverell know of any of it, his mind supplies, unhelpfully. He has no right to own its legacy.

Shush, another voice presses. Just be patient. They will be yours soon enough.

“Better?” Peverell asks.

“Yes,” Tom answers. It scrapes from his throat. 

Peverell is clearly unconvinced, because when he straightens, he stoops to collect Tom’s wand from where it rolled off. 

Tom fixes the man with a murderous glare, daring him to be so bold.

“Get up and I’ll give it to you,” Peverell instructs.

He had not thought to rise, and the very suggestion pricks at his pride. Tom obeys, but in a way which advertises his irritation—pushing himself upright with a huff, sweeping his fingers through his hair, brushing dust from his robes. Peverell studies him as he ruffles with disdain.

When he is done, Tom bares a mocking smile. It earns him his wand back.

If I were him, I would never return it.

But he does, which is precisely why Tom stays his hand. His palm closes around yew; at once, the rightness of it clicks into place, easing his mind into clarity. He feels himself again. 

Onto phase two, then.

He lowers his gaze, whispering to prevent spitting it out, “I apologise for my outburst, Lord Peverell.”

An incredulous huff answers him.

He wedges past the dismissal. “It was no more than a moment’s madness. You must understand—all this time I’ve spent convincing myself there was nothing left to find in this world, only to come face-to-face with a piece of history made whole… You too would be overwhelmed. There was no ill-will intended.” He softens the admission, impressing a candid vulnerability in his tone. “Merely the fervour of someone who has wanted too much, for too long.”

“Forgive you, because you were just excited?” Peverell shakes his head. “That’s new.”

“Because I mistook the occasion. But I am not so blind as to deny the error in my ways. Let me instead propose an arrangement,” he tips his chin, hiding clenched fists behind his back. “You did what no one else could; centuries of avarice have failed where you succeeded. That is no small triumph, yet you hide it away from those that might comprehend its magnitude. Why diminish so exquisite an accomplishment? Borgin and Burkes possesses both the means and the network to honour it properly. Let me be the instrument of that transaction. Let me see to it that your genius is not wasted.”

Peverell blinks at him, then lets out a short startle of a laugh—bright and so utterly unfitting the gravity of what Tom has just posited, it makes his jaw click in irritation. 

“Gods, that’s kind of incredible,” he says, shuddering with the aftershocks of hysteria. “Five minutes ago you tried to curse me, and now you want to play broker.”

Colour slinks hotly along Tom’s neck. 

“I’m not delusional, Tom. You can dress it up however you like—”

He looks good—infuriatingly good—when trampling down Tom’s last nerve. The grin splitting his features is pearly white and shiny with the wetness of his mouth. Tom wants to wrench those teeth loose from their beds, sink a thumb into the tender caverns of his gums, feel the pulp collapse underneath the pressure, until Peverell breaks along with it. The vision is the only thing restraining him from another impetuous, eruptive display of violence.

“—but it’s still just you wanting what I have. I’ll give you credit—trying to murder me was ambitious, at least. But this? Pathetic, really.”

Tom eye twitches. “Then what is your intention? To hoard them until theft or desecration overtakes you? Surely an intelligent man such as yourself understands the envy these relics invite. Better they be entrusted to an establishment that will outlive you, so they may be revered forever, rather than risk their vanishing once more when you are no longer here to guard them.”

“Mm, tempting speech. But I didn’t put in all that work just to cash out.”

“You will be rewarded beyond your wildest—”

“Oh, I bet. Might I interest you to know,” Peverell obnoxiously interrupts, “your beloved shop already had Salazar’s locket. For years, in fact. Burke picked it up for next to nothing. Real reverent approach he took there.”

“I don’t believe you,” Tom sputters.

“Check the ledgers yourself. Winter of 1926,” his smile slackens, not quite pity—Tom is too superior to be pitied—yet straying toward it, which is offensive all the same. An uneasiness overtakes him at the date, and then, “He scammed a poor pregnant woman for it.”

Of course, Burke’s predilection for the misery of others was never in doubt. There is no abjection the old miser would not indulge when profit dangles before him. Indeed, it was precisely this which secured Tom his post in the first place—a poor mudblood seemed the perfect hire for one who wished to pay starvation wages. That his family languishes at the lowest rung of the twenty-eight is inevitable; greed is the only legacy the name Burke evokes. None of this surprises Tom.

No. What surprises him is how swift and vivid it takes shape, this specter in his mind: a frail woman, belly burdened, breath shortened by illness, trudging through ankle-deep snow, lips blue and skin sallow, bartering away her pride. 

He does not need to be told her name. The vision is enough.

Because before he traced Morfin Gaunt to his hovel, before he slaughtered the Riddles, this was the only image of family Tom possessed. Mrs. Cole never resisted the temptation to paint it in his vicinity, though he had never asked. Of course he turned out this way. His mother was half a corpse when she came to us. Withdrawal, I shouldn’t wonder. Died in that very bed. He tore out of her. Too much since the hour he was born. Too much for all of us, even on our best days. God help us. 

He thought he had purged her from his thoughts. Yet in an instant, she stands again before him, handing away Salazar’s locket—her inheritance—for Tom. Had she known her death would follow? Perhaps not. Perhaps, if she had, she would have kept it, so he might have something to hold onto. 

But in the fragile calculus of survival, she gave it away, if only to live long enough to see him.

Tom has never been placed above anything. Yet Merope had done so without hesitation, choosing him over her last wealth.

The knowledge sinks inextricably into him. A freezing pressure drives into his chest, unlike anything he can name—closest to rage or shame.

Shame.

Unbearable. He smothers it at once.

“You bought it off him, then?” is the only question safe enough to speak, and still his voice is hoarse. Tom realizes how close he came to the locket, but he refuses to imagine what might have happened had he been at the shop before it sold. 

Or if his mother—

“No, actually. He sold it ages ago to—ah, erm, well, a close friend of mine. She also already owned the cup. It took some persuading, but she handed them off to me soon enough.” 

“How fortunate,” Tom mutters.

“Quite. A much neater tale than the sword, anyway. That one’s a mess.” Peverell pauses, then, absurdly, as if he owes Tom an apology, adds, “Sorry.”

But he does owe you. He owes you everything.

They stand in tense silence for an eternity. Tom breaks first. Despite his resolution not to think about it, he wonders whether the information the Grey Lady gave him had been correct—if Tom was at all close to procuring Ravenclaw’s treasure, as well. 

“And the diadem? Last I heard it was in—”

“A tree hollow in Albania, yeah.” Peverell speaks lightly now, half-cast eyes stirring something in Tom. It intensifies when he rakes a hand through his unruly hair. Grey strands catch the candlelight, and it strikes him again that this isn’t a boy, whatever his manner of speaking might suggest, but a man who has already crossed the threshold of magical maturity.

Peverell would have left Hogwarts years before his own arrival. Those are years he spent wandering the world freely, amassing knowledge, all while Tom remained shut away in a reeking orphanage, digging for trash in the Thames. Every hour of Tom’s confinement matched against Peverell’s advancement; those moments Peverell spent mastering his skills outstripped Tom’s own years of effort.

And before that—Tom imagines it so clearly, it must be true—as he was still oblivious in Merope’s belly, Peverell must have been rich, cushioned by living parents who cared, drawn into circles of schoolyard affection. With his glibness, he must have sorted into Gryffindor, and that alone would have earned him Dumbledore’s affection too. 

Peverell must have had all the things Tom had been denied. And that, he decides, is the only explanation for the gulf between them. Because it cannot be merit. It cannot be brilliance. If it were so, Tom would have already had the world folded into his palms. 

The injustice is exquisite, already coalescing into an ache of obsession. Tom wishes he were older, as ancient as the earth itself, so that he may have all the answers and none of the questions. Then Peverell might be nothing more than a bug to flatten under his boot.

“Sit, Tom,” Peverell says, almost kindly, gesturing toward one of two armchairs in the corner. “I’ll tell you all about it, if you want.”

Tom does want. He burns for it. 

So, he obeys.

Chapter Text

He sits on a drift of white sand, grains like sifted sugar cupping his heels. Snow does not receive him in this way, though Tom cannot recall where he ever learned to tell one from the other. The beaches of his boyhood were not beaches at all but strands of shale, rocks bitten through with salt.

Night sweeps above him. Its breadth makes the air seem lighter, almost buoyant. Stars perforate the dark like pinholes in silk, and the swollen gibbous moon hangs indecently close, blanching the shore to a waxy, devotional colour. Around him, green cliffs tower inward, and from that incline, a house catches his eye—sea-glass blue, tens of windows catching and reflecting the sky, scattering it over a lawn where white peacocks wander, their plumage brushing the grass like ghosts.

He wonders where Abraxas has wandered off to. This is his family’s property, after all. Tom must have come with him; though not, he suspects, with Lord Septimus’ permission.

Perhaps his father has already taken him back.

The tide rises, black water cresting over itself, breaking against the shoreline in gentle arcs. Spume froths, and the moonlight rides each swell like a pale, indifferent passenger. When the waves retreat, they leave treasures scattered before him—wet gold and jewels, pooling seductively on the shore. They are like little stars in their own right. He considers gathering them, but the backwash reclaims its offerings before he can.

He lets it go. He does not mind so much. The weather is perfect, neither cold nor hot, and he feels no want of anything. 

Tom is content to just sit there. 

He has never known peace like this before. It becomes clear that he is dreaming.

Still—when he wakes, it takes some time to remember where he is. He lies sprawled on a vast bed, sheets flowing with the coolness of the sea, and he coasts, buoyed, between wakefulness and water. 

His back, ordinarily sore in the morning, offers no complaint as he shifts to the side, letting the canopy above draw him into its heaviness. Velvet, dyed imperial violet, embroidered with willow trees in filigreed gold.

Right. Elderhurst.  

He takes a bleary survey of his surroundings. The room is dim, vacant and unfamiliar. His wand lies under one of several pillows, which he locates only after a moment of searching. He is in the clothes he’d worn underneath his new robe: trousers, now rumpled with the unevenness of sleep, and a dress shirt, rucked up to his underarms, abdomen bare and alert to the air. How he came to lie under the covers, he does not know. Tom remembers not intending to sleep at all.

The day before is hard to fix—if indeed it was the day before. The absence of light hemming the curtains confirms that night is still underway. So, only hours could have passed since he sat with Peverell in the study, discovering contours of a story he has long coveted as his own. Ravenclaw’s diadem and Albania, villages emptied in fear of vampire covens, excursions across unmapped mountains, caves alive with magic.

In that suspended, half-lit space, his attention no longer belonged to him. Peverell is—regrettably—a gifted storyteller, and no less a man of action. Had he not known him, Tom would have rejected half his exploits as impossible. Yet he did know him, and that familiarity did nothing to temper their impact. He was both thrilled and ashamed to believe him at all. And the night reformed around that rhythm—each of them conceding, with wary measure, small fragments of themselves. 

By the time Peverell wheeled the bar cart closer, Tom was oddly amenable to suggestion. Port and cognac; the intimacy of a voice speaking only for him; a glass passed into his hand before he could ask; another following as he sipped, listening to tales of the creature that stalked Peverell for weeks before he struck it down. It became easy, almost natural, to imagine himself in that wilderness, decisions refracted through his own brilliance—whom he would have exploited, whom he would have left to die, what steps he would have taken to avoid the scars marring Peverell’s shin.

(Trouser leg rolled up, baring tan flesh bisected by red, ragged lines. Tom’s throat knots uncomfortably, his attention flicking between the daring tilt of Peverell’s grin and the lean sweep of his calves, where dark hair melts into shadow.

“Wicked, yeah?”

“Grotesque, more like,” he croaks, crossing an ankle over his knee to shield his crotch.)

Liquor-warmed, the clean, compartmentalised walls of his thoughts sagged and seeped, until the fantasies he was mapping for himself took on other shapes. Against every inclination, Tom began to picture the both of them there, together—striding side by side through that dark land, hands clasped for balance over rough terrain, laughter loosening their inhibitions, the hush of firelight, a tent staked for two.

A dangerous thing to long for. He felt it keenly, drunk though he was, by the frenzied warmth pooling in his chest. Tom meant to leave then, to Disapparate someplace where desire could not make a spectacle of him. But he stumbled as he stood, and Peverell—perhaps just as far gone, perhaps not—caught him by the elbow and refused to let go. 

His grip was steadying. Gentle. And it was in that state that Tom allowed himself to be steered down the corridor, into this room, and left.

The bed really is far too comfortable. Perhaps he meant only to rest until the world stopped pitching—but instead sank whole into sleep.

Now, Tom buries his face into the pillow. It smells strongly of lavender and wind, like laundered linen dried outdoors. Jarringly clean in a house that has surrendered so much else to decay. The room, he realises, has been tended for company. There were sleepers here before him. There will be others to take his place the moment he is gone.

The thought sets his teeth on edge.

Tom cannot respect a faithless comfort. That it pleased him means nothing if it did so indiscriminately, with no regard to what he is owed. Even worse that it dogged him in-dream, only to condemn his waking moment, when consciousness returned and he was forced to relearn the old, enduring truth: nothing he values is ever truly his. 

Soon he will go back to Knockturn. Soon, Peverell—along with whatever guests he pleases to admit—will go on enjoying what they have never earned.

It should be his. All of it. The library and its hoarded centuries, the well-stocked kitchen, the gilt cornices, the cursed furniture, the endless bedrooms, and the Founders’ relics, most of all. These are meaningful things, worthy things, and it is an outrage that others should possess them while he goes without.

They could be yours.

They could. 

Even inebriated, it was difficult to miss the pleased little glimmer in Peverell’s eyes when pressing him to stay. The vanity in it. The eagerness. 

Men like him live to be indispensable. It is a universal truth, one which Tom has never struggled to make use of. His oldest art indeed: the suggestion of a fault line, a tremor shown at precisely the right angle, never more. It never fails. They come eager to mend what they believe they’ve discovered. Peverell seemed to be the exception—unmoved, unbreakable—until the smallest, unguarded crack stirred him like all the rest.

Another, and he might be snared fully.

Tom imagines it. 

Imagines drifting back into sleep and waking later, with a full spread of breakfast already prepared. Peverell would frown at his crumpled attire, before producing a robe from one of the many wardrobes scattered about the manor, offered without a thought to their antiquity. Or—better yet—shrug off the one he wore, if only to take pleasure in how ill it fits Tom, with nothing to be done about it. They must be returned as was, or else repaid in kind.

Would he like feeling owed? 

Abraxas certainly had. He smothered Tom with riches, solely for the satisfaction of the debt they incurred. After all, to be spoiled by a Malfoy was an honour, and one best justified.

Quills that wrote in molten silver, goblin-wrought rings, chessmen of obsidian and ivory. Green paper parcels left inconspicuously on his nightstand. (“Wear this to class. It cost a fortune, AM.”) Butterbeers and lemon lollies on Hogsmeade weekends. Everything off the trolley on the Hogwarts Express. Never for any special occasion. Teasing, always teasing, seeking the softest hinge of Tom’s composure, that hypothetical hidden seam where he might crack open, exposing the sort of weakness other boys betrayed unthinkingly. 

No such weakness exists.

And Abraxas, in time, came to understand it too. Ever since Tom let slip the circumstances of Myrtle’s death—offhandedly, born of boredom more than trust—the game between them mutated. Abraxas never spoke of it, but he no longer entertained the fantasy of power. He’d preen, he’d posture, but beneath the veneer ran the tight-held knowledge of what Tom was capable of.

Perhaps that was why Tom indulged him. Control was never in question; the fun lay in pretending otherwise. Let the brat strut, then snap him in two. Accept the fiction, only to savour the moment of its collapse. For each costly present, Tom would take him apart with his hands, until Abraxas could hardly hold a thought in his head, let alone a demand. Certainly, at the time, there seemed nothing better than the look on the blond’s face when the scales tipped, and pride caved to need. 

He gave gifts to buy Tom, but the pleasure of Tom’s company left him indebted, caught in a cycle that would never end.

(Except that it did, of course. But that is an altogether different story.)

On reflection, Peverell does not seem the type to keep accounts. He lacks the Malfoy instinct for leverage; unstudied in generosity, prodigal for never having had to ransom what he cherishes. He gives for the mere act of giving, wholly untroubled by what advantage might be gleaned.

Tom might linger after breakfast, letting slip that he has not felt the open sun on his skin since he was seventeen. And Peverell would, predictably, falter, admit the gardens have been neglected, then escort him there anyway, governed entirely by pity.

From there, it would be effortless. One excuse trickling to the next. Hearty meals, languid days pretending to work, uncovering the history of the grounds. He could live on borrowed clothes and borrowed time, fluttering about provocatively in the day, coaxing confidences in hazy after-hours, where the truth is eager to be touched.

Then—when affection ripens into helplessness, and Peverell loves him past all reason—and only then, Tom need only ask. A sweet tilt of the head for the world to fall obediently into his hands. The relics, at last. And perhaps more. Perhaps the estate itself, so when the man meets his end (by what means remains undecided) Tom’s triumph would be complete, and none of his labour wasted.

He lets the fantasy play out. It is a heady thing, splendid in its simplicity.

But it is just that, he realises.

Simple, and therefore brittle, beholden to contingencies beyond his fastidious control. Tom sees it at last, sitting in an unowned room, ringed by the mute evidence of another man’s life: everything balances upon Peverell. On the tremor of his sympathies and misalignments of circumstance. He may play the patron gladly, for now—but how long before some interloper draws his favour, and Tom is left empty-handed?

Long has he lived under the conviction that the universe was on his side. But to keep trusting fortune to arrange itself to his designs, Tom will remain precisely where he is: three years into freedom, and no closer to the dominion he was born to claim. He cannot bind the certainty of this future to someone else. 

(He knows better by now. Orphanhood should have cured him of that illusion—those wasted years believing his father would come. And when at last Tom went to him instead, what waited there? A body wasted by morphine, dosed by fawning, tyrannical parents; too ruined to offer even a token reparation for his absence. No remorse, no recognition, not even a plea for mercy when met with the murderous end of Tom’s wand. 

And later, Abraxas, so grand in his declarations, swearing he would kneel to no one else. Until his father demanded duty, marriage demanded heirs, and Tom was left with bitter proof of the contrary. 

Twice he has been disappointed. Twice, abandoned to the same truth: dependence is an immortal’s death.)

To rely on Peverell is to wager that he is less human than the rest. And already, Tom has endured the punishment of waiting. He must act, before it is too late. 

He will steal the relics and vanish before the hour is out, certain in this alone: his greatness will never be anything but his own making.

The study is unguarded.

He senses it before he reaches out to check. The bristling, aggravating wards are gone. 

Peverell left them unsealed after last night, but Tom naturally assumed he’d return to mend the lapse. That he did not is negligent to the point of insult, even by his shoddy standards. 

Suspicion ossifies when his palm flattens against the wood and nothing answers. 

His stomach twists. He cannot tell what roots the nausea. Liquor still courses in his veins, scalding nerves already frayed by a stolen handful of hours in sleep. Hunger and fatigue claw beneath it all. And it must be this—yes, some malignant concatenation of want, of thirst, of exhaustion—because it cannot be instinct. Instinct would never bid him to retreat. Tom has not known fear since he conquered it at sixteen.

Hinges give in without so much as a creak. The hall turns narrow and airless, black beyond a few steps. And the dark inside the study is heavier still, a tar-pit depth that sucks on the edges of his vision, vowing to hold him there indefinitely. Even sound feels alive in its absence, silence gaining substance and volume. 

For a breath, Tom doubts the topology of waking. He wonders whether the world has synthesised with thought itself; if fear and reality, desire and possession, are all threads tangled in a sole wispy membrane. He would not be surprised. Since Peverell’s induction, the physics of his life have obeyed unknowable laws. Nothing makes sense anymore.

This is it, a cautioning voice whispers. There is no turning back. He will have to abandon everything in London and vanish before dawn. By the time the theft is discovered, the whole of Peverell’s fortune will doubtlessly be marshalled in pursuit of him. Tom discerned that manic kernel existed from the beginning; he may let a lot of things go, but it cannot be mistaken for apathy.

No. Peverell will be anything but indifferent about this transgression.

A shiver brushes his back. Tom must make peace with the knowledge now. He will be hunted across oceans, across years, intellect matched to the blind endurance of a raging bull.

(And what of it? He is Lord Voldemort. He is magnificent. He has already thrown death off his shoulder. What is that compared to one man?

The voice cuts back, unwanted: Death is shared. Death has no mind to give you. Peverell is unpredictable, and he will give you his all.)

Pressure gathers in the interstices where impulse meets reason. His nausea melts into a vaguer but no less uncomfortable thing, bubbling thickly and settling low in his gut. 

Lord Voldemort is above distress, he reminds himself, but that helps none—and it slowly dawns on him that perhaps it is not distress making him feel this way. 

(Kill him now, before he has the chance to rise against you.

Inexplicably, the urge evaporates before he can take it up.) 

Tom bites his cheek and steps into the study. 

“Lumos.”

Useless. His surroundings drink the light, leaving only a pallid shimmer at his wand’s tip. Tom moves forward anyway, threading the layout through memory, counting his steps. Each footfall rings louder than it should. He worries it is not just him that can hear them. 

Just as he hesitates, something lunges from the shadows, cutting painfully across his ribs.

“Blasted–“ he wheezes, fingers digging into his side. “Lumos Maxima!” 

White bursts in a fierce glow, exposing the dastardly aggressor before him. The desk. Tom draws a breath, smoothing over the ache, before skirting round it.

That is where he sees them. Twinkling, set as they were on the shelf. 

His throat locks. His shoulders surge forward, then jerk back, hooked mid-motion by instinctive shame. Tom cloaks his impatience in a flurry of spellwork, diagnostics stabbing the air, taunting any wards that should exist. Nothing. 

He casts again, more elaborate this time, probing for a hidden lattice of defensive magic. Still, nothing. They lie completely exposed before him.

The discovery unsettles him more than anything. Not even Peverell could dally so monstrously in neglect. It reeks of intention, of temptation set openly before him, the fruit hung low upon the bough. Tom thinks, with a kind of apotheotic spite, that not even Eve herself had been more flagrantly invited to sin. Yet the part of Eve is not enough for him. He is the serpent also, urging himself toward the branch, whispering his own seductions, transgressor and tempter alike. To reach for it is to fall, he knows; yet the hand still itches, a willing martyr to its own damnation. 

To refuse would be the truest madness.

If he possessed a cooler mind, he might step back to rethink, but reason has lost all claim upon him here. Salazar’s locket burns brightest in the circle of light, emeralds glimmering like little eyes, voyeurs to the manner in which he receives his inheritance. 

That it is his inheritance, he feels acutely. Its passage through the centuries culminates at his immortal hand, never to be passed on again. 

His fingers lift. Morfin’s ring catches the light. The locket winks. 

Touched by your mother, once upon a time. Do you expect it to ever be truly yours?

And then she is there, dragged up against his will. Chain biting into her wasted throat, gold encumbering her posture, heavier than the child beneath her ribs. Tom chokes. Bile corrodes the passage to his mouth. His triumph sours, and he recoils from the locket.

No. Not that. Not yet.

His gaze snatches onto the diadem instead. The fine inscription along the band gleams: Wit beyond measure is a man’s greatest treasure. In this moment, the words could not be more exquisitely, omnisciently timed. This, at least, he may claim without compromise.

When Tom closes his grip around the circlet, he braces for impact—some convergence commensurate to the finality of his wanting. 

What he does not expect is the press of a body at his back.

Warmth swarms his nerves in a sudden, conflagrating rush, as if his skin has opened up to house a fire too large for his frame. Breath tickles the shell of his ear, lifting the fine hairs there, and a voice shadows its tail, low and intimate:

“I was wondering when you would show up.”

For one disoriented second, he’s convinced his paranoia is playing tricks on him. But the heat is too real for his body to conjure. 

Peverell is real, and he’s standing right behind him.

Tom’s heart erupts, vaulting on a strangled peristalsis, threatening to disgorge itself through the narrow aperture of his jaw. Instinct drives his elbow backward, blindly spasming for leverage in any vulnerable stretch of flesh—but the effort is thwarted, mid-arc. Arms latch around him, contorting his momentum into a useless, crippled parody of itself. 

Joints jab into his sides. Peverell's strength is shattering. Shivering with shallow breaths, Tom frantically tries to siphon in enough oxygen to think. The diadem slips in his sweat-slick grip, and he despises himself for the sole, idiotic act he does manage: a tighter fist, holding on.

There is a chin nestled in the slope of his clavicle. There is a calamity waiting to be addressed. 

Tom drags a glance sideways. Green eyes glow gently in the dark—mischievous and ruthlessly delighted. He cannot look away, and so he certainly cannot wrench free.

“You lasted longer than I expected. Well done,” Peverell whispers. Though he does not sound murderous, Tom will not attempt to profile him any longer. “But I know you, Tommy. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist forever.”

That name. That deplorable, puny diminutive… Tom swallows. His mind kickstarts in protest, curses and countermeasures assembling with preternatural speed, sailing over every weapon in his arsenal. Blood will be spilled tonight—there is no way around it—and he pictures it vividly: Peverell, gutted and splayed on the expensive carpet, viscera soaking fibres. Tom cannot let it be himself.

But before he can act, his magic hiccups, splintering where Peverell shifts his grip and a belt buckle digs into his arse. Retaliation flatlines, spell sticking to his teeth. Tom freezes—save for the thrum of his rabbit-heart, drumming on the teeth of a fox.

And Peverell notices, as he always does. Several candles flare to life around them. In the same way as Tom’s panic, it becomes impossible to miss the vague, knowing lilt to the other man’s smile when he shakes his head. 

“What was your plan, hm?” The words are punctuated by damp puffs, ghosting Tom’s chin. “Go on. Tell me. I’m just dying to hear what complicated mess you’ve whipped up this time.”

It should mean nothing—nothing at all, coming from him. What could Peverell know of his machinations? Their prior meetings supply no precedent for doubt. Tom had been on his best behaviour before today, short-lived murder attempts aside. And even if he had not, Peverell would still be wrong: his schemes are perfectly elegant, thank you very much. Anyone who suggests otherwise is welcome to have their brain plumbed for damage. 

Yet still, from the onset, Tom had been fixed with the same rancid suspicion. And astute though it may be, it matters naught. It offends him—just like Dumbledore’s skepticism following Myrtle’s death. Accurate but baseless, and therefore outrageously insoluble.

He despises being confined to the expectations of others, and he despises it all the more in these terrible men who sniffed the rot in him from the start.

Running a thumb over the diadem, Tom says, as casually as he can manage, “Nothing at all. I came only to admire them again.” 

Peverell laughs, chest jostling, testing the scant space between them. “Enough of that. Lying won’t get you anywhere.”

“I’m not—” 

“Tom,” The hold around him stiffens in warning. 

“What is it to you?” he spits back. “No matter what I say, you won’t believe me. Think what you please. I owe you nothing.”

“No.” Peverell angles his head, cheek slotting brazenly upon Tom’s shoulder. Light oozes over the angles of his face, pooling on his nasal ridge and the rugged plane of his jaw. Hard lines ripple like mercury, yet his eyes are clearer than ever, gravitationally bound in place. 

“No, you’re right. We owe each other nothing. But I don’t particularly care. I have what you want. You have what I want. And I think you know what that means, don’t you?”

Tom, in fact, does not process what that means. Not immediately. Tense, he frowns down at Peverell. 

Then, it dawns. Sunlight breaks through the storm. A path clears before him—slippery and precarious, but a path all the same, one which ends more in his favour, constrained as he is. Peverell cannot fathom the magnitude of the error he has made, admitting that terms might be struck. It is Tom’s second tongue, right after the one of snakes. Negotiation. Persuasion. No one bests him there.

Against all odds, it was the right thing to say. Already his balance returns. The ground rights itself beneath him, confidence rising from the ash of his indignity.

“My life,” he clips, authority drawn tight, putting the terms forward immediately. “And the relics, naturally. I will not assent to any bargain that imperils the two.”

“Naturally,” Peverell grins. “Brought them just for you, didn’t I? No matter how,” he adds, when he sees Tom’s confusion at the implication.

“Then…” Tom hesitates, spine stiffening into an imperious line. The muscles caging him flex to contain the movement. He ignores the hot pang it rouses, desire kindled by the knowledge that Peverell endured the unendurable to collect glorified bargaining chips. For him. 

All that effort, all to make Tom the object of pursuit. It is flattering, in the worst possible way. 

“What is it you want?” 

Though he already has an idea. 

Peverell’s brows crease, unexpectedly softening the craggy geometry of his face. The wild glint in his pupils dulls, replaced by a sedimented gleam, dense and oddly terrestrial.

His tone holds none of the baseness that ought to accompany so bald a demand.  

“I just need you to be good.”

But of course. Of course. It was always destined for this conclusion, wasn’t it? 

Tom had known it from the start. His raw magnetism outstrips all bounds, and it must be especially impossible to dismiss among circles of the tactless upper elite. Burke’s handsome assistant, Hogwarts’ brightest mind. Everybody wants him—those who shouldn’t want him, most of all. 

It was only a matter of time before Peverell revealed himself, predictable as the rest, hungry for the same thing everyone hungers for. It disappoints Tom, in a way, that he should be so unoriginal.

At the same time, an ache lodges in his loins. His entire life’s ambitions—down to his very survival—are being bartered to wet a cock.

(Which, Tom thinks, near delirious, he would have done for free.)

Peverell is of no assistance in this war. The body pressed against him gives nothing away, not even a bulge where his hips lean. His whole posture remains taut, as though this were the gravest matter alive. And is that not ridiculous? That he should care so much about this one thing, when he has acted against Tom’s wishes in every other respect.

It would almost be preferable to be forced to the ground, dispossessed of all choice. Maybe then, the fraught coil of his self-consciousness might ease, freed from the shame of knowing he met it halfway. 

But the animal self pays no heed to delicate rationalisations. It clenches and unclenches—arousal boiling fiercely already, finally at its apex after being left on low heat for so long. 

Perhaps he has already chosen, then. Perhaps the bargain was struck from that very first day.

“Let me go,” he snaps. He refuses to agree to anything like this.

Peverell does so instantly.

Tom stumbles, harried and wrung-out like a wad of soggy parchment. For lack of anything better to do, he wipes his cheek sleeve, smoothing over the spot where Peverell’s breath had touched. 

His bones are liquid, his mouth dry. He tucks his wand into his pocket and clutches the diadem tighter to his chest, planting himself before the shelf of relics, holding out for definitive proof they will be his.

“I want you to swear it. On your magic. Swear they will be mine if I do this.”

The subsequent pause stretches intolerably long. Peverell watches him—no obvious lust in his gaze, though Tom feels exposed all the same, every ungovernable want laid open. 

“And what is it you think you’d be doing, exactly?” he asks at last, very carefully.

What a silly question. Does he honestly expect Tom will confess to the hours he has wasted, fantasising about this very thing? 

(Of those hands ironing over his skin, groping his bare chest, venturing places he hardly permits himself to touch. Of being pushed upon the settee, bound and furious, not only movement denied to him. Of being forced open, taken until his voice broke, then balmed over with praise. Of earning the rarest books, the worthiest of treasures, by kneeling like no one else could.)

At all hours, in work and sleep, in morning and night. Always—far too often to claim otherwise. But he cannot readily admit to it either, so Tom huffs dismissively instead.

“You needn’t worry. You’ll get the most from it, I assure you,” he says coldly. And because Peverell only stares, visibly at a loss, Tom adds, “I am not a novice. I will know how to please you.”

The reaction this provokes is absurd, almost comical in its displacement. Peverell’s forehead crinkles, lightning-bolt scar tying into a gnarled knot of tissue. He blinks—again, again, and again—before his arms, once fixed at his hips, cross over his chest, then uncross, then settle on his hips once more. He says nothing. For a span of time, he appears to be genuinely working through what Tom has said.

Which makes no sense at all, given he was the one to raise the matter in the first place.

When his face finally arranges itself, the missing glint in his eyes slides neatly back into place. Mischief restored. Tom must have done something right—or wrong. It has become increasingly hard to tell, lately. 

“Is that right,” Peverell purrs. “That’s a hell of an ask. Swearing on my magic? You know what that might cost me.”

Pride sprouts in his chest. As cheap as the bargain values his demands, in the end, he comes away with more. Even if Peverell betrays him, he will be despoiled of his magic, freeing Tom to plunder the relics anyway. 

By sleight of cunning, the match has been overturned. He is the master, he is the arbiter.

The exhilaration surges straight to his cock. Peverell is suddenly desirable tenfold, no longer a grand colossus but a fool ripe to be taken advantage of. Tom could devour him for being so credulous. 

“Swear it,” he demands, voice cinched tight.

“Oh, if you insist,” Peverell says, smiling easily. “My magic bids it, then. They’ll be yours, only if you do exactly what I’m asking. No excuses.”

If challenge ever had a form, it would be this.

Tom’s very cells itch. Peverell does not move, prolonging the effort it takes to hold himself together. He feels feverish. He feels drunk. He has won, miles closer to greatness than he ever was before. Everything he spent the week agonizing over is here within his grasp. He has won. 

Power torrents through his blood—poisonous, vertiginous power, already his by oath. 

And if Peverell even thinks to add to its conditions, Tom will teach him what his obedience truly costs. 

Spurred, he lunges forward, sealing the pact in what might be styled a kiss—though nothing about it is civil. Lips tear into each other. Enamel jars against enamel. Rust wells from his gums, and the sting, far from repelling, anchors him within the fervour. Greedily, Tom imbibes draughts of pine soap commingled with that strange, electrical piquancy, like ozone before lightning.

Peverell accepts it in full, parting on a hungry sound, before plunging his tongue past bloodied lips. Tom’s own lashes back combatively, like a ticked-off viper, darting over the muscle to probe it for weakness. There is a moment where he believes the advantage is his—until he finds he cannot pull away. 

Their tongues have tangled, held captive by the other. 

His thorax turns a drumskin stretched too tight—depleted of oxygen, straining to split under the suffocating pressure. Breath itself stands as the first forfeiture demanded of him, and Tom is intent to withhold it for as long as he can. Respiration tethers inextricably to pride. He endures, certain that each second affirms his strength; he will not be diminished, however pliant he may become.

Peverell wants him to be good. Fine. Tom will do so in the only manner he knows—willing, so far as it keeps him master of himself.

At one point, the diadem tumbles from his grasp, striking the floor with a clang. Freed, he threads the fabric of Peverell’s collar and hauls him upright. Peverell responds by clamping the meat of Tom’s arse, driving them together until flesh and hardness collide. Their bodies jerk, pistol-hard bulges bruising, pain and friction fusing into an all-consuming insistence.

Somewhere, there is the scrape of lacquered wood. Tom is pushed against the desk, surface rattling underneath. It matters insofar as to help him harness the new leverage. He arches and grinds with renewed exigency, thrusts in tune to the licks he lays on the curve of Peverell’s mouth. 

“Like that, do you?” Peverell huffs a laugh, loud in the closeness, wet and gasping between kisses. “Clever boy, making the most of it.”

“Do try to keep up,” Tom snaps, seizing his lower lip between teeth to drag him in again. “I’d hate to waste all this effort on an old man.”

“Arrogant little devil,” Peverell murmurs, unbothered, continuing to knead his behind. Pinned against that hefty bulge, Tom is fired into recognition of what he has provoked. 

Then, without warning, Peverell pulls away. 

“Alright. Prove it. On your knees. You do know what happens then, yeah?”

Tom sneers, ego crackling through him like a whip. He shoves Peverell back a pace and drops, cold floor striking harshly on his knees. By the time the ache settles into his joints, his fingers are already at work, tearing at the placket until the buttons slip and fabric parts.

What surges free demands both hands, heavy and hot and flushed. Tom’s eyes narrow discerningly as he draws it into his grip. He watches the tip throb, a bead of moisture trembling by its slit. When he curls a hand around the base—stirring blood in a single stroke—it twitches appreciatively.

Lifting his chin smugly, Tom is delighted to find Peverell already heavy-lidded with lust.

A cruel comment would suit the moment. But a clatter snips the edges of perception—the unmistakable ring of metal—and Tom jerks just in time to spot gemstones as Peverell summons the diadem into his waiting hand.

Unease congeals in his belly. He forgets all about his desire for a moment.

Until it’s being settled into Tom’s dark hair.

Prenatural cold roots into his skull, the circlet clamping perfectly to his temples. Tom considers, amidst the shock, the logic of it: if the tales are true, if the diadem hones the mind, then he must already exist at the apex of reason, for nothing changes within him. Nothing, save for the inevitability suffusing through his marrow.

“Look at you. So pretty,” Peverell smiles, stroking Tom’s jaw. He toys with a loose curl, tugging until it springs back into place. “Crowned and kneeling. It suits you so well.”

Then, abruptly, he nudges his hips, and the weight of his cock slips from Tom’s loose grasp to thud heavily upon his cheek. 

Leaking where it rolls over his face, chin to the curve between root and sac—his humiliation is a sentient thing. Time fractures, and Tom hangs, immobilized, heart encased in a cage of corybantic fury. He cannot choose between scrabbling away or giving into the searing arousal that unmakes all control. It feels as though he might combust.

But the diadem is still implacable, refusing to take on the heat of his panic. A buoy in a maelstrom, he desperately holds on to haul himself up from drowning. 

Trembling, his fingers reseal around the shaft. Tom lifts it, and steadiness proves unnecessary as his nose drifts along the underside of a throbbing vein, where the skin is dry and velvet-smooth, betraying no friction, nor obstacle to his motion. He’s drawn upward effortlessly, steeped in the raw skin-scent of it all, And when the head comes into focus, his lips pop down, hesitation left to flake away.

Brackishness hits him first—the taste of salt and cleanliness, faintly bitter as precum dissolves into nothing. Past that, the stretch expends his every effort. His lips strain, tongue flattening to pillow the bluntness dragging slowly across his palate. Already, his jaw aches, but he refuses to falter. Inch by inch Tom powers forward, far past what he can reasonably take.

Peverell groans. Fingers splay insistently over the diadem, holding him to the impossible pace he’d set for himself. Pressure mounts behind Tom’s eyes. Raised veins impress onto the soft walls of his gullet, a foreign pulse hammering dissonantly against his own. Broken noises flood the room, but only once his thorax caves can he attribute it to his own, unchecked gags. 

Spit sluices past the bounds of his mouth and pools down his neck, soaking his collar. Eventually, his nose meets a wiry thatch of hair. There, his eyes sting, lashes tacking together, vision awash and hot at the edges. Tom refuses the fall of tears, fighting Peverell’s grip on his head—only to claim the action for himself, cheeks hollowed, tongue at work. 

“That’s it,” Peverell nods, voice smoked to a crisp. “Christ, I didn’t think… You know just what you’re doing, don’t you? Clever boy, sharp boy, on your knees with my cock down your throat.”

Another groan rumbles out of him, almost disbelieving. He tips his head back, then looks down again—eyes far less lucid than before. 

“Feel perfect,” he babbles. “You’ll ruin me for anyone else. No one could feel like this. You hear me? Only you, Tommy. Only you.”

The praise is poison and reward both. Tom’s arousal throbs, painfully incessant within his trousers, swollen to the point of rupture. He bucks forward, finding friction in the taut seams of his pockets. And it’s graceless—pathetic, even—though he refuses to name it such, convinced it’s only a mimicry of what Peverell is doing to his face without shame.

(Yet the truth seeps from the wound his urgency has gouged, a septic secretion running navel to groin.)

In his moment of weakness, the current turns. Power is ripped from him as Peverell clamps onto his ears with both hands, rooting him in place.

Tom sputters, dam to his tears shattering, flooding past his lashline in hot rivulets. The folds of his trousers pull stiffly over his erection. He cannot think of anything but the feral effort to hold it all back, to stop himself from coming untouched like some prepubescent lout.

He cannot. He cannot. Not like this, a sweaty ruin on the floor.

But Peverell’s grip is relentless, smothering thought. Hypoxia rakes the furrows of his brain, scouring away any last clots of discipline.

“Hold on,” Peverell husks above him. “Just a moment, sorry. I want to savour this. Look at me, Tommy.”

Tom does so, grateful for the distraction. The world beyond his nose swims, as though viewed through murky glass. His eyes film over, waterlogged and black as wet stone.

Peverell gapes anyway, wholly enraptured.

“Yessss,” he hisses, legs quivering, knees nearly giving out for a brief moment.

Yet the climax Tom expects doesn’t come. Instead, with a single smooth stroke, Peverell pulls free, cock shining lewdly in the lowlight.

And then, almost tenderly—mockery braided with perverse affection—he guides it across Tom’s face; meant to swill away tears, but instead painting streaks into the already salt-wet dips of his cheeks. He goes so far as to press the sticky length to the corner of one eye, daubing precum there too. 

It’s unreasonably gentle, intimate in a corrupted sense—yet desecration all the same, turning Tom’s humiliation into a canvas for Peverell’s pleasure.

“What’s the matter?” Tom croaks, donning a crooked expression that warbles even as it forms. “Afraid you’ll break if you finish?” 

“Why? You that desperate for it?” Peverell smears another irreverent line, this time across Tom’s forehead, before letting his cock fall away. “Be patient. I just don’t want to waste it.” 

His thumb outlines Tom’s lower lip, probing the reddened, pillowy flesh until it gives.

Then he swoops, crouching so their mouths align again, claiming Tom in a kiss as obsessive as the first. His hands become restless predators—one grabbing Tom’s jaw to bolt him in place, the other slithering down, tugging impatiently at the buttons of his shirt. Fabric parts under impatient fingers, baring his sternum to the air, prominent ribs bedecked in gooseflesh.

By the time they draw for breath, Peverell has dug into the fastenings of Tom’s trousers. The clasps snap with a harsh, metallic echo in the charged quiet. 

Chest-to-chest, it’s barely above a whisper when he says, “Let’s see you now. All of you.”

Tom blinks, dazed, vision stippled with motes that bulge and burst like dying stars. He is still caught in the echo of the last task, its aftershocks fizzling through him like trapped voltage. Thought crackles away in the static, burnt down to the frayed circuitry of obedience. Before he knows it, Tom is clumsily latching onto his waistband. He shoves the fabric down his thighs; it sloughs at his ankles like shed skin. A kick, a scrape of heels on floor, and he is unwrapped.  

Bare, he expects cold to take him.

It doesn’t.

He is within Peverell’s orbit now—too close to ever escape heat again.

“Merlin,” Peverell breathes, almost awed. His palm cups the swell of Tom’s cotton underpants, mapping the ridges jutting out. “Look at you. So fucking hard you could split seams.”

Fingers branch over his length and squeeze. 

It’s detonative. Tom jolts, a helpless hitch to his spine, hips pitching forward to meet the touch eagerly. His elbows skid and brace onto the ground below, sweat-matted curls rasping against the diadem. His voice cracks open, like the first cry of a fledgling trapped between shells.

“Hnngh—” 

Peverell moans, nudging his brow to Tom’s, grinding the heel of his hand harder into his arousal. “Hear that? Those wrecked little noises you’re making, all for me.” Canines graze the shell of Tom’s ear, words spilling molten into its folds, cooking straight through him. “You like me using you up, don’t you? Say it.”

Shaking his head, Tom jerks back, lips pinched into a brittle line, scrambling away from the fever of that mouth. He manages only a few inches before Peverell catches up—still kneading, shaping a living pulse out of nothing. 

New channels warren through sinew, spasming beneath too-thin skin, turning marrow to water. It’s been a while since anybody has touched him like this. Even Abraxas hadn’t been so bold. 

Peverell lingers, letting Tom squirm under his hold for a moment longer. Then, at last, he hooks a thumb under the elastic and drags it down. Cotton peels away reluctantly, copious strings of precum clinging, until Tom springs up into open air.

There’s a coarse exhale as the moment sinks into the sight. Tom could melt into this devotion forever, suspended in the hull of another’s hunger—if only it weren’t so fleeting. 

Too soon, Peverell’s eyes narrow, a ripple of recognition mutating his features, grin twisting into a wolfish arc. Knuckles settle on the bare terrain of Tom’s groin, sliding down the inside of his thigh, searching, and finding… nothing. When he cups the sac, it is just as smooth. 

“What’s this?”

Tom’s stomach contracts. Peverell grazes the delicate seam beneath his cock—a touch so impossibly light it drags a shard of himself out into the open. He cannot help but whimper. 

“Don’t be shy now,” Peverell croons, stroking over his bollocks and up his prick. His thumb draws circles along Tom’s foreskin, teasing the slit. Too gentle to satisfy, too insistent to ignore, a pinprick insistence that makes him feel flayed under a dozen invisible eyes. “Not when you’re all clean and polished. You knew this would happen. You planned on it. Tell me you did this because you wanted me to see.”

The violent twitch of his legs gives him away.

“Oh, I could just eat you.” Peverell chuckles. He pins the length against Tom’s belly, letting it drool into his flat navel and leap back up. “I guess you really were gagging for it, huh? Here I was thinking it was all an act. Well, you’re gorgeous, Tommy. Fucking obscene. And you bore yourself down to nothing just to prove it.”

He resumes his meticulous desecration—carressing, fondling, rolling Tom’s bollocks like delicate fruit, the fragile skin there pinching over itself. 

“Bastard,” Tom curses, gritty with need. He tries to be menacing in his glare, but it dithers when Peverell folds his cock into his abdomen again. “Get on with it, you d-deranged old pervert—”

“Don’t think I will,” Peverell smirks, mocking contemplation. “One wrong touch and you’d paint that perfect chest before I’ve even had my fun.”

Then the rhythm fractures. Peverell breaks away, leaving Tom to bob freely, achingly unfulfilled. The absence yanks a guttural, angry sound out of him. He can do nothing to stop it.

“Easy,” Peverell says. “I’ve got you. Not done yet—not nearly.”

Calloused hands slot firmly into the undersides of Tom’s knees, levering so his thighs are flush with his shoulders, folded into a pliable arch. Light ghosts over surfaces that have never known it, that belong to no one but this moment. 

There is nowhere to hide. While Tom hisses, mortified, Peverell revels in it—satisfaction given away in the twitch of his biceps. He pries Tom wider, tilting him further into exposure.

“Shit. Gods, this is so surreal,” his scrutiny oscillates between Tom’s rosy face and lower down. “Prissy, perfect little hole. So small and pink. Can’t wait to feel it wrap around me. Better than your mouth, I reckon. All I’d have to do is spit and sink in, and you’d take me whole. Yeah?” 

“Shut—shut your filthy mouth—” 

“I’ll put it to better use in a moment.” Peverell nuzzles his neck. “Hold your legs up for me, clever boy. I’m not finished looking at what you’ve made of yourself.”

Tom winces, instincts rearing to disobey. But the diadem, keeping the hair out his eyes, still abnormally cold, comes back as a reminder of the bargain he has shackled himself to. The thought of losing it—of losing it all—snuffs the impulse clean. 

Swallowing, his arms loop around his shaking thighs, displaying himself because he must. 

Peverell descends out of sight.

Humid air gusting over his taint is all the warning he gets. Then a wet, searching heat cuts up the seam of Tom’s arse before swathing the hole. 

He almost launches off the floor, entirely unprepared for a tongue so precise, so indecently curious. No one has ever… He’s never allowed it—so of course Peverell would be the first.

It feels wrong. It feels revolting. It feels—Salazar, why does it feel so good—like pleasure wearing a sinister mask. Those nerves, unkissed his entire life, flare awake in a bright sweep, as though each one has grown a mouth and begun to sing. Peverell works at him with impossible patience, alternating between luxuriant strokes and pointed, more merciless pokes, teasing Tom open by degrees.

“Sweet christ, you taste better than I imagined,” comes a rasp from below, half-muffled.

His cock lurches in sync with the plunges. Tom wants to claw himself into pieces; he wants to freeze here forever. It couldn’t possibly get any better than this. 

But something thicker, blunter, joins Peverell’s tongue. A fingertip, prodding at his rim, lubed with more than just spit. Before Tom can orient himself, it snakes inside, snagging onto his walls. Peverell does not desist as it happens, merely sucking around the knuckle.

Then another follows. And another, stretching Tom to accommodate three. His body becomes a loose instrument, winking and warping and keening around alien insistences. 

When, at length, Peverell mouth lifts, spit soaks his chin, and his eyes are fever-bright as he stares at the slick mess he’s made. 

“It’s like you’ve never been touched,” he rasps, wrist twisting, pumping. “I could keep you here for hours”

Tom reaches for a retort, some defiance to hurl back, but the moment any words occur to him, they funnel directly to the deep-seated sweet spot currently being toyed with—that which leaves him babbling and rattled.

“Beautiful little arse,” Peverell growls. “I almost don’t want to ruin it.” He laughs as his digits slip free. “Almost.”

In a fluid motion, Peverell shifts upward, knees bracketing Tom’s hips, and takes himself in hand. His cock, coated in tacky saliva, traces over Tom’s perineum for purchase. There, he presses, just enough to test the tender give.

“Still too tight to take me, I think. But you will. Sorry, I really don’t want to wait.”

Tom assembles some semblance of sense through his ruined throat. “You—” he coughs, “you flatter yourself. I’d break you before you ever—”

The sentence fractures into a wounded gasp when the head catches. 

“Break me?” Peverell repeats softly. He caresses the curve of Tom’s hip-bone, steadying him. “You can barely hold yourself together.” 

With that, he pitches forward, landing sloppy kisses just below the ear. Tom’s ankles hook over brawny shoulders, legs held aloft by nothing but Peverell’s weight. He can almost breathe again when his arms collapse limply to the floor. 

“Not that I’m complaining. You’re doing it so sweetly.”

Past Tom’s bitten lip, a mewl bubbles in the tang of spit-washed blood, seasoning itself to the rawness of his mouth. His fingernails scrape the ground underneath.

“You’ll see—” he tries to say.

“Oh, I am seeing,” Peverell dismisses, popping a fraction further past resistance. Dark lashes flicker shut at the pyretic squeeze. “And it’s the most exquisite thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

It does not relent. Peverell bears in, forcing Tom open on his girth. A flicker of pain blurs seamlessly into drugging pleasure.

“That’s it,” Peverell whispers. The remaining, brutal inches wedge home until there is nothing left to take. Their forms mesh, locked into a single loop, pelvis jammed to haunches.

Tom’s skull shocks back against the ground. Stuffed to the brink, scalded by madness, even the diadem is no longer immune. It slips upon his temples, unable to keep its coolness—indifferent metal now, branding him to this instant.

Half-formed thoughts flap and flurry like startled birds, skimming his awareness, impossible to snare. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck—the only legible thing that sticks, manic litany of curses fettered to where Peverell sheathes to the hilt. 

Above him, the man sways, caught in a mirrored friction, barely holding still himself. In the eyes slicing through damp-dark strands, Tom finds nothing tempered. It’s frightening. It’s fun. 

The stillness ruptures. Hips whip back and slam forth.

“Shit!” whistles through the sudden collapse of Tom’s vocal cords. “If you’re going to maul me, at least—ah—do it properly, you daft imbecile.”

“Properly, Tommy? What more could you want? Don’t tell me this isn’t enough for you, you little slut Listen to yourself. You’re gone.”

“I am not—ha, ha, gods, hhhahh—n-not gone.” 

“Then start making some sense. Or have I stolen your tongue?” Peverell grunts as he pivots, grinding into the tight clutch of Tom’s insides. “That’s fine too. I like you this way.”

Tom grits his molars, jaw clicking. “Touch me, curse you, touch me or I’ll—”

“I am touching you.” Peverell emphasises this by squeezing one calf.

“You know what I mean!”

“Not sure I do. You’ll have to spell it out.”

“My cock, you snivelling fucking maggot! Touch my cock, d-damn you.”

“Ooh, so dirty,” Peverell derides. “Are you begging me now? Cuz I’ll do it if you beg me.”

“I—” Tom’s resistance splinters as Peverell slams in deep enough to jar his heart. “Useless, you—you animal. Harder, harder, I hate you, I hate you—”

“You don’t hate me.” Peverell dips to nibble on his neck, trailing love-bites to the chin and back down again. “Not yet, anyway. So say it. Beg for me to touch you.”

“I’ll never—never beg you for anything,” yet he clutches Peverell’s wrist anyway, heaving it down to the volcanic epicenter of his need. His prick pulses into the humid space between them, ruddy and thrashing, as if it recognises the lie his mouth is trying to tell and cries in protest. “I’ll kill you w-when I can breathe again.”

“Finally being honest now, I see.” Peverell huffs, delighted. His next thrust is so rough, Tom’s spine skids up the floor. “Good. That’s what I like best.”

Only then does he do as asked. 

The instant Peverell’s hand lands on his cock, Tom shatters. It takes but a feather’s graze to burst all over himself, and a spectacle is what he makes, some shame-soaked parody of their circumstance—one which won’t stop, milked until his skin is tacky and he’s wheezing for oxygen.

To scream might help, but sound does not answer him. Nothing will. Peverell still fucks Tom ruthlessly open, and any debris that might cling to his erupted self is carried away in the tumult. 

And he hates this. But he loves it. Sweat burns into his vision, dousing tears to pitch the world into euphoric colours. Peverell rubs the cum puddling in the valleys of his ribs before it can congeal, reverent and voracious, much as Tom had done with the book. 

The diadem frays through his hair. For one manic, nonsensical heartbeat, he worries it might pierce him through with the knowledge of how ruined he looks. But the revelation that actually comes barrelling forth is one he least expects: he doesn’t care. 

When at last Peverell finishes, Tom scarcely registers it. Instead, it is air that first occurs to him—balmy but voiding to a cooler vacuum, Peverell abandoning him to twitch around nothing. He gasps at the loss, trying to find a fugitive solace in the remnants that drip between his thighs, spilling onto the floorboards.

And the aftermath is surreal, in that way. Not silent—not truly—but a relief that feels lighter than the cacophony they’d torn through. Drying sweat glues their skins together. Peverell’s forehead sags to the circlet now crooked on Tom’s brow.

Fury occurs to him. It does. But it is diminished, a tremulous shadow quickly dissipating in the luminance of his afterglow. His muscles will not gather themselves, electrocuted and rumbling, as though a storm had passed through and forgotten to take its thunder. Tom is spread out, undone, used, leaking, and there’s no disguising it. Nothing he can do to right himself into dignity. 

Is dignity relevant in a place like this? 

With nothing to brace behind, it should be. Already, he anticipates a rehash of his oldest lessons. Vulnerability invites the lash; wanting invites the boot; and every unguarded moment in his memory ends with someone grinding him into the mud to teach him what he is. 

Yet above him, Peverell is quiet, lost in the fog of his own interior skies—as though Tom’s ruin were not proof of a victory, but merely a moment passing through them both. The ridiculousness is like a shock to the system. Where is the interest in seeing him reduced? If it were him on top, he would be knocking back every last dreg of power. 

So, in fact, he is grateful it isn’t him, or someone like him. It helps him settle—being denied the very thing he would have exploited with ruthless glee. All his anger and shame are sealed behind a crystalline wall, reflected only in the faintest of inclinations. Tom recognizes this as the shape he is meant to assume—how he has inhabited himself for so long—but whether the tide will surge against the barrier now, or leave him stranded in this strange, muted calm, is a question the glass keeps to itself.

The silence grants him space, and the space becomes its own bewildering mercy. 

Warmth still blossoms in his gut. The pleasure that broke him open lingers as a stubborn shimmer in his blood, and he thinks about how it came entirely from him. Just like his magic. Just as nothing else ever has.

So many things in his life were claimed through force, or prised loose from someone else's grip, or inherited only in dreams. Power, status, artifacts—borrowed or stolen, smuggled into his keeping through sheer force of will.

Yet this senseless crescendo arose from somewhere wholly uncharted. A place within him, summoned without conquest. His body had answered itself; rather, Tom had answered his body. And for one impossible instant, nothing could have dissuaded him.

He thinks of boys in pressed robes who never lifted a finger. How he hated them—not merely for what they possessed that he did not, but for the illusion they cast of superiority. Tom had always assumed they moved through the world with freedom denied to him, that every step he took required double labor, double cunning, merely to catch up to their liberties. 

Now, staring up at the ceiling through the soft blur of his afterglow, he wonders if the freedom was ever theirs at all. Perhaps they were as bound to their inheritances as he is to his hunger; inhabiting a story written for them, no freer than he. 

And perhaps what he had envied was never theirs to claim, either.

His heart rate slows. A fissure inside him extends, opening from the sapphire dangling over his brow to the tips of his toes. Thin, yet wide enough to release a long-sealed pressure. Peverell shifts above him, and the movement yanks Tom back into the present, into the warm press of another body beside him.

Unlike so much else, there is a pure self-possession in this Peverell—maddening, irreverent, reckless… Harry, Tom remembers, biting back a smile at how absurdly mundane the name sounds. Self-divinity, indeed.

He circles back: a man like Harry answers to nothing. A man like Harry shapes his life and spends it as he pleases. 

Tom draws out the assumption he had once clung to—that Harry must have come from two doting parents and a swarm of wealth. It no longer fits the tapestry he sees before him. Wholeheartedly, he begins to believe they must have come from parallel places.

Which sparks a reluctant awe, one that may have always been there. If he could grow into someone like Harry, perhaps his lot in life would feel less of a burden. Perhaps one day he could move with that same self-rule. Tom wants to. 

Exhaustion seeps into his limbs, buoying him like salt water. For the first in a long, long time, he allows himself to admit he is tired. He lets that land within him, unsure what to do with it—only that, for now, he can exist without fighting.

It is fine, he tells himself. There is no urgency to move. Even when, eventually, Harry reclines back, Tom is not pressed with the panic to reclaim the high ground.

It is chilly without him.

For a long beat, neither speaks. Then, Harry strokes his arm. 

“I’ve got you now,” he says, almost inwardly, like it’s to assure himself.

Tom swallows. He should take the relics and leave. 

Instead, he shuts his eyes, throat torn, and lets his thoughts spin.

No, that isn’t quite right. They’re actually spinning. The vortex in his stomach is not imagined. The ground is suddenly significantly colder on his back.

When Tom opens his eyes, he is no longer in the wreckage of the study. 

The air has altered, laden with mist and mineral tang. He is lying on the floor of a grand bathroom, surfaces gleaming, polished by centuries of steam. A chandelier glitters above, scattering torchlight into opaline dispersions that flex along the tiled walls. In the corner, a vast tub carved from a single block of volcanic stone crouches like a slumbering leviathan, its lip broad enough to sit on.

And Harry—damn him—looks devastating. Hair tousled, chest flushed from exertion, trousers slung low and unbuttoned, with nothing on underneath. He has no right to appear so utterly magnetic; Tom recalls the resentment he’d felt the first time the thought struck him, though it comes now like a memory from another life. In this drift, it is merely the easiest impression to seize, a burnished, tangible soma in the clag of everything else.

His cheekbone rests against the marble, which nips through the fever of his flesh and palliates the ache, almost medicinal. He does not move, except to let his gaze drift after Harry as he flits through the chamber.

Kneeling by a shelf inset into the wall; plucking down crystal vials and fat-bellied bottles; uncorking, tilting, and pouring—liquid gold sizzling as it strikes the water already pooling in the tub. Another, tipped with greater care, drips drop by drop, intensifying the aroma of crushed mint and bitter herbs. Finally, a scatter of coarse white salt sprinkles through his fingers, bursting in brief flashes of steam as they meet the surface.

When, at last, he turns, Harry’s attention veers wholly to Tom. Suddenly, arms are sliding to cradle his back and knees. The floor dissolves beneath him as he is lifted.

Tom resists the urge to let his head fall, holding himself awkwardly rigid in the melting embrace. Only when the bath parts—enveloping him as he’s lowered slowly into it—does he surrender again. Bubbles simmer reactively, leaving a tingling sheen where sweat once clung.

Harry soon follows, stepping over the edge and sinking down behind him. Displaced water sloshes against the stone. His legs bracket Tom’s hips; his arms snake around his waist. It’s a wall of muscle behind him. Tom cannot deny the safety of it. 

The last vestiges of struggle evaporate. 

“How… do you feel?”

Glancing over his shoulder, Tom blinks through the vapour to check if he misheard. Harry stares, openly inquisitive, back at him.

“Pass me the soap,” he frowns, in lieu of answering, and turns back around.

There is a pause, the rearrangement of knees around him, the whisper of moving skin. Tom waits for the handoff, but he is lended nothing. Instead, a gentle grip on his neck tips his head back. 

He twitches. “I said—not… Don’t—”

“You’ll live,” Harry hums.

Suds lather through his hair, unspooling through the knotted skeins, slicking strands until they slip and loosen from one another. The soap residue slips in iridescent ribbons down his nape, pooling towards the bathwater and to the drain. 

Pine slices through the musk of their earlier frenzy. Bright and electric, it smells like Harry—which confirms that these are his personal quarters. That this is the shampoo he tends to, and that Tom, now enveloped in it, smells like too. 

Gone is the skin of aconite and belladonna that refuses to shed, no matter how much distance he put between himself and Knockturn. Gone is the smog of London; the tanneries and the bloated animal corpses and mud on the Thames. The overpowering bleach of Wools’ laundry sloughs right off, and Tom is an autochthonous being who had never born into any place at all.

His neck bends appreciatively, succumbing to that expertise that could lull him to sleep. He almost does, sinking deeper into the heat. His elbows hook loosely over Harry’s thighs; his head cushioned on the soft plane of his abdomen, boneless with satiation.

Fingers continue their pilgrimage across his scalp, parting tangles, smoothing what they find, which isn’t much. Tom’s hair has gone silky, the dexterity kneading into his temples more for his pleasure than anything else. There is nothing to impede Harry’s ministrations... 

There is nothing.

His eyes snap open. 

No cool band beneath the lather. No wisdom anchoring him, circlet biting faint crescents into his scalp. But the diadem should have barred Harry’s hand, turned strokes clumsy, snagged in each pass like trapped wings.

He can’t breathe.

Tom has been plummeting through frictionless air, wrapped in a self-made bubble, and the world blows back harder for his obliviousness. Through his spine, everything ruptures, serenity scattering like stones off a cliff. He flounders, unsure whether to reach for them or deal with the impact. And he can’t breathe. 

The man behind him falters too, sensing the sudden tension. He doesn’t ask—meaning he knows, which is enough of a confession as any.

Sweet-scented water shudders as Tom rips away, swivelling to come face-to-face with Peverell. His soul screams, even as his mind accepts it is necessary. He wants to hurl himself backward, to vanish into the suspension of ignorance, to never again feel the relentless weight of gravity again.

“Where is it?” Tom hisses. 

Peverell quirks a lone brow. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you planned to take that thing everywhere with you.”

If his hands weren’t leaden wastes of flesh, Tom would throttle him. “Where. Is. It.”

Sighing, Peverell crosses his arms. “I put it away, Tom. You can’t very well take a bath with it on.”

“It’s mine! You have no right to decide what I do with it anymore!” 

Fear clamps down. He recognises the look in Peverell’s eyes—and it trawls paranoia through the narrowest, most contorted channels of self, tugging up unwanted passengers until nausea gurgles to the surface too. What is happening, exactly, he cannot say; all he knows is that the rug is being yanked from underneath him, and his limbs are useless to keep him from smashing down on his nose.

“Your part of the deal has yet to be upheld,” Peverell explains, calmly.

“I let you—”

“You didn’t ‘let me’ anything, Tom. I fucked you because you wanted me to, not because I asked.”

Tom reels, scrambling backward to put as much distance as possible between himself and this—this devil, this malignancy, root of all evil that seems to inject venom into everything he does.

He hits the edge of the tub, harsh stone flaying the skin off his back.

(It occurs to him as he tries not to retch, naked and shivering—Tom was Apparated here, how? How could Peverell still have the magic to transport them after breaking his oath?) 

“I asked you to be good. Just that,” Peverell whispers. The boyish flicker of mischief has vanished entirely from his expression, age reclaimed upon his face. “Evidently good means different things to different people.”

Shaking his head, Tom rejects the very notion. “You said—”

“When I swore,” Harry interrupts, “I did not do so ‘on my magic,’ nor that I would simply hand them to you. I simply bid, by all the power I possess, that the relics could be yours only if you did exactly as I wanted, if you were good in precisely the way I meant. Implying you cannot steal them, either. If you do, Tom—and I know you’re thinking about it—they will never truly belong to you.”

“It doesn’t work like that—”

“Oh, but it does. I made sure of it,” he sits back, “Don’t take what I say lightly. After all the effort I put into finding you, I would never risk you just running off. No. You’ll stay with me. I’ll give you everything you could ever need. Whatever you want, Tom. You just have to be good for me, yeah? As promised.”

Tom can say nothing. Cleverness deserts him. Water holds his empty vessel, yet it is not water so much as memories of a river, the sense of being swept into a body larger than himself. Kept afloat, drowning, entombed, fossilised. He recalls the Thames as it once had been, a repository of ugly treasures. How special they felt regardless, coming to him and him alone, always unveiled in the flats he chose to search.

But whatever glimmered for him, he still had to dig.

Now, gripped in the same unending current, Tom realises he has never stopped digging—and perhaps he never will.

“I’ll help you find out what that means,” Peverell promises, reaching for him with steady hands. “Now sit still, and let me rinse you clean.”

END