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White, white all around.
The last thing Harry remembers is the flash of bright green from Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra.
Dumbledore is awaiting him on the misty train platform. Harry is presented with a choice—to board the train to the great beyond, or return to the war raging at present.
“What about him?” Harry gestures to the mutilated, flayed baby under the bench. It lies shuddering where it had been left, abandoned, struggling to breathe. “Can we do anything for him?”
“You cannot help.” Dumbledore says this with a tone of finality.
Harry’s jaw clenches, sets into a firm, stubborn line. He is feeling particularly intractable at the moment. He’s stubborn on his good days, but on a day like today, when he just took a Killing Curse straight to the chest, he’s not in the mood for taking ‘no’ as an answer.
Against Dumbledore’s protests, he grabs the baby under the bench and cradles him in his arms. He conjures a fluffy blanket to wrap around the tiny bare body, and in a pique of whimsy, a baby blue pacifier that he jams in between Voldemort’s gums. Then he marches off into the white mist.
*
Deeper into the mist, Harry stumbles into a dark figure cloaked in shadows that calls itself Death. It addresses Harry as its Master.
Death offers Harry a deal.
*
When Harry is deposited at the gates of Hogwarts in the midst of a raging snowstorm on Jan 1, 1943, he raises his arms instinctively to hold the baby in his arms closer and shield him from the worst of the storm. But his arms are empty except for the fluffy blanket he’d conjured. Panicked, he looks all around him through the blindingly white drifts of snow. The only sign of Voldemort is an abandoned pacifier, dropped in the snow next to Harry’s feet.
Where did Voldemort go? He drops down to his knees, desperate, digging through the frozen snowbanks around him until his hands turn blue. He attempts every finding spell he can think of. “Voldemort!” he calls out, the harsh Scottish wind stinging his cheeks until they feel like they’ve been lashed by fiery whips.
He finally acknowledges Voldemort hadn’t arrived with him. Death had played a cruel trick on him. Already his fingers and toes are feeling warm, the beginning stages of frostbite. If he doesn’t go inside, he will die again. And very soon.
*
Dumbledore’s office is less elaborate than Harry remembers. There are far fewer spinning and whirling and glimmering magical instruments and detectors. Harry fights down the urge to jump up and smash them all, telling himself he got it all out of his system in 5th year.
“Lemon drop?”
Harry nods and takes a piece of the proffered candy, to buy himself some time.
The bright-tangy-sunshine-sweet taste hits his tongue and floods the back of his mouth. He takes a moment to gather his thoughts and make a plan for what he wants to convey.
He’d like to officially enroll at Hogwarts as a transfer student; he needs to get Sorted; he needs to explain how dangerous Tom Riddle is, and why this is their best chance to stop him. He’ll request a sorting in Dumbledore's office, not a big splashy welcome in the Great Hall.
His goal is to stay low-profile and blend in. He has to remain completely average. If he stands out in any way, it’ll be harder to catch Tom Riddle off-guard. He can’t afford for Tom to notice him.
Harry’s gone through a handful of lemon drops by the time he starts speaking.
The words come rushing out. How he’s from 1998 and how Dumbledore’s instincts about Tom Riddle were right all along. How his parents were murdered by a Dark Lord, and how this same Dark Lord plunged the wizarding world into war twice in 20 years. How he’s been on the run for the entirety of his 7th year and destroyed nearly all of Voldemort’s horcruxes before succumbing to an Avada Kedavra and ending up 45 years in the past.
Dumbledore scrutinizes Harry with a bright-blue piercing stare as Harry talks and talks for the greater part of an hour.
“I’m here to stop Tom Riddle before he sets himself on the same path. I know I already change the future simply by being here, but my greatest hope is that my parents and friends will exist in some form decades from now, and go on to live full lives in a peaceful society,” Harry finishes, his eyes beseeching Dumbledore for help.
Dumbledore is oddly silent. Not even the news of his own death seemed to have fazed him.
Finally he speaks, a wary, careful heaviness to his voice that Harry had never heard before.
“Are you aware, my boy, you are speaking wholly in Parseltongue?” No whimsical twinkle in his eyes, no pretense of grandfatherly mannerisms. “There are only a few people alive in the world who can understand Parseltongue, and while I can speak 43 languages to varying degrees of fluency, I am sorry to say that Parseltongue isn’t one of them.”
Harry’s insides feel like they’ve been plunged in ice-cold brack, black as night.
There is not a single trace of merriment on Dumbledore’s grave features.
Harry grips the arms of his chair, frozen to the spot, unable to comprehend how – how – he just seemingly lost his ability to speak English over the course of the last few hours.
The blue eyes scrutinize Harry’s state of shock, and then soften a bit, finding Harry genuine in his astonishment. “You didn’t know?” Dumbledore presses.
The look on Harry’s face must be broadcasting something like—then why the fuck did you let me talk for so long?—because Dumbledore preemptively offers an explanation. “Though I don’t understand any Parseltongue at present, I hadn’t wanted to interrupt you before you were done. I wanted to preserve your initial message to me in a memory for which I can one day find a translator, because it seemed important.”
Harry doesn’t know why it bothers him. He does feel a little played, perhaps a bit deceived, because he doesn’t think he would have shared as much during that first hour if he had known Dumbledore was only pretending to understand him.
The deputy Headmaster slides a piece of parchment over to Harry, along with a phoenix feather quill. “Could you write out your name for me?” he urges. “In English, if you’re able.”
Harry takes the quill from Dumbledore and writes out ‘Harry James Potter’ at the top of the parchment. He adds, ‘I’m from 1998,’ below in his messy scrawl.
A deep furrow appears in Dumbledore’s forehead.
“I’m afraid this is Parselscript, and I’m unable to read it,” he slowly explains to Harry, eyes scanning the parchment as though trying to commit Harry’s chicken-scratch to memory. He sits back in his chair and studies Harry closely. “I’m going to assume you can understand English perfectly well, since you seem to comprehend what I’ve been saying to you. I’ll also assume you’re here because you want to enroll as a student—”
At this, Harry eagerly nods.
“Can you read English? Cast spells at an OWL level?” Dumbledore places a text in front of Harry, a standard Transfiguration text for 6th years. Harry flips through it and lands on a spell to transfigure a feather quill to a live mouse. When he pulls out his wand, he realizes with a twinge of sadness that he’s still using Malfoy’s hawthorn, as since his own is still broken, the snapped pieces tucked away in his moleskin pouch.
To Harry’s relief, he hasn’t lost the ability to cast spells, even in Parseltongue. He quickly transfigures the quill to a live mouse, then back to a quill again. Then, on a whim, he casts a Patronus. The familiar silver stag erupts out of the end of his wand and prances around the office before dissolving into the air.
“—Very well.” Dumbledore sounds almost resigned. “Hogwarts is an educational institution that welcomes all British wizarding children. We’ve taken in more… challenging… cases before that require a certain level of accommodation. We shall dispense with the Sorting, as I assume you are a Gaunt, and thus, your designated house would be Slytherin, as is tradition for the descendents of any of the founders.”
Harry nods, less eagerly this time, but how is he to communicate he’d like to request Gryffindor House instead?
“Mr Gaunt,” Dumbledore continues. “As long as you understand English, you should be able to navigate classes just as well as any other student. I shall explain your situation to the professors; it is no different than that of other students who’ve enrolled here that require additional accommodations to complete their coursework. Luckily for you, there happens to be another student attending Hogwarts who also confided in me before he started school here that he too can speak the language of serpents. He will be your guide to classes and help translate your written assignments.”
Oh shit, Harry realizes with a sinking feeling in his stomach.
*
Tom Riddle is summoned in short order to the Deputy Headmaster’s office. Handsome as ever—the sharp cheekbones, the perfectly curled hair, those dark, searching eyes—it’s all as Harry remembers from his encounters with the diary horcrux.
He silently regards Harry throughout Dumbledore’s explanation of the circumstances, an unreadable expression on his face. Harry again marvels at how very identical he looks to the memories preserved in his diary from 5th year.
As Dumbledore draws to a close, Harry wonders how much Tom must be festering in resentment for no longer being the only Heir of Slytherin anymore.
Not so special amongst your little Slytherin followers now, he thinks smugly, shooting Tom a sly glance.
A muscle twitches in Tom’s jaw, barely perceptible.
“Is he telling the truth? About you,” Tom asks Harry in Parseltongue. His dark, intelligent eyes bore through Harry, ever alert, assessing him, sizing him up.
“I didn’t even realize,” Harry responds. His own speech still sounds just like English to him.
“So you were able to speak English before?”
Harry shrugs.
Tom gives a coldly polite nod in response to Dumbledore’s request to chaperone Harry around during his first term at Hogwarts.
“Very well, then. You may show Mr Gaunt to the dorms; the house elves should be done with adding another bed by now. Oh, and one last thing, Mr Riddle,” Dumbledore adds. “Mr Gaunt was unable to inform me of his given name.”
“Harry,” Harry says to Tom.
“Gary,” Tom tells Dumbledore, with a perfectly straight face.
“Gary,” Dumbledore muses, sounding out the syllables slowly. “Gary Gaunt. I would like to formally welcome you to Hogwarts.”
Harry is struck by the urge to break things again. In particular, Tom’s stupidly perfect face. Instead, he restrains himself. “It’s Harry,” he says, glaring daggers at Tom.
Tom smiles for the first time that afternoon, a dangerous, warning glint in his eyes informing Harry that Tom is the one who holds all the power over Harry to affect his experience with the outside world. “Excuse me, professor,” Tom says smoothly. “Please forgive me. It turns out I had initially misheard. He actually goes by Harry.”
Dumbledore shoots Tom a sharp look. “Very well, then. A pleasure to meet you, Harry Gaunt. Though the Gaunts don’t usually…” He trails off, his next words going unspoken, but the meaning is clear. The Gaunts don’t usually give their children names as common as Harry. But Harry can’t be bothered to make up some fancy fake first name and be forced to go by that for years and years, for no good reason at all.
Dumbledore shakes his head, brow furrowed in thought, his sharp blue eyes twinkleless. “Welcome to Hogwarts, Harry.”
*
Tom shows Harry to the Slytherin dorm, to his classes.
Slytherin House looks at Harry with a mix of deference and pity. What level of inbred ruin has the once-mighty house of Gaunt fallen to?, their expressions say. But they seem to respect Harry’s ancestry and blood status (or at least what they think is Harry’s blood status), and to Harry’s surprise, no one singles him out or bullies him for his speech impairment.
Outside of Slytherin, the other students mostly gawk at Harry like he’s a circus exhibit. The few students from other houses that try to talk to him speak too clearly and slowly—gesture too broadly—and it dawns on Harry that they must think he’s mentally handicapped, or something of the sort.
Harry tries to nod politely and step away with a tight smile, not wanting to answer in Parseltongue and witness their reflexive flinches away from him. He’s noticed, whenever he does speak, that the other students’ reactions range from revulsion to fear, even if they try not to show it. Their reactions, however involuntary, are more hurtful than ever in his new state of isolation.
“Can he even understand us?” Merryweather asks Tom as though Harry is not even there, barely sparing him a glance.
“Yes, he can understand English perfectly well,” Tom answers in a bored tone, as though he’s answered the same question a million times.
If Harry wants to communicate with the outside world, Tom is his only connection. He is never called on in class without Tom translating. All his written assignments are rewritten in English by Tom before getting turned in. When his grades mysteriously improve, he suspects Tom has been correcting the glaring errors in his homework before turning it in. Not so much out of altruistic instinct, Harry is sure. More out of the know-it-all’s impulse to correct anything that’s blatantly wrong or inaccurate. After all, he had seen Hermione succumb to the same impulse all too many times.
“So are you really a bastard descendent of an errant Gaunt line,” Tom remarks lightly to Harry one afternoon as they’re studying in the Slytherin common room. He occasionally tries to dig into Harry’s past—voice too casual but eyes sparking with interest—a careful edge to his words.
Harry doesn’t want to subconsciously set up in Tom’s mind that he’s any sort of challenger or competition to him. He wants to reassure Tom he doesn’t want the Gaunt claim or share the title of Heir of Slytherin. “I don’t care about it anymore. It’s part of my past life. I left all of that behind,” he says, careful not to technically tell a lie.
“Did you,” Tom murmurs, tilting his head, his dark, handsome eyes scrutinizing Harry.
“I don’t want to be known as an Heir of Slytherin. I don’t care for the title; you can have it all. I only wish I hadn’t been... cursed, in this manner.”
Tom clearly wants to know more, wants to keep pressing, but he bides his time, like a viper waiting to strike.
Harry never lets his guard down, trying to maintain as unremarkable and unassuming a demeanor as possible around Tom. As a result, Tom doesn’t let his guard down either. Perpetually cold, distant, and polite—as fake of a version of Tom Riddle as anyone’s gotten.
You came here to stop Tom Riddle before he becomes Voldemort!, Harry reminds himself. Yet he’s not making any progress if Tom never shows his true self around Harry. So go do something about it.
He has to find some way to build rapport. He’s forced to spend all this time in Tom’s company anyway, but now he has to pretend to like Tom, in order to get close to him and foil his plans.
And so he tries to break the ice first, hating himself for being so slimy and insincere and so… Slytherin. It reminds him of that evening he had coaxed the memory out of Slughorn with flattery and false reassurances, except now it’s a long-term con he needs to sustain.
Slowly, he starts engaging Tom on topics of dark magic, compliments Tom on his iron-fisted control over his Knights, gradually begins to ingratiate himself—all the while hating everything about the process. Tom never lets anything incriminating slip, remaining intensely aware of his words and his perfect image at all times.
Once in a while, one of the Slytherins tries to make a nice gesture towards Harry, respecting his status as a descendent of the Founder of their house. Slughorn invites Harry to join him at Slug Club dinners, though Harry never speaks at those, only nodding at the other guests with a tight smile. Abraxas buys Harry lavish gifts—new robes and shoes, brand-new textbooks, anything Harry could need for school to fit into the Slytherin image and look less shamefully impoverished. A blushing Druella and Lucretia even show Harry a little-known cosmetics charm to help flatten his messy mop of hair.
Once, Orion, the Heir to the Black estate and a third year who barely comes up to Harry’s shoulders, formally extends his hand in the middle of the Slytherin common room. The rest of the Blacks—Aphard, Walburga, Lucretia, Cygnus—flock to his side, as they invite Harry to take a seat. As though synchronized, they seat themselves in an attentive circle around Harry on the expensively-upholstered dark green sofas.
“How are you settling in? Is there anything you need?” Orion asks Harry with a too-intense stare that reminds Harry, with a sad twist of his stomach, a little too much of Sirius. “You have whatever support of ours that you require—the full backing of The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.”
Harry has no idea why they’re all so nice to him. No one in Gryffindor House had ever cared about this deranged calculus of who was descended from an ancient wizarding line, and who wasn’t.
He gives a neutral smile at their offers of financial assistance. Once the formalities are dispensed with, the cousins settle into a comfortable banter, and Walburga carries on a mostly one-sided conversation with Harry about the history of the Gaunts at Hogwarts.
“Father had us memorize the genealogical lines of everyone in the Sacred 28. I believe the last of the Gaunts to attend Hogwarts was back in the 1800’s. Someone named Ominis, but people lost track of what happened to him afterwards. He was… blind? Or perhaps he was a deaf-mute. Yes—that must be it. Some sort of speech impediment. Not too dissimilar to what you have. In any case, we haven’t had a Gaunt at Hogwarts for decades. It makes sense now, after meeting you. The Gaunts must have lost their ability to speak English several generations ago,” she says in her chatty but completely insensitive way. She leans in and says to Harry in a conspiratorial tone, “I bet your family’s really close.”
The Slytherins are the only ones that don’t widen their eyes with horror, or flinch away, whenever Harry speaks Parseltongue. “That’s disgusting,” he says dryly, even though he knows she doesn’t understand him.
Walburga squeals in delight, as though it’s the prettiest sound she’s ever heard. “Merlin, you’re so pure you can’t even speak English anymore,” she says in a tone of awe. “We have Tom as a representative of the Gaunts, but Tom’s not—well. Let’s just say your blood, on the other hand, rivals even that of the Blacks’…” She directs a coquettish smile at Harry with her perfectly rouged lips, as though propositioning him.
Rather than horrified, the gathered Blacks looked downright impressed at the Gaunts’ inbreeding and dedication to keeping the line pure.
*
By late spring, Harry realizes Tom is looking for the Chamber of Secrets. Lately, Tom has been spending too much time pouring over blueprints of Hogwarts’ plumbing system during their study sessions in the library.
Their conversations to date have primarily centered around coursework and the occasional digression into dark magic. But now Harry has to make a choice that he can’t walk back from.
He grabs Tom by the arm one night before Tom leaves for his Prefect rounds that Harry knows are just a pretext for searching for the entrance to the Chamber.
“Wait. Tom,” he says. They’re just inside the portrait entrance of the Common Room, not that it matters, since no one can understand him anyway. “I know what you’re looking for.”
Tom stiffens imperceptibly.
“I know where the entrance is. It’s passed down in the family.” Not exactly a lie; Harry assumes it must have been passed down by each generation of the Gaunts until they stopped attending Hogwarts. “I can show you, but you have to promise me you won’t awaken the basilisk, at least not this year.”
The whites of Tom’s eyes widen at the mention of the basilisk.
“The basilisk is incredibly dangerous. She’s ancient, nearly a thousand years ago, and practically impossible to control,” Harry explains. “I can show you the Chamber, but please leave her to her slumber.”
Fortunately, Tom’s too sharp to play dumb. “What if I want to hear what it has to say?” he asks without missing a beat.
Harry shakes his head. “If you or I lose control over her, someone will die. The Board of Governors will shut Hogwarts down. At least wait until the end of seventh year,” Harry coaxes. “Then you’ll be nearly out of Hogwarts. It won’t lead to anything good if you open it now.”
Tom studies him. “How did you know—how do you know this?” he asks, one of his few times he’s slipped and shown outright frustration at being unable to crack Harry’s impenetrable shell and learn anything about his mysterious past.
Harry again skirts along the edge of truth. “Sometimes I get feelings—like a bad feeling, about the future.”
Tom scoffs. “Divinations? Prophetic visions about the future? It’s not a real branch of magic,” he says dismissively.
“I’m not a Seer,” Harry says. “But sometimes I get a feeling, a flash of what could unfold, you know?”
“Show me,” Tom insists, grabbing Harry by the arm and dragging him out of the common room.
Harry does. When he’s satisfied that Tom won’t awaken the basilisk, at least not this school year, it feels like an impossibly heavy weight has been lifted from his shoulders.
One murder averted.
*
After that, Tom’s icy demeanor cracks. Harry had proven himself useful—and loyal—to Tom.
“We’re family,” Tom says, with an odd relish, as though marveling at that fact. Harry supposes Tom had never imagined himself to have family before, and spent his whole life believing he was all alone in the world.
Almost overnight, Tom becomes a lot more comfortable with letting his guard down, knowing Harry won’t betray him. Or really, Harry can’t. Who could understand him?
As a result, Tom has no compunctions about sharing the cruel unfiltered thoughts that must run through his head all day.
When the Gryffindor Head Girl assigns Tom to a particularly undesirable midnight patrol shift—
“Gwendolyn's mere existence triggers a storm of rage deep within me,” Tom rants to Harry in Parseltongue in the middle of the breakfast table, surrounded by their classmates. “It's as if she's purposefully designed to test the limits of my patience. I can't wait for the day where I can shatter that facade she so carefully maintains. I want to cut into her throat, slice it open from ear to ear; I wish to conjure a hundred needles and pierce each one into the skin of her cheeks, and crush her windpipe so that she can’t even scream; I want her head up on a pike in the middle of the Great Hall." He continues in this manner for some time.
Harry shoots Tom a look of disgust. “You’re a fucking psycho,” he mutters. He’s saved Myrtle’s life, but apparently that wasn’t enough—now he’ll need to keep an extra eye out to make sure Tom doesn’t murder the Gryffindor Head Girl in her sleep.
Tom laughs. It’s with a genuine fondness that Harry doesn’t feel.
*
Harry still hates Tom Riddle with a burning passion, but it’s incredibly isolating to hate the one person in the whole world who can communicate with you.
Despite Tom’s innate charm, Harry tries to keep the hatred alive and burning-hot, because when he’s not actively thinking about how much he hates Tom, his emotions swing towards sorrow and grieving for the life he left behind. He’s not sure if this sacrifice was worth it. At the train station, he had been struck by how helpless and defenseless Voldemort had been. The genuine instinct at the core of him was to do everything he could to prevent Voldemort from turning out that way—to prevent their world from suffering under the weight of two wars that had killed thousands.
But he had given up everything, right at the moment when the war would finally be over. He misses his home with a soul-deep yearning that made him sick to the pit of his stomach; he misses the people in his life that he loves, Ron and Hermione and Teddy and everyone else that had grown to become his family over the years.
Did he make the right choice at the train station? Most of the time, it feels like he had made the wrong choice in deciding to come back in time.
*
Tom’s rants become ever the more grandiose the more comfortable he grows around Harry. He’s moved on from fantasizing about singular homicides he’d like to commit to fantasizing about genocide in general. “In 50 years from now, these vermin won’t even exist,” he remarks, flipping through the Daily Prophet’s latest report on the bombings affecting central London, worryingly close to Diagon Alley.
“...Nazis, you mean?” Harry asks tentatively.
“Nazis, Germans, the British, Muggles in general.” Tom waves a lazy hand. “Nothing would advance our world more than exterminating every last one of them; once they’re gone, we’ll have the run of the world. All the resources, all the land, we’ll be able to preserve everything for wizardkind. We won’t have to share space and hide our activities from those vile creatures anymore. An earth completely wiped clean of Muggles—we hold the power to eradicate them entirely; in fact, this should have been done ages ago before they were allowed to get to populous. They’re completely powerless against us; all they have are sheer numbers, but they can’t do anything to stop us.”
Harry points out that Tom would not even exist if the world had been wiped clean of Muggles ages ago.
Tom laughs it off. “That just means we’ll have to do it now. We’ll do it together,” he insists. Then he adds, “I can be completely myself around you,” with a strange note of relief.
Harry holds in a groan.
Something—something very profound—had shifted after Harry had shown Tom the Chamber of Secrets. Tom treats Harry as one of his now; he seems to genuinely enjoy spending time in Harry’s company; he’s oddly attentive to Harry in an unsettling way, rarely leaving his side these days.
“I’ve never had someone I can call family,” Tom says casually to Harry one night as they pack up to leave the library. “I’ve always wondered what it’s like to have a younger sibling or a cousin of some sort. Just knowing that someone is out there who’s – like me, but not me.”
Harry sighs. “Tom, we are nothing alike,” he says resignedly.
*
It had never occurred to Harry that Tom Riddle would feel so isolated he’d be so desperate for someone who finally understands him too.
*
Tom disappears during an unseasonably warm weekend in May, and when he comes back, he looks like a wreck. Drained of all color with hollowed-out cheeks; shivering despite the warm spring air. His eyes gleam ruby.
In their dorm, he unfurls his hand and presents it, palm-up, to Harry. In his palm rests the Gaunt family ring with the Resurrection Stone set in the center of it.
Before Harry can say anything, Tom takes one of his ice-cold hands and grasps Harry’s wrist, then slides the ring onto his ring finger. It resizes to fit Harry’s finger perfectly, and Harry feels something dark and weighty sinking its hooks inside of his chest, along with a sense of disappointment and failure. He wasn’t able to stop Tom from killing his family and creating his first Horcrux.
“Were they the Gaunts you were raised by?” Tom asks. “I didn’t see anything in Morfin’s memories, but—” He sounds unsure of himself for the first time, as though it’s only now occurred to him that Harry might have an adverse reaction to killing who he thinks is also Harry’s family.
Harry shakes his head, mutely, hating himself for allowing Tom to get this far.
“Good. They were living in squalor, ignorance. They aren’t worthy of you. You’re the only family that matters to me.”
Tom picks up Harry’s hand and caresses the back of it, long, pale fingers lingering over the stone. “I like seeing it on your finger,” he says, a surprisingly tender look on his face.
The only upside to this situation is that Harry now possesses the only Horcrux that Tom has made, and there’s a basilisk underneath the school if he ever wants to destroy it. It’s the best insurance policy he can think of.
“You’re my own blood and flesh,” Tom says with no small amount of pride, and a weird, creepy devotion to his tone.
*
Harry sees Voldemort’s relationship with Nagini in a whole new light. When Tom Riddle is the last human being on earth that can understand you, of course you’re loyal to him, all the way through to the end.
For the first time, he feels a stab of remorse that he asked Neville to kill Nagini. But there’s nothing he can do about it now.
*
Tom is attentive and perceptive to all of Harry’s needs, and Harry can tell that Tom has gradually started to coax more secrets out of him. Or is that Harry is opening up more and more to Tom, since there’s no one else he can talk to?
Whenever Harry passes by a window with a view of the Quidditch pitch during practices, he gazes wistfully at the tiny flying figures in the sky.
Tom frowns, never quite understanding the appeal of Quidditch. “They won’t let you on the team, you know. You have to be able to communicate with your teammates.”
Harry shrugs. He’d figured as much.
“But I’ll show you something better than flying around on a stupid broom,” Tom promises.
And he does, bringing Harry to the Astronomy Tower at night and showing him how to gently float his way down. The waxing moon shimmers above them, casting a delicate silver hue over the grassy field where they land. A gentle breeze rustles through the surrounding trees in the Forbidden Forest next to the clearing, and the stars—the stars are magnificent. Scattered like diamonds across the dark nighttime canvas, with no light pollution in 1940s rural Scotland, they look utterly breathtaking. In any other circumstance, it would have been a picture-perfect date.
Tom promises to take Harry back another night to teach him the next part, how to fly—unsupported—along the tree line of the Forbidden Forest.
Another night, there’s a rowdy drunken game of spin-the-bottle in the Slytherin common room right before their finals. Harry sits morosely in front of the fireplace, thinking of Ginny, thinking of his sixth year where they played such games in the Gryffindor common room, thinking about how no one would want to kiss him now. If he can’t even communicate with anyone, how is he ever going to pick anyone up?
He sips at a half empty bottle of firewhiskey that had made its way to him earlier in the evening, before various of his classmates’ shirts and skirts and trousers had started coming off. Tom is next to him, reading some thick and incomprehensible book, pretending not to pay attention, but Harry can tell he’s keeping one eye on the festivities, tracking any potential material for blackmail.
Some of the girls in their year really are quite pretty, Harry thinks, kicking idly at the ground with a scuffed shoe. Even Sirius’s crazy mum was a babe at this age.
“How the hell am I ever going to get laid?” Harry bemoans. The alcohol has loosened his tongue and lowered his caution. “I’m probably going to die a virgin,” he adds glumly.
Tom frowns and looks at Harry the same way as when he’d watched the Quidditch practices longingly—with a look that makes it clear that he doesn’t understand the appeal.
“Never you mind,” he says with a haughty sniff. “You’re better than all of them anyway.”
Harry shrugs. Tom can think whatever he wants, but he’s not the one facing the prospect of a whole lifetime of sad wanks with only his own hand.
*
Before the party winds down, Harry trudges back up the winding hallway to his room. He undresses and tries to shake off the melancholic mood, figuring a midnight wank would do wonders for his stress levels.
He’s got one hand wrapped around his mostly-hard length, thinking of dark eyes and smooth pale expanses of skin and—
The bed dips. Tom wraps himself around Harry from behind, his arms settling around Harry’s shoulders and chest.
“The fuck?” Harry protests. He was just getting to the good part.
“You won’t die,” Tom says in a strange tone. Then one of his hands wraps around Harry’s now fully-hard cock. “You’re not going to die.”
It feels so nice to have someone else touching his cock for once that Harry can’t help but buck into Tom’s tight grasp. Someone touching him, holding him, skin sliding against his—he had forgotten how good it feels. He can’t bring himself to kick Tom out of his bed, as much as he knows he should.
Tom plants soft kisses on the back of Harry’s neck. Holds him tight and ruts slowly against him, sliding his hard cock up the dip in the center of Harry’s bum.
Harry’s so aroused he can’t think straight, but he still gives a couple of half-hearted attempts to throw Tom off of him.
A low voice says against Harry’s ear, “I am everything for you—let me be this for you too.”
A shiver runs up Harry’s spine.
He feels Tom reach his release against his lower back. “I’m your only family left in the world, and you mine,” he hisses right as he comes.
Harry comes too, with a shudder of revulsion mixed with perverse, twisted fascination.
*
Harry comes to realize that Tom is the only person in the world who can understand him, and he can’t lose that. No matter what Tom does, he can’t lose the only thing that connects him to the rest of humanity.
He tries to push away the self-loathing that eats away at him. He has no other choice. He’d lose his mind otherwise.
*
Tom visits him every night. Promises that he won’t let Harry die a virgin. Promises he won’t let Harry die at all.
It’s almost sweet, how Tom touches Harry’s face, his lips, his throat, slips in between the sheets with as little noise as possible, and wraps himself tightly around Harry’s whole body, like a constrictor closing in on its next meal—whispering, “Mine, mine, mine,” in Harry’s ear in a needy hiss. “If you ever try to run, I’ll tear apart the whole world looking for you.”
The hard length of Tom’s cock rests heavily on Harry’s thigh as Tom cradles him from behind, from the side, from above, obsessively, possessively, as though he were trying to sink his way into every one of Harry’s cells.
He turns Harry’s head and kisses him slowly, deeply, almost like it’s romantic, what they have going on.
It pushes Harry to snap one night.
“I’m never going to let you go. You’ll never die. You will never die, and you will never leave me,” Tom whispers almost frantically into Harry’s messy mop. A grasping, determined hand grips around Harry’s cock and strokes it into full hardness, adding exactly the right kind of twist at the top that Harry loves but had never mentioned.
What about my parents, Tom? Do you promise to keep my parents alive too?, Harry wants to snarl in return. What about the childhood you stole from me when I was forced to play child soldier in the face of your genocidal rampage?
The feelings of soul-wrenching loss and a deep lifelong hurt—mixed with a very unhealthy arousal—grip their way around Harry’s heart until it all becomes twisted up into a black snarl of rage and vengeance and oh-god-oh-god-when-did-he-get-this-hard—
Harry can feel the last tentative thread of his self-control snapping. Everything he’s ever experienced in his life—both his past one and this one—is a hundred-percent the fault of Tom Riddle and his mad, raving quest for power.
Following naught but his most base of instincts, Harry flips Tom around and slams his back against the bed. Shoves his hand over Tom’s mouth, twisted up in pre-emptive outrage, and growls in Tom’s ear. “You’re going to shut up and let me if you don’t want me to kick you out.”
A muffled protest.
“Hmm, what’s that?” Harry asks mockingly. “I can’t hear you.”
Tom bites down on Harry’s hand from where he’s pinned down. Blood spurts out from one of the bite marks. Harry has no choice but to backhand Tom across the face, leaving smears of blood across Tom’s perfectly ivory features.
To his surprise, Tom is grinning up at him, still rock-hard against Harry’s leg, his dark eyes shining with something like approval.
“It was about time,” Tom crows in triumph, white teeth shining with blood. “I was wondering when we’d get to see the real you.”
“This isn’t the real—” Harry tries to protest. But it is, it entirely is. He was baptized in blood just as Tom Riddle was, even more so—left crying alone for hours next to his mother’s dead body, reborn into death and violence. “I’m not – I’m – never mind. Just – just shut up.”
He’s grasping, clawing, biting all over Tom’s unblemished ivory frame, like a mad sculptor messily carving into a pristine marble slab—before jamming spit-slickened fingers between Tom’s legs. There’s surely a spell for lubricant, but he’s forgotten the incantation.
Tom is willing, pliant, it’s like he’s so eager for it—Harry realizes with a sick twist of his stomach that what’s getting Tom so excited is seeing Harry’s darkest instincts coming to light, to prove that Harry is every bit as brutal and rotten to the core as Tom is—that they come from the same blood—that they’re the same.
Harry hastily vanishes Tom’s pants, leaving some shredded fabric in their wake, to distract himself from thinking about it too hard. Too readily, after only a palm around the hip, Tom turns over on his stomach, props himself up by his hands, and slides upwards onto his knees. Harry can’t—he can’t remember—red-faced, he whispers at Tom, “What’s the spell for lubrication?”
With a wave of Tom’s hand, Harry’s hand is drenched with warm oils. He wraps it around his cock, as angry and red as his face—and it feels good, so good, to stroke himself and feel that thrum of tension build and build in his lower belly and run down his legs until his whole body feels good in that overheated, anticipatory kind of way—his other hand fisting through Tom’s hair and pulling it back—
He lines up and pushes in. He knows—well, he doesn’t really know, but he had heard something about this-or-that kind of preparation, that he’s supposed to use the lube to stretch Tom out first, but he can’t be arsed to care at the moment, not with a raging inferno burning its way through his body, wanting to get back at every time Tom Riddle had ruined his life from birth.
A sudden tension in the muscles rippling along Tom’s back is all the indication that he gives that it must hurt him as Harry pushes in.
Tensing up probably makes it hurt more, Harry thinks vaguely, but he keeps pushing, realizing that he wouldn’t be enjoying this nearly enough if Tom wasn’t struggling to take him, if this were easy for Tom—like how Harry’s whole life should have been if it weren’t for him.
After one particularly vicious thrust, Tom makes a strange noise and lurches forward, Harry’s cock nearly slipping out of him as he tries to get a respite from the roughness of Harry’s thrusts.
It’s no match for Harry’s Quidditch-honed reflexes. Without thinking, Harry grabs Tom by the hips in a bruising grip, and pulls him back down, crashing them together until his pelvis slams against Tom’s perfectly rounded arse—squeezing tight enough around Harry’s cock that Harry has to fight the wave of feeling like he’s about to pass out.
“I knew you had it in you,” Tom goads Harry on, breathless, voice strained and cracking, but still proud. “I knew it all along,” he says in a low voice. “Yes, yes, come on.”
Harry doesn’t let Tom drag himself away for the rest of the next two hours. He doesn’t bother to check if Tom came or not; he assumes Tom is a big boy who can take care of such things himself.
Tom is fine, Harry tells himself, before collapsing next to him in exhaustion. More than fine—he surely was exultant. He had to be. He had finally succeeded in dragging Harry down to his level.
*
By the end of term, Harry sneaks into Dumbledore’s office. He destroys the vial containing the memory of their first conversation, and—
There is no more out.
After that, Harry tells Tom about the future. About how he’s not really a Gaunt. About how he’s one of Tom’s horcruxes come back in time.
“Mine,” Tom says, a slow smile stretching over his handsome features. “You’re one of mine. I knew you were special. And to think, I thought you were just family this whole time. We’re even closer than family. We’re bound even closer than by blood. Our very souls are bound.”
Harry has never seen Tom look so pleased before.
“You realize that, now, I really am never letting you go.” Tom’s arms tighten possessively around Harry.
“I mean. Where would I go?” Harry replies, with a hollow laugh.