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On his twentieth birthday, Tom Riddle meets Harry.
As far as gifts go, he thinks the universe could have done better.
*
In hindsight, Tom will wonder if things would have gone any differently had he followed his urge to disappear after Hepzibah Smith’s and left to find Ravenclaw’s diadem in Albania.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Be that as it may, Tom is in the Savoy Hotel, still very much in Britain.
It’s beautiful, if regrettably muggle, but Tom had decided to overlook his dislike both because the hotel is the kind of luxurious he had only dreamed of as a kid and because it's not something he could afford in the magical area—being the heir of Slytherin is nice on paper but it hardly brought him much material wealth— and he certainly wouldn’t have traded his royal suite for a dingy room in Knockturn Alley.
Having to interact with the Muggles makes his skin crawl still, always has, but a quick, wandless suggestion—of the kind he had mastered long before grazing Hogwarts' floors, in the dark of the orphanage and the minds of children—had fixed the problem of money and people's treatment of him.
As far as they know, Lord Voldemort is a VIP guest of the highest importance, one who very much likes his privacy.
Being in muggle London has also allowed him to place more wards around his suite than he would have been comfortable with in whatever room he could afford in Knockturn Alley. People tend to think you have things worth stealing if you protect yourself too much after all, and if you don't then you're sure to be missing most of your possessions by sunrise. Your life too, if you're unlucky.
Tom is more than good enough with warding to make the magic both discrete and lethal, but that doesn't mean he wants the hassle. Having to live in Knockturn Alley while he worked in Borgin and Burkes had been far too much for one lifetime already.
It had been worth it though, Slughorn’s disappointment as Tom politely turned down his apprenticeship offers, the Slytherin’s silent—for they knew better than to laugh in Tom’s face—contempt when spotting him behind the counter, Hepzibah Smith’s lecherous gaze, all of it, and the heirlooms hidden beneath wards upon wards in his truck were proof of that.
Slytherin’s locket, Hufflepuff’s cup, the former cradling a piece of his soul and the latter soon to, his very being mixing with the founders’ magic.
So when Tom snaps awake in the middle of the night, entangled in his Egyptian cotton sheets and with his instincts screaming at him that something is wrong, he doesn't immediately understand what is out of place.
He doesn't cast a Lumos immediately, not wanting whoever—whatever—it is that woke him to realise he's not sleeping anymore, he doesn't move, doesn't change his breathing pattern, he lies still, fingers ready to tighten around his wand the moment it jumps out of its holster, and listens.
No movement.
Not even the light rustle of moving clothes, dampened footsteps on the hardwood floor, or an intake of breath.
And yet.
Tom can tell, in the instinctual, visceral way that he always knew things as a child, like he had known that he was special and that he needed to avoid Dumbledore’s eyes, that someone is in his room.
Not someone, no.
Tom doesn't fear anything bearing a man-given name, doesn't fear any mortal, any member of his kind.
He doesn't fear the thing either, but he knows it's there.
His wand jumps in his hand right as he tries to peer through the darkness of his room, his knuckles as white as the yew they close around.
There's nothing there.
Nothing apart from a pair of glowing green eyes, looking down at him from the bottom of his bed, cat-like except cats’ have the decency to need a sliver of light to shine, and then he catches a glimpse of a grin too, almost comically wide, horribly toothy, and as disjointed from reality as the eyes are, a Cheshire monstrosity made of horror.
Before Tom really has time to think it through, he's hurling a killing curse at the creature.
It's barely intentional, magic builds up in an instant in his core, sears its path through his arm, and shoots out of his wand with a vengeance, lighting up the thing’s feature in a nightmarish green glow.
The first thing Tom sees is Its human shape, the way Its features are linked together, the eyes, the grin barely fitting into Its face, the mop of dark hair defying gravity, before his eyes fall on the rest of Its form, on Its robes, Its laid-back posture, even in the face of certain death, Its extended hand—
Its extended hand which stops the killing curse.
Tom stares.
Blinks.
The sight greeting him doesn’t change.
The curse wasn’t blocked, it just vanished the moment it hit the thing’s skin, not like it had hit something inanimate, because any spell destructive in nature would have done some amount of damage even when cast at a stone, left some kind of mark even on an inferius, but like it simply hadn't hit anything at all.
“Well, that was quite the welcome,” It says, in a voice that echoes too many times inside Tom’s skull to be a singularity, a lone ball of light coming out Its hand and finding a resting place against the ceiling.
Tom's mind hysterically looks for any trace of the Avada Kedavra green of his failed spell into the light, as if his magic, absorbed as it was, would still shine through, but he only finds it inside the thing's amused eyes.
“Are you—” The question dies in his mouth, his tongue refusing to let out the words, as if simply voicing them will turn them into facts, truths that can’t be taken back.
“Dead? Death?” The creature asks, Its gaze focused completely on Tom, observing him like he's the most interesting sight It has ever laid eyes upon. “Close enough. I’m Harry.”
Harry.
As if such a common, unordinary name like this can even begin to encompass what this thing is. It's amusing how ill-fitting the name is, like Tom's, in a way, the kind of name that you hear mentioned in passing so often that it loses its meaning, its shape.
Harry.
The creature has a name in the same nonsensical way that natural disasters and illnesses do, not because the assemblage of letters and syllables means anything to It but because it's comforting in the most humane way to name something that you fear and can't hope to beat.
“Why are you here?”
It doesn’t answer at first, It tilts its head to the side, looking almost childishly curious, and when It speaks, it’s with another question.
“Are you afraid?”
“No,” Tom answers. It's not a lie.
He doesn’t fear Death, he rages against it.
The fact that Harry is, by Its own words, something else entirely, is irrelevant.
It beams, Its smile far too wide to ever look anything but disturbing, Its lips stretching almost from one ear to the other, so much that Tom can't help but stare at the far too sharp canines it reveals.
“See, that’s why I’m here.”
Because Tom is too proud for fear?
Maybe, but then Tom’s eyes fall on the horribly familiar locket around Harry’s neck, and he knows that even if it’s true, it’s not the only reason at all.
That’s what had woken him up, hadn’t it? He hadn’t known, hadn’t realised, but something in him had felt his soul come in contact with the thing’s hand.
“You’ve taken something of mine,” he says with a calm that almost surprises him, expertly hiding how seeing the locket out of his hands again so soon after recovering it makes his skin crawl, how he itches to do something, anything, to have it in his hands once again. “I would have it back before we continue this conversation.”
“This little thing here?” Harry asks, almost innocently if not for the blankness of Its human face. “For someone so keen to rip his soul apart, you’re oddly protective of it.”
Tom stiffens, keeping his eyes trained on Harry lest they fall on his truck and betray the location of the diary.
The fact that he knows a killing curse did nothing isn’t enough to stop his mind from whirring into action at Its words, cataloguing his options if he wants to recover his horcrux and the cup, calculating whether or not they would be worth endangering himself and the ring currently on his finger or if he should just apparate away while he still can.
Harry also being in possession of the diary would make for a horrible situation, but his first horcrux is far less ostentatious than the locket, so maybe the thing missed it when It took his locket—
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, this wasn’t a threat.” Wasn’t it? “I don’t want to destroy it or you, it would defeat the purpose of coming here.”
What is that even supposed to mean? That It believes Tom would have been killed in the future if It hadn’t come?
“Then you won’t mind giving it back to me, I’m sure.”
Harry’s expression closes, Its fingers closing protectively around the locket and Tom isn’t sure how to describe how it feels, to have your soul in someone—something— else’s hand, he had expected to feel wrong and gritting, but instead he can practically taste what has to be Harry’s magic, feel it curl around his very being. It’s not trying to hurt him, that he can tell, it’s not even threatening, it’s just there, filling his lungs, seeping into his skin.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” It says, the amusement dancing in Its eyes making it obvious that It knows just what kind of reaction Its touch is causing. “But I can give you something else in exchange.”
“And why should I accept? You’ve said yourself, you know what this is, and I find myself ill-inclined to take the kind of faustian bargain you’re offering.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I won’t actually drag you down anywhere after your death, and it’s not like you’re planning on dying anyway, are you?” It has a point, but that doesn’t make Tom want to make a proverbial—is it proverbial still when the thing in front of him could very well be it?—deal with the devil any more. “It’ll be worth your while, I promise.”
Its words carry a weight, heavy and all-too present in the very air hanging between them, one that Tom would like not to acknowledge but has to.
“I’m listening,” Tom says, eyes sharpening. He’s not actually planning on letting Harry keep his horcrux, but it’s better to see what it has to say, agree for now and get it back later. Safer.
Funny, how he can’t remember the last time he actually had to agree to something purely to stay alive.
Harry grins again, and this time the expression is almost boyish, almost nice, Its lips pulling up just the right amount to look human, Its eyes pools of Scheele's green.
“I will protect your soul and stand at your side for as long as you remain mortal.”
And even if the thing is some kind of fae or genie who’s going to use the wording of the deal to betray him, Tom can’t see how this could be in Harry’s interest. Standing at his side might not imply that the creature will take an active role in his conquest of the wizarding world, but the part about protecting his soul can’t exactly be misinterpreted.
“Standing at my side hardly means anything,” he stills notes, because he’s a Slytherin and Slytherins don’t simply take deals without trying to change the wording in their favour. “I don’t need an observer, especially one who knows as much as you do.”
Harry’s smile doesn’t fall, if anything it becomes brighter, the thing sensing that Tom is actually considering it. That he has no other choice but.
“Even without that part, wouldn’t it be worth it?” It practically purrs, inching closer to his bed. “I don’t fear fire, I could protect the locket far better than a cave full of inferi ever could.”
Tom doesn’t react outwardly, doesn’t stiffen, doesn’t ask, but the question remains, how can it even know about that? Tom hasn’t visited the cave since he was a child drunk on revenge and he certainly had never told anyone about what had happened or his plans for the locket.
Legilimency?
He doesn’t want to entertain the thought of something being able to simply leaf through his memories and thoughts without him realising it, but then what if Harry really is Death itself, amused by his attempts at avoiding Its hands?
It wouldn’t have any reason to make a deal to protect his soul, but then neither does Harry, as far as Tom can tell.
“Why would you?”
Its eyes flash with something Tom can’t place, gone too fast for him to analyse it.
“Does it matter?”
It should.
It doesn’t.
“I want a binding vow,” he says, eyes trained on the locket, on Harry’s pale fingers caressing the incrusted S. They both know that Harry hardly needs to obey him, that It could simply take his horcrux without Tom being able to do much—to do anything—but then Harry hadn’t taken it in his sleep, had it? It could have, the feeling of someone holding his soul would have woken him still, of course, but Harry would have been gone before Tom could realise what was wrong.
“On what?” It asks, voice lilting and amused. “My life?”
As if Harry is alive enough for that.
Tom stills, thinks, answers:
“On your magic.” And then it comes, from somewhere in the dark of his mind, like the instinct that told him he wasn’t alone anymore, primordial knowing. “On your blood.”
It means something, though he’s not quite sure what, something even to a dead thing, something even to Death.
Harry’s smile is as close to human as it can be, eyes burning with will-o'-wisp hunger.
*
Tom doesn’t remember the vow.
He remembers one of Harry’s nails turning into a sharp claw, he remembers the creature slicing Its own hand and the way the wound had reddened without bleeding right until Harry had put a finger near the cut for one heartbeat, two, forcefully pushing magic into Its bloodstream to pump the blood out of Its body, he remembers Harry closing Its bleeding hand around the locket, he remembers Harry opening Its mouth and—
He remembers the scent of magic, copper and power, the fingers squeezing his soul and heart, infinity thrumming through his body.
He doesn’t remember the words.
They hadn’t been anything like what he had ever heard before, that he knows, their meanings had echoed directly inside his skull, bypassing his occlumency shiels like they weren’t there in the first place, but once he had heard them, acknowledged them, they had simply flowed out of his mind and disappeared somewhere that he couldn’t hope to reach.
It’s not for mortal ears, Harry says with a knowing smile when Tom asks, ignoring the fact that the horcrux around Its neck means that Tom isn’t really mortal by any stretch, and then It disappears, saying that It’ll bring him back a gift to celebrate the start of their collaboration before Tom can answer something like what kind of gift or please don’t.
There isn’t the familiar crack of apparition or any kind of sound, one moment It’s right there, in front of him, and the next It’s simply… gone.
Tom blinks, wondering if this was all some kind of strange nightmare induced by his proximity to dark artefact for the last two years, but the next instant his eyes fall on his still open truck and he knows.
He knows.
A quick perusal of his belongings shows that the diary is still there, nestled where it was at the bottom of his truck, and the cup hasn’t moved either, still protected from prying eyes by his old Slytherin scarf and enough curses to kill even a phoenix for at least a few hours. Nothing has moved or been taken, nothing but the locket containing part of his soul.
On autopilot, Tom gets dressed and brews himself a cup of tea, refusing to still be powerless inside his bed when Harry comes back.
And come back It does, though It’s not alone.
Or, well, It is, corpses hardly count as companions, do they?
“Happy birthday,” Harry says, looking awfully like a cat who just brought back a dead, gutted bird on its owner’s bed.
It takes a second for Tom to recognise the man, with how pale he is and how much of a mess his throat has become, Tom doesn’t know his name, but he remembers seeing his face in the newspaper, a few weeks after his graduation. Hogwarts’ latest Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher, the one whom Dippet had hired after refusing him, is lying on the pretty hardwood floor of his suite.
At least he’s not making a mess of it, the wound, as gaping as it is, isn’t even bleeding, which probably has to do with the trickle of blood at the corner of Harry’s lips.
“Why did you bring me a dead body?”
He has quite a few theories himself, including a few dark rituals and an illegal version of Polyjuice using a whole corpse, but he would prefer to hear from Harry itself what It had thought Tom would want it for.
Harry, ever contrary, simply shrugs.
“I thought of leaving his body in his quarters and just telling you about it, but then they would have known about his death and investigated. You might have been a suspect if you had shown up right afterwards asking for the job.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Tom says, because it really, really, doesn’t. “I hardly see how this could be a gift.”
Harry stares at him, bemused.
“He’s not the gift, silly. Hogwarts is.”
And it has always been Tom’s goal to teach in Hogwarts one day, to go back home and never be forced to leave again, but he still has so many things to do, branches of magic to learn, the diadem to find, most of those either harder or downright impossible while under Dumbledore’s scrutiny. As much as Tom wants to go, he knows he can’t, not now.
“You’ll be barred from Hogwarts the moment Dumbledore becomes Headmaster,” Harry say,, states, obviously seeing right through his blank expression, through his memories and dreams.
Tom grits his teeth.
Of course, he knows, the professor has never tried to make his distrust of him less obvious, but surely he'll have to look past his dislike if Tom is the only skilled applicant, won’t he?
Harry tuts, guessing—Tom doesn’t allow himself to linger upon the other possibility—his thoughts.
“What do you suggest then? For me to just go?”
“Oh, not immediately, no, it would seem strange if you showed up, wouldn't it?”
Then what?
“You should just be ready for Armando Dippet to contact you.”
Harry smiles sweetly, like there isn’t a corpse a few feet away from them with most of its trachea open to the air, takes Tom’s forgotten cup of tea, and finishes its content.
When It puts it back, there’s blood on the rim.
*
Dippet does, surprisingly—or unsurprisingly?—send him a nicely worded letter a few weeks after the professor's mysterious disappearance, asking Tom to please kindly visit his office for an interview if he still wants the job.
Of course, Tom comes.
It becomes obvious to him quite early on that the interview is more a formality than anything.
The old Headmaster waxes poetic about how hard it must have been to put his future on the side to better his knowledge of the dark arts in Borgin and Burkes, tells him that now that two years have passed, Tom is obviously the best choice for the position, and then proceeds to offer him the post, like it’s not the one thing Tom has been dreaming about ever since he was eleven and in Professor Merrythought’s class.
Tom idly wonders if Harry has anything to do with the fact that Dippet now couldn’t care less about how young he still is. The only answer he gets is Harry’s disjointed grin floating in the shadow of the Headmaster’s bookshelves.
*
All of his new colleagues—all of whom had taught him and know of his brilliance—seem quite happy to see him join them.
Dumbledore, rather predictably, isn’t.
He doesn’t say it, he’s never been the type to voice his distrust openly in front of everyone, especially now that Tom is a fellow professor and not merely a beloved student, but the blue eyes following his every movement are just as hard and cold as they always were during his school years.
The old man can’t subtly threaten him with expulsion anymore though, Hogwarts is his home once and for all now, and Tom knows better than to let go ever again.
Sometimes, Harry lets Dumbledore catch a glimpse of It, of Its hair, of Its smile, of Its Avada Kedavra eyes, It throws Its arm around Tom’s shoulder, holding him close like a lover might and It winks at Dumbledore before kissing Tom’s cheek.
He loves nothing more than misguided youth, Harry simply says, when Tom asks him what It thinks It’s doing, give him a lost cause, a deceiver, and watch him dance.
*
Hogwarts is nice, it's everything he remembers and more.
Teaching is—
Well, not completely what he had expected, it’s not like with his Knights where their obedience was mandatory and any failure to do as he said would result in a Crucio, but his students don’t seem inclined to call his wrath on themselves and no troublemaker disturb his class.
He gets used to it.
The students love him anyway, he’s young, pretty, and he’s teaching the older students how to duel. They don’t ask for more.
It takes Dumbledore naught but a few weeks of Harry egging him and Tom acting like he has no idea of Its presence for him to call Tom to his office.
“Tom,” he says, his smile both more genuine and slightly more strained than it usually is. “Tea?”
Tom sits down, allowing himself the smallest hint of a responding grin at Dumbledore’s fruitless attempts to spot Harry.
The creature likes to lurk in shadows while remaining just visible enough for the sight of It to be disturbing, but if It doesn’t want to be seen, Tom knows It’ll just cloak itself in darkness and disappear.
“Yes, please.” Not that he’s actually going to drink anything Dumbledore hands him, but a silent vanishing charm will take care of that for him. He doesn’t expect him to try and poison him, not now that the Damocles sword of Harry’s mystery is hanging above his head at least, but who knows what Dumbledore might be able to rationalise as being for the greater good. “You wanted to see me, professor?”
“It’s Albus for you, Tom, we are colleagues after all.”
Tom smiles, the sweet, pretty smile he reserves for people he’ll kill one day, and they settle in something that could be a comfortable silence if they weren’t Lord Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore, both pretending to be too busy enjoying their tea—cherry, nice if a bit mild for Tom’s taste—while ignoring the basilisk in the room.
Dumbledore has always been rather good at that.
“Albus then,” he says after precisely thirty seven seconds of silence, dragging the name out until it sounds sibilant on his tongue. “Did you have a reason to see me?”
“Do I need one?”
Tom’s pleasant expression is still in place but they both know the answer to that question.
“I assure you, I merely wanted to know how you were settling,” Dumbledore lies with a sigh. Though, maybe, it isn’t as much of a lie as an omission of the truth. “And if you had a good time in Knockturn Alley. Had you gone there before the start of your employment?”
“He thinks that’s where I found you,” Harry whispers helpfully inside his ear, Its cold breath caressing his skin. “He wants to know for how long I’ve been pulling your strings, isn’t that amusing?”
It is, truly, if Tom had known that the way to get Dumbledore to lower his guard was by acting like a victim, he would have let the other Slytherin hit him around a bit as a first year.
“Abraxas took me before our sixth year, so I was already a bit familiar with it.” He hides his amusement behind his tea cup, looking down to avoid dropping his facade at the way Dumbledore must have reacted to that—perfectly true, if irrelevant—piece of information.
Will Dumbledore think that the petrifications weren’t his doing now? That he wasn’t behind Myrtle’s death?
Harry laughs, that and so much more, Its voice says inside Tom’s mind, knowing and terrible.
“And working in Borgin and Burkes was as I had expected, far from pleasant but still necessary to better my understanding of cursed artefacts,” Tom adds idly, still avoiding Dumbledore’s eyes in case the old man realises just how hilarious he finds the whole situation.
“You could have taken one of the apprenticeships Horace offered you and gotten the same knowledge without needing to spend time in such a dark place.”
Tom shrugs, allowing himself to look just a little bit dazed.
“It seemed like the best solution at the time.”
Dumbledore presses his lips together, the picture of concern, and Harry continues to laugh even after the painting to Dumbledore’s quarters closes behind them.
*
Playing Dumbledore doesn’t exactly get easy, but it does get easier.
All he has is to act like some of his own decisions confuse him or like he has some blanks in his memories—especially the one related to any kind of dark activity—and the old man turns most of his suspicion onto the very convenient, Harry-shaped shadow following Tom around.
“He’s been spending his nights reading,” Harry tells him as It draps itself over Tom’s shoulders like an overgrown ferret. “Trying to discover what I am. He knows though, just like you did, he just doesn’t want to see.”
Tom hadn’t either, not really, but then he hadn’t been given much of a choice.
*
His first birthday in the castle, Tom wakes up to Harry standing at the foot of his bed—so reminiscing of their first meeting that for a brief instant, Tom thinks he’s dreamed the past months—holding Hufflepuff’s cup and one unconscious Caratacus Burke.
“Here,” It says, flashing him Its prettiest smile, the one that looks almost human, that whispers beware instead of screaming danger. “Better than a random muggle, don’t you think?”
It is, because Tom hates the man with a passion, for the way he had treated him when Tom had been working for him, for the way he had laughed when he had explained just how the locket had ended up in Hepzibah Smith’s hands—
Caratacus wakes up when Harry unceremoniously drops him on the floor, his confusion turning to anger at the sight of Tom and then glorious, beautiful fear when he sees his expression.
Good.
Tom doesn’t care nearly enough about his late mother to avenge her, but he can avenge the loss of his heirloom, can’t he?
*
Tom tears his soul apart and forces a part into the cup, agony ravaging his mind and making him scream his throat raw behind the silencing charms of his quarters.
Harry holds him until he stops shaking and picks up the pieces.
*
A year passes, time unperturbed by the cracks in his soul, and soon enough it’s his birthday again.
Amongst the gifts he got from the other professors, his Knights and even some students, is a gleaming diadem, but this time, there isn’t an unconscious body accompanying the priceless artefact, it’s just Harry, lying on his settee with the diadem on Its head and a pleased smirk on Its face.
They spend most of the day preparing the ritual that will once again split his soul, Harry watching him with lidded eyes as Tom carves runes into his own chest and mirrors them with his blood on the floor of the Forbidden Forest, looking far too interested in preparations that It has seen the previous year for Tom’s liking.
Still, It doesn’t say anything until It’s prowling through the streets of Muggle London at his side, looking for a proper sacrifice.
“Let me kill them for you,” Harry suddenly says, as if finally coming to a decision for a problem Tom hadn’t known existed.
“You do know I have to kill them myself to split my soul, don’t you?”
Surely something as old as Harry—he doesn’t know how old exactly, but a conversation with the ghosts as to why they keep avoiding It had at least revealed that It’s far older than the castle itself—knows how horcruxes are made, right? It hadn’t seemed surprised the previous year, when It’d helped Tom pull himself back together, so Tom hardly understands why It’s getting confused now.
“Not yourself, no. The basilisk killed Myrtle Warren for you the first time, did it not?”
Tom bristles, both at Harry’s intimate knowledge of his past—no matter how much time he spends in the other’s company, he just can’t get used to the utter lack of secrecy—and at the implication that, what, he couldn’t have killed her himself?
Tom had murdered his father and his grandparents in cold blood the summer that had followed, he hadn’t needed the basilisk to do the job for him, just like he doesn’t need Harry to do it now.
“Oh, there’s no need to take it like that, don’t you see what I’m offering? Myrtle’s death worked because the basilisk killed on your order, because it was yours. If it works—”
If it works—
Harry stops, smiles, eyes dark and all-devouring, the expression managing to look both soft and hungry, Its full attention reserved for Tom. “I’ll be another of your leashed monsters,” It says, Its breath cold as It purrs against his skin. “One of your caged abominations.”
And in that precise instant, Tom wants that, needs that more than he thinks he’s ever needed anything else before.
It unnerves and alarms him both that he never realised when his warranted wariness turned into something more, into that ignoble want that he hadn’t noticed growing inside of him until it was a rogue wave swallowing everything in its wake, but Harry takes his hand, grabs a muggle, and his thoughts don’t matter anymore because they’re back in the forest and his sacrifice is trying to scramble away.
“Let me,” Harry insists, lowering Tom’s hand and wand before pouncing after the man, Its eyes alight with the thrill of the chase, as short and easy as it may be.
And short it is.
The muggle is barely a few feet away, when Harry pounces on him, shoves him on the floor, and Harry is opening Its mouth wide, too wide, displaying the sharp teeth that Tom will never get used to seeing, and Harry is biting the man’s neck, holding the body on the ground as it convulses in the throes of death and—
The struggling stops.
Tom feels him die, feels it, the ritual working, registering the death like it had registered Myrtle’s, his father’s, that useless muggle’s and Caratacus’, his soul tearing apart like Tom had taken the life with his very hands.
It hurts, just as it always does, a glimmer of Death for the man who would truly avoid it, it hurts, but it means that Harry is his, an extension of his being with his soul beating against Its chest, it means that in that moment, with Its teeth in the dead man’s neck and blood in Its mouth, Harry is Tom’s utterly and completely.
Harry kisses him, and Its lips are bloody, the coppery taste of the muggle’s death so strong that Tom is drunk on it, that it eclipses the agony of soul nesting itself in the diadem, that it feels like Tom is the one who sank his teeth into the body and tore.
Didn’t he? Didn’t he?
What is Harry, if not another part of himself?
It holds his soul, keeps the shard greedily around Its neck, It reaches inside Tom’s chest and takes his heart, takes everything, until all that is left is a void behind his ribs and the need to fill it.
Harry crowds him, leads him and pushes him on the forest floor, on the runes Tom etched in the soil, Harry is everywhere, and it’s hands ripping his clothes and touching skin, claiming, it’s claws caressing his skin and sinking into the soft parts of his being that Tom never should have bared, it’s teeth against his throat, grazing but without the intent to destroy, the intent to kill, it’s blood, the muggle’s, Tom’s, Harry’s.
Harry’s doesn’t flow, but when Tom bites Its lips, he still tastes it.
*
For his third birthday in Hogwarts, Harry takes Gryffindor’s sword out of the Sorting Hat, climbs on his lap to carve the runes on his chest and gives him another bloody death to shatter his soul with. In the aftermath, It lets Tom fuck It into their bed as he rides the wave of power and agony, It throws its head back and laughs, sacrilegious and sublime, until Tom collapses into Its arms.
*
On his fourth birthday in Hogwarts, he lies down on the roof of the astronomy tower with Harry, looking at the night, at the dark and starless sky above them.
“Why did you even come to me that night?” Tom finds himself asking, without quite knowing why, without expecting an answer.
It had taken the locket, yes, but It’s not like It’s using it. It just hangs above his robes days in and days out, right over Its still heart, and when they fuck, when they sleep, chest to back, Harry just makes it disappear right into Its chest, hiding away Tom’s soul in the cage of Its bones.
“I was bored.”
“Are you bored now?” Tom asks with a grin, rolling on his side to face Harry.
Harry doesn’t answer.
It doesn’t smile either.
*
On the birthdays that come, Harry gives him the world.
You-know-who, they call him—not him, most of them don’t know Tom, don’t know Lord Voldemort and never will, they just know It—not daring to call It by any other name.
Harry smiles and laughs and kisses him but there’s nothing behind Its eyes
Tom wonders if this is what Dumbledore saw, when he came to the orphanage to meet a boy who had yet to perfect his facade, if this is what made him suspicious of him, when he had yet to be blinded by his fear of Harry, if he saw the dead thing that Tom was no matter what expression he twisted his face into.
Sometimes, he wonders if Dumbledore can see how Harry changed him without his volition, how It twisted Tom into something that he was never supposed to be, something starved that yearns and wants and—
And Tom doesn’t want love, he doesn't, he doesn’t want something that he can’t feel, something that's useless to him in the great scheme of things, something that Harry can't muster anyway.
It would be senseless to want something he can never have.
*
“Were you always like that?”
Harry turns to face him, holding a glass filled with what Tom is almost sure is blood, but his gaze is nowhere near the crimson liquid, lost inside Tom’s soul instead.
What’s left of it in his own body anyway.
“Like what?”
Dead? Harry’s cold eyes ask, Avada Kedavra green, Death?
“Undying,” Tom says instead, because he’s still not completely sure what Harry is and he’s not sure he really wants to know.
“No,” Harry admits after a while, quietly, like the word itself is an admission of guilt to some great and unforgivable crime. “Though maybe I was always meant to be.”
And—
He has to ask, hasn’t he? If he doesn’t, no one will.
And—
It’s not because he wants to, the thought of asking is as daunting as the thought of knowing, but there are some words that need to be voiced and others that need to be heard.
And—
Tom is uncertain that either the question or the answer are part of those.
It should matter.
It doesn’t.
“What happened?” he asks, inevitably.
Harry wets Its lips, stalling for the first time since Tom has met It, and if Its words before were a confession, this is so much worse, something so terrible it becomes unspeakable.
Weakness, instead of guilt.
“When I was young,” It starts, ignoring Tom’s wide-eyed expression—part lie, part truth, like everything Tom does, like them—at the implication that It was young once. “Someone came to me. Something. I trusted It when I shouldn’t have and It gave me Its curse.”
“Few would call immortality a curse.”
No answer comes at first apart from a disturbingly human grimace, and after two minutes of silence, Tom has resigned himself to having to restart the conversation another day.
“It’s boring,” It says finally, the word dying lonesome death on Harry's bloodied lips, alone for a handful of interminable seconds before two more syllables are torn out of Its throat. “Lonely.”
It’s the answer Tom was seeking years ago during their chat on the roof of the astronomy tower, has to be.
“That's why you came to me, isn't it? To end your loneliness.”
Harry hums, noncommittal and evasive.
“To make it end, yes.”
Then It succeeded, didn’t It? Once, Tom would have jumped at the possibility of abandoning Harry the moment he stopped fearing for his life, but now he can’t imagine his life, endless as it will be, without Harry’s power at his side, without Harry’s magic surrounding his soul, without Harry.
“You'll have me for the rest of eternity soon enough.”
Harry sets down Its empty glass with a resounding clink, licks Its lips again, like it will make them any less red, any less Tom’s, and talks:
“Eternity is— it changes everything. It changes you. Things that might have been important before aren't anymore. People too. Time erodes everything, thoughts, memories, feelings. It all washes away.”
“I love you,” Tom says then, because in that instant he knows that Harry doesn't believe it or maybe doesn't—can't—care and he's not sure which is worse but at least it has to know. “I won't forget that.”
“Love,” Harry repeats, tasting the word, the promise it holds, savouring it like it’s yet another bloody thing coming to die on Its tongue. “The sweetest things always rot first.”
*
Tom has been teaching for decades already when he meets James Potter.
The boy is a force of nature in the way hurricanes are, all chaos and careless cruelty, just like the Black heir is leashed madness and callous mirth, they’re both brilliant, all three of them, really, alongside the werewolf cub they’ve befriended, and they walk around Tom’s castle like they own it.
Dumbledore lets them because he’s always been blind to the fault when it comes to his dear Gryffindors and he still doesn’t understand that not being dark doesn’t mean being good, because he’s a fool and he doesn’t notice Tom taking them aside, dubbing his new Knights in the dead of the night, because he’s too busy fearing Harry and Its influence on the rest of the world to notice what Tom is doing right underneath his nose.
Too bad, too bad, and little James Potter grins at him in a way that’s familiar, horribly so, but that Tom just can’t place, before huddling underneath his invisibility cloak with his friends and sneaking back into their dorm.
Harry stares at the cloak right until it hides the three boys, transfixed, and Tom has never seen It actually pay that much attention to something that isn't him.
*
Time passes, another decade drifting away as his influence in the wizarding world grows and grows, like some sort of great monster of old, feeding on children and magic, and Tom is everywhere, everywhere Harry is, everywhere his Knights went after leaving Hogwarts, and Tom owns the fucking world.
Then there's a prophecy and the world, Tom's or not, tilts on its axis.
“It doesn't mean anything,” Harry says, and Tom would think It’s being gentle if he thought It could actually be. “Prophecies almost never do, don't lose yourself to a few nonsensical words.”
“You're not the one this is about!” he hisses, fists clenching and unclenching at this side, resisting the urge to whip out his wand and start casting Fiendfyre to give his rage an outlet. “You're not the one who's going to be vanquished by an infant.”
Tom knows that Harry doesn’t care, doesn’t feel, but apparently anger, like boredom, isn’t out of Its grasp yet, for Its face twists in fury, mirroring Tom’s own expression
“You won’t be vanquished by anyone if you don’t mark the child as your equal. Dumbledore doesn’t even think that you’re the Dark Lord, hasn’t for more than three decades, he believes that the boy will kill me.”
Kill Harry? Tom knows that Dumbledore is growing senile, but—
“Vanquish Death?”
And Harry isn’t really Death, not really, just like Harry isn’t quite dead, but Tom still can’t imagine something as everlasting as Harry disappearing one day.
“What am I, if not the last enemy to destroy?” it wryly asks.
*
For his birthday this year, Harry takes his arm and uses Its strange kind of apparition to materialise them both inside the Potter’s house.
Tom knows now, that Dumbledore isn’t going to use their infant against him, that he couldn’t even if he wanted to, not when the boy is the child of two of his best Knights and his parents answer to him first and everyone else second, but still, the mere existence of the prophecy is enough to unsettle him.
The house is quiet when they appear in the nursery.
Dark, if not for the colourful mobile floating above the cradle.
The Potter couple is asleep in their room, not knowing that Death is lingering in their home next to the man they trusted enough to make their secret keeper, and there’s a baby in the crib, a little thing, five months old, with a bird nest for hair and a tiny face scrunched up in sleep. Tom can’t imagine himself being killed by the child.
He can’t even conceive dying to Dumbledore, but this infant? He knows that the child will grow and that one day, he might be a threat, but Tom has years on him. Even if little Harry Potter is strong, even if he refuses to take his parents' path and join him, Tom is already a one-in-a-century genius with decades of experience and Death at his side, how can the boy ever hope to match that?
Little Harry Potter—
“Do it,” Harry says, cold and indifferent. “What are you waiting for?”
Harry.
Tom stills, stares, and sees. Harry doesn’t look like the small thing in the cradle, of course It doesn’t, It doesn’t really look like James or Lily Potter either, mostly because It doesn’t look human, but sometimes, Its eyes soften, Its smile is the right shape to look real and—
Harry Potter.
It looks at him curiously, as if following the train of his thoughts.
“Did you come here to vanquish me, Harry?”
Harry caresses the sleeping baby’s face, his unblemished forehead where Harry bears Its lightning scar.
“What do you think?”
And he remembers Harry’s teeth, tearing out the muggle’s throat, he remembers Harry’s lips on his own, Harry’s hands, everywhere.
Tom looks back to his past and sees Harry in Billy Stub’s rabbit as it hung from the wooden beam, in Myrtle’s eyes right as they started to glaze over, in his muggle father, unmoving on the floor, sees Harry in every dead thing, in every death.
“I think you could have done so a long time ago,” he says, and his eyes fall back on the baby, on the small, harmless thing that in another life, he would have marked as his equal. “I think you would have, if you hadn’t come.”
And Tom takes James’ cloak, because it’s right here, haphazardly thrown over a chair, because Harry is still staring at it now that It has spotted it, ignoring little Harry’s sleeping form, he takes it because it feels right and because if Harry looks at it now, he’ll be looking at Tom.
Harry doesn’t tell him if he’s wrong or not, if he’s doing the right thing by letting the baby live, by taking the cloak, but when they appear back into Tom’s rooms, It kisses him and Tom can almost convince himself that the heart he can feel beating inside Its chest isn’t his own.
*
Almost.
*
Except Harry doesn’t love him and Tom has always known that.
It likes him well enough, it seems—in the way you like a random stray cat you’ve petted for a few minutes even though you know you won’t ever see it again—or at least It likes not being bored and Tom is a suitable distraction.
Sometimes he wakes up in the dead of the night, certain that Harry just took off the locket and disappeared into the night, having gotten tired of him and his little war, sometimes he wakes up and his bed is cold, so cold, but Harry is still there, against him, Its heart just as dead as it always is, and Tom goes back to sleep.
Sometimes he wakes up and he finds Harry staring at him like It can’t fathom why Tom is here or why It is in his bed either, like nothing about them or Tom’s affection makes sense, but then It smiles, nearly soft, nearly fond, and Tom decides that he doesn’t mind being a distraction if it means Harry stays.
*
No matter what Dumbledore likes to call it, the situation never actually dissolves in a full blown war.
There are skirmishes between Dumbledore’s Order and some of his own overzealous supporters, but it’s the actions of a few and not the majority, most of his Knights knowing better than to flaunt their allegiances, preferring to quietly change the world while Dumbledore is busy fighting a few fanatics.
It helps his image, his images, as both Professor Riddle and Lord Voldemort, and he has to thank Dumbledore since the old man never tried to recruit him in his little militia. Having to murder his own followers, no matter how misguided they are, would make things a bit awkward after all, but Dumbledore couldn’t ask that of poor, misled Tom Riddle, could he?
Not when the good professor is still doing his best to fight the shade of Death on him and teaching the new generations, not when Harry has been making himself more and more scarce—as far as Dumbledore can see him—to make it look like the Headmaster’s various attempts at warding and banishment had any effect on It.
Still:
War or not, Tom has always known that this confrontation would come one day.
The fact that Dumbledore still somehow holds onto the hope that Tom will—what? Escape Harry’s clutches? Realise that he’s been used and turn against the puppeteer?—be on his side changes nothing.
You-Know-Who makes a show of appearing near the Black Lake, engulfed in darkness and shrieking shadows, casts a spell to prevent teachers and students alike from leaving the castle and giving them an audience, then waits.
Dumbledore comes.
There’s a discussion, something inane, like most things are when Dumbledore is involved, about how Tom can still turn his life around and do the right thing, about how his mind has been poisoned by a great evil, about the pull of the dark arts and why Tom must resist it—
Except it’s not the pull of the dark arts, just like Harry isn’t a Dark Lord or a man at all.
Tom would explain that, if he were a more magnanimous person, but he’s not, so he simply smiles and says that there’s nothing to resist.
Dumbledore calls him Tom then, like he always does, except in his mouth plea and ultimatum, Tom calls him Albus, then he calls Harry and Harry answers.
Tom hadn’t expected Dumbledore, with all his talk about Death being naught but a wizard’s last adventure to be frightened by Harry, but then Harry isn’t quite Death, is It?
It’s close enough.
They duel, Tom with the confidence of a man who knows he’ll win, Dumbledore with the desperation of one who knows he’ll die, they fight and Harry watches, at his side, like It always is, like It always will be.
Then Dumbledore finally falls, his wand flies out of his lax grip and—
A ring on his finger, a cloak around his shoulders and a wand in his hand, everyone knows how the story goes.
When Tom turns back to face his lover, grinning in victory and elation, the locket is on the stone floor, intact and unblemished, but Harry, his soul, his heart, is nowhere to be found.
*
For his last birthday in Hogwarts, Harry gives him immortality and disappears from his life.