[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Living Well, Harry/Tom, R, 4/8

[lomonaaeren]

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Part Four

“Is this to your taste?”

Harry nearly wrenches his neck turning around to look at Tom, his eyes as wide as Dumbledore’s mouth when he found out Tom managed to get an apprenticeship with Nicholas Flamel. “It’s amazing,” Harry breathes. Then he abruptly folds his arms and tosses his head a little. “Which it should be.”

Tom holds back a laugh. It’s so obvious that Harry has never been treated as he deserves. Whoever dated him beforehand—and Tom finds it hard to think about them without boiling rage rising in the center of his chest—never wooed him, never took him to the places where his beauty could be properly celebrated and complemented.

Tom has to wonder why. Did they not know about his Parseltongue, his Patronus, his power? Or did they fear it?

Yes, perhaps that is it. Harry marching between Aurors would make sense if he ran into the kind of prejudiced people who once hated Tom, before he became powerful and improved Parseltongue’s reputation.

“Are we getting me robes or not, Riddle?”

Tom bows his head and extends his arm for Harry’s. “This way, my dear.”

Harry’s ears turn pink, but he still manages to accept Tom’s arm and say in a voice loud enough to turn heads around them, “I hope that we can find robes that are comfortable for me while still looking formal, or I don’t intend to come back.”

Tom smiles at him, hoping that Harry’s obviously fake reactions at the moment will eventually be replaced by spontaneous, free ones. The way he gaped at the ceiling and walls of Glamoursall’s fascinated Tom as much as all the rest. He wants to see more. Touch more. Have more.

I will have more.

Of course, if Tom tries to see it through a stranger’s eyes, he can admit that Glamoursall’s is well worth looking at. The inside of the enormous building is draped with midnight-blue cloth, making it resemble a tent, and the ceiling has silver stars picked out on it, as close as something can come to resembling the ceiling of Hogwarts’s Great Hall without the enchantments that would let it actually mimic the night sky. Cool breezes whisper past gleaming trees whose illusions change them from spring to summer to fall to winter’s bare branches on a stately, rotating basis. Winged cats swoop about the sides and walls, bringing clothes to customers on occasion and on occasion refusing to do anything but hang upside-down like giant bats.

When Harry gets more accustomed to surroundings of this type, of course he won’t gape. But Tom isn’t able to think about that without a pang of loss.

To distract himself, he takes Harry straight to the dress robes section, in a corner of Glamoursall’s made to look like a winter forest. Unfortunately, Harry takes one look at the dress robes and bursts out laughing.

“I thought you wanted expensive robes,” Tom murmurs, trying not to show how much Harry’s honest amusement does prickle him.

“Yes, yes, of course I do.” Harry is attempting to smother his snickers, which escape anyway. “But ones that look like something a human being would wear, not a baby from the nineteenth century.”

Tom shakes his head and steers them in the direction of a spring forest that has fashionable robes of the kind someone might wear to a Ministry party where there’s not going to be dancing or many of the formal old purebloods. “All right, here, then.” He studies the open-front robes floating on air near them, spread out by magic so all the ripples of their sleeves and panels can be studied. “I bet you’d look stunning in blue.”

“Oh? Why?”

Tom blinks at Harry. Harry has his arms folded, and seems to have forgotten the pose of “spoiled child” he was aiming for. He glares at Tom as hard as Tom has ever been glared at, which, considering some of the idiots he’s dealt with in the Wizengamot, is frankly impressive.

“Because it would look good with your eyes and hair.” Tom keeps his voice soft and lulling as he holds up the blue robes, decorated along the sleeves and hems with golden dragons. “Have you never thought about what would look good with them?”

“Usually thinking too hard about people trying to kill me, wasn’t I?”

Tom lowers his hands as he stares at Harry. “What?” Harry can’t be older than his mid-twenties. How has his life been filled with people trying to kill him?

Harry abruptly turns bright red, and he sticks his nose up in the air again. “Fancy you falling for the jokes I’m trying out,” he says, with a voice that would be more convincing in its spite if it wasn’t shaking slightly. “Anyway, I’ll try those robes, but I bet they look horrible on me.” He reaches for them.

Tom holds onto the robes with one hand, putting the other on Harry’s shoulder. “Harry, look at me.”

“So you can rip the truth out of my mind again? I don’t think so.”

“Please look at me so you’ll know I’m sincere in what I’m about to say.”

Harry’s eyes flicker back towards him. His face resembles a shut door. Tom knows it will shut all the way, and permanently, if he fucks this up.

“I wish that you had not suffered what you did,” Tom tells him quietly. “Even if it meant that I never would have met you, even if it means that you walk away from me now.” He thinks Harry might. Everything Tom says seems to offend him in some measure or another. “If you could have had one moment of happiness more, I would wish that I had not met you.”

Even if I now think that I would have withered away from boredom before too much longer.

*

Harry stares at Riddle and wonders what game he’s playing now. Trying to keep Harry at his side, of course, and having Harry look into his eyes is just a ploy to pretend he’s sincere. Or possibly use Legilimency on him again. Harry would almost be glad of that. It would allow him to resolve the endless debate in his head in favor of walking away.

He’s playing a lot of games. You’re not as smart as he is, and not as Slytherin. You probably couldn’t understand them even if he explained.

Harry takes a deep breath and says, “Fine. Thank you. But I still don’t know how these robes are going to look on me.” He tugs on the blue robes that Riddle continues to hold, wondering exactly how ridiculous he’ll look in them. With any luck, it’ll be so bad that Riddle will back off.

Riddle doesn’t let the robes go. “Who hurt you?” he asks quietly. “Will you allow me to punish them?”

Harry pictures Riddle stepping through the Veil in this world, hoping to go to Harry’s world and find the Ministry who betrayed him but only showing up in more and more worlds to feature in various Harry Potters’ nightmares, and begins to laugh.

Riddle leans towards him. “What sort of answer is that?”

“One that means you can’t punish them because they’re beyond your reach,” Harry says, and tugs on the robes again.

“No one is beyond my reach.”

“Yeah, now you sound like Voldemort,” Harry says, and then winces when he realizes what he’s said. He tugs hard on the robes and gets them away from Riddle, but probably because Riddle’s hand has fallen nerveless back to his side.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing you need to repeat,” Harry says, and prances away with the robes. Two fronds part in front of him, and a small mirrored room appears. Harry steps inside, shuts the door, and takes off his patched robes to try the blue ones on.

He can feel his heart beating frantically with the way that Riddle stared at him when he spoke that name. Possibly Harry won’t have to act like a spoiled brat after all to get Riddle to back off.

*

Tom stares blankly at the mirrored wall behind which Harry has vanished. He feels as if he has been given a huge jolt sideways and the room still hasn’t realigned beneath his feet.

How did Harry know that name? It was one Tom entertained only in his head when he was a dramatic teenager investigating different ways of obtaining immortality. Well, yes, he might have told one other person. Possibly Abraxas Malfoy, who in those days was the closest thing to a friend Tom had.

But he discarded the idea once he realized how closely Dumbledore watched him and how much power Dumbledore would have once he defeated Grindelwald, which everyone expected of Dumbledore long before it happened. All that he needed was one suspicious death near him, and Tom could find Dumbledore’s word closing all sorts of doors to him.

So, he swallowed his pride, persuaded Nicholas Flamel to accept him as an apprentice, and went down the path that took longer but was less risky. And he would have said he was satisfied with his life, up until the point when Harry grabbed it and forced it to spin around him.

Where did he learn that name?

Tom paces back and forth, plotting the best way to ask, until the mirrored door opens. He spins around, mouth already open.

It stays open. Harry steps out and tugs on the collar of the robe, frowning at his reflection.

“This isn’t flattering at all,” he complains.

Tom makes an inarticulate noise of disagreement. Nothing has ever been more flattering.

Harry is skinnier than he should be, Tom can see that now, which probably comes from suffering under starvation wages from people who deserve to have their bellies split open and their intestines pulled out one loop at a time. But his body is slender in any case, and the robes will showcase it perfectly once Harry gains a little more weight. His eyes almost glow, his skin shines, in those robes. Tom cannot imagine that Harry has ever worn ones like them before, or he would have been married by now, but the wizard who wove them might have had Harry in mind.

“Get them,” Tom says hoarsely, when he can clear his throat.

“What?” Harry looks at him as though he assumes this a practical joke.

Merlin. Who told him what he looks like? Or has he just not made a habit of looking into mirrors?

“I insist on buying them for you,” Tom says, and his eyes run over Harry’s muscles and the skin around his ribs and waist that he can see now for the first time. “You look—Harry, magnificent doesn’t encompass it.”

Harry glares at him again. “Oh, come on. I know that you want to flatter me into helping you with whatever plot it is you have, but you don’t need to heap me with extravagant words of praise anyone knows are false.”

“Harry, I assure you—” Tom begins, while his brain whirls once more. Harry thinks this is all a plot? He doesn’t believe that Tom desires him, wants to take him to bed and have him for the rest of his life? He didn’t think the offer to marry him was sincere?

How could he not? What kind of life has he led?

Harry rolls his eyes. “Look, I want some robes, yes. I enjoyed the breakfast this morning, yes. But I can’t be bought for that kind of coin. I’ve had a Minister for Magic offer me a lot more than that, for a lot higher stakes.”

Who is he?

Harry sighs, then, as if coming to some conclusion. “I planned to take you for all I could,” he mutters. “And I can’t do it because I can’t keep my fucking mouth shut. Buy me these robes, and we’ll call it even, okay? I’ll leave, and then you don’t have to look weak to anyone else or endure any public embarrassments I could cause—and I’d be pretty good at causing them. Oh, and I’ll take the money for a Portkey to France.”

Tom shakes his head and takes a step closer. Already, the thought of Harry leaving makes him feel as though something inside him has burned to ash, and he’s trembling with the thought that he might never recover it again.

“Harry, please,” he whispers. “I do desire you. I don’t want you for some plot or for some obscure kind of political advancement. I just want you.”

“You don’t sound like you’re lying,” Harry says doubtfully.

“I am not.” Tom hesitates, but he doesn’t see any other way to prove that he’s telling the truth. Even if Harry doesn’t think he’s lying, he doesn’t seem about to drop his plans to simply leave the country and go to France. “Do you have any skill at Legilimency at all? Look into my eyes. I’ll drop every shield I have and let you see everything I’m thinking about you.”

Harry stares at him, and the eyerolls and sighs and doubt are gone in his shock. Tom will take it. He half-closes his eyes, dropping all his shields for the first time since he was fifteen, and then opens them again and meets Harry’s gaze directly.

See me as I am. Understand me, soul-called.

*

I can’t believe he’s doing this.

Harry can feel his face burning, but he also knows that there’s no one around but them in this small corner of Glamoursall’s, and it’s unlikely that Riddle will ever grant him this privilege again. He’ll break out of the fascination soon enough.

I mean, yes, it does sound as though he’s more enthralled with me than I thought, but how can you really be ready to marry someone you’ve only met three times?

Harry leans forwards and draws his wand as Riddle looks at him, his eyes different in a way that makes it seem as if a shadow has faded from them. “Legilimens,” Harry murmurs, his wand weaving the pattern he remembers.

It takes little effort to dart forwards and fall into Riddle’s eyes. Perhaps Riddle is using his own magic to ease the way. Harry doesn’t know, and he’s too busy falling—

Into the center of a burning sun.

There’s the memory of Riddle lying in the coma and hearing the song that symbolizes Harry’s soul for the first time, his immediate curiosity and desire. Harry flinches a little. How lonely was Riddle, to think that a stranger’s soul was that fascinating?

So long alone, whispers a thought to him that Harry thinks is Riddle’s subconscious, not something he’s deliberately shoving out there to try and entice Harry.

The memories of Riddle’s time in the shop come to him, and how possessive, how covetous, he was when seeing Harry’s power. Harry shifts, almost ready to break free of the hold Riddle’s mind has on him. He doesn’t want to be possessed, and he has already had enough of being coveted.

The moment comes when he leaves and Riddle walks into the alley to see what Harry did to his wards. Harry braces himself against what he assumes will be anger that someone else shares Riddle’s supposedly unique gift.

Instead, there is worship.

Harry reels. The feeling washes over him and almost knocks him from his feet, never mind that he isn’t actually there. Riddle wants to touch him, hold him, hoard him.

Harry’s breathing is loud and hoarse in his own ears when he finds the memory of their breakfast that morning and what Riddle feels as he watches him eat. The plotting of vengeance plays through the memory like music. That someone besides Ron and Hermione could want to hurt the people who hurt him is news to Harry.

Is new. No one has ever gone that far before, felt that much. Ron and Hermione would have done almost anything for him, but not stormed the Ministry and cursed Kingsley and the Aurors.

Riddle would. He would sacrifice any of his Aurors for Harry without a second thought. He is already dreaming about how he will break the spines and tear out the beating hearts of the ones who marched Harry to the Veil in chains.

Harry breaks free by closing his eyes, finally, and taking a long, deep breath. He can feel Riddle’s gaze on him now, a touch on his skin that weighs heavier than the cloth of the exquisite robes he’s wearing.

He doesn’t—he can’t—

“You at least believe me now, I hope.” Riddle’s voice is soft and cold. Harry doesn’t have to open his eyes to know that Riddle has once again put his Occlumency shields in place, and anything else he had guarding his mind.

“I believe that you’re utterly insane,” Harry says, not looking at him.

“Why is that?”

“Because no one becomes this obsessed with someone they just met, Riddle.” Harry draws in one breath, and then another, and manages to open his eyes. This time, Riddle’s gaze hits him harder than ever, knowing what’s behind it. Harry turns and stares at himself in the mirror, in the mockingly beautiful robes that he knows he can’t actually buy. “I think it might be a side-effect of the spell that connected me to your soul. Or maybe it’s because I’m the first different person you’ve met in a long time, the first person who didn’t behave like you expected them to. Or the first Parselmouth.”

“What are you saying?” Riddle has retreated behind a veil of coldness, if his voice is any indication. Harry shivers and wishes he hadn’t thought about veils.

“That this is real for you, for right now,” Harry says. “But it’ll break, sooner or later. Probably just after I got settled into it and managed to escape thinking that it’ll break. Then you’ll be kicking me out, and you won’t be obsessed anymore, and I’ll have to go somewhere else and make a home again.”

Riddle doesn’t respond. Harry smooths his hand down the sleeve of the robe he’s wearing, enjoying the glide of the fabric. Then he sighs and reaches up to remove it. His plan won’t work, anyway. He can’t cheat Riddle out of things like this, not now that he knows what’s behind his plans to buy them. It won’t be real forever, but it’s real to Riddle now.

*

“Don’t take them off.”

Tom feels as if someone has scoured the inside of his brain with sandpaper. Harry’s Legilimency was—not gentle. It’s obvious that he has barely any experience, and what experiences he does have came from him sharpening his claws on an enemy’s mind.

Harry turns to look at him, startled. Tom stares at him and wonders how, with all the secrets hiding behind his eyes, he can look so innocent and guileless. He might, might, understand power plays like the ones he thinks Tom’s preparing to use on him, but it never seems to have occurred to him to undertake them himself.

Or maybe he did, and that’s part of the reason that Tom saw him being marched by Aurors in chains.

Tom touches the side of his skull for a moment, is reassured it’s whole, and moves forwards a step, until he sees Harry tense. Then he stops. “They still look lovely on you.”

Harry studies him. “I know you want me,” he says. “I saw that much in the memories. But you don’t have to compliment me, you know, or make up lies, whichever it is. I can decide whether I should let you buy me things without being lied to or complimented.”

Tom studies him back in silence, noticing the way that Harry’s face gets pinker and pinker the longer he stands there. Then he shakes his head. “Did no one ever compliment you at all?”

“Sure they did.” Harry rolls his eyes. “And every single person was someone who could turn their backs on me the minute the papers reported some stupid story about me or I did something they didn’t like.”

“Who are you?” The question leaves Tom’s lips without his permission.

“Someone,” Harry says with finality. He glances down at the robes and strokes their sleeves again the way he did a moment ago, and a quiver runs through him. Tom wants to sigh with relief that he understands this emotion, at least. Harry does want these beautiful robes, precisely because he seems never to have had anything like them.

“I will buy them for you,” Tom says quietly. “Don’t think of it as strings attached. Think of it as the way I bought you breakfast this morning, as a way of making up for what I did when I invaded your privacy and your mind.”

Harry turns to consider him again. Whatever it is about Tom’s words that strikes him differently this time, he spends some time weighing them. Tom waits, not looking down at Harry’s revealed skin even though he’d like to.

“Okay,” Harry says abruptly. “But nothing else has to be this expensive, you know.”

“What if I want it to be?”

“Then you’re a git.”

Tom laughs, and Harry starts at the sound, as if he didn’t think Tom capable of it. If he thought of Tom as Voldemort, however he learned that name, then that probably makes sense.

“Choose other less expensive robes if you want,” Tom says, waving a hand. “Just make sure that they fit you well and that they’re what you actually want. If I’m going to spend a lot of Galleons, it should be on something you can wear, not on something you’ve just picked to make me spend more money.”

Harry visibly thinks about that some more, and then bares his teeth in a fierce grin. “What if I keep up the façade of spoiled child outside of the shop?”

“If it would make you happy, please do.”

Once again, Harry seems uncomfortable with Tom’s sincerity. But he looks away, and nods once, and vanishes into the spring forest section of the shop again to find something else that he likes, and which Tom is sure will look stunning on him, although perhaps not as much so as the blue robes.

Tom settles back, already plotting how he wants to ask his next questions, and what he can do to make Harry comfortable enough to answer them.

Besides letting him go, which is utterly out of the question.

*

Harry leaves Glamoursall’s wearing robes that he knows must make him look like the height of fashion. He’s actually willing to believe Riddle that the startled glances people give them in Diagon Alley when they see him and Riddle together are either because of Riddle’s position or because of how well the robes fit him, not because he looks freakish in them.

No one except Jenkins and his landlady, and a few of the Aurors, know who he is here. There’s no one to gape at him because he’s walking around with someone who was once his greatest enemy.

Harry grimaces at the thought of that. He supposes his greatest enemy now is the Ministry, or at least the one in his old world. He has no need to antagonize this one. Having Riddle following him around is enough of a problem.

“I would like to know,” Riddle says softly when they’re nearly to the Apparition point Riddle has said they’ll leave from to begin looking for places Harry can live, “how you heard that name.”

There’s no mistaking which name it is, of course. Harry turns his head and smiles at Riddle, watching him relax, before he says, “No.”

“What?”

“No. I’m not telling you.”

Riddle stares at him for a second, and Harry can see a vein start to throb in his forehead. Harry straightens up a little, grinning. What? All he has to do is tell the truth, and Riddle’s obsession with him already starts breaking? That’s a lot simpler than his plan of acting like a spoiled brat.

Although, he probably should have saved it until Riddle had at least paid for a lease on a flat or something. Or even bought him a house. He might be—might have been—obsessed enough to do that.

“Why not?” Riddle demands in Parseltongue. That causes a few people to stare at him in fear and reverence and greed.

Harry doesn’t want them to do that to him, so he shrugs and replies in English. No one is going to know what he’s talking about anyway, when they can only understand half the conversation. “Because I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

Harry smiles, and lets the smile widen across his mouth as Riddle continues staring at him. “Because.”

Riddle makes an intensely frustrated noise, and closes his eyes for a second. They’re standing near a small building that seems to be a sweet shop. Harry is more than happy to stop when Riddle does, watching that throbbing vein.

“Then answer me something else,” Riddle snaps at last, his nostrils flaring as he opens his eyes and glares at Harry.

“If I feel like it.”

Riddle appears to be on the verge of stomping his foot like an angry child. “What have your past lovers been like? Have you slept with a man before? What do you like? What can I do to give you pleasure in bed?”

Harry feels as though his blush is trying to take over his entire body, and he breathes in slowly. He decides that he’s going to speak in Parseltongue, and fuck Riddle for doing this to him. But the people who were closest to them are now giving them a wide berth, and he doesn’t think that they’ll hear his Parseltongue or automatically mob him if they do. “How would I know?”

“What do you mean? I am asking you a basic question. Do you not want to answer it?”

Harry glares at Riddle. Yes, he is all one giant blush, but once again, this seems like it might be a good opportunity to drive Riddle off, an even better one than before. He won’t want to stick around once he knows Harry’s answer to his questions.

“How should I know,” Harry asks slowly, “when I’ve never slept with anyone before?”

*

Harry’s answer drops into Tom’s skull and rattles around, in the same space that feels scoured clean by Harry’s Legilimency.

Emotions claw at him, so many that Tom doesn’t know what he’s feeling at first, and then he doesn’t know which is deepest, which he should act on first, what he should do other than stare at Harry like a gormless fool with his mouth open.

They ostracized him—

No one has ever told him what he looks like when he’s wearing robes like—

They arrested him—

He knows the name I never told anyone except Abraxas—

He’s a virgin—

Eventually, Tom does settle on one thought, one that rises to the surface of his mind and refuses to be silenced.

What kind of fools was he living with? How has no one snapped him up before now?

Then again, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Harry can be Tom’s, and Tom has yet another new experience to offer him.

Tom manages to control his breathing, and his desire to shout, especially when he’s not sure that it would be in triumph or fury. He offers Harry a small smile. “I would still like to discuss this with you, but we don’t need to do it right now,” he says, watching Harry’s shoulders relax at the return to English. “Perhaps we can discuss this over dinner? Or we can talk in privacy, and you could tell me what you would need to trust me.”

“You wouldn’t be willing to give it to me.”

“Would I not?”

Tom lowers his voice a little, drops his masks a little, to let the expressions on his face if not the emotions in his mind through. Harry gasps, and for one instant, Tom thinks he’s about to run away.

Then he firms his shoulders and stares at Tom speculatively. Tom keeps silent. He would wager a thousand Galleons that Harry’s profound loneliness and lack of good experiences with people in what seems to be the vast majority of his life are driving his reaction, as much as his trust in what he glimpsed in Tom’s mind.

But Tom doesn’t really care for the means, if he can attain the end.

“Let’s go somewhere private, then,” Harry says, with a tilt of his head, another gesture that proves he was perhaps living on a whole planet of fools. “And you can show me whether you’re willing to swear an Unbreakable Vow to keep my secrets.”