[From Litha to Lammas]: Immaculate, 6/7, NC-17, Tom/Harry

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last regular chapter; I’ll post the epilogue tomorrow.

Part Six

Tom watched, fascinated, as Harry crouched beside Malfoy and tilted his face up. He woke the bastard, who’d slumped into a faint, with a tap of his wand against one of Malfoy’s legs, likely because he couldn’t get into his mind without eye contact and consciousness.

Tom suspected that before long, Harry would be capable even of that, but it made sense that he didn’t want to try it now, on his very first foray into vengeance.

Harry’s eyes were narrowed and shining. He bound Malfoy to the floor with a contemptuous flick of his wand when the other man started to thrash and move, and whispered something Tom couldn’t make out completely, but which ended with, “—how’s it feel?”

I wonder if even Harry knows how deliciously vindictive he can be.

Malfoy started to snarl something back. Harry filled his mouth with what looked like a thick, uncomfortable gag, casting the spell wordlessly, and then dived into his brain.

Tom could only feel a little of what was going on, given that Harry was using Occlumency instead of Legilimency and doing it with his back to Tom and no more tendril in his mind. But that which he could feel, he clung fiercely to. This was the first new thing he had learned about his art in more than a decade. His breath shot through his lungs and his heart pounded as if he were running a race.

Really, everything about Harry was exquisite.

*

Malfoy had some barriers, and some Legilimency that lashed out at Harry as he passed. Harry pushed them away easily. Malfoy felt as if he had learned both mental arts a long time ago and never practiced them much since.

How do I know that?

Harry shrugged the question away. He could consider it later, and he was sure that Riddle would be happy to help him explore the issue. Harry reached for Malfoy’s memories of what he had done to Harry, turning them over and bursting them like a slug he had stomped on.

Malfoy’s disgust cascaded over him. He hated the fact that another man could look at him and desire him in particular. He wasn’t afraid of gay people in general, or so his inner self-reassurances sang in broken notes, but no one should look at him that way. His cock wasn’t made for that, or his mouth, or his arse.

Harry sneered and scraped through the memories that had once nearly destroyed him, his own Occlumency hovering protectively in the back of his mind to ensure it didn’t happen again. Malfoy had loathed Harry for making him feel desired by a man, he had hated the sight of him, and he had wanted him to leave almost the moment Malfoy had finished taking the pictures. And—

Harry felt the explosion of rage happen in the back of his mind, and freely leaped to embrace it, pushing aside the shields that might have kept it from him.

Malfoy had wanted to ensure that Harry never looked at any man with desire again. So he had spun the twisted net of words about how disgusting Harry looked, and kept the pictures as backup he could spread around in case Harry seemed to be getting too close to anyone. It didn’t matter how obedient Harry had been or how quiet. Malfoy had always meant to expose the secret at some point. When he had heard that Harry was being seen with Riddle, Malfoy’s first thought hadn’t been that Riddle could read the secret out of Harry’s head but that it was unacceptable for Harry to date any man, let alone one with connections and power.

Harry snarled and snarled, and felt his body trembling, distantly, far away from the mental claws he was wielding against Malfoy. Malfoy screamed weakly. Harry had to close his eyes and hold himself back.

He didn’t want to hold himself back. But he knew that if he didn’t, he might end up destroying Malfoy’s mind thoroughly enough that not even Riddle could glue the pieces back together again.

And Harry did so want Malfoy to know exactly what had happened to him with part of his mind and why it would be of no use to go to any other Occlumens or Legilimens.

Once he was sure that his fury wouldn’t cascade out of control and break Malfoy’s mind like ice, Harry went on searching for Malfoy’s worst memory, wondering absently if it was going to be the one where Harry had confessed his crush.

But no, it turned out to be something much more hurtful, pulsing away at the middle of Malfoy’s mind like a dying star. Harry reached for it.

*

Tom shuddered under the backwash of Harry’s power, which felt like a winter wind as it passed over him. He could tell why Harry was holding himself back on a short rein. He wanted the vengeance to last longer than what would happen if he simply shattered Malfoy.

But part of Tom wanted to see that. Malfoy lying on the floor, drooling and staring at the ceiling, as mindless as a Dementor victim, while Harry rose and coolly cast aside Malfoy along with other shards of his past—

Tom did something he should have done sooner, and cast a Locking Charm over the door. It would be more than awkward if someone came in here to see Harry bent over a sprawled Malfoy on the floor, and somewhat awkward if they realized how much Tom had hardened at the thought of Harry destroying Malfoy.

*

Harry found himself hovering in what seemed to be a serene blue sky. When he glanced around, he realized this memory began with Malfoy on a broom, above what looked like half of Slytherin sprawled and chattering on the grass. Touching the knowledge Malfoy had about the memory, which spread through the rest of it like a half-visible glass dome, let Harry know this was the end of the last term of sixth year, after he had left.

Malfoy slanted down on his broom and landed next to Pansy Parkinson. She gave him a dismissive glance and went back to listening to Millicent Bulstrode describe a duel she’d participated in.

“Pans, can I talk to you?”

Malfoy’s voice throbbed with something that his memory told Harry was supposed to be impressive depth. But Parkinson just shrugged and stood up. “Okay,” she said, and walked away from the other Slytherin students to stand on the far side of the pitch.

Malfoy turned, took a deep breath, and began, “I’ve always thought you were a terribly good-looking person, Pansy.”

Parkinson lifted a hand. “If this is leading up to a marriage proposal, you ought to save your breath.”

The whole world seemed to tremble as the bottom fell out of Malfoy’s stomach. “What?”

Parkinson rolled her eyes. “Look, dating was fine. Fun. We had some good times. But you’re nothing I want in a husband, Draco. This is the perfect time to go our separate ways, since we’ve got one more year in Hogwarts and no one is going to be listening for wedding bells until at least the end of that. I hope you find someone else.”

“Why don’t you want to marry me?”

Parkinson lifted one eyebrow. “You sure you want the answer to that?”

“Yes, damn it!” Malfoy’s hands were clenched. “You owe me that much!”

“All right.” Parkinson’s face turned into a bored mask. “You’re childish and cruel, Draco. Those taunts that you still keep shooting about Loony Lovegood? All right, she’s mental, but you’re a year older than she is and it’s tired as hell. And I know you had something to do with Potter leaving, even though I don’t know what.

“You don’t let anything go. You’re still fuming and fussing about how Cedric Diggory shouldn’t have asked you on a date, even though that was years ago. He backed off when you asked. How bad could it be? I wouldn’t want to listen to you going on and on about things that happened decades ago.

“You don’t interest me on an intellectual level. All you can do is brag about your father and your family and your wealth. You don’t try in your classes because you know that no matter what, you’ll have money and your needs will be taken care of. I want someone who was put into Slytherin for his ambition, not his complacency.

“And finally, you’re pretty magically weak. That would be acceptable if you acknowledged that and worked on getting better, but you’re stubborn and stupid, too. You lose every duel with Blaise, but you keep on challenging him.” Parkinson swept Malfoy with a glance that seemed to flay him naked. “I don’t want children who will be near-Squibs or who will refuse to give up and accept that they’re beaten.”

Malfoy stood there, still staring at her, world filled with a heartbeat of pain and embarrassment and near-hatred.

It was so good. (And of course Malfoy’s worst memory would be someone he’d thought he loved telling him the truth about himself, instead of something deeper or more tragic). Harry gathered up all those emotions and the memories of that day—still as hot and bright as if Malfoy were experiencing it right then—and began herding them together with his Occlumency shields. Malfoy stood there, and Harry pictured him standing there, forever.

Well. A part of him. He would relive this in his dreams, Harry decided, carefully positioning some of the floating shields around Malfoy’s unconscious mind. And Malfoy would experience the constant, furious tearing at his self-confidence that those words had produced in him, without any opportunity to retreat or reassure himself, as if he was feeling them for the first time.

But on the surface, in his consciousness, Malfoy would go about as Riddle had suggested. Aware that something was wrong, not able to tell it to anyone, while a part of him screamed and screamed and screamed.

Harry smiled a little as he worked. Seven years ought to do it.

Or, rather, seven years was a beginning. For all that Malfoy’s worst memory was so similar to Harry’s in that it involved being rebuffed by someone else, he hadn’t reacted the same way Harry had. He’d built up walls of hurt pain and told himself that he never wanted Parkinson anyway. He hadn’t had to retreat from the world or fail his OWLS because of it. No one had blackmailed him with it.

Harry thought he would start with seven years, and then see how merciful he felt.

*

Harry shifted and slowly came back to his body. Tom watched the way his head turned, and the way Harry’s eyes focused on him, and the way his breath came slowly out, before he spoke. “Did you want me to take a look and make sure that you’ve done it successfully?”

“You can do that if you want,” Harry said, giving Tom a deep, amused glance that made Tom shiver. “You’d probably like to see it. But I’m absolutely sure that I did it right.” And he stretched in an unselfconscious way that made Tom’s eyes travel all the way down Harry’s back to his arse.

When he looked up again, Harry was looking at him with narrowed eyes that held a good deal of amusement in them. “Did you know that one of Malfoy’s motives was trying to wreck my romantic life?” he asked abruptly.

Tom blinked and tried to focus. “No.”

Harry nodded. “He was so offended that another boy dared to have a crush on him that he decided to make sure I could never date anyone else. He thinks of himself as not homophobic.” Harry snorted. “But it was really more me he wanted to destroy. He planned to pass the pictures around if it ever looked like I was getting close to dating someone else. That was why he paid attention when you started coming around, along with the fact that you were a master Legilimens.”

Tom smiled.

“No.”

“No, what?”

“I know that smile.” Harry tipped his head and watched him with the kind of quiet confidence Tom hadn’t seen much of him since he’d started reading and destroying people’s minds. “You want to kill him. We aren’t going to kill him. We’re going to leave him alive to suffer.”

“You already know me that well,” Tom said, and his voice wasn’t a question but it was light and breathy.

Harry’s eyes darted downwards, then returned to Tom’s face. “And you think you already know me well enough to want me.”

Tom didn’t see any reason to hide it. Besides, Harry had already seen it. He tilted his own head and shrugged. “I wouldn’t press you. But I see no harm in making my intentions known.”

*

What a fucker.

Harry had to snort at the words playing through his own mind, and at the look on Riddle’s face. He was absolutely confident in himself. He wanted Harry. He knew Harry had already seen it, that they’d discussed it. He wouldn’t hide it. And he was confident that he would appeal to Harry at some point. He didn’t intend to retreat or play modest. Harry wasn’t even entirely sure that Tom Riddle knew what “modesty” was.

And yet…

Malfoy had stolen seven years of Harry’s life. Seven years of what could have been love. He’d intended to take more.

Harry didn’t want to just let that go, to pretend that he was going to live the obedient, chaste life Malfoy had tried to create in him. He didn’t intend to jump into bed with Riddle right away, but he could do whatever he wanted, now.

So he shot Riddle a heated look, and watched as his eyes darkened with lust, and stepped back shaking his head. “I thought you wanted to see what happened to him.”

It took Riddle a second to reorient himself to the room. Then he stepped over to kneel next to Malfoy’s body, still looking over his shoulder and not letting Harry’s eyes go until he absolutely had to to use his Legilimency.

At least I know I’m still desirable. And he wants me because of my Occlumency, my power—what I became over these years, not because he’s fantasizing about some innocent schoolboy.

Truthfully, for all the power of his Occlumency and being able to manipulate himself into being the right person for the situation, Harry wasn’t sure that he would be able to turn himself back into the person he’d used to be. That boy was gone. It had been unfair, the way he had died—Harry could acknowledge that for the first time—but there was no way to resurrect him.

And Harry didn’t want to. He wanted to be the person he was now, powerful and strong and sure and shining with satisfaction at having got his revenge on Malfoy.

And being desired of Tom Riddle, apparently.

*

Tom had never seen such work as the kinds of shields that Harry had woven around Malfoy’s worst memory. Then again, he had never seen this kind of Occlumency before, and he had rarely even examined the work of another Legilimens unless he’d been hired to undo it.

Harry had set things up so that the walls of his Occlumency shields were part of that memory, little drifting bits of stone and mirror that imprisoned and concentrated Malfoy’s emotions like a glass concentrating a beam of sunlight into a fire. Even if Malfoy was skilled enough to figure out in his conscious mind that someone had done this to him, there would be no way to simply unpick it. The scattered bits relied on and reinforced each other, not like solid walls that would be easy to spot and remove.

Harry had not only taken his revenge, he’d made it into a work of art, and Tom was panting heavily as he finally extricated himself from Malfoy’s mind and turned to look up at the man he hoped would become his lover someday soon.

Harry gave him a languid smile, leaning back against his desk with his hip cocked.

Tom clenched his fingers as he stood up. He had to leave the office now, or he would reach out, and Harry would be waiting for him but not truly waiting for him, and—

“Running away?”

The taunt made Tom spin around with a snarl on his lips. Harry laughed at him soundlessly, eyes so bright that Tom didn’t know if he had a single shield left. Perhaps only the ones that most held at bay the trauma he had suffered at Malfoy’s hands.

“I know that you don’t want to sleep with me right now. And that is what I want.”

“I know that I want to reclaim what Malfoy stole from me. And that you’re standing in the perfect position for me to do it.”

Tom stood there like an idiot as Harry stalked towards him. He paused in front of Tom, studying him like a lion watching his prey through tall grass. And then he leaned forwards, and smirked, and struck.

With his mouth.

Tom fought to keep his hands at bay at his sides. No matter what Harry said, Tom thought he would spook now if touched. But the brush of his lips was confident enough to fool many, and although he also kept his hands at his sides, he swept his tongue thoughtfully over Tom’s lips as he withdrew with a grin.

“Why with someone you didn’t know before now?” Tom whispered.

“That’s part of what makes you perfect. You know the truth, and you’re not dancing awkwardly around me. You’re not one of the Slytherin students from my year who would see me as weak. And everyone else, I’ve driven away through the last seven years that I spent here.” Harry glanced around the office and grimaced. Then his gaze came back to Tom, and his eyes were so brilliant that Tom wanted to touch them, hold them, grasp them, never let them go. Or perhaps that was only the emotion in them. “And you want me.”

“You will no longer stay here?”

“I don’t see how I could be content in this role any longer.”

“Good.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “My leaving this job sounds almost more important to you than my saying I might like to sleep with you.”

“You were being wasted here,” Tom pointed out, and reached out to take Harry’s hands between his. He could touch after all, if he was gentle, if he was careful, and backed up the minute Harry objected. “Now you can teach others Occlumency if you want, learn what you’re capable of, retake your OWLS—”

“I didn’t think they let you do that.”

“Who told you that?”

Harry’s grimace deepened. “Malfoy.”

“I think it time to reject everything he ever told you,” Tom said as delicately as he could. “And I think that we should decide—”

Someone rattled the office door then, hard enough that Tom turned around and placed himself between it and Harry. For a moment he thought it might be an Auror angry about corrections to a report he had written—Harry had told him about that—but then a voice he had heard before called out, “Draco? What are you doing in there? Why is it taking you so long?”

Harry met Tom’s eye, and grinned. “I believe I did cede you the punishment of Theodore Nott,” he murmured.

“I will take it with pleasure,” Tom said, and undid the Locking Charm on the door.

The moment Nott stepped inside, Tom seized his mind.

Nott fought back. He had some Occlumency, after all, and a rudimentary Legilimency gift that it didn’t seem he’d developed beyond the Occlumency. But Tom could leap over, under, between such barriers as he had, and meet Nott’s Legilimency head-on and crush it. Within moments, he was in the inner, guarded sanctum of the man’s mind.

He found the images of the pictures and pried at them, making sure that Nott hadn’t sent the photos to anyone and that Crabbe and Goyle had none of them, corroborating the information that he had taken from Malfoy. Then he went seeking for answers as to why Nott was following Malfoy around and obsessing about their persecution of Harry. Malfoy’s homophobia would account for it on his end, but—

Tom laughed aloud when he came across Nott’s own obsession with Malfoy, carefully hidden. Nott flinched and wailed in his grip. Tom turned and struck.

He surrounded the image of Malfoy in Nott’s mind, the sound of his name, the sight of him and the sound of his voice and the scent of his skin, with longing and with hatred. Every time Nott tried to think of Malfoy, he would be repulsed even as he yearned for him. If he tried to wank to Malfoy’s image, something he had done often in the past, then he would find himself soft and in pain even as he was restless with desire. If he spoke with Malfoy, he would lose track of what the other man was saying as he focused on the ugliness of his face.

Tom tied off all the memories of the pictures and the incident with Harry in the back of Nott’s mind under a neat layer of indifference, blurred memories, and revulsion towards Malfoy. An Obliviate could be traced, tracked, broken. Memories that Nott had no reason to go searching for could not.

He had no need to do the same to Malfoy, whose bound mind would suffer from much the same result. Harry did good work with his Occlumency. Soon, Malfoy would lose whatever interest he still possessed in life, occupied instead with the growing sense of despair that radiated from that memory of being cut down by the girl he had wanted to marry.

And Tom did think he should propose going after Crabbe and Goyle with Memory Charms. Just in case.

He drew back and smiled at Harry. “Would you like to look?”

“I’m not sure that I really could, not without using my Occlumency to herd Nott’s memories in one direction and maybe ruining your work.” But Harry was stepping forwards and bending over the moaning Nott, and his power reached out—

Yes, that was exactly what it was like, Tom thought, watching Harry with fascination. He wasn’t looking at the memories the way a Legilmens did, but holding the shields so that they reflected Nott’s emotions and memories and let Harry see them in his own mind. He drew back with a soft snort and a shake of his head.

“He deserved to suffer,” Harry said simply as he stood. “And you gave him that suffering.”

“And Crabbe and Goyle?”

Harry paused, then shrugged. “You can hunt them down and bind their memories if you want. I honestly don’t care, and if they don’t have the pictures or the same dedication to making my life miserable that Nott and Malfoy did, I don’t care about claiming their punishment.”

Tom reached out and let his fingers glance down Harry’s wrist. “I know you have little and less time for romance right now,” he murmured, and tilted his head at Nott and at Malfoy, both of them undone by love in their own ways. “But I hope that when you do, you will consider what I have to offer.”

*

Punishment for my enemies?

Yet Harry knew that was an unfair assessment. Riddle had done more than that. Had named Harry’s gifts Occlumency, had shown him the first admiration he’d received in years, and encouraged him to take revenge. Had reveled in it, even, and in the kiss that Harry had given him.

He might want more, but he was holding himself back.

And even the manipulation Riddle’d done of Dad’s mind had been one of those things that had enabled Harry to break through his Occlumency shields and shift them around, and start feeling things again for the first time in seven years.

“I have little time for romance right now,” Harry agreed. He had so much to do first: rebuild trust with his family, find out about retaking the OWLS, decide what he wanted to do in the future, learn to understand his Occlumency all the more, and enjoy Malfoy and Nott’s slow deterioration. “But when I have time again, you’re the only one I want to go to.”

Riddle’s smile was slow and long. He bowed to Harry with his hands clasped behind his back and turned away.

And that left Harry to decide how to wake Nott and Malfoy and get them out of his office. He wasn’t worried about them remembering what had really happened, but he would have to make up an excuse as to why they were there in the first place.

Bloody Riddle, leaving me the boring part.