lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2023-07-22 08:45 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2023-07-22 08:45 pm
Entry tags:
[Songs of Summer]: Stolen Child, Harry/Tom, 1/3, PG-13
Title: Stolen Child
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, James/Lily
Content Notes: AU (the Potters live, no Voldemort), Slytherin Harry, Tom Riddle born in Harry’s time, angst, dysfunctional family, obsession, violence, manipulation, present tense, non-linear/flashback style, underage kissing, blood prejudice, discussion of canonical child abuse
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 5000
Summary: AU. Harry was greatly loved by his parents, but they didn’t really know what to do with him when he Sorted Slytherin. And that gave Tom Riddle, third-year Slytherin student, the opportunity to steal Harry’s heart.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It’s based on a request from BeyondsMadness for Harry being Sorted into Slytherin and manipulated by Tom, and Lily and James failing to reconnect with him. This will be a three-shot, with the second and third parts to be posted over the next few days. The title is from the William Butler Yeats poem quoted below.
Stolen Child
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
“SLYTHERIN!”
Lily wasn’t even in the Great Hall when the Hat cried that word for Harry’s Sorting, but sometimes she thinks that she’s heard it echoing down all the corridors of her life since.
She stares at the letter in her hand, and then opens it, just in case, just in case Harry’s written something at the end of it…
But there’s nothing. It’s the letter she sent him, in her own hand and still marked with the tears that fell when she was writing it. Lily knows a Preservation Charm must have been cast on them for the stains to still be there, and she closes her eyes, shaking.
Harry did that. Riddle never would have bothered. At least she knows he saw this letter, touched it, opened it, perhaps read it.
Or not.
Maybe he opened it, cast the Preservation Charms, and tucked it into the original envelope—yes, this is the original envelope—and sent it back to make a point.
Lily tucks the letter against her chest and closes her eyes.
*
“SLYTHERIN!”
When the word echoes in his ears, Harry spends a long moment sitting there, staring at the wall, and not moving. It takes Professor McGonagall taking the Hat from him and speaking his name in a soft voice to get him moving again.
Harry stumbles towards the Slytherin table feeling like he’s in a dream. Draco Malfoy is staring openly at him. They’ve met plenty of times before, because like it or not, blood prejudice or not, Harry’s Dad is Head Auror and Malfoy’s dad is the Minister’s main advisor, so they’re in the Ministry together all the time. Draco doesn’t like Harry and Harry doesn’t like him. He never assumed they would be in the same House.
He never thought of Slytherin as a possibility. Why would he? He’s heard all the stories, how Slytherin made Mum’s best friend turn against her out of blood prejudice and how a bunch of Slytherins, including Abraxas Malfoy, tried to start a blood prejudice war in the few years before Harry was born. It didn’t work out, but still.
Harry isn’t a blood purist. He’s a half-blood. There’s no way he will fit in here, and he has no idea why the Hat peered into his head, chuckled, and announced his House without even giving him a choice.
It’s terrible.
“What are you doing here, Potter?” Malfoy questions in an undertone even as he claps for the next Sorting.
“I don’t know,” Harry snaps back, keeping his voice lowered. There are already people at the table staring at him with dislike. The last thing Harry wants to do is attract their attention. “It’s not like the Hat gave me a choice.”
“Of course not. The Hat makes the decisions.”
Harry looks up, blinking. There’s an older student leaning towards him, one who looks like a third-year. He has dark eyes that are difficult to make out the color of and dark hair that tumbles artfully on his head.
“Who are you?” Harry finds himself asking.
“Tom Riddle.” The student holds out his hand, and Harry shakes it uncertainly. He’s noticing that the boy has a surname that sounds Muggle, and he hates thinking that way. He shouldn’t have to think that way. He doesn’t notice people’s names. He doesn’t care.
Now he has to.
“Yeah, hi,” Harry says, and turns his head away to watch as Ron Weasley finishes Sorting into Gryffindor. Ron puts the Hat down on the stool and gives Harry a wondering look as he trots off to Gryffindor—the House Harry always assumed he would be in.
There was no discussion of other things, even if Sirius sometimes joked when he saw Harry reading a thick Defense book about him being a Ravenclaw. Harry has always known who he is and where he belongs. Other people have always known, too, based on the disbelieving looks he’s getting from up the table.
Now everything’s changed. Harry sinks down in his seat.
“Sit up,” Riddle says, so sharply that Harry stares at him, hardly thinking this boy is talking to him.
“Huh?”
“Sit up. Square your shoulders. Hold your head high.” Riddle is speaking in short words like Stinging Hexes, leaning closer to Harry. “Do you want to prove everyone right about the poor manners of half-bloods at the first meal?”
“They’re not right!”
“I know, but they’ll think they are, if you hand them such easy ammunition.” Harry blinks, and Riddle tilts his head with a thin smile. “Yes, I was raised in the Muggle world. I’m a half-blood myself. I know a lot about how surviving in Slytherin works.”
“But—you look nice.”
What sounds like a choked laugh bubbles out of Riddle. It’s probably against the rules or something for him to actually laugh, Harry thinks, a little resentfully. “What does that mean, exactly? You think you can’t?”
Harry tugs at his hair. “I know what I look like,” he explains. It’s always been a source of pride, with James pointing out that their hair makes them different from all the perfectly prissy pampered purebloods. They can’t be the same, and they won’t. “So they’ll never take me as one of them anyway, and I should do what I like.”
Riddle’s eyes glint for a long moment as he studies Harry. Then he says, “Of course they shouldn’t take you as one of them.”
“But you said—”
“You act the way you need to, to make it clear that they should pay attention to you, and you matter.” Riddle puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder and squeezes. It’s an odd, unnaturally warm touch. “And then you prove that you’re better than they are.”
“You are not better than us, half-blood,” Malfoy splutters. Harry blushes. He honestly forgot that Malfoy was siting close enough to hear them. He’s the only one who is, since the last new Slytherin, Blaise Zabini, took a seat down the table. “Stop talking as though you are.”
Riddle turns and pins Malfoy with such a sharp gaze that Harry swallows. His eyes are like needles. “Oh, no?” Riddle asks, and stretches out his hand. A glint of light moves above his fingers, and then there’s a snowflake turning there. “How many purebloods can do this?”
“Oh, you can do ice!” Harry says, excited. “I can do fire, look!” He snaps his fingers, which Sirius always taught him to do to make it more dramatic, and a flame dances above his palm.
People gape at him.
Shit. Harry doesn’t know what the best thing to do is, but it’s probably not to make waves. He flushes and lowers his hand, then turns around as the Headmaster begins making a speech about the Forbidden Forest.
He can feel people staring at him, and he keeps his head bowed as he eats. He has to think about writing a letter to Mum and Dad, anyway.
They won’t stop loving him. Harry knows that. But the number of times he’s heard them talk about Slytherins and how everyone they knew in school during the years they attended turned out bad…
It makes a harsh feeling grip his throat, that’s all.
He stands up to walk to the common room with the others, and is surprised when he finds Riddle waiting for him. And he learns something then that startles him. The sensation of eyes on him was apparently mostly Riddle.
From the way he’s staring, he at least is impressed by Harry’s magic.
Maybe too much so. Before this, Harry would have said that positive attention for his magic was always good. Mum and Dad have praised him for it, and Sirius laughs whenever Harry conjures a little flame or makes something fly across the room.
But there’s something off about the way Riddle looks at Harry. Harry just doesn’t know what it is.
“Come, we should catch up before you lose the way,” Riddle says softly, and begins walking. Harry follows, not able to keep himself from casting a mournful glance at the group of first-year Gryffindors leaving the Great Hall in the direction he always assumed he would be walking.
Ron catches his eye and looks extremely puzzled. Harry tries to give a helpless shrug and hopes Ron understands.
He hopes they can still be friends.
Riddle stays behind him as Harry hurries after the disappearing line of Slytherin first-years, and he frowns at the older boy. “Is there a reason you’re here?” he asks. “Don’t they want us to stay in groups by year?”
“It’s fine,” Riddle says carelessly. “I just wanted to make sure that you knew the way to the dungeons.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Harry says, nodding at the firsties in front of them.
“If you don’t want my help, of course, you only have to say,” Riddle murmurs, and shifts away.
Harry hesitates. This feels like a mistake, telling Riddle no. If he’s going to be that impressed by Harry’s magic, maybe it’s a good idea to try to make friends with him. Merlin knows that the only person Harry is familiar with in Slytherin is one he doesn’t much like.
“I do want it. Thank you.”
Riddle flashes him a smile like a lightning strike, and they make their way into the dungeons.
*
“James?”
James leans further back in the chair that he and Lily set outside in the sunshine years ago. James can still remember Harry climbing on it as a baby, laughing and giggling. He closes his eyes and tosses the glass of Firewhisky down his throat.
“James, come on. What are you moping about now?”
“The same thing I’m always moping about,” James says, and turns a little to the side so that he can see Sirius watching him with a forced smile. The smile fades as they lock eyes. James turns around and faces the wide gardens behind the cottage in Godric’s Hollow again, hiccoughing. “How did I lose him?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I just—I told him that I didn’t trust Slytherins and I wished he was in some other House, but that shouldn’t have been enough. I just told him that once. And then he came home for the first summer and he was already different.” James closes his eyes and tilts his head forwards so that he rests his forehead on his fingers. He can hide in the darkness behind his eyelids, except not really, because he’s still speaking the truth that will haunt him for the rest of his life. “Why did—what did Riddle do?”
“He gave Harry attention. That’s all.”
“He had attention from us! He wasn’t neglected or anything! He got more attention from us than I did from my parents! That can’t be it!”
Sirius is silent for long moments, stroking James’s arm. Then he says, “I wonder if that’s part of the problem.”
“What?”
“He got attention from you and Lily, and he knew exactly who he was and what you expected from him.” Sirius pulls back, and James drops his hands and stares at his best friend. He resists the temptation to sip from the Firewhisky glass again. He knows it won’t help. “So, the first time that something different happened from what he’d always been told to expect, he was vulnerable to the first person who offered attention to that new part of him.”
“That makes…no sense, Sirius.”
“Of course it makes sense. What did you think and feel when Harry was Sorted into Slytherin?”
“You bloody well know what I felt, Sirius.”
“Explain it to me.”
James swallows roughly and ends up taking another drink of Firewhisky after all. “I felt—betrayed. I didn’t know how that could have happened. We didn’t raise Harry that way. Or even to think that he had to have cunning and ambition at all. Why did it happen? That’s what I still don’t understand.”
“I don’t know why the Sorting Hat decided the way it did.” Sirius doesn’t move his hands from where they’re clasped in his lap now. “But Harry obviously does have those qualities, because he’s thrived in Slytherin.”
“Only because of Riddle!”
Sirius obviously listens to James’s yell bounce off the side of the house. Then he sighs and leans back in his chair. “You really think that?”
“Of course I bloody do!” James plasters a hand over his face and breathes to control his temper. Yelling at his friend wasn’t the plan, and an obvious reason why he shouldn’t drink Firewhisky. After a long moment, James manages to lift his head and speak calmly. “I know that people could go to more than one House. And I’m sorrier than I can tell that my bias against Slytherin drove Harry away. But Harry would have felt lonely and like an outcast there without Riddle’s support. He wouldn’t have…”
He lets the words trail off, both because what he wants to say next is so horrible and because he doesn’t know if it’s true, not really. Become so Dark is more true than become the consort of a Dark Lord.
James hopes so, anyway.
“Would he have felt so lonely he wouldn’t ask other Slytherins for support?”
“Yes, he would have, Sirius!”
Sirius sits still for a second, and then gives a gusty sigh and falls back on the chair next to James’s. “Yes, okay, you’re probably right,” he mutters. “Harry would have been lonely. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have appreciated attention to his new traits, the ones he didn’t even know he had. Maybe it would have been Malfoy’s son instead of Riddle, or the Slytherin Quidditch team. You can’t know.”
James just looks away. He knows.
*
“James?”
Harry pauses. He was going upstairs after dinner, a tense, strained meal on the first evening of Christmas holidays. Harry just got back from Hogwarts, and he saw clearly how his parents, despite claiming not to, have changed. They wrote nice and forgiving things in their letters, but now they don’t know what to do with him.
It’s just like Tom said.
And now his mother is calling to his father with a tone in her voice that’s like the helplessness in their smiles and the strain in their faces. Without a thought, Harry casts a Silencing Charm Tom taught him on his shoes and moves down the stairs to stand hidden in a shadowy corner near the bottom.
“Lily.”
Dad walks into the library and practically falls into Mum’s arms. And then he begins to weep.
Harry stares with his mouth open. He’s only seen Dad cry twice in his life: once when Mum was experimenting with a dangerous potion and spent a day unconscious in St. Mungo’s, and once when it turned out that Harry’s Uncle Peter was feeding information about the Aurors to a blood purist conspiracy and ended up going to Azkaban.
It makes a funny little pebble appear and sit under Harry’s breastbone.
Am I an exploding potion? Am I a traitor?
Harry’s afraid that they’ll shut the library door and he’ll have to creep nearer and do something else to defeat the wards on the library, but they don’t. Instead, Mum puts her head on Dad’s shoulder, and they cry.
Harry stands there and watches them, and the pebble in his chest gets heavier and heavier.
I did this. I don’t know why, but I did this.
Finally, they stop crying, and Mum steps away from Dad and wipes her nose on the back of her hand. Harry’s eyes widen. He doesn’t think that he’s ever seen her do that. She always at least conjures a handkerchief if she doesn’t have one.
“I don’t know how to relate to him anymore,” Mum whispers.
“It shouldn’t make such a difference, Harry being a Slytherin…but it does,” Dad whispers back.
“He sits straighter than he ever did.”
“He doesn’t laugh as much.”
“He sneered when we talked about having Sirius come over.”
“He looked like he was about to say the words blood traitor.”
“He talks about Tom Riddle all the time, did you notice?”
“He mentions Malfoy’s son in a friendly way.”
“He said he wants a pet snake.”
“We can get him a snake,” Dad finally says, in a whisper that seems colder and darker than all the others. “Lily—we have to show that we accept him. Otherwise, he might drift away from us, and who knows what he’ll get involved in?”
Harry falls back one step, then another. Suddenly he almost doesn’t care if they hear him. They’re—just like Tom said they would be. Just like, down to the words that Tom warned Harry they would use.
Harry laughed when Tom first confronted him about it, one night in the Slytherin common room before the start of the hols. The fire flickered softly on the hearth, and Harry was full of sleepy warmth and thinking about going to bed, but then Tom sat down in the chair next to him, and Harry turned to face him.
Tom shouldn’t have been so interesting and attractive, but he was. Maybe it was just because he was the only other person Harry knew who could do wandless magic, and they could practice together. Maybe it was because it was flattering to have the attention of an older student.
But Harry didn’t know what Tom wanted now. Tom’s face was dark, and he spent several minutes staring into the fire before he turned around and asked Harry, “Are you really going home for Christmas?”
Harry laughed a little. “Of course I am. I know that you’re staying, but my parents will be expecting me.”
“The same parents who wrote you all those strained letters?”
Harry glanced away. It was true that Mum and Dad’s letters had changed. But then again, they—well, they hadn’t really written him letters before, since they’d all lived together. They just asked lots of questions and tried to comfort him with Slytherin being “almost as good” as Gryffindor and told him they would always love him.
It was what Harry expected, really. He knew they still loved him. A simple Sorting couldn’t change something like that.
But it was all so different now than it had been. They had never once expected that Harry would be a Slytherin. Why would they? Harry wasn’t ambitious. He wanted to be an Auror like his dad and help people. He was loud and brash and laughed at Sirius’s stupid jokes and ran around with the Weasleys like any regular Gryffindor boy.
“They won’t understand.”
Harry started. He’d fallen into his own thoughts, the way he rarely did when Tom was around. He shook his head. “They might not understand right now, but they’re trying.”
“Why is it so hard for them?”
Harry hesitated, but—well, in the end, he didn’t think that anything he was going to say was a secret. “Mum had a best friend when she was in school who was in Slytherin. A half-blood like us, named Severus Snape. They used to experiment with Potions together. But he got caught up in the blood purist nonsense, and he called her a Mudblood, and the last thing she knew, he had to flee the country because the Ministry was after him for suspected poisonings.
“Dad just hates Slytherins because they went after him a lot in school. Especially his friend Remus Lupin, who’s a werewolf.”
Tom snorted and leaned back in his chair, slinging one leg over the other. That was part of the posture he kept bothering Harry about. Harry wasn’t in any hurry to change his posture, though. Tom was too preoccupied with things like that sometimes. “That seems a stupid reason to be upset that their son is a Slytherin now.”
Harry shrugged and kept quiet. Part of him wanted to agree. Part wanted to disagree.
Tom turned around and stared at him. “You should tell them you want a pet snake and see what they say.”
Harry stared at him. “But why? I’m not a Parselmouth like you are.”
“You do want a pet snake, don’t you?”
Harry nodded slowly. It was true, he did. He’d learned more about snakes since spending time with Tom, who had his own, and Harry just thought they were brilliant.
“Ask them.” Tom’s eyes glittered. “See what they say. It’ll be words about how they suspect you of turning into a blood purist and how they don’t know where they went wrong with you. I can predict it almost down to the word.”
And now, with tears running from his eyes and his hands clenched furiously at his sides, all Harry can think is that Tom was right.
*
“Please.”
Harry turns to face Sirius with a fluid snap of his body, It’s an economical way to move, Sirius can’t help noticing, a dueler’s motion. Harry sniffs and shakes his head. “Why should I listen to you?”
“Because I’m your bloody godfather, that’s why!”
Harry snorts. Sirius stares helplessly at him, and thinks that no one would recognize the boy he watched grow up and played with and babysat and taught magic in the elegant young man before him.
Harry is wearing black robes decorated with vivid green snakes, coiling around each other on the sleeves and hem and cuffs. There’s a glittering golden chain around his neck, which runs down under the robes and, Sirius is pretty sure, links up to an emerald ring on his right index finger that has a chain flowing backwards from it. There’s a lightning bolt scar on his forehead that didn’t used to be there, and he doesn’t wear glasses. The impact of his eyes is all the more stunning because of it.
“You abandoned me like they did,” Harry says. He doesn’t seem able to speak the names of his parents, or maybe he doesn’t know how to refer to them. He tosses his head, his dark hair flying. It’s long enough and heavy enough—Sirius thinks some spells have been cast on it—that he no longer looks a thing like James. “Why would you want to talk to me now?”
“I didn’t bloody abandon you!” Sirius can’t care that they’re getting narrow eyes and gaping mouths aimed at them, where they stand in front of an apothecary. He takes a step towards Harry, who promptly lifts his wand. Sirius stares at it, distracted. “That’s—not the holly wand you got at Ollivander’s,” he says weakly.
Harry laughs. The sound isn’t anything Sirius remembers. “That’s because it’s yew.”
“Yew—Harry, why?”
“Because, as it turns out, a holly wand doesn’t suit me anymore, if it ever did,” Harry says, and turns away decisively.
Sirius stands and watches him walk away. He could blame what he sees next on the dazzling sunlight and the shifting cloth of Harry’s robes, but he doesn’t think he’s wrong. One of the snakes on Harry’s back lifts its head and hisses at Sirius.
Sirius doesn’t know what to do. He never despised Harry. He never condemned him for being in Slytherin. The most he did was tell Harry that his friend Tom Riddle was a bad influence on him, which is fucking true, and now…
Now, the man walking away from him is most definitely the consort of the Dark Lord.
*
“Please, Tom, are you okay?”
Harry wrote to Tom a lot during the summer, and went over and saw him a few times at Malfoy Manor. (Draco was enough of a friend for that). But Tom didn’t ever want Harry to visit him where he was living, and in the end, Harry had to accept that he had a reason.
Maybe the reason is visible now. Harry came down to meet Tom in the common room after everyone else went to bed, the way Tom said to, and he’s surprised Tom with his shirt off.
Long, long scars crisscross his back.
Harry stares, and feels something wild and alien rise up in him. It’s anger, he knows it is, but all the other times that he’s felt it, it’s burned hot. Sirius used to tell him that’s one reason it’s so easy for Harry to conjure fire.
(Sirius doesn’t tell him anything now. Harry buries the agony).
“Yes, Harry, I’m fine,” Tom says quietly. After a long moment, he reaches for his shirt and drops it into place over his head, turning to face Harry with a strained smile. “I want to hear more about your summer. How are your parents and godfather reacting to you being in Slytherin now?”
“No, Tom. We’re not doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Deflecting from an important conversation. What gave you those scars?”
Tom’s eyes flash dangerously. Harry doesn’t care. He’s been learning to be dangerous, too.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Tom says coolly.
“Bollocks.”
Tom stares at him. “What did you say?”
“You told me to come to the common room at a time when you knew most other people would be asleep, and you took off your shirt, probably when you heard me come down the stairs.” Harry folds his arms. “You wanted me to see. You wanted me to ask. Or was showing me your scars just another way to manipulate me?”
Tom blinks once, twice. Then he opens his mouth and laughs softly. Harry stares at him. This is a way that he’s never heard Tom laugh before, which is usually bell-like and ringing. This is soft and creepy and so dark.
He might finally be seeing the real Tom Riddle, after all.
“Very well,” Tom says, and gestures for Harry to sit down in the middle of the couch facing the fireplace. “Yes, I wanted you to see the scars. But I am more interested still in seeing whether you can guess why. Can you?”
Harry stares at him. Then he says, “I think the Muggles you live with hurt you.” He would normally say “the people you live with,” but Harry is doing some manipulating of his own, and Tom will get side-tracked arguing about the exact definition of “people” if Harry lets him. “I think you want an escape from them. And because I’m too young to help you with that legally, I think that you want some of the Potter money.”
Tom laughs again.
“Very good, Harry,” he murmurs, his eyes so bright they seem to catch the firelight and shine red for a moment. “Yes, some of the Potter money would help me to secure my independence. There are places in Knockturn Alley where you can rent a flat and no one will look twice at your age or care, as long as you can pay.” He flings himself onto the couch opposite Harry, which Harry almost never sees him do. “The question remains: can you help me secure the Galleons I need?”
Harry takes a deep breath. There are questions he wants to ask, like what Tom is doing living with Muggles in the first place if he’s a half-blood and knows it, and why he didn’t go to his Head of House or the Headmaster for help.
But the first one, Harry doesn’t think Tom will share, and the second part, he knows. Slughorn likes to help people who are famous already—he’s reached out to Harry a few times, since he’s the son of the Head Auror and a notable Potions brewer—or who he thinks will help him in the future. Tom isn’t either one of those. He’s smart, but too aloof for Slughorn’s tastes.
The Headmaster is kind and works with James, but a random Slytherin living in the Muggle world wouldn’t get much consideration from him. He might even think Tom is being influenced by blood prejudice and should live in the Muggle world to learn more about them.
Either way, Tom wouldn’t be asking Harry if he could think of other options.
Harry sits up with a nod. “All right. I can’t give you that much money, or Mum and Dad will notice, but I can give you some.”
Tom freezes for a second. Harry watches him, and frowns as the seconds pass and the silence and the freezing continue. What is this all about? Why did Tom ask him in the first place if he thought Harry might refuse?
But then Tom relaxes and smiles at Harry, leaning back and crossing his legs over each other again, the way he kept nattering at Harry to do last year. “Thank you, Harry. A Galleon or so a month will be sufficient, since I only have to stay there for the duration of the summers. I can remain at Hogwarts for all the other holidays. In fact, I should prefer to have it in Sickles. Those will stand out much less in Knockturn Alley.”
Harry relaxes. He did have to be a little suspicious of someone asking him for money, he thinks. Even Mum told him she got taken in by that at first, when she married Dad and suddenly people were asking her for donations or personal gifts, playing on her sympathies.
A Galleon’s worth of Sickles a month is less than what Harry gets in gifts from his parents every week.
“Sure,” he says. “Remind me before we go home for the summer.”
Tom smiles at him, and Harry’s breath catches. It seems like the first honest smile that Tom has given anybody, ever, since Harry’s been at Hogwarts. It’s bright and shining and full of teeth. “Thank you, Harry.”
Harry swallows, and buries his reaction, and talks to Tom for a few more minutes before he goes back to bed. He flops back with his hands tucked under his pillow and stares at the canopy of his bed for a few seconds.
He doesn’t know exactly why Tom chose Harry of all people to approach, but Harry is going to take advantage of that opportunity. Play up to Tom, flatter him, give him the money he’s requested, quietly prove himself useful and capable of keeping Tom’s secrets and just as powerful with wandless magic as Tom is.
Because his parents don’t know what to do with him, and it drives distance between them even when Harry thinks they’re trying their best not to let that happen.
Tom? Tom knows what he wants, and part of that is Harry.
And Harry isn’t fool enough to let that go.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, James/Lily
Content Notes: AU (the Potters live, no Voldemort), Slytherin Harry, Tom Riddle born in Harry’s time, angst, dysfunctional family, obsession, violence, manipulation, present tense, non-linear/flashback style, underage kissing, blood prejudice, discussion of canonical child abuse
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 5000
Summary: AU. Harry was greatly loved by his parents, but they didn’t really know what to do with him when he Sorted Slytherin. And that gave Tom Riddle, third-year Slytherin student, the opportunity to steal Harry’s heart.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. It’s based on a request from BeyondsMadness for Harry being Sorted into Slytherin and manipulated by Tom, and Lily and James failing to reconnect with him. This will be a three-shot, with the second and third parts to be posted over the next few days. The title is from the William Butler Yeats poem quoted below.
Stolen Child
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
“SLYTHERIN!”
Lily wasn’t even in the Great Hall when the Hat cried that word for Harry’s Sorting, but sometimes she thinks that she’s heard it echoing down all the corridors of her life since.
She stares at the letter in her hand, and then opens it, just in case, just in case Harry’s written something at the end of it…
But there’s nothing. It’s the letter she sent him, in her own hand and still marked with the tears that fell when she was writing it. Lily knows a Preservation Charm must have been cast on them for the stains to still be there, and she closes her eyes, shaking.
Harry did that. Riddle never would have bothered. At least she knows he saw this letter, touched it, opened it, perhaps read it.
Or not.
Maybe he opened it, cast the Preservation Charms, and tucked it into the original envelope—yes, this is the original envelope—and sent it back to make a point.
Lily tucks the letter against her chest and closes her eyes.
*
“SLYTHERIN!”
When the word echoes in his ears, Harry spends a long moment sitting there, staring at the wall, and not moving. It takes Professor McGonagall taking the Hat from him and speaking his name in a soft voice to get him moving again.
Harry stumbles towards the Slytherin table feeling like he’s in a dream. Draco Malfoy is staring openly at him. They’ve met plenty of times before, because like it or not, blood prejudice or not, Harry’s Dad is Head Auror and Malfoy’s dad is the Minister’s main advisor, so they’re in the Ministry together all the time. Draco doesn’t like Harry and Harry doesn’t like him. He never assumed they would be in the same House.
He never thought of Slytherin as a possibility. Why would he? He’s heard all the stories, how Slytherin made Mum’s best friend turn against her out of blood prejudice and how a bunch of Slytherins, including Abraxas Malfoy, tried to start a blood prejudice war in the few years before Harry was born. It didn’t work out, but still.
Harry isn’t a blood purist. He’s a half-blood. There’s no way he will fit in here, and he has no idea why the Hat peered into his head, chuckled, and announced his House without even giving him a choice.
It’s terrible.
“What are you doing here, Potter?” Malfoy questions in an undertone even as he claps for the next Sorting.
“I don’t know,” Harry snaps back, keeping his voice lowered. There are already people at the table staring at him with dislike. The last thing Harry wants to do is attract their attention. “It’s not like the Hat gave me a choice.”
“Of course not. The Hat makes the decisions.”
Harry looks up, blinking. There’s an older student leaning towards him, one who looks like a third-year. He has dark eyes that are difficult to make out the color of and dark hair that tumbles artfully on his head.
“Who are you?” Harry finds himself asking.
“Tom Riddle.” The student holds out his hand, and Harry shakes it uncertainly. He’s noticing that the boy has a surname that sounds Muggle, and he hates thinking that way. He shouldn’t have to think that way. He doesn’t notice people’s names. He doesn’t care.
Now he has to.
“Yeah, hi,” Harry says, and turns his head away to watch as Ron Weasley finishes Sorting into Gryffindor. Ron puts the Hat down on the stool and gives Harry a wondering look as he trots off to Gryffindor—the House Harry always assumed he would be in.
There was no discussion of other things, even if Sirius sometimes joked when he saw Harry reading a thick Defense book about him being a Ravenclaw. Harry has always known who he is and where he belongs. Other people have always known, too, based on the disbelieving looks he’s getting from up the table.
Now everything’s changed. Harry sinks down in his seat.
“Sit up,” Riddle says, so sharply that Harry stares at him, hardly thinking this boy is talking to him.
“Huh?”
“Sit up. Square your shoulders. Hold your head high.” Riddle is speaking in short words like Stinging Hexes, leaning closer to Harry. “Do you want to prove everyone right about the poor manners of half-bloods at the first meal?”
“They’re not right!”
“I know, but they’ll think they are, if you hand them such easy ammunition.” Harry blinks, and Riddle tilts his head with a thin smile. “Yes, I was raised in the Muggle world. I’m a half-blood myself. I know a lot about how surviving in Slytherin works.”
“But—you look nice.”
What sounds like a choked laugh bubbles out of Riddle. It’s probably against the rules or something for him to actually laugh, Harry thinks, a little resentfully. “What does that mean, exactly? You think you can’t?”
Harry tugs at his hair. “I know what I look like,” he explains. It’s always been a source of pride, with James pointing out that their hair makes them different from all the perfectly prissy pampered purebloods. They can’t be the same, and they won’t. “So they’ll never take me as one of them anyway, and I should do what I like.”
Riddle’s eyes glint for a long moment as he studies Harry. Then he says, “Of course they shouldn’t take you as one of them.”
“But you said—”
“You act the way you need to, to make it clear that they should pay attention to you, and you matter.” Riddle puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder and squeezes. It’s an odd, unnaturally warm touch. “And then you prove that you’re better than they are.”
“You are not better than us, half-blood,” Malfoy splutters. Harry blushes. He honestly forgot that Malfoy was siting close enough to hear them. He’s the only one who is, since the last new Slytherin, Blaise Zabini, took a seat down the table. “Stop talking as though you are.”
Riddle turns and pins Malfoy with such a sharp gaze that Harry swallows. His eyes are like needles. “Oh, no?” Riddle asks, and stretches out his hand. A glint of light moves above his fingers, and then there’s a snowflake turning there. “How many purebloods can do this?”
“Oh, you can do ice!” Harry says, excited. “I can do fire, look!” He snaps his fingers, which Sirius always taught him to do to make it more dramatic, and a flame dances above his palm.
People gape at him.
Shit. Harry doesn’t know what the best thing to do is, but it’s probably not to make waves. He flushes and lowers his hand, then turns around as the Headmaster begins making a speech about the Forbidden Forest.
He can feel people staring at him, and he keeps his head bowed as he eats. He has to think about writing a letter to Mum and Dad, anyway.
They won’t stop loving him. Harry knows that. But the number of times he’s heard them talk about Slytherins and how everyone they knew in school during the years they attended turned out bad…
It makes a harsh feeling grip his throat, that’s all.
He stands up to walk to the common room with the others, and is surprised when he finds Riddle waiting for him. And he learns something then that startles him. The sensation of eyes on him was apparently mostly Riddle.
From the way he’s staring, he at least is impressed by Harry’s magic.
Maybe too much so. Before this, Harry would have said that positive attention for his magic was always good. Mum and Dad have praised him for it, and Sirius laughs whenever Harry conjures a little flame or makes something fly across the room.
But there’s something off about the way Riddle looks at Harry. Harry just doesn’t know what it is.
“Come, we should catch up before you lose the way,” Riddle says softly, and begins walking. Harry follows, not able to keep himself from casting a mournful glance at the group of first-year Gryffindors leaving the Great Hall in the direction he always assumed he would be walking.
Ron catches his eye and looks extremely puzzled. Harry tries to give a helpless shrug and hopes Ron understands.
He hopes they can still be friends.
Riddle stays behind him as Harry hurries after the disappearing line of Slytherin first-years, and he frowns at the older boy. “Is there a reason you’re here?” he asks. “Don’t they want us to stay in groups by year?”
“It’s fine,” Riddle says carelessly. “I just wanted to make sure that you knew the way to the dungeons.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Harry says, nodding at the firsties in front of them.
“If you don’t want my help, of course, you only have to say,” Riddle murmurs, and shifts away.
Harry hesitates. This feels like a mistake, telling Riddle no. If he’s going to be that impressed by Harry’s magic, maybe it’s a good idea to try to make friends with him. Merlin knows that the only person Harry is familiar with in Slytherin is one he doesn’t much like.
“I do want it. Thank you.”
Riddle flashes him a smile like a lightning strike, and they make their way into the dungeons.
*
“James?”
James leans further back in the chair that he and Lily set outside in the sunshine years ago. James can still remember Harry climbing on it as a baby, laughing and giggling. He closes his eyes and tosses the glass of Firewhisky down his throat.
“James, come on. What are you moping about now?”
“The same thing I’m always moping about,” James says, and turns a little to the side so that he can see Sirius watching him with a forced smile. The smile fades as they lock eyes. James turns around and faces the wide gardens behind the cottage in Godric’s Hollow again, hiccoughing. “How did I lose him?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I just—I told him that I didn’t trust Slytherins and I wished he was in some other House, but that shouldn’t have been enough. I just told him that once. And then he came home for the first summer and he was already different.” James closes his eyes and tilts his head forwards so that he rests his forehead on his fingers. He can hide in the darkness behind his eyelids, except not really, because he’s still speaking the truth that will haunt him for the rest of his life. “Why did—what did Riddle do?”
“He gave Harry attention. That’s all.”
“He had attention from us! He wasn’t neglected or anything! He got more attention from us than I did from my parents! That can’t be it!”
Sirius is silent for long moments, stroking James’s arm. Then he says, “I wonder if that’s part of the problem.”
“What?”
“He got attention from you and Lily, and he knew exactly who he was and what you expected from him.” Sirius pulls back, and James drops his hands and stares at his best friend. He resists the temptation to sip from the Firewhisky glass again. He knows it won’t help. “So, the first time that something different happened from what he’d always been told to expect, he was vulnerable to the first person who offered attention to that new part of him.”
“That makes…no sense, Sirius.”
“Of course it makes sense. What did you think and feel when Harry was Sorted into Slytherin?”
“You bloody well know what I felt, Sirius.”
“Explain it to me.”
James swallows roughly and ends up taking another drink of Firewhisky after all. “I felt—betrayed. I didn’t know how that could have happened. We didn’t raise Harry that way. Or even to think that he had to have cunning and ambition at all. Why did it happen? That’s what I still don’t understand.”
“I don’t know why the Sorting Hat decided the way it did.” Sirius doesn’t move his hands from where they’re clasped in his lap now. “But Harry obviously does have those qualities, because he’s thrived in Slytherin.”
“Only because of Riddle!”
Sirius obviously listens to James’s yell bounce off the side of the house. Then he sighs and leans back in his chair. “You really think that?”
“Of course I bloody do!” James plasters a hand over his face and breathes to control his temper. Yelling at his friend wasn’t the plan, and an obvious reason why he shouldn’t drink Firewhisky. After a long moment, James manages to lift his head and speak calmly. “I know that people could go to more than one House. And I’m sorrier than I can tell that my bias against Slytherin drove Harry away. But Harry would have felt lonely and like an outcast there without Riddle’s support. He wouldn’t have…”
He lets the words trail off, both because what he wants to say next is so horrible and because he doesn’t know if it’s true, not really. Become so Dark is more true than become the consort of a Dark Lord.
James hopes so, anyway.
“Would he have felt so lonely he wouldn’t ask other Slytherins for support?”
“Yes, he would have, Sirius!”
Sirius sits still for a second, and then gives a gusty sigh and falls back on the chair next to James’s. “Yes, okay, you’re probably right,” he mutters. “Harry would have been lonely. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have appreciated attention to his new traits, the ones he didn’t even know he had. Maybe it would have been Malfoy’s son instead of Riddle, or the Slytherin Quidditch team. You can’t know.”
James just looks away. He knows.
*
“James?”
Harry pauses. He was going upstairs after dinner, a tense, strained meal on the first evening of Christmas holidays. Harry just got back from Hogwarts, and he saw clearly how his parents, despite claiming not to, have changed. They wrote nice and forgiving things in their letters, but now they don’t know what to do with him.
It’s just like Tom said.
And now his mother is calling to his father with a tone in her voice that’s like the helplessness in their smiles and the strain in their faces. Without a thought, Harry casts a Silencing Charm Tom taught him on his shoes and moves down the stairs to stand hidden in a shadowy corner near the bottom.
“Lily.”
Dad walks into the library and practically falls into Mum’s arms. And then he begins to weep.
Harry stares with his mouth open. He’s only seen Dad cry twice in his life: once when Mum was experimenting with a dangerous potion and spent a day unconscious in St. Mungo’s, and once when it turned out that Harry’s Uncle Peter was feeding information about the Aurors to a blood purist conspiracy and ended up going to Azkaban.
It makes a funny little pebble appear and sit under Harry’s breastbone.
Am I an exploding potion? Am I a traitor?
Harry’s afraid that they’ll shut the library door and he’ll have to creep nearer and do something else to defeat the wards on the library, but they don’t. Instead, Mum puts her head on Dad’s shoulder, and they cry.
Harry stands there and watches them, and the pebble in his chest gets heavier and heavier.
I did this. I don’t know why, but I did this.
Finally, they stop crying, and Mum steps away from Dad and wipes her nose on the back of her hand. Harry’s eyes widen. He doesn’t think that he’s ever seen her do that. She always at least conjures a handkerchief if she doesn’t have one.
“I don’t know how to relate to him anymore,” Mum whispers.
“It shouldn’t make such a difference, Harry being a Slytherin…but it does,” Dad whispers back.
“He sits straighter than he ever did.”
“He doesn’t laugh as much.”
“He sneered when we talked about having Sirius come over.”
“He looked like he was about to say the words blood traitor.”
“He talks about Tom Riddle all the time, did you notice?”
“He mentions Malfoy’s son in a friendly way.”
“He said he wants a pet snake.”
“We can get him a snake,” Dad finally says, in a whisper that seems colder and darker than all the others. “Lily—we have to show that we accept him. Otherwise, he might drift away from us, and who knows what he’ll get involved in?”
Harry falls back one step, then another. Suddenly he almost doesn’t care if they hear him. They’re—just like Tom said they would be. Just like, down to the words that Tom warned Harry they would use.
Harry laughed when Tom first confronted him about it, one night in the Slytherin common room before the start of the hols. The fire flickered softly on the hearth, and Harry was full of sleepy warmth and thinking about going to bed, but then Tom sat down in the chair next to him, and Harry turned to face him.
Tom shouldn’t have been so interesting and attractive, but he was. Maybe it was just because he was the only other person Harry knew who could do wandless magic, and they could practice together. Maybe it was because it was flattering to have the attention of an older student.
But Harry didn’t know what Tom wanted now. Tom’s face was dark, and he spent several minutes staring into the fire before he turned around and asked Harry, “Are you really going home for Christmas?”
Harry laughed a little. “Of course I am. I know that you’re staying, but my parents will be expecting me.”
“The same parents who wrote you all those strained letters?”
Harry glanced away. It was true that Mum and Dad’s letters had changed. But then again, they—well, they hadn’t really written him letters before, since they’d all lived together. They just asked lots of questions and tried to comfort him with Slytherin being “almost as good” as Gryffindor and told him they would always love him.
It was what Harry expected, really. He knew they still loved him. A simple Sorting couldn’t change something like that.
But it was all so different now than it had been. They had never once expected that Harry would be a Slytherin. Why would they? Harry wasn’t ambitious. He wanted to be an Auror like his dad and help people. He was loud and brash and laughed at Sirius’s stupid jokes and ran around with the Weasleys like any regular Gryffindor boy.
“They won’t understand.”
Harry started. He’d fallen into his own thoughts, the way he rarely did when Tom was around. He shook his head. “They might not understand right now, but they’re trying.”
“Why is it so hard for them?”
Harry hesitated, but—well, in the end, he didn’t think that anything he was going to say was a secret. “Mum had a best friend when she was in school who was in Slytherin. A half-blood like us, named Severus Snape. They used to experiment with Potions together. But he got caught up in the blood purist nonsense, and he called her a Mudblood, and the last thing she knew, he had to flee the country because the Ministry was after him for suspected poisonings.
“Dad just hates Slytherins because they went after him a lot in school. Especially his friend Remus Lupin, who’s a werewolf.”
Tom snorted and leaned back in his chair, slinging one leg over the other. That was part of the posture he kept bothering Harry about. Harry wasn’t in any hurry to change his posture, though. Tom was too preoccupied with things like that sometimes. “That seems a stupid reason to be upset that their son is a Slytherin now.”
Harry shrugged and kept quiet. Part of him wanted to agree. Part wanted to disagree.
Tom turned around and stared at him. “You should tell them you want a pet snake and see what they say.”
Harry stared at him. “But why? I’m not a Parselmouth like you are.”
“You do want a pet snake, don’t you?”
Harry nodded slowly. It was true, he did. He’d learned more about snakes since spending time with Tom, who had his own, and Harry just thought they were brilliant.
“Ask them.” Tom’s eyes glittered. “See what they say. It’ll be words about how they suspect you of turning into a blood purist and how they don’t know where they went wrong with you. I can predict it almost down to the word.”
And now, with tears running from his eyes and his hands clenched furiously at his sides, all Harry can think is that Tom was right.
*
“Please.”
Harry turns to face Sirius with a fluid snap of his body, It’s an economical way to move, Sirius can’t help noticing, a dueler’s motion. Harry sniffs and shakes his head. “Why should I listen to you?”
“Because I’m your bloody godfather, that’s why!”
Harry snorts. Sirius stares helplessly at him, and thinks that no one would recognize the boy he watched grow up and played with and babysat and taught magic in the elegant young man before him.
Harry is wearing black robes decorated with vivid green snakes, coiling around each other on the sleeves and hem and cuffs. There’s a glittering golden chain around his neck, which runs down under the robes and, Sirius is pretty sure, links up to an emerald ring on his right index finger that has a chain flowing backwards from it. There’s a lightning bolt scar on his forehead that didn’t used to be there, and he doesn’t wear glasses. The impact of his eyes is all the more stunning because of it.
“You abandoned me like they did,” Harry says. He doesn’t seem able to speak the names of his parents, or maybe he doesn’t know how to refer to them. He tosses his head, his dark hair flying. It’s long enough and heavy enough—Sirius thinks some spells have been cast on it—that he no longer looks a thing like James. “Why would you want to talk to me now?”
“I didn’t bloody abandon you!” Sirius can’t care that they’re getting narrow eyes and gaping mouths aimed at them, where they stand in front of an apothecary. He takes a step towards Harry, who promptly lifts his wand. Sirius stares at it, distracted. “That’s—not the holly wand you got at Ollivander’s,” he says weakly.
Harry laughs. The sound isn’t anything Sirius remembers. “That’s because it’s yew.”
“Yew—Harry, why?”
“Because, as it turns out, a holly wand doesn’t suit me anymore, if it ever did,” Harry says, and turns away decisively.
Sirius stands and watches him walk away. He could blame what he sees next on the dazzling sunlight and the shifting cloth of Harry’s robes, but he doesn’t think he’s wrong. One of the snakes on Harry’s back lifts its head and hisses at Sirius.
Sirius doesn’t know what to do. He never despised Harry. He never condemned him for being in Slytherin. The most he did was tell Harry that his friend Tom Riddle was a bad influence on him, which is fucking true, and now…
Now, the man walking away from him is most definitely the consort of the Dark Lord.
*
“Please, Tom, are you okay?”
Harry wrote to Tom a lot during the summer, and went over and saw him a few times at Malfoy Manor. (Draco was enough of a friend for that). But Tom didn’t ever want Harry to visit him where he was living, and in the end, Harry had to accept that he had a reason.
Maybe the reason is visible now. Harry came down to meet Tom in the common room after everyone else went to bed, the way Tom said to, and he’s surprised Tom with his shirt off.
Long, long scars crisscross his back.
Harry stares, and feels something wild and alien rise up in him. It’s anger, he knows it is, but all the other times that he’s felt it, it’s burned hot. Sirius used to tell him that’s one reason it’s so easy for Harry to conjure fire.
(Sirius doesn’t tell him anything now. Harry buries the agony).
“Yes, Harry, I’m fine,” Tom says quietly. After a long moment, he reaches for his shirt and drops it into place over his head, turning to face Harry with a strained smile. “I want to hear more about your summer. How are your parents and godfather reacting to you being in Slytherin now?”
“No, Tom. We’re not doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Deflecting from an important conversation. What gave you those scars?”
Tom’s eyes flash dangerously. Harry doesn’t care. He’s been learning to be dangerous, too.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Tom says coolly.
“Bollocks.”
Tom stares at him. “What did you say?”
“You told me to come to the common room at a time when you knew most other people would be asleep, and you took off your shirt, probably when you heard me come down the stairs.” Harry folds his arms. “You wanted me to see. You wanted me to ask. Or was showing me your scars just another way to manipulate me?”
Tom blinks once, twice. Then he opens his mouth and laughs softly. Harry stares at him. This is a way that he’s never heard Tom laugh before, which is usually bell-like and ringing. This is soft and creepy and so dark.
He might finally be seeing the real Tom Riddle, after all.
“Very well,” Tom says, and gestures for Harry to sit down in the middle of the couch facing the fireplace. “Yes, I wanted you to see the scars. But I am more interested still in seeing whether you can guess why. Can you?”
Harry stares at him. Then he says, “I think the Muggles you live with hurt you.” He would normally say “the people you live with,” but Harry is doing some manipulating of his own, and Tom will get side-tracked arguing about the exact definition of “people” if Harry lets him. “I think you want an escape from them. And because I’m too young to help you with that legally, I think that you want some of the Potter money.”
Tom laughs again.
“Very good, Harry,” he murmurs, his eyes so bright they seem to catch the firelight and shine red for a moment. “Yes, some of the Potter money would help me to secure my independence. There are places in Knockturn Alley where you can rent a flat and no one will look twice at your age or care, as long as you can pay.” He flings himself onto the couch opposite Harry, which Harry almost never sees him do. “The question remains: can you help me secure the Galleons I need?”
Harry takes a deep breath. There are questions he wants to ask, like what Tom is doing living with Muggles in the first place if he’s a half-blood and knows it, and why he didn’t go to his Head of House or the Headmaster for help.
But the first one, Harry doesn’t think Tom will share, and the second part, he knows. Slughorn likes to help people who are famous already—he’s reached out to Harry a few times, since he’s the son of the Head Auror and a notable Potions brewer—or who he thinks will help him in the future. Tom isn’t either one of those. He’s smart, but too aloof for Slughorn’s tastes.
The Headmaster is kind and works with James, but a random Slytherin living in the Muggle world wouldn’t get much consideration from him. He might even think Tom is being influenced by blood prejudice and should live in the Muggle world to learn more about them.
Either way, Tom wouldn’t be asking Harry if he could think of other options.
Harry sits up with a nod. “All right. I can’t give you that much money, or Mum and Dad will notice, but I can give you some.”
Tom freezes for a second. Harry watches him, and frowns as the seconds pass and the silence and the freezing continue. What is this all about? Why did Tom ask him in the first place if he thought Harry might refuse?
But then Tom relaxes and smiles at Harry, leaning back and crossing his legs over each other again, the way he kept nattering at Harry to do last year. “Thank you, Harry. A Galleon or so a month will be sufficient, since I only have to stay there for the duration of the summers. I can remain at Hogwarts for all the other holidays. In fact, I should prefer to have it in Sickles. Those will stand out much less in Knockturn Alley.”
Harry relaxes. He did have to be a little suspicious of someone asking him for money, he thinks. Even Mum told him she got taken in by that at first, when she married Dad and suddenly people were asking her for donations or personal gifts, playing on her sympathies.
A Galleon’s worth of Sickles a month is less than what Harry gets in gifts from his parents every week.
“Sure,” he says. “Remind me before we go home for the summer.”
Tom smiles at him, and Harry’s breath catches. It seems like the first honest smile that Tom has given anybody, ever, since Harry’s been at Hogwarts. It’s bright and shining and full of teeth. “Thank you, Harry.”
Harry swallows, and buries his reaction, and talks to Tom for a few more minutes before he goes back to bed. He flops back with his hands tucked under his pillow and stares at the canopy of his bed for a few seconds.
He doesn’t know exactly why Tom chose Harry of all people to approach, but Harry is going to take advantage of that opportunity. Play up to Tom, flatter him, give him the money he’s requested, quietly prove himself useful and capable of keeping Tom’s secrets and just as powerful with wandless magic as Tom is.
Because his parents don’t know what to do with him, and it drives distance between them even when Harry thinks they’re trying their best not to let that happen.
Tom? Tom knows what he wants, and part of that is Harry.
And Harry isn’t fool enough to let that go.