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1
When they met, Harry was sixteen and, though he didn’t know it yet, he’d spent his last night with the Dursleys.
Harry slouched more deeply into the hard plastic chair and pressed the tip of his tongue into the place where his tooth had split the inside of his lip open. The pain bloomed there in a clear way that was easy for him to understand, and a bit of the tension in his shoulders eased.
“Harry Potter?”
Harry didn’t look up at first. He was used to that tone -- so accustomed to it, in fact, that he could find it in any particular Concerned Adult’s voice. This was a woman, peering through the doorway with one of those sad, semi-conspiratorial looks on her face. I know what you’re going through and I’m here for you . It was such a ridiculous way to lie to people.
Harry looked up at her and smiled tightly, which was the closest he could come to playing his role today. There was a particularly swollen place in the long bruise on his thigh, and he sank his fingers into it, saw stars, and lowered his head gratefully onto the cool table to wait for whomever the woman was going to get. She’d been the same one at the desk when he came in an hour before, so he knew she wasn’t a social worker. Those usually came all the way into the room before speaking. They made careful eye contact and spoke with a specific, studied vocabulary that was beginning to make Harry grind his teeth whenever he heard it.
The next noise Harry heard was the chair across the table from him being pulled back across the tile floor. It screeched obnoxiously, and he jerked upright, blinking. It was part of the Social Workers’ Mandatory Behaviors to announce themselves at the door with a loud knock. To enter slowly like he was some sort of easily startled animal, and to keep their hands visible as they approached.
Perhaps it was this bloke’s first day. He did look young, maybe only a few years older than Harry, right out of university. He was handsome, and far too well-dressed for this place. He looked more like a solicitor than a social worker, really. Harry’s skin felt a bit too tight when their eyes met. However, the one time someone other than Vernon had knocked Harry around had been when Harry, at thirteen, had shyly told another boy he had nice eyes. The boy’s friends had intervened to preserve their mate’s virtue from Harry’s deviant advances. So now, Harry swallowed and stared determinedly at the tabletop.
“Harry,” said the worker, businesslike. “My name is Tom Riddle, and I’ll be your caseworker. Do you have any questions so far?”
Harry hunched his shoulders, prodded the slice in his mouth, which had begun to bleed a bit again in a tangy, slow trickle, and shook his head.
“Very well. Would you look up, please?”
Against his better judgment, Harry did. Tom Riddle’s eyes were quite blue. He had a posh accent. His clean-shaven face was old-fashioned looking, as though he protected himself carefully from the sun and chose his haircut from the pages of a vintage magazine. Harry wanted to feel judgmental about what was clearly a studied character, but he couldn’t deny the overall effect, so he just swallowed and tried not to blush too much.
“You’re going to be placed in a group home. I will visit you there once a week. Do you have questions about that?”
Harry shook his head again, but he couldn’t control his surprised reaction entirely. He had thought that one little shove down the stairs would be explained away. When he thought about complaining to someone about the Dursleys before, the anecdotes of worse things happening generally stopped him. He knew better than to embarrass the Dursleys in even minor ways for no reason, and couldn’t imagine how they’d react if he outright accused them of anything. He wouldn’t have said anything this time, only he’d been having trouble walking and the school had noticed. After an uncomfortable, borderline involuntary physical exam in the nurse’s office, subsequent events had been out of Harry’s hands.
He supposed he should be fearful about the idea of a group home, but over the years he had needed an outlet, so Harry had won more than his share of fights. He hadn’t meant to learn, but he now knew how to make people fear him, just enough. He supposed a group home would have to feed him, and wouldn’t be allowed to lock him up, and that he would still be sent to school.
“I’m not going to assume you mean something which you do not express,” warned Tom Riddle. “If you don’t answer my questions honestly, then you can blame yourself for the results.”
Harry nodded, noting that Tom Riddle was a thoroughly unpleasant and inexplicably underemployed perfectionist. A ruthlessly intelligent bureaucrat. A person who seemed to care nothing at all for anyone but himself yet did a job that was based upon helping others — in short, an enigma. The impression was solidified over the next few days, which were the most surreal in Harry’s life. Mr. Riddle spoke less than a dozen words to Harry but somehow convinced him to bare all of his bruises for evidentiary photographs against his family and maneuvered him into private quarters in the most exclusive group home.
During the third day of their acquaintance he looked Harry in the eye and Harry blushed, as was their routine, and he said, “Any questions?”
For three days Harry had only answered questions. He hadn’t asked any, though one in particular had been turning over constantly in his head. This time, however -- seated on the neat twin bed in his little private room at the group home, which was shabby but clean and his -- Harry asked.
“Why the fuck are you a social worker ? You seem, y’know, too smart. And good at it. To be one.”
Harry had never been encouraged to develop his skills as a conversationalist, but he found that all of these words came out easily, if a bit tangled up. Before he could blush and retract them, he was plunged back into muteness by the sound of Tom Riddle’s musical laugh.
“Oh, Harry,” said Tom, in a warm tone of voice that Harry had not heard from him before. He dabbed a bit of moisture from the corner of each of his eyes with a perfect white handkerchief, then looked up at Harry with new interest, his head to one side. “Aren’t you something?”
2
When they began having sex, Harry was nineteen, Tom was twenty-six, and Tom wouldn’t appear with him in public. Their relationship was secret due to what Tom called “optics.” It started during his first mayoral bid. He lost, which Harry tried to console him about only to be told, after a withering look, that the plan had never been to win. Tom was nonetheless lauded as the youngest man to ever come so close to being mayor of a city of such significant size. People wanted an excuse to invite Tom onto their talk shows, where he sparkled effortlessly in pressed button-down shirts and elegant slacks, drawing in the interviewer and then guiding them into the questions he wanted them to ask in a way they never seemed to notice. It was, however, terribly transparent to Harry.
He had a lot of opinions about Tom’s politics, but they became less scathing when they began getting naked together. In fact, if Harry wasn’t careful he could find himself smiling fondly at Tom even when he spouted the vilest of his views about the poor and less fortunate, of whom Harry had to, occasionally, sharply remind Tom he was one.
On one such occasion they were sprawled over the sheets and Tom was rambling euphorically about liberated international trade, as he often did when Harry had just sucked him off. Harry was more interested in burrowing his head under Tom’s arm and falling asleep than in active listening.
“Truly, the vast majority of people with inadequate resources are a lost cause long before we could intervene, anyway. Did you know most neurological development has already occurred by the time a child turns three years old?”
Harry didn’t remember, but was aware, that his second and third birthdays had passed uncelebrated in his cupboard under the Dursleys’ stairs. He shoved Tom so forcefully that he fell off the bed, hitting the floor hard.
Harry got away with things no one else could. Directly after Vernon’s trial for criminal abuse of a child, Petunia had cornered Tom in the corridor of the courthouse, snarling about the “vicious lies” he’d told during his testimony. Tom had been too far away for Harry to overhear, but the few quiet words he said in reply left Petunia pale and haunted, and Harry in receipt of a mysterious anonymous bank transfer three days later. Harry was stunned to discover he was a few hundred thousand pounds richer.
“It should have been more,” was all Tom said. Harry, happily, hadn’t heard from the Dursleys since.
In the second mayoral race, in a bigger city yet, Tom’s opponent withdrew the morning before ballots were printed. Tom was declared the winner without a single vote being cast or counted. That night, Harry began to inquire as to whether Tom knew any details about this convenient turn of events. But Tom bent Harry over the kitchen table in Harry’s little flat and silenced his every coherent thought with the tip of his tongue.
Harry had adjusted to having a sex life to a point where he couldn’t be quite so thoroughly distracted by the time he graduated from University.
Of course Tom planned attended the ceremony. He did make public shows of involvement in Harry’s life on significant occasions under the guise of the supportive former social worker. How else could a half-dozen news outlets photograph him in all his heart-of-gold splendor?
For a week Harry had been formulating his demand that Tom let their relationship be public. He was sick of hearing speculation about who Tom, now lauded as one of Britain’s most eligible political up-and-comers, might be dating. It was especially aggravating when someone photographed a passing encounter between Tom and any random young woman, and the gossip columnists were atwitter. And then Harry had to spend days miserable with jealousy, though he didn’t know Tom to show any interest in the opposite sex.
He thought about it that morning - Tom, a week before, had insisted he get his hair cut before the ceremony, and apparently the only appointment was for that day. So he sat listening to the stylist making one-sided small talk and met his own eye firmly in the mirror.
When she stepped away for a glass of water, Harry leaned in.
“You’ll have to decide,” Harry said, experimenting with how tightly to hold his jaw. “No more excuses. I don’t want to be anyone’s secret.” He was as ready as he was going to get. And whatever the stylist had put in his hair was keeping it uncharacteristically tidy, which Harry thought lent him a decidedly serious and adult look.
But Harry never had a chance to deliver his speech. When the ceremony ended and Harry started toward the car lot, Tom intercepted him, and not with his usual polite, camera-ready public smile. He was grinning, all teeth and danger, as he became when sincerely pleased. And he kissed Harry, right in front of the cameras. Harry, dizzy with the romance of it, leaned heavily against Tom’s shoulder.
Tom rubbed his jaw against Harry’s temple in the absently affectionate way that had always made Harry’s knees weak. Then he said, “The optics really couldn’t be better. Even your hair is behaving today. Well, better than usual.”
Harry was so happy that even that remark couldn’t totally break the spell.
3
When he looked back, Harry would realize the beginning of the end was the day he met Ron Weasley.
Harry hadn’t ever had friends before, really. First the obvious limitations of living with the Dursleys, then the fact he was socially stunted and Tom implemented a rigorous study schedule for him in university, unwilling to let Harry’s “inherent limitations” keep him from near perfect marks.
So when he got his first job — ironically, in social work — he didn’t expect to find friends amongst his colleagues at any point in time, let alone on his first day
“Harry, isn’t it?” asked a tall, handsome red-headed bloke with an excess of muscles and guileless light blue eyes.
Harry was used to being recognized; it was part of being Tom’s boyfriend, and though for a while, delirious at being publicly acknowledged, Harry had gotten some enjoyment from it, he now realized he preferred obscurity.
But the bloke waiting for HR orientation with Harry wasn’t looking star struck or even like he might pick a fight about politics, which were the two, equally tiresome reactions Harry usually got from people who recognized him. Instead he just looked pleasant, and politely interested. And Harry remembered he was wearing a name tag, and also that his handwriting was very poor.
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Harry glanced down at the tag the bloke wore. It said “Ron” in clear block letters. “Nice to meet you.”
Harry had only ever felt an instant connection with Tom, and he was fascinated to find one with someone else. Of course, it couldn’t have been more different in variety, but he liked Ron very much; he felt invested in Ron’s well-being from the outset. By the time they’d been working together a few weeks, going out to dinner to meet a few of Ron’s friends seemed completely natural.
Watching him get dressed, Tom frowned. “You said it was a few people from work going out together,” he said, in one of those deliberately neutral tones of voice that tended to make people who knew Tom nervous. Harry just rolled his eyes.
“I said it was a few people going out together, and that Ron from work asked me.” Harry straightened the collar of his jacket and frowned at the stubborn cowlick above and behind his right ear.
“Hmm. Maybe I should join you.”
Harry couldn’t help but be pleased at the idea of showing Tom off. He looked away from the mirror to smile at him. Tom smiled back, indulgent.
“It would have to be after dinner, but I could join you for one drink.” He got up and strolled across the bedroom. Tom took Harry’s hand a moment, then released it to run his fingertips up Harry’s arm. Harry sucked in a breath in anticipation.
“After all,” Tom murmured, stepping closer yet. “We can’t have them thinking you’re not spoken for.” His touch skated toward Harry’s bicep, the soft place near his underarm, and he pressed his thumb firmly into a bruise he’d put there the night before. Harry bit back a moan.
“It’s not like that,” he managed, staggering a bit when Tom stepped away to take Harry’s place at the mirror and adjust his tie. He had a dinner with supporters, which Harry wasn’t invited to since the last time he’d nearly stabbed someone with a fork when they raised the subject of reforming tax on investment income to follow the American model.
Tom caught Harry’s eye in the mirror and smirked. “Oh, Harry.”
Shaking off Tom’s remarks, Harry went to the restaurant, where Ron was waiting at the hostess’s station with his hands in his pockets and a frown. When he saw Harry, he grinned and started forward so fast he knocked over a server carrying a tray of drinks from the bar.
Harry tried not to laugh while Ron, apologizing profusely, tried to help the woman pick up the broken glass until she all but shouted at him to stop. Harry seized Ron’s arm to drag him away, and he dissolved into giggles, only egged on by Ron’s furious glare and how his ears turned endearingly red with embarrassment.
There were three other people eating with them, two of whom Ron knew from school and a third from university, a pretty witch named Hermione now in her last year of studying law. Somehow Harry wound up sitting between them and the evening passed in a pleasant blur, listening to them tell stories and lulled by their easy banter.
When the plates were cleared and Harry caught Hermione giving him a puzzled look, he smiled at her. “All right?”
She blinked, flushing. “It’s just you look a lot like the other Harry Potter. The one who dates the mayor.”
Harry frowned. “Well, yeah.”
Hermione looked confused, and then, an instant later, horrified. Harry wasn’t sure why, until he felt Ron’s hand land on his knee under the table and squeeze.
Oh, fuck. So it was like that.
When Tom came in, he seemed to read all he needed to know from Harry’s expression. Harry had just dashed off to the loo, hoping that while he was gone Hermione could fill Ron in on their...misunderstanding. Harry was torn between dealing with the surge of pride he felt at having a friend to introduce to his boyfriend, and the horror of realizing said friend had thought he was actually a boyfriend, or the closest thing to one.
Of course Harry couldn’t just have an ordinary friendship experience, he thought sullenly. Tom walked over, his grin less condescending than Harry had been anticipating, at least, and slipped an arm around Harry’s waist, then kissed his cheek.
“So, you were right,” Harry muttered.
Tom was looking over at the table — Harry had sort of frozen in the hallway that led to the bathrooms, so they stood there together now — and Harry saw Ron watching them, though when he saw Harry look over, he looked away at once.
“Well, it’s very mature of you to admit that, Harry.” Tom slid his fingers into the waistband of Harry’s jeans and Harry scowled.
“Not here,” he protested, but when he pulled away, it was reluctantly.
“Home, then,” Tom said. “I’ll meet your ‘friends’ another night.”
Harry sighed, and wondered if he was being cowardly or kind when he agreed.
4
After everything happened Harry had nothing but time to think. To obsess. He wondered what might have been different if he’d listened to his friends.
Hermione got a prestigious job when she finished school, but she did her pro bono work for the government and was occasionally assigned one of Ron or Harry’s cases. They were three years into their respective careers and Tom had just proposed. They had a working lunch together and Hermione, looking steeled to face a firing squad, snapped closed her file and set it aside the instant they finished.
“Harry, we have to talk about something.”
Harry set down his salad fork and leaned forward, alarmed. “Are you well, mate?”
She was very pale in that moment, but at this question her face suffused with sudden color. “I’m fine,” she said shortly, with a bare smile to thank him for asking. Then she cleared her throat and began fiddling with the edge of the linen table cloth. Hermione always took him to nice places and paid with her firm account, and Harry let her.
“I was wondering if you’re sure, Harry, about...um, marrying Tom.”
Harry was not sufficiently oblivious to have missed the signs altogether, but he hadn’t thought Hermione would bring herself to say anything. He knew his friends didn’t like Tom. Tom was hard to like, unless you agreed with his politics, which of course Harry’s friends did not.
“I am,” Harry said quietly.
She looked more anxious still. “There are things I can’t talk to you about, Harry, but…how well do you really know him?”
Early in their friendship, Hermione and Harry had a conversation about Tom that had been almost as uncomfortable as this one. But not quite. That day, they’d been watching one of Ron’s soccer games, sitting together in the stands. Harry had tugged off his jumper, and when his shirt had ridden up he’d inadvertently flashed Hermione the neat row of fresh welts across his abdomen.
She’d interrogated him for three minutes until he’d finally confessed, eyes averted and cheeks blazing red, that Tom had left them and it had been with Harry’s ecstatic consent.
This was worse.
Harry wasn’t an idiot. He knew that Tom’s goals in life would probably do the world more harm than good. But the idea of being without him wasn’t just painful, it was inconceivable. He rubbed his face with both hands and tried to think of how to explain any of this to Hermione.
“Tom is a bad person, Harry. Bad things are going to happen to him.”
At that, Harry forgot his discomfort and stared at her, gaze sharp. “What does that mean? What do you know?”
She continued to look down, twisting the table cloth between her fingers. “I’ve said all I can, Harry.” She looked up, and he saw she was exerting a lot of effort to keep from crying. “Harry, I think you know you can trust me. Do you believe me?”
Harry sat back and looked at her. He sighed. “Yeah, I do trust you. And I believe you. But…”
She smiled sadly, and a few tears escaped. Harry hated the thought of hurting her, but there was no choice here. Not for Harry, not really. When he said good bye to Hermione after lunch, it wasn’t the sort of casual farewell they’d had before. There was nothing in it of “see you soon” or “I’ll call next week” or even “until next time.” Hermione wrapped her arms tightly around him for a fierce half second then swiped her arm over her wet face as she backed away.
“I love you, you know, Harry.”
Harry smiled sadly. “I know. Me too.” But more than anyone or anything else, Harry loved Tom.
Harry stopped hanging around Hermione, but remained friends with Ron. It was close to necessary, what with work, and somehow their friendship hadn’t been weakened irreparably by the misunderstanding of its early days. A person less...well, a person who wasn’t Tom might have been uncomfortable with Harry spending so much time with Ron, considering, but Tom didn’t experience jealousy, as far as Harry could discern. He did become extra affectionate when Ron was around, which was irritating, but Harry thought it could only be in the manner of an animal scent marking its property. That or one of the mostly harmless cruelties with which Tom amused himself.
But the day came when Ron, like Hermione, couldn’t help himself either. It was all rather cliche. Ron was drunk, Harry’s wedding was the following weekend, and toward the end of the night Ron suddenly became intensely passionate about smoothing all of the wrinkles out of Harry’s shirt.
“That’ll do it, I think, Ron,” Harry said, sidestepping his friend, which wasn’t hard because Ron’s imbibing had reduced his reaction time at least by half. Then Ron got teary, and the part of Harry that had always known the moment would come braced itself.
“You can’t really marry him , Harry,” said Ron. “He doesn’t even care about anyone but himself.”
That wasn’t exactly true, Harry thought, but it was close enough that he might not have argued even under better circumstances, let alone these.
Harry avoided Ron all the next week, citing all the work he had to get done beforehand, but it wasn’t that difficult. He thought Hermione might have tried to stick out a friendship no matter what if Harry had let her, but walking the tightrope of loathing someone’s spouse was different than if it was only a boyfriend or even a fiance. Harry had figured Ron wasn’t really cut out for it.
That Friday, tucked into Tom’s side and feeling the entire, immediate power of him, Harry could almost accept a future of having no one else close to him.
But the next morning pounding at the door woke Harry, and he was alone. He tugged on his jeans and rushed downstairs to fling open the door before they could break it down, flustered and alarmed. The sun was high in the sky, but Harry and Tom had planned to wake up long before dawn. They’d wanted to see the sunrise over the private island where they were meeting their officiant, and no one else, to exchange vows and spend a week alone together.
But the sunrise and the flight had been missed. At least by Harry — where was Tom?
The people at the door were wearing uniforms and bulk protective vests. Three of them had firearms drawn and fixed on Harry. He looked back at them in shock.
“He’s not here,” he blurted. Then he realized, dazedly, that one of the men was Ron. He was toward the back, but at his height he still looked over the rest. He looked regretful, but resolute. At least, Harry thought hysterically, he wasn’t one of the ones pointing a gun.
“It’s you we’re here for, I’m afraid, Mr. Potter,” said a woman Harry had never seen before. “We’re placing you under arrest.”
During Harry’s pretrial incarceration, a lot of detectives asked him questions assuming he knew the answers and was just being stubborn. As a result, he could work backward from what they were asking and deduce that Tom was deeply entrenched in organized crime and ready to make a play for his own organization, of which he’d be the head, at the moment of Harry’s arrest.
Their intention was to convince Harry that Tom didn’t care about him and in so doing get Harry to flip, but even if Harry was capable of betraying Tom, he didn’t have anything useful to barter with. Tom didn’t confide in Harry. Tom would never have involved Harry in any of his power plays — not out of lack of trust, but because in his life, that wasn’t what Harry was for.
One time they even sent Ron, which was a bit awkward for the first few minutes. Then Harry broke the charged silence. “Not a social worker, then?”
Ron looked up. “I was at first. I was..:um, recruited.”
Harry thought of the way Ron had reached for him under the table at the restaurant, and believed him. If all of that confusion has actually been a con, Harry couldn’t see a point to it.
“They’re asking me stuff I don’t know anything about,” Harry said. He kept his tone casual, but he was vibrating with the urge to hit someone. Even Ron would do, though surprisingly he wouldn’t have been Harry’s first choice. Ron was a good person, and Harry wasn’t. It was fine with Harry if Ron wanted to place himself in opposition to Harry. In fact, it made sense.
“I guess that doesn’t surprise me,” Ron sighed. “I tried to talk them out of these charges, harry. I know you’re not…” he paused, then seemed to remember that he no longer had to pretend to be Harry’s friend, and his expression got firmer. “You’re a good person, Harry, but you made a shit choice picking him.”
Harry shrugged. He thought about the day he’d met Tom, and how his life changed course after that. “I dunno. Maybe.”
Harry was charged with aiding and abetting and the possible penalty was twenty years incarceration. They offered him ten years and he waited three months for some word, or any sign, from Tom. It didn’t come, so Harry took the deal.
Once, when Harry had only been living with Tom a few months, he’d been rummaging in a hall closet looking for a dry towel, and found a small black case on the lowest shelf, toward the back, concealed by three neatly folded spare blankets.
Curious — and unthinking — Harry opened the case. Inside were neat stacks of cash, exactly like something out of a crime film, and two fake identification cards. One had Harry’s face and one had Tom’s.
Harry didn’t pay a lot of attention during his trial, but his solicitor spent a lot of time talking about how nothing had been found in the thorough ransacking of the flat. Certainly nothing as suspicious as all that money and false IDs. Harry supposed that meant that Tom hadn’t just stepped out that morning for the paper and gotten held up.
He wasn’t sure what would bother him more - if something terrible had happened to Tom to keep him away, or if Tom had left and stayed away deliberately. Harry knew Tom. He strongly suspected the latter.
But there had been two IDs in that case the day he saw it, so he wondered.
5
Harry had been in prison for six months, and it wasn’t so bad. His old fistfighting skills had come in handy, but more often he polished his rusty talent for invisibility. He didn’t try to fit in but he didn’t make the mistake of going it alone, either. He stayed in the periphery of all the people he was expected to hang around and made the agreeable noises they expected him to make.
Tom visited him on the twenty-sixth Tuesday Harry had spent inside.
They faced one another across a little acrylic table and Harry tested the joints in his chair by shifting his weight deliberately until he found the movement that made the loudest squeak. It was a pretty impressive one, and Harry felt deeply satisfied when he saw Tom’s left eye twitch. Harry did it again.
“You have every reason to be unhappy with me,” said Tom evenly. “That you are here is absurd. And it’s unconscionable.”
Don’t pretend you care, Harry thought fiercely, and bore his weight down on the corner of the chair again so the loose leg squealed again.
Tom rubbed the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “I’m trying to have an adult conversation with you, Harry.”
“You…” Harry stopped himself. There was no point. He’d always known the way Tom was. But in the end he couldn’t help it. “You left me there! You must have known they were coming and you just…!”
Tom’s hands fell away from his face and he just looked at Harry.
“And you...you aren’t even apologizing! You should be begging me for my forgiveness!”
Harry jumped to his feet and leveled Tom with a look. “I never want to see you again.”
And he didn’t; they wouldn’t make him, so when he got notice that someone was there to see him he declined the visit, and when he received mail he put it directly in the bin. Then on the forty-first Tuesday, there was talk of a new inmate. A tall, handsome one who had already hospitalized someone five minutes into his first day.
The description made Harry think, wryly, of Tom, but he didn’t think about it any more behind that night.
Then that night Harry’s cellmate was stuffing all his photographs and extra clothes into a sack, looking apologetic when Harry came in.
“I’ve been reassigned,” he explained with a shrug.
Harry watched him go silently, and waited. He was still shocked when it was Tom.
Tom, who entered the cell cautiously, in a way Harry had certainly never seen him enter a room. It was their altered dynamic that was responsible, Harry knew somehow. Not just the setting.
“I was badly injured that morning,” Tom said. He was unbuttoning his shirt without looking directly at Harry. “And in hiding - and recuperating - after. By the time they even told me about what happened to you, it was too late.”
He shrugged out of half his shirt to reveal a massive scar, still angry red and several inches along the left side of his rib cage. Harry looked at it.
“I would never have gone without you. But Bella knew where I kept the money.”
Harry walked forward and lifted a hand so that as soon as he was close enough he could pull Tom into a kiss by the back of his neck. It was overeager - half desperate, really - and designed mostly to shut him up. Harry hated lies, even from Tom, who didn’t really understand that they were wrong.
Just to be sure, he stuck a hand in Tom’s shirt and ran his fingers over the scar. He knew how different wounds healed from his complicated childhood and the nature of his work. It was quite sloppy of Tom, really, to think he could convince Harry that something that was clearly from a superficial wound had put him in mortal peril.
But with Tom, as always, Harry had to take what he could get, and pick his battles, and it wasn’t as though he could convince himself to resist him now, any more easily than he could at sixteen.
“Ten years isn’t that long, and there’s parole eligibility much sooner.” Tom was always so talkative when they were skin to skin. He nosed the sparse hair below Harry’s collarbone and inhaled deeply, before straightening and tugging Harry’s elastic-waist pants over his hips. He always wanted to undress Harry.
Harry had missed him. And he’d missed touch altogether. He came embarrassingly fast, over Tom’s fist and thigh, and then Tom put him on the bed and thrust into him too eagerly, only preparing Harry halfway. But Harry had always liked it that way. It left him half senseless with that hybrid pleasure/pain. Tom curled his body around Harry’s afterward and Harry revelled in the pressure of his knees and his thighs behind Harry’s, and the strong arm tight around Harry’s torso.
“Ten years isn’t that long, and especially not in this day and age,” Tom murmured in his post-coital fervor. Harry was beginning to tune him out and drift off already but he caught a few final words.
“I’ve put a lot of investment dollars into cryogenics. Such a fascinating new industry.”
Oh, Tom. Harry thought. Aren’t you something.