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Tom did not understand love. None of it. He did not understand the pomp and pageantry that people assigned this somewhat unpleasant feeling that curled around his heart, like a snake, squeezing; constricting his lungs until he could hardly breathe.
Love was unpleasant.
But he couldn’t give it up.
He had never intended to fall in love, because falling in love was a form of weakness and he did not have weaknesses, but then Harry had stumbled into his life. What had once been a methodical existence was now controlled by whims, as casual and flippant as the wind across the sea as it whips up a storm. Harry was the butterfly that had flapped its wings at precisely the right moment that it caused a hurricane to rip up Tom’s heart when it was still so far away.
What made it more irritating, was that objectively Harry had so little to offer. He was awkward, and not especially clever, though that could be balanced with a certain ingenuity that Tom felt was interesting. But regardless of his apparent lack of talent, the two of them were similar, to say the least. The same story told with different characters and a different setting but was ultimately identical when stripped back to its core.
And Tom had always been a little narcissistic.
Always willing to indulge himself in things that reminded him of himself.
But that did not make the feeling, that putrid emotion that had blossomed like rotten fruit in his stomach, justified. What Harry did to him was worse than any threat he had, or ever would, receive, it was sickening and horrifying and honestly scary.
Tom did not like feeling scared.
Though there was really no other way to describe sitting on the tiles of the third-floor bathroom, between the sinks that dripped, feeling sick to his stomach with thoughts of someone who looked little like him infecting every inch of his brain, penetrating down into very fabric that held him together. Losing control was terrifying.
Tom had never wanted anything that he couldn’t have before. All the other impulses and urges and fancies that he’d ever known, were easily satisfied with a smile to one of his ‘friends’, or perhaps a sweet little threat hissed in their ear like a lover’s murmur, and sometimes, if he wanted an especially large favour, well he’d learnt that actions spoke louder than words. That his hand on Abraxas’ thigh was a lovely little conversation starter for getting exactly what he wanted.
He simply always got what he wanted, whatever it was.
Now though, what he wanted was an intangible and inextricable mess of cold wires, melted together. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, that he wanted. Whether it was merely Harry’s smiling at him from across the room, or Harry sitting beside him as they burned the world to a husk, or Harry moaning on top of him.
Tom wanted all of them and none of them.
He wanted to be wanted. To be needed. To be craved just as much as he was craving the smell and the touch and the taste of Harry’s skin scraping across his own.
Never before had he wanted something so completely, and he hated himself that this was the first.
Though he hated Harry more because this was all Harry's fault, if he could have been a little less of everything, then they both could have lived in peace.
But Harry just had to have captured his attention, and now he was caught in a bear trap of love.
Godawful love.
Less than gently Tom knocked his head back against the tiles. Wishing that he could just drag the offending feeling out like it was a tumour. Just dig his fingers into his stomach and pull out the butterflies one by one, scattering them across the floor as a reminder. He wanted to sink his entire hand through a hole in his chest and throw his useless heart across the room. Perhaps pick it up and squeeze it, punish it for its weakness before forcing it down the plughole, not caring if it became mashed and broken, not caring that it turned to a pulp around his fingers, because what use did he have, for a heart?
But he couldn’t, not because he hadn’t tried, there were still nasty scratches he wouldn’t show anyone even if they stung every time his shirt shifted; rather he couldn’t because the sentimentality was infused right into him. It was pulsing through his blood and pressing into his bones, this awful painful crushing that ached and ached and ached.
It was a pressure in his head.
And black spots across his eyes.
And a tightness in his lungs.
And a pulsating of his heart.
And a wooze in his brain.
At first, he hadn’t understood what it was, then all his ‘friends’ had helpfully diagnosed him.
It was love.
Stupid, pathetic, love.
Why his ‘friends’ spoke so highly of this horrid, horrid thing, he would never understand. They said it was fun to be in love, they said it was exciting, they said it felt just so damn good.
It did not.
Love was a void. Dark and full, swallowing him alive over and over again. His stomach did not tie itself in knots, it imploded. Collapsing in on itself, squashing and squeezing his organs together until he was biting through his lip and tasting blood and wishing that it was just crushing him to a pulp, as though he was plum in a giant’s grasp.
But love was cruel.
Love wanted him to suffer, repeatedly. Love was not content with swallowing him, it wanted others too because love was a hunger. A delicious noxious hunger that bit him and chewed him. It was an awful clawing thing that ate away at his stomach, burning him from the inside out, like the corrosive liquids that he used to force his friends’ hands when they were being 'moral'.
Love made him hungry.
So hungry.
And it was not an easy hunger to sate.
Food certainly did not eradicate the feeling, nor did casual sex with subordinates willing to provide such things. If anything, that made it worse; it made whatever threads that held all his feelings in their veins, tangle together into such a mess. A sticky mass of sensation and emotion that was much too closely linked for his liking.
But however much Tom wanted it to, sex did not satiate the starvation, and he was left alone in his bed with chaos swarming his mind like a biblical plague. Hunger always scratching his insides, tearing him apart from the inside out until he put his own fingers between his teeth, and bit and chewed and mauled, trying to silently beg the need to go away.
Despite himself, Tom knew what he wanted.
What it wanted.
For love was eating and being eaten.
Animals did it all the time. They copulated, and then one ate the other, that was nature, however horrific it may seem to those who didn’t understand that urge, those innocent masses who’d never been in love. He wanted to eat Harry. To satisfy that craving that was tearing him open, to make all these petty feelings go away, to simply be done with love.
He was sick of hearing the sinks drip, and feeling the tiles digging into his back. He was sick of wasting time thinking about Harry. Just sitting here and thinking of his lopsided smile, and the way he twisted his hands when he was nervous, and how he tipped his head just a little to the side when he was trying to understand something. Those idiosyncrasies were the blight on his life, and Tom wanted them gone.
He wanted to go back to a time before he was infected by love.
Because he had plans, he had a future that simply did not involve wasting his life fawning over some pathetic lover.
He was meant to be above all that.
None of that stopped the feeling though. Love did not care for his plans because love was selfish. Dinner was the absolute worst. Tom could see Harry, between the people and the space, just sitting surrounded by the few friends he maintained; Harry had to know he was watching, those slight glances, so surreptitious, gave it all away.
Harry saw.
Harry knew.
Perhaps he did not understand what Tom really wanted to do, but he knew that something was connecting them, however unpleasant that thing might be. Tom had to think it was barbed wire, cruel and nasty, sticking right into their stomachs snarling their souls together and dragging them both to an unnaturally early death if nothing was done to cut them free.
Tom never ate at dinner when Harry was watching him.
He just watched him back, tongue on the back of his teeth, imagining what it would be like to pull all of Harry’s out, because love was a violent, vicious thing, and he was a violent, vicious person. Perhaps, if he couldn’t claw love out of him himself, then he’d have to feed it, nourish it, let it blossom and finally die, at its own accord.
Perhaps, he just had to give into it, regardless of how foul the idea tasted on his tongue when he tried to murmur it aloud. Perhaps, the way to outmanoeuvre what love was doing to him, was to think of it as a game he could win. In this game, he could lull his prey into a false sense of security, let it fall into the quarry of love and start to drown in the excess.
If love craved such things, then love truly was a monster.
Tom hoped that Harry liked monsters, liked the way they smiled; liked the false flattery that spilled from their mouths. He hoped that Harry was sick with love as well, that he would happily die to make all these feelings go away. Deep in his heart, Tom had the audacity to wish that Harry would enjoy their collision and the splintering that would follow.
Harry would yearn for violent love.
For the darkness that was so obvious between Tom’s teeth.
He would like to be opened up ever so slow.
And then eaten even slower.
Tom would make sure he would, because whilst Tom didn’t understand how to love, he certainly understood how to be a monster.