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Those who called love an angel were naïve, for love was not the angel that they believed it to be, love was a true angel. An abomination that even God feared to look upon; it was a monster whose power was always underestimated.
And though Tom was aggrieved to say it, perhaps he too had underestimated its power.
He had thought that he was stronger than an emotion that dared not show its face.
But his hubris would be his downfall.
For a month ago, love had grabbed him by the throat. Its claws digging into his neck and wrenching him from his thoughts, and forcing to acknowledge someone that he had never thought was important enough to acknowledge before.
He had known of Harry Potter.
Everyone did.
But he was a nobody.
He was a nothing.
There was absolutely no reason in the entire world why he should pay attention to him, and yet now it was the only thing he could bear to do.
There was nothing special about Harry, nothing unusual, nothing extraordinary, at least, not on the surface. But then he’d smiled, not in any way that was different, except it was.
It was so different.
That smile was like being slammed against a wall.
Tom had never meant to fall in love. If anything, he had avoided it like the plague, kept everyone at arm’s length because if he did not let his heart sense the world outside, then it would not be tempted to stray.
At least that had been the plan.
At it had backfired horribly.
The others had said it was obvious what was happening. That Harry was mentioned by name far more than anyone else had ever been. They said that Tom’s eyes strayed where they shouldn’t far more often than they should. And they said that he was distracted, that Harry was a liability to his plans.
He just hadn’t realised it until he was in too deep to get out.
For by the time that he had seen Harry’s shy smiles, he was buried neck deep in a grave he had been digging himself for months.
None of them had any sympathy.
Because he had not given them sympathy when their affections had strayed.
And now he was left standing in a bathroom, his hands moulded around the sink basin and his whole body shivering as though it were sick. Because, somehow, in a single moment, the world had shifted entirely to the left. His heart had broken free from the cage he had built, and his breath had been stolen from his lungs.
It was unexpected, to say the least.
And horrific.
No one had ever told him that love could come so sudden, that love could crash against him as a violent wave does against the rocks. No one had bothered to tell him that love would make him feel like he was drowning in oxygen, that despite the abundance of air that surrounded him,
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe.
He was at the mercy to every useless part of himself, and he couldn’t stop it. The floodgates that he had been holding back for so long were open so painfully wide and everything was gushing into him, filling him up until he could hardly bear it, and then cramming yet more feeling into him.
Until he felt so fucking sick.
Until he was leaning over the sink and choking on the love that clogged his throat. Hardly believing that someone as simple and as lovely as Harry was his weakness. His true angel, so horrid being that no man could describe it, because no man could ever comprehend the true depravity of love. There were many that believed that they had experienced the truest love in the world, but what they had seen was nirvana, a heaven on earth.
And that was not real love.
That was artificial.
A trick of the brain and not divine intervention. For anything so beautiful could not be love, because love was not made of beautiful things. Love was the pain of heartbreak. Love was the monsters of jealousy. Love was the wretched sorrow of abandonment. And the voice in his head seemed to shout out that love was hurting, that love was breaking, that love was destroying.
That love was the wildest passions tamed into the smallest spaces.
Love was simply hatred.
Because it had to be founded in hatred for someone to dare to make him feel like this.
And, how dare they rip him apart from the inside out without ever having to lift a finger?
Tom wanted to return the compliment, and yet…
Whenever he tried.
Whenever he just thought about Harry every part of him became so weak, so utterly pathetic that he could hardly stand it, and he ended up here, standing in the bathroom at God knows what time, watching the lights dance in his eyes and his reflection dissolve into Harry’s.
In those silent moments, there was no way to describe the desire that flooded through him. That distinct need that he had to consummate his marriage to violent love. In the bright white light of half-heaven, Tom wanted to hear Harry’s bones break.
To hear them crack beneath his own fingers.
Because of his own fingers.
When it was so dark that he could hardly see beyond the black of his eyes, Tom wanted to be the one to graze and cut and ruin Harry’s skin. He wished that he could peel back all the superficial feelings that had got them here and get right down to the crux of what this was all about.
Hurting and being hurt.
Because love was a violent thing.
And Tom was being swallowed by the violence.
Chewed up and rolled all over its tongue. His own mouth mimicking the actions in the mirror, biting at the skin on the inside of his cheek, and chewing his tongue and crushing his lip until it bled.
He was being eaten alive by the angel that was dining on his soul.
And he hated it.
But that voice so loud and so quiet, so resounding and so empty echoing through his head, simply told him.
To love, you had to hurt.
To love, you had to break.
To love, you had to destroy.
And he had lost the words to describe those things he wanted to do, to show the angel that he could. Though, a small part of him suspected that such words had never existed in the first place. For there were no words in decent English for wanting to destroy someone completely.
For wanting to consume them.
For wanting to press them against white sheets and seeing them stain red, for wanting to taste the darkest corners of their mouths.
To go further than anyone had ever gone before.
To be the one who ate what was sacred.
Tom would have denied it to anyone who would have asked, but to himself, in the corners of the night, he knew what he wanted to do. He knew that the only things that would start to even sate the angel that was tearing apart his soul, was to eat another.
Swallow their heart.
And beg that horrid angel to reverse what they had done to him.
Because love was a horrid thing.
Love was screaming in the mirror until he could hardly breathe. Love was electricity constantly, constantly, constantly pounding through his nervous system, forcing every single nerve, and forcing every single muscle into never-ending spasms.
Love was burning and being burnt up.
Love was a violent, horrid thing.
And though it made Tom sick to think about, he wanted to dig between Harry’s ribs.
He wanted to snap them.
To fold them back.
And find the jewel at the centre of the crown. Deep in the blackest, most awful depths of his heart, Tom wanted to hold Harry’s own heart between his fingers, he wanted to feel its weight in his palm, and he wanted to squeeze it until it turned to pulp. He wanted it under his foot, and he wanted to press down on it.
Crushing it.
Mashing it.
Pounding it into the grout of the tiles until everyone could see what he would do to things that broke him up inside.
Because love was such a violent, beautiful thing.
And as he stood there, with blood in his mouth, and his fingers turned white from gripping the sink so hard, he understood what he had to do to be rid of the angel that was eating his heart.
He had to hurt.
He had to break.
He had to destroy.
He would have to eat the heart of the thing that was doing this to him.
And he couldn’t fucking wait.