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Tom slips out his third floor window and climbs down the rose trellises that adorn the sides of Riddle Manor. From there, it’s a quick ten-minute jaunt to the left and down the street to the much humbler home of his best friend.
Per his watch, it’s only a few minutes after midnight. Still early enough for Harry to be awake.
As he moves, the expensive adornment on his wrist jangles with an unpleasant reminder. It had been a gift from his grandfather for his sixteenth this past week, but right now it feels more like a cuff, chaining him back to his family’s manor and the hateful legacy there.
Next time, he’ll remember to take it off before he goes.
He flips over the fence into the backyard of the Potter home and then circles over to the ground floor bedroom. These secret nighttime hangouts have been happening for years, all the way back when he’d needed Harry’s help to make it over the fence, but as his family’s demands have grown heavier – as things have… changed between him and Harry – he’s come by less and less.
Something hopeful stirs in his chest when he finds Harry’s window cracked open despite the bracing chill and the unusual hour.
He didn’t think it would be.
It’s been several weeks since his last visit, after all.
Through the gauzy curtain, he spots Harry hunched over his desk, hands working at something on the surface and turned away just enough that his body perfectly hides it.
“What are you doing?”
Harry startles, sending a shower of fluttering bits flying. He spins toward the window.
“Oh fuck. Tom. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Obviously.”
Then Tom narrows his eyes, recognizing the appearance and the slight smell of the bits in question. Ground up marijuana. As part of his Head Boy duties, he’s caught plenty of delinquent students smoking the substance behind the stands.
He lifts the window, ducking past the curtain and climbs inside the room.
It is, as always, a study in Harry’s misguided priorities: football posters covering every wall, and, around the desk, an arrangement of strategy diagrams, each annotated with Harry’s ugly scrawl. Academic rigor has never been Harry’s domain, but the effort he applies to his sport is more than most their age could claim about anything.
The rest of the room is chaotic but mildly so. He spots Harry’s academy blazer tossed thoughtlessly beside the nightstand. Near the closet, a small pile of unsorted clothes and a second chair that Harry rarely uses. There’s also a stack of two player games nearly waist tall behind the closed bedroom door, only odd in that Harry's an only child just like Tom.
The spare chair is still where he had left it last.
He shuts the window behind him with a declarative thunk, makes his expression pleasant, and turns around.
“It’s not what you think,” Harry says immediately. At Tom’s disbelieving stare, he purses his mouth. “Okay, so it is, but it won’t be a problem.”
“Harry,” Tom says, chiding. “You don’t decide that.”
“Oh, and you do?”
“Yes. I do.”
Harry groans, entirely unbothered by Tom’s icy tone. “Just leave me alone, you pompous prick. You do know that there’s no award for being the biggest goody-goody of the year?”
“And am I to stand aside while my darling Harry slides into the unforgiving grip of addiction? I think not.” Tom smirks as Harry pinks at the endearment. Still weak to praise as always.
“How many times do I have to tell you to stop calling me that? It’s weird, Tom.”
“What’s weird is how you’ve been hiding this from me.”
Harry stiffens, his arms crossing with a defensive slide. “I have my own life, Tom. I don’t have to tell you everything constantly.”
“You do, actually,” Tom says, his voice dripping with smug indulgence, “because you need me to tell you when you’re being daft.”
“I don’t just sit around waiting for you to waltz back into my life.”
Harry glowers, spitting each word.
Tom doesn’t budge. “What would Lily think if she found out?”
“Ha! She already knows. Caught me straight away.”
“Then I’ll tell James.”
“You wouldn’t,” Harry says, rolling his eyes.
They both know that dealing with James’ occasionally controlling temper isn’t worth the meager satisfaction he’d get, but Tom’s lips thin, deeply displeased by Harry’s flippancy.
“You forget yourself. I do not make a habit of keeping friends that lie to me.”
Harry bares his teeth, readying his next retort—
But then he deflates with a sigh.
The tight line of his shoulders melts away.
“I hate this,” he says, sounding for all the world like he’s ten years old again. And petulant. “I haven’t seen you in ages and as soon as you show up we’re fighting over something stupid again. I hate it, and I hate how you never listen to what I actually have to say because it’s always about you and your bloated ego and your plans.”
Tom hesitates, his retort melting on his tongue. Harry’s plaintive words cut straight to the core of him, and any enjoyment he had taken from reminding Harry of his place suddenly seems small.
“Forget it,” Harry mutters. Without quite looking, he continues in a voice that’s gone strangely light. “Why’d you even come tonight? It’s been weeks. Thought you’d maybe—” He stops, face twisting as he trails an absent finger along the edge of his desk. “Thought maybe you were done with all this. With—” He gestures vaguely at the window, the rooms, all of it. It appears, for a breath, as if he’s been rendered in miniature, his form dwarfed by the harsh lines of the desk and the wall behind him. “Y’know.”
Tom stares, unmoving.
The words that hang between them are so ridiculous that he can’t make sense of them.
He understands them, technically, but he simply cannot make them mean anything. Done. That there would ever be a world in which they would be done. As if he hadn’t clambered down two trellises and over a fence on a frosty January night for the privilege of being insulted in this shrine to poor taste by the only person he wouldn’t kill for the audacity alone.
The notion is so absurd it loops back into something almost touching.
“Don’t be stupid,” Tom says, scoffing, because it’s easier than saying anything else. He slides onto Harry’s bed and makes him comfortable on top of crimson duvet. It seems safer here, somehow, with the mattress solid beneath him. “Now — about the drugs. Speak.”
The change in topics is a needle to the swollen wound between them.
Harry brightens. “Wow. Someone’s in a good mood.”
Tom sniffs, suppressing the urge to snap another insult.
“Alright,” Harry says. He settles back into his chair. “If you’re actually listening—”
“I am,” Tom says drolly.
Harry takes a bracing breath. “So the weed’s a surprise, I get it, I’m sorry, but it’s hardly horrible. Getting stoned is practically a rite of passage. Ron says you haven’t really lived if you haven’t done it at least once.” He coughs, clearing his throat. “Or more than once. But I’ve been safe about it! And I was going to tell you about it soon, I swear. I just—” He trails off.
“You just?” Tom prompts, keeping himself stern.
“I know how you get about these things.”
“These things.”
“Y’know,” Harry hedges, his gaze sliding to the gleaming silver ring on Tom’s hand. “Sins.”
His meaning is obvious, and this argument is nothing new. Tom bristles anyway.
Few families in Britain are religious anymore, but Tom’s family is one of them, devout Catholics running generations back. It’s been made abundantly clear that as the only child in line for the Riddle fortune, he would be devout too.
The purity ring that he’d received alongside his watch is meant to assure it.
A representation of a vow he’d taken between himself and God, with his father and grandfather as witness, that he would save himself for marriage, for some performance on some faraway night, with whatever mindless wench that his father deems fit to bear the next generation of Riddles. Tom’s mother had died during childbirth, and his father, a believer that they would be reunited in the bosom of God, had chosen never to remarry.
Tom hopes his future wife dies during childbirth too. It would simplify things.
He’s only ever shared these thoughts with Harry. Tom doesn’t particularly believe in God but keeps pretending anyway to fit the mold, and Harry greatly disapproves. Whenever they get into it, Harry has plenty of trite lines to spout about living one’s own life, as if he would understand a lifetime of expectation.
Or the purpose of revenge.
Tom wasn’t born, he was bred. No better than livestock in the eyes of his sire.
The farce with his family chafes him more than it does Harry but he’s mindful not to let it show. No need to worry Harry’s pretty little head. After all, there’s one important detail that Tom hasn’t shared. After ensuring that all the wills and deeds are in his name, he has a long-considered and well-formed plan for removing both Riddle patriarchs from the picture. Permanently.
Then his life would truly be his own.
For the time being, however, it’s a recurring source of disagreement between them. And it’s true that their friendship has grown even more strained in recent months, owing to both this, as Tom nears his choices for university, as well as an odd undercurrent beneath it all. An unnameable, inexplicable tension that’s made all their normal squabbles properly explosive.
Tom’s struggled to identify the source, and they’ve never been the sort to talk it out.
Still, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
Simple affection is enough to disarm Harry.
A promise that the bond they share is special. Over the years, Harry’s grown into his own – developed his own group of annoyingly athletic friends, and even, to Tom’s chagrin, spawned a fanclub of admiring schoolgirls, cheering shrilly at the sidelines of all of Harry’s matches.
Harry’s grown into his body too. Tom had been taller for most of their youth but Harry’s now tall enough to match Tom, and all of his limbs are corded with tight, lean muscle. If Tom admires them, the powerful flex of Harry’s bicep when he lifts, the lovely curvature of his well-shaped jaw, that’s a secret he has no plans to share. It’s easy enough to look while Harry pays attention to other, less important things.
No one else would ever be Tom Riddle’s darling boy, and that fact alone is enough to keep Harry coming back to him.
Enough to make Harry weak.
It’s how Tom prefers it.
With Harry flustered and painfully honest, but only if it’s like this. Only if it’s for Tom.
If Harry had been worried enough to hide his new habit, then that’s no good. Tom must nip this disobedience in the bud – not for him by coercing Harry into stopping, he knows better than anyone what a fool’s errand that would be – but that he can let this particular sin slide so long as Harry doesn’t try to keep it from him anymore.
“Finish rolling,” he says blithely.
Harry gapes. “Really?”
“Yes, really. Don’t be tiresome.”
“Okay,” Harry says slowly. “If you insist.”
Tom watches quietly as Harry gathers the scattered bits of plant back into a pile and then begins rolling it into form. His movements are methodical, always good with his hands, but not yet the practiced motions of someone that’s done this many times before. Harry’s friends are all generally straight-laced, and Tom would’ve thought back alley deals for weed to be a bit beyond their usual fare.
Tom reasons that smoking must be a recent habit and perhaps only in the privacy of his own room. Which leads him to wonder…
“Where did you get it?”
Harry snorts, giving him a quick sideways glance. “Where do you think?”
Sirius, Tom realizes, frustration bubbling.
Harry’s good for nothing lout of a godfather.
So what if the man is a successful musician? It’s still true that he’s a terrible influence and could afford to visit the Potters less.
Harry slides out a couple textbooks stacked along the back of his desk and pulls out a lighter, flipping it open with a grin. Silvery and engraved with a howling hound on the side, the lighter seems nice. Fancy. Presumably another gift from his insufferable godfather.
Harry lights one end of the blunt and lifts it to his lips.
Tom’s eyes trail the motion, and he swallows, battling a barrage of mortifying thoughts. That Harry looks good like this, loose-limbed and confident. That Tom would gladly trade places with that accursed blunt.
But Harry pauses. Lowers the blunt and cocks his head at Tom.
“Did you want to give it a go?”
“No,” Tom denies immediately.
“Oh, come off it with your Head Boy act. You’re curious, aren’t you? It’s not hard to notice that you’ve been staring at it like some sort of overgrown snake.”
“I do not want to ‘give it a go’.”
Harry’s eye gains a concerning twinkle. “Really? Aren’t you all about exploring your limits?” He seems far too pleased by the turn of events – with Tom finally on the side of the law. “Pushing the boundaries of mankind and all that rot. C’mon, it’s not like a puff would kill you.”
“It might,” Tom replies shortly.
“You know what I think?” Harry drawls, his eyes flashing with challenge. He licks his lips, and Tom can’t help but be captivated by the motion and the way they now glisten in the golden lamplit glow. “I think you’re afraid.”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not,” Harry echoes, his tone wry. Then he offers the blunt to Tom, its acrid smoke already dispersing into the room.
Tom stares at it disdainfully.
He is above being baited by such juvenile goading.
He is.
He is.
But he takes the blunt.
Harry’s cheeks puff with barely contained mirth. “That’s what I thought.”
“I do have limits to the amount of insolence I will tolerate,” Tom says icily. “Even from you.”
“Haven’t killed me yet,” Harry shrugs, careless, and it only riles Tom even more.
“Yet. Perhaps even soon, if you keep at it.”
Then he brings the blunt to his mouth and pulls.
The smoke immediately begins to scratch at his throat and his lungs, and for a lack of a better word, tastes overwhelmingly smoky. Like he’s sucked in a giant lungful of carcinogenic, burning, and mind-altering plant matter, all because Harry always brings out the worst in him.
The best, too, he supposes, since he’s never tried particularly hard to be good for anyone else.
He pushes back against the deeply inelegant urge to cough and splutter, already imagining Harry’s pitiless mockery, but ultimately fails. White puffs billow into the air as he coughs until his ribs hurt, glaring at the still-smoking blunt in his hand all the while.
At his show of objectively miserable suffering, Harry only grins. “I thought blokes were supposed to look hotter when they smoked but I guess you missed that memo.”
“Stuff it,” Tom snaps hoarsely, cheeks heating despite himself.
A childish jibe. Harry knows that Tom will figure it out sooner than later. He’s good at everything he’s ever tried. Quick on the uptake, he’s always been.
He offers the blunt back to Harry for his turn but Harry shakes his head.
“No thanks. I’ll just keep an eye on you tonight.”
“What?” Tom blurts, aghast and oddly betrayed.
But before he can make it abundantly clear just how strongly he disagrees, Harry leans forward in his chair to press a finger to his lips.
Tom stills, entranced.
He blames it on the oddly floaty feeling that has begun to creep into his limbs.
“It’s for your own good,” Harry explains.
The worst part is how each word is genuinely fond, as if Tom’s well-being really might be Harry’s foremost priority.
In a fit of troubled pique, Tom sticks his tongue out, wetting Harry’s finger and grimaces as the bitter aftertaste of the rolling paper and weed spreads on his tongue.
Harry snatches his hand back with a laugh.
“It’s called tripsitting. I’m just trying to make sure this is good for you.”
Judging by Harry’s smug expression, he’s very much enjoying knowing more than Tom for once. Annoyed, Tom brings the blunt to his lips again.
“Woah,” Harry says, twitching forward to steal it away but Tom only leans away pettily.
“Too late to change your mind, Potter.”
“That’s not— God, Tom, it’s your first time. Let’s take it slow.”
Tom sneers and takes an even longer draw than his first just to prove that he can – and he’d do it without coughing half of it back up right away.
Harry sighs, defeated by the spiteful expression on his face. “No more, alright?”
Tom nods, eyes watering as he sits on the burning sensation until he’s nearly lightheaded from it. Then he slowly releases the smoke through both his nose and mouth, forming a large cloud, imagining for a brief, fantastical moment that he’s instead some mighty beast, like a firebreathing lizard of yore that could devour Harry with a single snap of his powerful jaws.
Harry watches him warily, as if he just might.
When Tom’s lungs finally settle, he scoffs.
“Take it slow? Like I’m some blushing maiden?”
“I’m just being a responsible friend,” Harry says, his frustration obvious by the way his shoulders have hiked up to his ears.
Ever responsible and terribly generous, his Harry.
It’s why he tolerates Harry despite his frequent disapproval, rigid morals, and surprisingly hot temper, which Tom can also admit has mostly been reserved for him and the various schemes that he’s managed to sweet talk Harry into over their long, nebulously criminal years together.
Harry continues, drawing an irritated hand through his dark, scruffy hair, already messy beyond hope. “God forbid you have an awful experience because you couldn’t manage your ego and then suddenly it’s somehow my fault. Like that time in the caves.”
Tom leans back in the bed, delighting in the unabashed pettiness of Harry’s rant. Like this, he resembles an angry cat, and Tom finds his scowl unfortunately endearing, even if it’s while he gets tedious about their past. Especially any incidents with casualties.
Well. Casualties outside of Harry.
Harry himself possesses less self-preservation of a blind and legless lemming.
“Benson and Bishop made it out just fine,” Tom notes, very reasonably. “Not even a scratch.”
Harry, on the other hand, had nearly drowned trying to fish not one but two idiots out of the water.
“Sure,” Harry snarks. “As long as you don’t count the mental damage. Hermione tells me that Amy still can’t handle a dark room because of you.”
“Hermione,” Tom echoes derisively. Perhaps his least favorite of Harry’s friends.
She’d made it into their academy at the start of the year on a golf scholarship of all things, and worse, the pitiable beggar had the audacity to challenge Tom’s place at the top of their class, her hand shooting up more often in each class than even their teachers had the patience for.
“Hermione,” Tom says again, tasting each syllable in his mouth and hating that he likes the shape of them. “Who names their child something so garish. Her-mi-oh-nee.”
Tom expects that Harry will come rushing gallantly to her defense but when he glances over, Harry’s expression is one he hasn’t often seen before.
One that can only be described as sly.
It should concern Tom – really, it should – but he’s too busy mouthing Hermione’s name over and over.
Harry’s hand moves to one of his desk drawers, from which he withdraws a small packet of crisps. He extends it to Tom, shaking it slightly like one might a treat bag before a favored pet.
“If you think her name’s silly right now, you should try this. It’s incredible how different everything is when you’re stoned, crisps especially.”
Tom feigns distress. “Oh, Harry. Is this why you’re softer around the edges lately?”
“Hey! That’s a dirty lie!”
“There’s no harm in being careful,” Tom says, smirking. “You’ve seen how Goyle’s swelled to three times larger this year alone thanks to Crabbe’s pothead ways.”
“You’re such a prat. Championships are just around the corner, you know I’m being careful.”
Then Harry shakes the packet again, tempting Tom with its devious crinkle.
Tom snatches it away with a sniff. He pops it open, withdraws a single crisp, and places it into his mouth. Then he bites down and a pleasant cacophony of crunching blots out every other thought. It would dismay him terribly, but his mind has gone strangely quiet, and while he’s not usually one for snacking, the bright tang of salt and vinegar tastes especially pleasant on his tongue.
After he finishes the first, his hand has already moved to take another.
And then another.
Absorbed by the act of eating, he hardly notices as his head grows more and more ponderous with each passing moment, as if weighed down by an invisible anchor, until it becomes intolerably heavy, and he’s forced to lie down on Harry’s bedspread, taking care to not crumple the half-emptied crisp packet under himself as he does.
He examines the ceiling, intrigued by the way the shadows seem to move on their own, and time stretches taffylike as the remainder of his focus devotes itself toward understanding what must be different about these crisps for his opinion to have changed so drastically.
“Tom?”
Harry’s voice explodes into his awareness like a firework, startling his thoughts.
He’d completely forgotten that he wasn’t alone.
He’s also interested to notice that it doesn’t bother him that he did. The usual reflexive sting that comes with letting his guard down is nowhere to be found, like the drug had driven it somewhere else.
“How’s it goin’ over in that big brain of yours? Must be nice to have it quiet for once.”
It’s not terrible, and it’s not just his brain. The whole world itself feels a bit that way. Muted. Even though he knows, rationally speaking, that the volume of Harry’s voice hasn't changed, his questions still feel as though they might be passing through a thick layer of wool.
It takes a second to follow his tripsitter’s meaning (what an awful name, like Tom would ever need a sitter): Harry’s checking to see if he’s alright.
Tom turns toward his voice, or he tries to, too slowly, as he finds that Harry’s already moving out of his chair and asking a second question before he can muster a reply to the first.
“Hey there. Still with me?”
When Tom tries to say ‘yes’, he finds that he can’t.
Anxiety finally blooms, a half-step too late.
He wants to answer to let Harry know that he’s still here but his tongue is a lead weight and his mouth refuses to obey no matter how much he wills it. Muzzled by a force beyond his control. It’s this unexpected lapse that finally writhes in his chest, uncomfortable enough to slide through the wool of his thoughts. His pulse rises as he wracks his mind for another way.
An idea alights.
He hums, affirmative and lilting up with a songlike trill at the end.
There. Now Harry knows he’s fine.
The anxious swirl of emotion releases him.
He trills again, and it occurs to him that he sounds like a bird. The thought spins for a weightless moment before he giggles, once at first, then uncontrollably.
Harry climbs onto the bed beside him, his face lit up with an odd sort of awe.
“What’s so funny?”
Tom repeats the noise, terribly amused, and it’s a bit baffling that Harry doesn’t seem to think the same. Tom shuffles slightly so that he’s on his side and regards his friend, now kneeling on the covers, with his hands – his strong, handsome hands, well-defined by his many hours of training – clenched on his lap.
If anything, Harry seems tense.
Tom’s head fills with an urgent concern, and this time he has no problem speaking it aloud. “Would you still be friends with me if I were a bird?”
There’s a small crease between Harry’s brows as he gives Tom’s sudden question a moment of serious consideration. Then his mouth quirks.
“Are you testing me, Tom? Really, you ought to know by now that I would be friends with you no matter what. Forever, remember?”
Tom remembers.
Let’s play together forever.
This small handful of bright, innocent words spoken from one child to another in a sandbox, once upon a time, has transformed into something more like a spell, keeping them bound together through the years even as their interests had grown beyond mere play.
“Forever,” Tom agrees. He tries to put the strength of his conviction – of this burning, heart-rending affection – into his reply because he can never say it aloud. But giving anything less is more than he can bear.
It’s worth it for the way that Harry beams.
Still, Tom can’t help but look away.
“You alright?”
“The light,” Tom mumbles. “Bright.”
“Oh, sorry.” Harry moves off the bed to click his desk lamp off, and then the only light in the room is a gentle caress from the waning crescent of the moon.
Harry returns to Tom, this time joining him in staring up at the ceiling with a fwump.
“What other sensations?” Tom murmurs. Ever since Harry said it earlier, his curiosity has been haunting him.
“Huh?”
“What else feels different?”
“Oh. Loads. Music, for example. I can hear a song I’ve heard a million times and somehow hear something new. It’s too late to try it but I’ll show you next time if you come by earlier. Touch too, of course, but you’re probably already getting some of that. Like, hmm—” Harry grabs Tom’s hand that had been resting atop his stomach, the now-emptied crisp bag fluttering to the floor, and brings it to his thigh, pressing it against the denim fabric of his trousers. “Try this.”
Tom listens, decidedly amenable to something he’d always wanted, and he presses his hand against the coarse texture, dragging his palm along the plane of Harry’s thigh.
“Mad, isn’t it?” Harry says, a bit absently.
Tom nods as he squeezes harder, marveling at how the pad of his fingers tingles so insistently that they feel nearly numb. Harry jumps under his hand but he continues feeling along the tense line of Harry’s thigh, moving inwards, interested in finding out what the rough-looking seam might feel like against the inside of Harry’s particularly lovely thigh.
When Harry speaks again, he sounds much more strained. “Sirius also says that snogging is absolutely mad.” Then he sits up so quickly that it jostles Tom, and he grumbles with mild offense. “Obviously I’m not suggesting that we—”
Harry’s panicked denial cuts off mid-sentence, and he glances around the room nervously. He’s turned a rather appealing shade of red, his blush visible only by the pale mellow light streaming in from outside.
“I dunno why I said that.”
Tom hums. He doesn’t know why either, but he liked it.
He continues stroking his thumb along the seam of Harry’s jeans, unbothered by the abrupt silence while he’s entirely mesmerized by the bumpy, tactile feel.
There’s a part of him that preens at the intimacy of the touch, at what Harry’s allowed him to do. There’s another that preens because Harry still hasn’t pushed him away, even as his hand wanders further and further up the seam.
He’d be more than pleased to stay just like this, touching Harry, with his numbed cheek pillowed on Harry’s thigh. But his eyes eventually land on the bulge in Harry’s trousers.
The realization comes to him slowly.
Proof that Harry’s enjoying this.
That Harry knows exactly why he’d said it, because he wants it too.
Tom’s pulse remains remarkably steady despite how often he’s imagined this exact moment. Of course, he never imagined that it would be quite like this, in Harry’s bedroom, the one they’ve spent countless hours in, playing games, trading bets, up to anything but good.
This, somehow, already feels like the best thing they’ve ever done.
He’s only ever seen Harry’s cock when it’s soft. In shared locker rooms. The outline of it in Harry’s tight football shorts. His own cock is no slouch when it comes to size, but Harry’s, so obviously tenting his trousers, so woefully ignored, is a cut above even that.
He can't help but be drawn closer. He wants to feel it for himself – would he be able to feel the heat of it? would it twitch for him? – and his hand slides up and up.
Just waiting for Harry to stop him.
“Tom.”
Tom stills.
“Would you want to?”
Tom pauses, unable to process the meaning behind Harry’s words.
“Kiss, that is. While you’re stoned. I could, if you wanted.”
The force of how much he wants floods his every vein with a breathtaking rush, and he can only be grateful that he’s already lying down or he might’ve fallen over.
It would be easier to blame it on the drug, but he knows better than that.
He’s fantasized about kissing Harry for years. About pushing Harry to his limits until he unravels under Tom’s careful hand, deliberate and devoted.
“I would,” Tom replies with a smile, and it’s a wide and open thing. He’s unable to stop himself despite his keen awareness of how it stretches across his face. “Pushing boundaries, remember?”
“Er…” Harry bites his lip. “Are you completely sure? You’re not really in your right mind—”
“Mhm.”
“Right,” Harry says shakily, more for himself than anything else.
Tom watches, rapt, as Harry’s attention flicks between his lips and the rest of him. With Harry still frozen by indecision, Tom’s amusement flares. He leans forward, tilting toward Harry like a flower towards the sun, but goes no further.
If Harry wants this, then he’ll have to take it for himself.
This is the only thing – beautiful and inevitable – that Tom refuses to let Harry put on him.
After a quiet moment, Harry shuffles closer, tips Tom’s chin up even more, and finally closes the gap.
Their lips connect.
The kiss begins chaste, just a tingling brush of their mouths – but Tom quickly grows impatient.
He nips at Harry’s bottom lip, forcing a gasp, and then presses in harder.
At the same time, his dizziness swells, and he sways into Harry, hands shooting up to steady himself against Harry’s chest – and the well-defined physique there. He contents himself with enjoying the feel of it as Harry helps him lie back, still kissing him all the while.
He closes his eyes and melts into the hot, wet slide, the fizzing on his lips and tongue. The thrill of Harry’s skin against his own and the shadow of stubble on Harry’s cheek chafing him just so, lighting the fire inside him that he hadn’t fully known was there, because all he wants is more. Like with the crisps but a thousand times stronger, and he wants all of Harry’s breath, hot and heavy, delving into each other until all he knows is the shape of him.
The shape of his one and only friend.
Because friends are allowed to kiss each other, on occasion. There’s nothing unusual or deviant about that. Nevermind the fact that he would surely be rutting against Harry like an animal, if only he had more possession of his body.
And men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty.
The verse flashes through Tom’s thoughts, unbidden, and he tenses with sudden fury. He presses into their kiss with even more enthusiasm, tongues slick and lips swollen, and lets the brilliant perfection of this moment – of finally having Harry right where he wants him – banish his father’s words.
When Harry finally pulls away, Tom finds himself spellbound by a strand of saliva between them, wanting to chase it as it thins before breaking.
“How was that?” Harry asks, flushed and triumphant.
“Mn,” Tom replies, with a soft smile playing on his still tingling lips.
It was good. Better than good. He liked it, and he would like to keep kissing, in fact.
Things he would say if he could.
Harry’s face shifts into concern. “You usually have far more to say than that.”
Tom shakes his head slightly. The realm of speech had moved past him sometime during the kiss, too weighed down by the leaden hand of the drug within him, the one that seems to be getting stronger even still.
It’s a small mercy but he can still think, at least.
“You can’t talk?” Harry realizes. “Oh god. I’ve never had that happen before. Are you ok? Is this okay? I think you’re really bloody high, Tom. Do you think we need to go to the A&E?”
No, Tom thinks unhappily. He needs Harry to kiss him again.
“Fuck, we can’t go,” Harry says, and this pleases Tom.
He always has the best ideas. They should both stay here and do more nice things.
“What do we do? Who can I ask right? Not my parents. Mum won’t mind but dad would kill me. Your dad would kill me, too.” Harry jumps out of bed and paces as he runs over the options. He stops, wheeling to Tom. “Wait here. I’m going to make a call.”
As if he could go anywhere at all right now, he thinks a touch wryly. His limbs feel like they may as well be made of concrete.
Still stuck to the bed, he hears more than sees Harry step out of the room and shut the door, and since he very much dislikes the twinge of upset emotion that it stirs, he lets his mind float into a much cozier sort of blank.
It’s not fair to say that the room changes as he sinks deeper into sensation, but it still feels that way as he notices more of it. Mundane details: the downy, quilted squares of the duvet beneath him. The lazy sway of the plum tree just outside Harry’s window. Ten sways a minute, just about, if he’s still counting his seconds right. And the way a smile can hurt, if it stretches his face for long enough.
He bursts into another bout of laughter, abdomen straining as it turns hysterical without cause.
He’s giddy, he realizes.
Like he never has in his storied life. The most exciting moments of his past hardly even holds a candle to it. Tom compares them like two swatches of paint against a freshly primed wall.
It’s better than when he’d secretly strangled the class rabbit in primary school to see if he could and get away with it (after which his giddiness had completely drained away when Harry proved unfortunately unmoved by Tom’s frank explanation of why he had done it).
It’s also, shockingly, better than when he’d casually shoved two of Harry’s childhood ‘friends’ into that dark, dark lake (once again, Harry always made for a wet rag about such things).
The swell of emotion spreads through all of his thoughts, and in a heroic attempt to prevent it from carrying him off into the stratosphere, he turns his mind back toward reality as best as he can. He catalogs everything that he can see around him.
Harry’s hangings on the walls. The duvet. His own rapidly warming body.
He stares down the length of himself and finally notices that something has indeed changed.
He’s embarrassingly, undeniably hard.
While he’d been elsewhere when it was happening, it now announces itself as a hot and impossible-to-ignore presence, aching and pleading for even a mote of attention. But there’s nothing he can do while his body is utterly unavailable for his own use.
He flits between anger and despair at his helplessness, and before long, not a crumb of his formerly giddy mood remains.
The walls seem to pull away from him, and the space within the room stretches, which Tom knows is absurd because houses can’t move simply because they’d like to.
A clammy layer of sweat gathers across his skin.
Why hadn’t Harry come back yet?
Would Tom be locked within the burning confines of his own body forever, a consciousness trapped within a miserable object that could not move, could not speak but merely watch, powerless and detached, as the world moved on without him?
More than anything, he hates that he’s alone.
A creaking noise startles him out of his apprehensive haze.
The door, he thinks. Harry, he thinks.
Tom hopes he’s back.
A hand lands on his upper arm. It pats him gently, comforting and solid, driving the inexplicable furnace within him to burn even hotter.
“Sirius says it’s never killed anyone. Small comfort, I know, but you should ride it out by morning.”
Morning. That’s eons away.
Tom moans, terribly displeased. It’s too hot. So hot that he thinks he might burn into a crisp before he sees dawn. Even worse, he’s never been this desperately horny in his life. He wants Harry to keep touching him and he wants his damn shirt off.
He moves his hand to the top button, the one nearest to the hollow of his throat, but with the tips of his fingers strangely numb it’s a difficult task, and he fumbles with it, frowning.
“Did you want help getting that off? You look like you could use it off, honestly. You’re really, really flush.” Harry laughs. “Very tomato-y.”
Tom’s thoughts are at a crawl. The bloody button.
Harry’s hand wraps around his wrist, and Tom glances up at his friend. “Yes or no, Tom?”
Tom stares up at his gaze, immediately hypnotized by the unreadable emotions flitting through them. Concern. Affection. Desire, perhaps. Tom basks in it, letting the moment linger.
Harry breaks away first.
He brushes Tom’s hand aside and slowly undoes the first for him. Then he moves down to the next. Tom smiles, dopily, and notes that Harry’s breaths are coming quicker.
The flush on his cheeks has deepened – embarrassed?
Or aroused?
Both, Tom decides.
“Is this really okay?” Harry asks, hands clutching at the fabric of Tom’s half-unbuttoned shirt. “I’m taking care of you, right? This isn’t— I’m not taking advantage.”
Tom blinks, too absorbed in examining Harry’s slightly trembling hands to reply.
Harry’s mouth purses, and he continues until all of the buttons are undone, his shirt drawn to the sides. Then he leans back to stare at Tom with open hunger. Splayed out on the bed with his neck and his chest completely exposed, Harry’s eyes roaming over the expanse of bare skin.
The air crackles with an electric tension.
Tom isn’t one to feel shy, and it’s not even close to the first time Harry’s seen him topless – but Harry’s also never looked at him like this. Like he wants to put Tom on a board and pin him there.
Harry only breaks his gaze to strip his own shirt one-handed, tossing it carelessly onto the floor.
Tom’s throat tightens, suddenly, urgently parched.
He could down an entire lake and it wouldn’t be enough to quench his thirst.
“I can’t leave you to be the only one shirtless,” Harry says, with a roguish smile that only serves to make him even hotter and does absolutely nothing to help Tom’s already lust-addled mind.
He concentrates his rapid, shallow breaths and tries to slow them – to regain any semblance of control over himself – but his focus evaporates as Harry brings a hand to his sternum and presses his palm flat.
“Your heartbeat,” Harry says slowly, as if providing a reason for the touch would make it any less overwhelming. He shuffles closer, leaning down to press the side of his head against the same spot, listening. One of his hands slides over Tom’s skin with absent exploration. “God, I can’t believe this is happening. You’re so bloody hot, Tom.”
Harry could mean the heat pouring off of him. Or him.
Tom is fairly certain he knows which one, his mind purring with satisfaction.
Harry pushes back up, a looming presence as he kneels between Tom’s loosely spread legs. His hands continue to wander over his sensitized skin, and Tom settles into the touch, letting his heavy eyelids slip shut once more.
He knows that he’s objectively attractive. Very attractive, even.
Plenty of people have said as much, but he’s never found it particularly flattering. Neither does he think this to be vain, although Harry sometimes accuses him of it anyway. But his desirability in the eyes of others hasn’t ever meant much to him. It hasn’t been a source of admiration for Harry either considering they've known each other since they were barely old enough to talk.
Long enough to have seen each other’s worst.
So for Harry to finally say this now – when Tom finds himself at his most vulnerable – he’s utterly unprepared. It sets his blood aflame.
He wishes, not for the first or the last time, that he could say it back.
Privately, he’s always thought Harry pretty. Too pretty. His dark hair, unabashed in its mess, and his eyes, intelligent and lively and so spectacularly green. As if Harry had been made with the best parts of parents, each part of him handpicked by something greater. Then, Harry had grown into himself, both tall enough to rival Tom and even broader to boot.
The years have been generous to Harry.
By Tom’s estimation, he might be the closest thing to divinity that Tom’s ever known.
And there are others who think the same. He’s been horribly aware of this for years.
First, to shield Harry from any enterprising admirers. Then, simply to drive them away.
Harry has no girlfriend – or a boyfriend, for that matter – and Tom’s been more than content to keep things that way. Either he or his minions, the ones who know what it means to be discreet, have warned off any more serious prospect, but that’s neither here nor there.
All’s fair in love and war, so long as Harry never finds out.
Always one to defy expectations, Harry has still managed to entertain a handful of girls at their academy – those that managed to confess their feelings, shedding coquettish tears. From the way Harry tells it, they had each been wretched enough to be worth consoling, and he’d shared with them a furtive kiss or two but never anything further.
And it saves Tom the effort of having to arrange any unfortunate accidents.
An unexpected touch interrupts his musing as a finger glides over his nipple.
This first brush might be excused as accidental. The second one cannot. His eyes snap open as a nail digs into it meanly, sending jolts of sensation crackling over his skin.
He shifts, still slow to find his bearings, when he catches the gleam in Harry’s eye – just a moment too late.
Harry pinches and twists.
He arches off the bed. “Ah!”
Harry rubs a thumb against his tender flesh, soothingly, and Tom sinks back into the fuzz, shivering as his body goes slack once more. He’d always thought of his nipples as being useless and vestigial. He could’ve never imagined that they would give him such sharp intense pleasure.
“You’re so sweet for me like this,” Harry says wondrously. “Normally, you’d have bitten my head off twice over just for offering to unbutton your shirt. But right now—”
Harry twists again, merciless as Tom writhes like a puppet on a string.
“Is there anything you wouldn’t let me do? Could you even stop me if you tried?”
He shivers as a sudden rush of electric arousal sparks and then pools heavily into his gut.
He isn’t sure if he could.
The thought should terrify him, but instead, he has a moment of awful clarity.
Harry knows it, too, and has chosen to turn it into the wicked blade against Tom anyway.
By any reasonable measure, it’s despicable. Depraved, even.
He’s clearly beyond consent, too out of it to truly even participate, but Harry barrels past any sign of Tom’s muddled, half-hearted resistance, and if he goes any further, does something he can’t take back…
Would it be enough to get Harry tossed into a cell with the key thrown away?
Him, the upstanding captain of the Hogwarts Academy football team, beloved by all, and Tom’s very own moral compass, his beating heart, his best friend—
If Tom made it the next day’s news, would Harry, once the jewel of their little town, become their shame?
And Tom, naturally, would be so generous as to stay at Harry’s side anyway, remaining his one and only friend. He could be Harry’s entire world.
The fantasy is slick, sliding around Tom’s thoughts like an oil spill, and his arousal ratchets even higher. He could let Harry take what he wants and then punish him for it, for the rest of Harry’s mortal life, with Tom as his only savior.
If Harry should suffer for anyone, it should be for what he’s done to Tom.
If Harry should belong to anyone, it should be Tom.
The thought is magnetic but all-too-hasty. He forces himself to spin the fantasy out just a little more, and the logic follows that if he reports Harry, the fallout would entangle him as well.
At a minimum, he’d be imprisoned within the basement of Riddle Manor for a time.
Charged with crimes against the Holy Father and partaking in sin. Sneaking out in the dead hours of the night to get high with a friend. Drugs alone are more than bad enough to earn him house arrest, but he hadn’t stopped there. Like a trashy wastrel, he’d let himself fall so far that he’d got himself raped by another man.
By Harry.
His gut flares with need.
His body is pure but only as a yoke. In the exacting eyes of his father, he’s only as precious as he is because he’s obeyed. A virgin for his father’s hand to mold. Tom can bear it no longer.
In all of his imaginations of how he might willingly defile himself, it’s only ever been like this:
With Harry.
Tom aches with twisted desire, snarled by years of denying himself and wanting anyway.
If there truly was such a thing as an afterlife, they would go to hell together.
Harry, so desperate to have any piece of Tom that he can't resist taking advantage, and once he starts he can't bring himself to stop. That Tom might not be alone in his secret, jerking off each night to a flurry of lurid imaginations, each one bearing a simple wish: to wriggle his way into Harry like a worm might an unblemished fruit and make himself a home inside.
Would that he could lock Harry away in a hidden room so he could have him forever, all to himself.
Tom can't help the soft moan that slips out from his lips.
His dick strains against the fabric of his trousers, and he watches Harry eye it as if it might make a fine meal, drawing one tentative finger over the length of it. When Tom bucks into the touch, Harry wraps his fingers around it, stroking against him with substantially more force.
Tom gasps, hips bucking off the bed.
Even like this, he still lives on the edge of deniability.
He hasn’t asked for any of this. He’d only come running to Harry because he’d fought with his father; it’s what he’d always done to stave off the urge to try to kill the man where he stands.
And Harry had promised to take care of him.
Apparently like this.
The dark shape of Harry’s tender mercies fills him with twisted sort of warmth, and with it, the rest of his worries slip away, back into the gentle, shivering fog to a place of comfort and delight, where pain seems so very far away.
“I’ve never seen you like this before,” Harry murmurs. “You’re not all here right now.” He draws a possessive hand along Tom’s exposed flank, his nails painting hot white lines in Tom’s mind, pulling forth a cascade of gooseflesh and shivers from Tom, before finally settling at his waist with an almost savage grip. “But still here enough to like what I’m doing, I think.”
As Harry babbles, Tom’s emotions flutter around like what he might describe as shapes, or perhaps colors. A whole collection of hot, sharp-edged shapes, ones that look indignant and possessive and so indescribably pleased that he’s Harry’s first too.
It’d be much easier to sort his emotions out if he could think about them like this all the time.
“I just want you to be happy,” Harry says, still touching him all over, touching him there, and sending frissons of ecstasy pulsing through his mind. “But there’s always so much responsibility on your shoulders. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen you smile and you really meant it until tonight. God, Tom, you should see yourself right now. You look so out of it.”
Harry too, Tom thinks. He’s never seen him look so undone.
“This is utterly mad. I could do whatever I want to you like this and you would let me.”
If they both go out of their minds tonight, it will be together. As in all things.
Despite all the terrifying nature of the things that Harry has said and the crazed fixation that betrays itself in every word, it’s his honesty that feels the best. That feels right. And Tom especially loves how it looks, the shape of this rightness. Like a bright swirling whirl of mesmerizing green, like it might suck him in and keep him there forever.
It’s the same color as Harry’s eyes.
“You’d let me, right?”
If you earn it, Tom thinks. You can have it all.
“You’d let me see you. Let me in.”
Tom doesn’t quite understand what Harry’s asking, just that it’s deeply perverse for him to do it when he knows that Tom can no longer truly respond. Rationally, he knows this.
But the rabbit-quick thump of his heart consumes all of his thoughts, terrified that if he makes a sound, Harry will change his mind and stop.
Harry leans forward to press a quick peck to Tom’s lips, too quickly for him to return it, and then Harry’s hands slide lower, undoing Tom’s trousers.
He slides them down and then does the same for his briefs.
Tom’s throat draws tight. Harry’s expression can only be described as reverent, and his hand extends slowly to brush along Tom’s inner thigh, ghosting further up along his bollocks before reaching his weeping cock and taking it in hand.
Harry gives it an experimental tug, and Tom trembles, feeling weaker than he ever has with how much he wants Harry to keep going. Then Harry’s hand moves away, trailing lower, toward the base of Tom’s spine. Tom flinches lightly as Harry swipes a thumb over the pucker there, his virgin hole, and a dark and hungry mood flits over Harry’s face. Harry pulls his hand away and leans over, retrieving an oblong bottle from inside his nightstand.
Lube, Tom realizes.
His stomach swoops as Harry lifts his legs as if he were no lighter than a doll to shove a pillow under his arse. He’d known Harry was fit but it’s another matter entirely to have it demonstrated on himself.
His mind prickles with indignation while his cock twitches, interested despite it.
“Fuck,” Harry mutters, uncapping the bottle and spreading a copious amount on his fingers. “I’ve never done this with anyone before. I’ve only seen it in lad mags ‘cause Sirius doesn’t hide them nearly as well as he thinks.”
A single finger presses inside of his arse with an easy slide, going in where things had only ever gone out. He blinks, uncertain what to do with the odd feeling. A memory surfaces in his thoughts: of his father, placing Tom’s right hand on the Bible and a laughably useless ring in his other for him to make a solemn vow under his grandfather’s watchful eye. Like a noose, tied around his neck, threatening to strangle him now as it pulls taut.
“Tom,” Harry breathes, hushed with awe. “You’re so hot inside.”
Nothing about that ritual in the manor had felt holy. Not like it does now, with Harry’s worshipful touch, calling his name like a prayer. The itch around his throat fades.
Tom relaxes into the tentative one-fingered thrusts, and before long, Harry adds a second. This one he feels more. Harry goes slowly, slipping his digits in together, allowing Tom a moment to adjust before scissoring them. Sweat beads at his temples as he rides through the strange pressure below. His gut coils even tighter with silken anticipation.
Despite the attentiveness of Harry’s ministrations, the stretch finally grows uncomfortable when he presses in a third finger. The battery of new sensation makes him lightheaded, and he barely contains a whimper – but then Harry brushes against a spot, just a little further inside, and Tom spasms, limbs flailing, as a hot shock of pleasure rolls through him.
“Oh.” Harry’s voice turns smug. “Did you like that?”
Tom pants, still trying to process, when Harry’s free hand laces with his own. Before he can question it, Harry begins pumping his fingers perfectly into that spot.
He convulses, with only Harry’s hand to steady him. He battles to hold onto his thoughts but each thrust scatters them like a flock of doves. It overwhelms him and he goes slack in Harry’s hold, twitching feebly, but Harry doesn’t stop. If anything, he fingers Tom even harder, insatiable for his defenseless reactions.
Unlike before, when Tom had been alone, he can’t float outside of himself and observe from on high. Each touch grounds him to his own flesh, shaking apart at the assault of sheer animal sensation. An unhurried, all-encompassing buzz unfurls through his nerves and washes away everything else. He’s convinced that he can feel everything that Harry does with even more clarity than if he were sober. The intensity alone is enough to make him shudder, wishing it would stop, and yet, he’s too greedy for Harry’s attention to truly mean it.
“I never thought you would let me get this far,” Harry admits. “I wanted to take our time and do this properly so I could be sure that it wouldn’t hurt.”
The relentless assault comes to an abrupt halt as Harry withdraws his fingers completely.
“But I think if I have to hold myself back any longer I’ll go mad.”
Harry wipes his lube-slicked hand indelicately on the leg of his own trousers. Then he grips Tom’s chin and holds him there under his piercing stare, so resolutely that Tom couldn’t possibly look anywhere else but at him.
“I’m sorry. I’m only going to ask once.”
Tom waits. His pulse, eager and unsteady, thuds so violently that it’s deafening.
“Please let me fuck you.”
Each word crackles through his mind like lightning.
“I’ve wanted it for so long, for years, but I’ve been— I could never—” Harry swallows hard, his free hand stroking along the curve of Tom’s hip. Reassuring. Promising. “If you want me to stop here, you need to say it now. If you don’t—”
Then tonight, the polished silver ring on Tom’s hand will finally be made a lie.
A transcendent calm washes over him. Holding Harry’s searching gaze, he finds that he recognizes the hunger there. It’s one that he’s seen in the mirror: a wild thing, barely leashed, that wants simply to swallow him whole.
Even knowing this, Tom doesn’t want this to end.
He says nothing at all.
Harry waits for several beats, keeping himself entirely still, down to even the breath in his lungs.
Tom can see the moment Harry’s resolve settles over him like a second skin, and the last of his hesitation melts away. Tom watches, eyes half-lidded, as Harry shucks the rest of his clothes and pulls out his cock and dumps at least half the lube onto it. Then he places a steady hand on Tom’s thigh to press it back even further, tilting Tom’s hips up, exposing his hole even more, and lines himself up against it.
“Don’t tell me to stop,” Harry growls.
Tom’s gut clenches with heat. Outrage surges along with it. He opens his mouth to protest, summoning his words – he could stop this if he wanted because Harry would always listen to him. Harry does whatever Tom pleases. It’s axiomatic. A law of their universe.
But he’s not quite fast enough.
His mouth parts in a silent cry as Harry pushes in.
His rim swallows the blunt head of Harry’s cock, the tight ring of muscle there stretching with a torturous sting. The drug still amplifies his every sensation, and he chokes on his own breath as Harry continues to feed his cock inside, heedless of how he squeezes his eyes shut against the pain. Involuntary tears gather at the corners of his eyes.
Harry’s hands slide up his thighs, and when he speaks he sounds wounded.
“Tom. Tell me you’ve never done this with anyone else.”
It’s a tender plea that he wishes he could answer.
Never before. There’s no one else.
But he can’t.
Instead, his only reply is with his body, spasming from the stretch.
His thoughts go even farther away.
There’s only this: Harry driving in, deeper and deeper.
Harry releases a pained groan as Tom clamps down even harder, his body reflexively fighting against the intrusion in a futile effort to slow the advance, to stop Harry from breaking him open even more.
Despite the thoroughness of Harry’s preparation, his girth alone feels enough to tear him in two.
A distant protest wells up in his throat but gets stuck there like all the rest, and he can only pant as Harry’s hands dig cruelly into his hips and pulls Tom’s devastated and trembling form back onto himself, burying even closer inside. The pressure is intense, stuffing him so full that he swears he can taste it, and a wave of painful heat skitters through his oversensitized nerves.
He quivers as Harry finally stops. Lube gushes down his buttocks and thighs, having been bullied out from inside of him under the immense squeeze. It pushes him past his limits, filling him more than he thought possible.
Harry’s so big – too big.
Making a single sound is more than Tom can manage now.
He feels so full he might burst, but all he can do is lie there limply and take it.
His virgin hole split open on his best friend’s cock, the head of it carving into a place that no one’s ever touched, where he thought no one ever would.
Ruined, he thinks, briefly panicked, the word of a gospel he’s never believed in springing to life. His father’s word, not his, and he wants to laugh over the absurdity of it all. Running from fate is useless when it was always going to be like this.
His fear dissolves into ash when he remembers that Harry’s never once cared about such frivolous things like sin.
Harry finally stills, muttering curses under his breath.
“Fuck, Tom. You feel so good. You’re so tight, oh god, you’re gonna kill me.”
If there was anyone who could do such a thing, it would be him.
Tom smirks but Harry doesn’t see it, head hanging low, overrun by the mad heat enveloping his cock, and the muscles in his abdomen quivering as he holds himself still.
“I’m gonna move,” Harry blurts, desperate – as if the pause to warn Tom already costs him a great deal.
Panic flutters in Tom’s chest.
Wait, he thinks. Not yet!
He wills his mouth to move, wills his hands to obey and push Harry away. Not for him to stop but to make him wait—
But Harry’s already pulling out, the pressure abating as he goes. It leaves Tom feeling horribly empty. As if his guts had been scooped out, and he’d been left behind, wholly changed. His whole body throbs and his hole clenches around empty air, forming one single point of dreadful awareness that pulls all of his attention in with anticipation.
Then Harry thrusts back in with one fluid motion, groaning as Tom’s battered hole clings to him, bearing down against the unfathomable, all-consuming stretch.
The fullness makes Tom’s nerves spark and his thoughts burn, and the beginning of a dim pleasure begins to bleed into the ferocious ache below. Harry withdraws again and Tom quakes, half-convinced that he won’t survive more. Harry’s cock fills him up again, and again, as Harry picks up a fast pace. Tom hardly has a moment to catch his breath, and he finally cries out, gasping and moaning as his hands grab weakly at Harry’s rumpled bed for something – anything – to anchor him against the mind-shattering sensation of being filled, again and again.
Broken apart, piece by piece, and made whole. Taken and used.
“How does it feel?” Harry asks, clutching at Tom and pressing each word into the delicate hollow of his neck. “Tell me, is it good? I want this to be good. Fuck, I want it to be so good you never think about anyone else.”
The scent of Harry’s sweat is sharp and familiar in his nose. His debauched cries echo against the walls. He can’t contain them. Harry doesn’t even try to quiet him. Tom thinks that they might be loud enough to wake up the whole house.
“I know you wouldn’t understand what it’s been like for me, seeing all those prissy bastards just hanging off of you all the time. It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
Pleasure shocks up Tom’s spine as each violent thrust punches desperate, mewling noises out from him but he hasn’t the embarrassed thought to spare. Harry snaps his hips without pause or mercy, releasing a loud smack each time he bottoms out, and his movements grow even rougher as he slowly loses himself to the tight hot grip of Tom around him.
“You have plans. I know. I get it. But I can’t touch you. Can’t call you mine. It’s driving me mad.”
Harry holds him close, licking the moans from his mouth as he fucks him entirely boneless. Pliant. A head full of only Harry. As the force of each thrust begins to shove Tom up against the headboard, Harry reaches forward, a hand sliding into his hair to cradle him and protect him from knocking against it.
Even now, submerged in a flood of his own desire, he’s still so careful with Tom.
Always – never an afterthought.
Tom reaches up to cling onto Harry’s shoulders like a lifeline, and Harry shifts with him, his breathless words pouring out from him like a confessional into Tom’s ears.
“You’re on my mind all the time, and I swear it gets worse every day. I’m obsessed. You mean so much to me that it scares me.”
It’s everything Tom’s ever wanted to hear. He thinks he must be dreaming.
To hear his own thoughts echoed back to him from the one person he’d never believed possible.
It feels good.
Harry makes him feel good.
And Harry is still doing exactly that.
Each time he brings their bodies together, impossible colors burst into being.
“Please,” Tom gasps, the first and only thing he’s been able to say in what must be forever, not even really knowing what he’s begging Harry so feverishly for.
Perhaps for less, and slower, or for more – for it to never stop. He’ll gladly spend the rest of his life like this, forever held because there’s nowhere Harry would rather be than with him.
Even if this is the only way that Tom’s allowed to have it.
Harry jerks at his plea, his frenzied breaths fanning hotly against Tom’s neck as he pounds even harder. His grip tightens against Tom’s hips so much that he wouldn’t be surprised to find purpling bruises in the morning.
“Gonna cum. Wanna cum in you.”
Yes. Yes. There’s nothing Tom wants more. The thought of Harry coating his insides with white, with his spend, marking him completely. He wants it so badly he could die, and he claws bloody rivulets into Harry’s back as Harry’s thrusts grow even faster, both of them desperate for the world to know that they belong to each other.
His.
Tom’s mind whites out with pleasure, a thousand wild stars sparking and fizzling away as he seizes with his own orgasm, cock spurting between them, the proof of how well he’s been fucked splattering all over Harry’s chest and his own quivering abdomen.
“Oh fuck,” Harry gasps, hips stuttering as he follows Tom over the edge, with the tight, fluttering clutch of Tom’s hole too much to resist even a moment longer, and Tom could swear that he feels the moment when Harry spills into him, filling him with an unbearable, unforgettable warmth.
Then Harry slumps on top of him, limp, and his panting breaths slowly even out.
“That’s embarrassing,” he mumbles. “I came so bloody fast. You can’t make fun of me for it, you have to promise.”
Tom can’t string together a coherent thought, fully enveloped by a comfortable static.
“We made a mess,” Harry says, laughing quietly, with words mild and full of adoration.
Then he pushes off Tom, sliding his softened cock out, and Tom lets slip a small whimper, partially because it aches and partially because he wishes that he still had Harry inside. Harry freezes at the sound, his hands twitching.
“Sore?” he asks, voice small.
When Tom doesn’t reply, Harry moves out of the bed and steps over to the side of the bed beside Tom, stroking his sweat-damped hair.
“I’m sorry. I’ll be right back. I’m just going to get cleaned up and then I’ll—”
He draws in a short breath and pulls away, expression dark.
“Fuck.”
He goes.
Then he returns with a damp rag in hand and the rims of his eyes red.
It’s hard to know how much time had passed while Harry had been gone. As far as Tom’s mind is concerned, Harry had been there, and then he hadn’t, so he’d stopped paying attention to the world outside of himself until Harry had come back again.
He watches Harry clean him with a series of meticulous strokes, wiping away both sweat and spend before quietly lifting his thighs to clean up below. Tom can’t see his face as he works but he feels Harry pause and then pay special, cautious attention there. His abused entrance feels puffy and raw, and Tom can only imagine it looks even worse than it feels given how roughly Harry had fucked him.
Harry finishes and puts the rag aside, climbing back into the bed.
It’s likely not a good sign that he hasn’t spoken a single word since he’s returned.
The mattress coils shake lightly, and Tom turns to find Harry curled against the wall, arms wrapped around his knees and wracked with silent, agonized sobs.
“I’m sorry,” Harry croaks, shuddering. The pent-up terror from everything that he’d done seems to be crashing onto him all at once with a world-shattering wave of remorse. “I hurt you. I didn’t mean to take things this far at all, but it looked like you were enjoying it, and I swear I’m not trying to blame you for any of this. I just wasn’t thinking. Whenever I get in trouble it’s always because I don’t think about things before I do them, and I know it pisses you off so much when it happens, and that it’s absolutely no excuse but—”
Harry pauses, eyes wild but unseeing.
“Can you forgive me? I’m such a selfish prick, but I genuinely don’t know what I’d do if you can’t. If I just cocked everything up. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Then his face scrunches with anguish, visibly recoiling at his own words.
“God, what the hell is that? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I wouldn’t forgive me— How could anyone? This was well and truly fucked, wasn’t it? I mean, I just did whatever I wanted because it turns out that—”
“You—” Tom whispers, barely loud enough to be heard.
“—I’m a fucking monster.”
Harry stops, tensing even more. His gaze finally slides to Tom, and his face is blank despite his continued shaking.
“Me?”
Tom tries again, shimmying a little closer. “You idiot.”
Harry blinks.
“Lie down,” Tom hisses.
Harry obeys, his movements mechanical. After it becomes obvious that he intends to lie there all night as stiff as board, Tom tugs Harry’s arm onto his chest, lacing the fingers of one hand and then using the other to begin tracing idle shapes against it. Harry watches this for a time, expression pained but finally relaxes.
“I really am an idiot,” he says, with a short sniffle. “A massive, blithering cunt of an idiot. I’m sorry. I know you don’t care about that stupid ring or what it means, but I assume this was probably something you were saving for someone special, unless you’d kept that a secret, and if you had, maybe you were right to because, as it happens, I’m not worthy of your trust. I’m sorry. I fucked up. I don’t think I can say it enough times.”
“Shut up,” Tom sighs.
His special someone is right here: an idiot drowning in remorse.
Good, he thinks viciously.
If nothing else, the shame of what can’t be undone will bind Harry to him forever. The guilt of it – of bullying Tom into smoking more than he should, promising his care should things go awry, and then taking that promise, taking Tom’s trust, and using it for something else entirely.
Not that Tom is really complaining.
But his plan falls apart as Harry continues to shake apart beside him, self-loathing seeping from every pore over finally taking what he wanted for once.
Tom’s traitorous heart lurches with protest. Harry deserves the world.
“You,” he forces himself to say.
“Me,” Harry echoes, toneless.
“Only you.”
Tom tries to explain more – that tonight was only alright because it’s Harry, that he’d only forgive all of this because it’s him – but he’s lost his tongue again. He blows out a tired breath instead and wills Harry to understand, holding his gaze firmly despite his lethargy.
“Only me,” Harry repeats dutifully, turning the words over in his head. Then his eyes blow wide, leaving his irises two tiny rings of green. “Are you sure it’s—”
Tom cuts him off with an annoyed huff.
As if there was anything in his life he didn’t choose to do.
Harry ought to know that much at least considering Harry knows him best, and Tom doesn’t suffer fools. The silence stretches between them, filled in with only a light hush of the wind through the trees just outside their window.
“Alright,” Harry says finally.
Satisfied that his point had been made, Tom lets his eyes seal shut. After a moment, there’s a light touch at his temple: a delicate kiss pressed at the line of his hair.
“Good night, Tom.”
Tom nuzzles closer to Harry’s unflinching warmth.
Tomorrow will bring tomorrow’s problems. If Harry has truly forgiven himself, if Harry would like for this to happen again, and if Tom can move on if the answer is no.
For the moment, the only thing Tom wants more of is this: rest, safe in the arms of the only person that matters.
The only person that would ever matter.
Good night, my love, he thinks in reply, and he’s helplessly glad that he’s too tired to speak it aloud, as if that might make the truth of it real and bring forth the terror that, despite everything, his Harry might not feel the same. Under the throbbing high of the drug, Tom finally understands that the well of his affection runs all the way through the earth, deep into the bedrock of his soul. More than he’d ever thought possible.
Harry couldn’t possibly feel the same, but Tom hopes that he’s at least more than a fancy.
If it turns out that he’s just a relic, a childhood toy to be discarded when Harry is ready for a real family, and something to be indulged in until then, then he thinks he might ruin Harry for it; even if it destroys him, too.
He shifts, the discomfiting thoughts drawing an unhappy noise from his throat.
“Shh,” Harry soothes from somewhere beside him. “I’ve got you. You can sleep. We can have breakfast before we go since I doubt your lot will miss you tonight.”
Tom presses a small, worn-out nod into the warmth. Exhaustion nibbles at the edges of his thoughts and his fears, and his eyes droop like kiloton weights. He settles heavily into the steady rhythm of Harry’s heart, drumming with a disarming certainty.
Harry’s not going anywhere. Not tonight.
Just before Tom's awareness fades, he catches a quiet murmur.
“Just don’t hate me. Please.”
Tom thinks that he could never but he doesn’t reply. Leaves Harry to his own troubled thoughts.
A hand begins to stroke gently along his back, so tender and deliberate, tracing each knob of his spine and each dip of his back, like he’s a delicate, treasured thing, and for the moment, just for this one moment, Tom can let himself believe what it says.
Mine. Forever.
It wraps around the edge of his thoughts, no longer painful.
The dark lulls him, soft and reassuring, and sleep finally drags him under.
He falls into nothing at all.
===
He wakes from a dreamless slumber.
Beside him, Harry snoozes peacefully. He traces the livid red marks all around Harry’s shoulders and back, not quite brave enough to touch lest he wake him, and in the harsh, unflinching light of day, the hope he’d felt before shrivels away.
It’s obvious that Harry cares for him to some extent, but with his bleeding heart, the one that he refuses to admit is too big and frail for all the evils in the world, he cares for everyone.
It’s not good enough for a gluttonous and greedy creature like Tom.
He covets, and what he covets is always more.
He wants everything that Harry has to give and then some.
The marks that he’s left will fade within a week, and he wishes he could etch himself into the marrow of Harry’s bones, deeper and further, until he’s seared into Harry’s terribly noble soul.
The promises and confessions that had been whispered into his ear could have just as easily been born from a bout of temporary insanity, brought on by Harry’s teenage passion, too lost in the heat of Tom’s willing flesh.
An accident.
It’s unacceptable, and there’s no guarantee that Harry would ever let it happen again.
If Tom is to have him – his singular irreplaceable friend – then he needs to be sure. He needs to be certain. No matter what happens between them, no matter what horrors may come to pass, Harry would be his.
Last night had been a mistake but it’s not too late to save them both.
He unrolls the rest of the morning, the day, the week, and imagines how it would end if he does nothing. Harry will wake, and Harry will remember. It will be an ugly, violent affair: like a hangover splitting a head in half, not from a drink but a memory. Every place he’d touched and every torn and raw word he’d spoken without thought would add to the tally; like a man climbing into his own burning pyre, Harry would punish himself gracefully. Make himself scarce, apologizing all the way out the door, certain in the kindness that is removing himself from Tom’s life.
In short, Harry will run.
It’s the very last thing that Tom would like for him to do.
So he won’t allow it
He’ll let Harry believe that the hand of a loving god has offered absolution. A clean slate. An untruth that will hold the door open for Tom to redo things, correctly this time.
Of his many talents and many sins, lying is perhaps his most divine.
Because last night will not be the night to remember. Not something so easily denied.
Their real first time requires planning.
Tom will make him confess everything again. Make him say it sober. Make him mean it twice.
Everything will be perfect, so that Harry understands the truth. And the occasion would call for more lube if Harry insists on topping again – although he certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Harry open up for him instead. To take another thing that Harry hasn’t offered anyone else.
His arousal stirs at the idea, his dick twitching stubbornly to life, and he puffs a laugh. If he had more time, then perhaps he’d take care of these more carnal needs, but as it stands they’re already well on their way to being late to their first class.
He slides out of bed and tosses on yesterday’s clothes, rumpled from a night on the floor and still faintly scented with sweat.
Padding with silent steps, he slips out of Harry’s room and into the adjoining hallway bathroom. He takes his spare toothbrush from where it’s stowed in the medicine cabinet and freshens up. It takes an uncommonly long while to sort out his hair since it appears Harry had a wonderful time ruffling it to the high heavens. When he’s finished, it’s back to his usual combination of coif plus artfully loose lock.
There are vague clanging noises from the kitchen; the sound of a pan being worked.
Since he only has interest in dealing with one particular Potter at the moment, he returns to the room.
He settles into Harry’s desk chair.
He waits.
When Harry finally stirs, Tom ignores the nervous flash that passes across his face when he spots Tom and remembers that he hadn’t slept alone.
“How did you sleep?” Tom asks smoothly. He lounges upon his seat like a throne, peering down at Harry’s frazzled face. “I wasn’t expecting to stay overnight, and your bed, frankly, was made for ants.”
“I slept alright,” Harry says while rubbing the bleariness from his eyes. Then he grimaces, straightening. “We need to talk. About last night.”
“It was a horrid idea,” Tom replies, clipped.
“Yeah.”
“I’m astonished that whatever Sirius gave you wasn’t meant to kill you. Judging by the potency, it still might, and I will be ensuring you bin the rest.
“Oh. That’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” Tom says snippily. “I recall nothing after the drug hit, and then awoke feeling as if I’d been mauled by a bear. I can only imagine what indignities might lead to such a thing.”
Harry stares at him as if he’s grown another head.
“You don’t— You don’t remember any of it?”
“A word of advice,” Tom says, voice low but even. “If it wasn’t good, then you should lie. And if it would get us on the front page of the Godric Post, then you ought to speak to your father about what his Holy Chiefness can do about that.”
Harry pales. He makes to reply but a shout interrupts them from beyond the door.
Harry’s mouth snaps shut.
“Boys!” Lily booms again. “You’re going to be late!”
Harry swears, pushing out of bed hastily and grabbing the scattered pieces of his uniform, still strewn haphazardly across the room. He strides across the space and reaches deep into his closet, unhooking his spare set and handing it to Tom since it would fit him nearly as well
Then he turns to rummage in his wardrobe for a clean pair of briefs, speaking as he’s turned away.
“Last night… It wasn’t much. You smoked, said some dumb things, and then spent the night staring at the ceiling. Outright boring, really, but—”
“Don’t make me come up there!”
“Right,” Harry says, passing the briefs to Tom with a blush. He pointedly does not look at Tom and turns away, tossing on his blazer and smoothing down the lapels. An old nervous habit. “We should get going. I can tell you more later but I’ll, er, I’ll step out so you can get changed.”
Tom nods, offering a bland smile to hide his dark amusement.
Truly an awful liar.
Since when has Harry ever cared about Tom’s modesty?
But he lets him leave without comment.
Once Harry’s gone, Tom strips and swaps into the fresh set. Harry’s clothes fit him well, as expected, like they could be one and the same. The observation fills him with a languid satisfaction anyway.
On his way out of the room, he snags a loose belt from a pile on the floor and fastens it tightly around his waist. The bruises on his hips twinge, and a jolt of interested heat shoots into his gut.
He allows himself one moment to bask in the memory of how Harry had pressed them into his flesh, wretched and ravenous in his frantic appetite for Tom. He’d always known that Harry had a vicious streak in him, hidden somewhere deep down under the good.
Tom wants to see it again.
But he lets the thought go.
There will be time for such things. Later.
When he’s ready.
He makes his way downstairs to find his best friend and begin their new day.