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fatesundress · 11 months

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⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine.

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones.

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary.

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly.

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile?

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up.

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about?

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers.

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession.

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary.

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure?

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning.

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with.

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge.

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books.

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls.

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin.

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated.

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again.

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any.

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now.

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice.

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all. You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else.

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them.

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten.

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.)

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true.

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer.

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t.

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid.

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless.

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that.

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately.

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end.

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight.

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes.

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand.

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain, a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him.

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love.

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock.

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly.

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it.

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.)

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish.

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same.

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much.

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition.

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal.

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it.

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is.

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —”

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant.

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor.

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together.

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident.

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be.

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop.

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece.

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that."

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval.

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will."

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis.

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain.

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.”

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back.

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake."

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster.

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating.

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself.

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh.

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes.

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you.

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle x you #tom riddle x y/n #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle smut #tom riddle angst #(the trifecta)#tom marvolo riddle #voldemort #voldemort x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle oneshot #harry potter fanfiction #wizarding world #ftltutbh

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wfodicks · 2 years

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#567: BLACK HORSE AND THE CHERRY TREE

mike, travis and drunk discuss the following topics…. dogs are getting monkey pox….. we’re resurrecting dead pigs….. mike loves music lawsuits….. michelle branch vs. the guy from the black keys….. after the break, we play america’s favorite gameshow: what’s in drunk’s mouth? the items in this edition include doorstop, paint roller, bbq tongs, fly swatter, tape measure. potw: lost ollie…

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#3LW #DEAD PIGS #HOUSE OF THE DRAGON #LOST OLLIE #MICHELLE BRANCH #MONKEY POX #movies #PODCAST #THE BLACK PHONE #WHAT&039;S IN DRUNK&039;S MOUTH? COMEDY #zombies

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ellecdc · 24 days

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DONT TEASE ME WITH PLATONIC BARTY AND BIG BRITHER SIRIUS STOP IM ON MY KNEES PLEASEE 🪩

okay so this accidentally ended up being almost 5.5k words??? whoopsie daisy.

this concept was a collaboration with @unstablereader and also intertwined a few requests for best friend Barty, big brother Sirius, and poly!moonwater hurt comfort!!

poly!moonwater x fem!reader who was bitten over the winter hols

CW: Best Friend Barty (i.e., swearing, chaos, slight insanity), Big Brother Sirius (i.e., coddling, bad cop, certified dumbass), swearing swearing swearing, slight muggle blasphemy, description of wounds/blood/injury, discussion of Sacred 28 Pureblood Families, etc etc etc - hurt/comfort, angst with a happy ending

Barty Crouch Junior was a plethora of dichotomies and contradictions.

He was a good friend and a bad son. He was a smart boy who made horrible ideas. He was a rational person with unreasonable reactions. He was a menace and very reliable. He was a good lay and a bad boy.

Barty liked that about himself though; he liked that no one ever knew what to expect when it came to Bartemus Crouch Junior.

Though, he supposed to those who knew him, it would have been completely predictable for him to have stayed at Hogwarts over the winter holidays. Maybe he should have gone home – really surprised everyone then.

His nightly routine of trying to incendio Daily Prophet articles of his father with nonverbal and wandless magic was interrupted by an awkward thump on his dorm room door.

“Come in?” Barty called awkwardly, unsure who might be at his door seeing as his friends were all home for the holidays and the staff here tended to avoid him like Dragon Pox.

The doorknob began to rattle but it sounded as if the person on the other side of the door was struggling to turn it.

“Salazar’s saggy balls. WHAT!?” He seethed as he ripped the door open, determined to teach whoever was stupid enough to bother him a lesson when he came face to face with you.

Except...except you were crying, and bloody, and so pale.

“Treasure!?” Barty squawked, awkwardly catching you as you began to slide down the door frame which you were leaning the entirety of your weight on.

“Barty...I-” you started before a pained sob tore through your teeth. “I need help.”

“What happened?” Barty asked breathlessly, moving you from the door to his bed without your help after your left leg gave out on you.

“Barty...”

“What. Happened. Y/N?” He demanded.

“Barty, you cannot- cannot tell Reg and Remus. Pl- hnggh - please promise me you won’t tell them.”

“Tell them what, Treasure? What’s wrong!?” Barty pressed, beginning to panic when his bedding quickly became saturated with your blood.

“Promise me!” You shrieked, your voice carrying the most clarity since you had arrived.

“Okay! I promise!” Barty agreed readily. You didn’t seem convinced, however.

You shakily held your pinky out to him and stared intensely at him. “Promise me that y-, that you will not tell Remus or, or Regulus.”

Barty looked between your eyes and your pinky before finally interlocking your pinky with his. “I promise I will not tell Remus or Regulus.”

More tears fell as you began pulling your long winter robes off. You were wearing a long sleeved shirt and long trousers, but Barty could tell most of the bleeding was coming from your leg. Your fingers were shaking too much as you unsuccessfully tried unbuttoning your trousers, so Barty silently asked for your permission before undoing the button and zip for you.

You pulled the pants to your knee to expose a large...werewolf bite on your left thigh.

“Treasure.” Barty breathed out horrified, looking back up at you with tears in his eyes. “What...what happened? No, I ... I can see what happened. How did this happen?”

“I...I just-”

And you passed out.

“No! No no no. Nononononono.” Barty chanted as he tried to rouse you awake.

“Okay Barty, come on, think. You didn’t achieve all twelve O.W.L’s for naught.” He berated himself, lying you down on his bed and pulling your trousers the rest of the way off.

He turned you onto your right side and tried elevating your leg to stop the blood flow after he realized a simple episkey was not going to close the wound.

He realized that the reason you’d been struggling to open the door was that your wrist appeared to be broken, and you’d been leaning onto the doorframe to keep your weight off of your injured leg. That he could fix with an episkey, so at least he wasn’t completely useless.

His sweet, sweet Treasure. Bitten. By a werewolf!? Your parents...

Oh gods, your parents.

That’s why you were here.

You couldn’t go back home, not as a werewolf; your parents would kill you. The only thing worse to a Sacred 28 Family than a dead daughter would be a werewolf one.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Any why couldn’t he tell Lupin and Regulus!? Lupin was probably the only person who could actually help you right now. Barty hated that – hated that someone else could help you and he couldn’t – but he also loved that you had people who loved you and could help you.

Fucking fuck, he was supposed to be burning moving pictures of his father right now, not trying to bring his best friend back from the brink of death.

“That’s enough Treasure, you need to wake up.” He muttered, shaking you by your shoulders gently. When that still didn’t work, he cast a quick rennervate.

You groaned in pain and tried rolling onto your back.

“No, Y/N, you need to stay like this. I need you to tell me what happened.”

You moaned again and turned back towards him; eyes shut tight in pain.

“I...I needed to leave I, I – ugh.”

“Okay, okay. So you left, that much I can understand. How’d you get bitten?”

“I didn’t, I didn’t know it was there until it was too late, Barty. I swear it. I was following the trail behind my-my house and it just appeared! I fell back- backwards onto my arm when it lunged and I apparated once I realized what was happening, but it was...it was too- too late.”

“Where were you trying to go?”

“The Potter’s.”

“And why can’t you go there now?”

You opened your eyes at that, and Barty felt his heart fall out of his ass at the amount of pain that spilled from your eyes that had nothing to do with any of your various physical injuries.

“Rem... Rem hates himself. He hates The Wolf, he ha- hates his lycanthropy; he thinks he is a m... monster and deserves nothing. Barty, he’ll hate me.” You broke into a sob at the end of your sentence and Barty was very close to joining you.

He didn’t think you were right at all, mind you; he thinks it’d be rather impossible for anyone to hate you, least of all Lupin who seemed completely lovesick for you and Regulus. He didn’t think it was worth your energy to argue with you about it though, seeing as he already pinky promised not to go to the lycanthrope or your other boyfriend about this.

He didn’t know what to do, though. He needed to close this wound and stop the bleeding, he needed to pilfer from the infirmary, he needed to pilfer the potions supply closet, and he needed to figure out how to help a werewolf. And he needed to do all of these things whilst somehow not leaving your side at all.

“I’m tired, Barty.” You murmured quietly, startling him from his internal panic.

“You can’t sleep, Treasure. Not until we close this wound and stop the bleeding.”

He pulled out his third year DADA textbook to find the chapter on werewolves.

“Dangerous creature this, loss of moral sense that, right then – powdered silver and dittany applied to a fresh bite wound.” Barty recited as he read off his textbook. He looked over to your wound, still oozing and bleeding, though the new angle and elevation did seem to be helping staunch the blood flow at least a little.

“Right... fresh enough I suppose.” Barty sighed, making you promise to stay awake long enough for him to raid the potions supply closet and the infirmary to get the necessary ingredients.

Barty had been feeling quite confident in his plans.

Except something was very, very wrong.

The dittany and powered silver bubbled slightly where it interacted with your blood and flesh but didn’t seem to be sticking to your wound at all; it seemed that it was just causing you to moan in agony as Barty uselessly tried spreading it over your leg.

“You’re sure it was a werewolf that bit you?” He asked again. Barty was certain that if you were feeling better, you would have kicked at him.

He wished you could have kicked at him.

“Yes, Barty.” You cried.

“Oh, Treasure, I’m sorry.” He lamented, putting down his bowl of useless silver paste and brushing sweaty hairs away from your forehead.

“Salazar, you’re burning up, Y/N.” He commented, cupping your heated and flushed face with his hand.

“I’m cold.” You argued, awkwardly trying to pull at his bedsheets to cover your arms. Barty hated to add more layers on you when your fever was this high, but he couldn’t really bring himself to deny you, either.

Unfortunately, it appeared that Barty needed help.

Unfortunately, Barty made you a promise.

Fortunately, there were ways around that.

Unfortunately, that meant having to resort to a fate worse than death.

“Oh! Hello there.” Mrs. Potter greeted Barty as she rounded the corner after being alerted by the house elf that there was a student at the floo. “Are you looking for Regulus?”

Barty adorned his most charming (and least maniacal) grin as he bowed politely to Mrs. Potter like the proper Pureblood he'd been beaten raised to be.

“Euphemia Potter – looking as smashing as ever.” He said before returning to his full height. “Actually, I’m here for the lesser Black brother today.”

Mrs. Potter narrowed her eyes at his comment but pursed her mouth as if fighting back a smile.

“Am I to assume you’re referring to Sirius, Barty?”

Barty sighed in admiration. “Smart and pretty, Euphemia; how do you do it?”

“I’ll be right back, Mr. Crouch.” Mrs. Potter called over her shoulder as she left the floo reception room. Barty quickly pulled out the charmed compact mirror he had connected to a hand mirror which he had set up beside you before he left. You were asleep and shivering violently, but you were alive.

Help is coming, Treasure.

“Oh.” Barty heard, causing him to close the mirror and look up to see a confused looking Sirius pausing mid-step into the room. “Sorry, I’ll go get Regulus for you.”

Barty scoffed derisively. “Oh, come off it Black – give the woman a little credit, yeah? I asked for you. Now let’s go.” He barked, turning towards the floo flame.

He turned back when he realized Sirius wasn’t following him.

“Hello??” He called sarcastically. “Did you not hear me? I said let’s go.”

Sirius looked Barty up and down and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“Why in the hells would I go anywhere with you?” Sirius asked bemusedly.

“Black!” Barty seethed. “I do not have time for this, we have to go now.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about.”

Barty sighed and looked down to the hells for patience or possibly extra strong demonic powers to get through this conversation with Sirius.

“Where is Regulus right now?”

Sirius considered Barty skeptically but answered, nonetheless.

“Upstairs with Remus.”

Barty looked at Sirius at that. “Is it safe to assume he is helping him recover from last night?”

Sirius’ face fell and he levelled Barty with a hard glare. “What the hell are you on about, Junior?”

“Black, please believe that there is absolutely nothing in this realm that I’d rather be doing than sitting here asking for your help but I’m here doing just that.”

“For what?”

Regulus was here, and Regulus was helping Lupin, which meant that Lupin was also here with his supernatural hearing. Barty made you a promise – he would not tell Regulus or Remus what has happened.

“I need your help, because I’ve found a lost Treasure that seems to be in some Trouble.” Barty explained slowly, praying to every god that Sirius would pick up on his not-so-subtle clues.

Sirius’ eyes stayed narrowed at Barty before they grew comically in understanding.

“Where is-”

“Not here.” Barty interrupted. “Grab your things and come with me.”

“I have so many fucking questions.” Sirius muttered as he stepped through the floo, somehow ending up standing in the Slytherin common room.

“Like?” Barty asked in a bored tone.

“How the hell did you manage to connect the floo network to the Slytherin common room?” He started, realizing that it probably wasn’t the most important question, but it seemed to take precedence in his mind.

Barty turned to sneer at Sirius, though his steps never faltered as he sped towards what Sirius could only assume was his dorm.

“Really, Black? I tell you that your future sister-in-law is in dire need of your help, and that’s what you’re- you know what? I’m not surprised. The floo network is easy to manipulate so long as you know how to dismantle ancient wards.” Barty explained dismissively.

Easy. Dismantle ancient wards. Sure.

“What’s wrong with Y/N?” He asked much more seriously. Most (though not all) of the contempt drained from Barty’s face as he stopped in front of a door.

“She...she was bitten.”

Sirius just stared dumbly at the absolute last person he imagined he'd be spending his morning with as he let that information process.

He wasn't given much time, however, as Barty quickly opened the door and disappeared into the room, clearly unbothered to see if Sirius was following him in or not.

“Treasure? Hey, hey; it’s okay. Look? I brought some help, okay? You’re alright.” He cooed at a curled-up form on his bed – your curled-up form.

“Oh, Trouble.” Sirius breathed out in disbelief, surveying your shaking and battered body before his gaze paused on your exposed thigh – clear as day was a large canine bite, still bleeding.

“Oh, my girl.” Sirius cooed, feeling like he might be sick at the sight of one of his favourite people in the world in so much pain. It was very different from post moon care with Remus; Remus was seasoned, he was prepared, they were prepared.

You looked like you were dying.

“What’s wrong with her?” Sirius asked quickly, shaking himself and trying to force himself into action.

“Other than the very obvious werewolf bite?” Barty sneered. “She has a fever that won’t quit.”

“Take the blankets off.” Sirius ordered, earning him a whimper from your form.

“S’cold, Siri.” You whined.

“I know, Trouble, but you’re burning up.” He replied apologetically, pulling the blankets out of your currently much weaker grasp.

Barty looked like he was just as heartbroken as you were at the loss of the warmth, but clearly agreed with Sirius enough not to argue.

“Mean.” You pouted; eyes still screwed shut in pain.

“I know, I’m the worst.” He whispered, casting a quick auguamenti and glacius on a rag and placing it on your head, earning him another protesting groan from you.

“Why’s her leg still bleeding?” Sirius asked, eyes still on your face as he used the cloth to wipe away the sweat from your features. He quickly prepared two more rags and placed them on the back of your neck and your chest.

“I don’t know. I followed the instructions from our DADA textbook on werewolves – three tablespoons of powdered silver mixed with four tablespoons of dittany to create a paste. It did nothing but hurt her and aggravate me.” He admitted, sounding horribly dejected.

“Where’s the silver from?”

“Slughorn’s supply closet.”

Sirius groaned. “That’s why. The school buys the cheapest ingredients they can to keep costs low. That won’t be pure silver.”

“Well, where in the hells are we supposed to find pure silver then?” Barty groaned.

Of all the times for Sirius to not be at Grimmauld Place anymore – that place was teeming with pure silver.

Pure...

Toujours pur.

“Regulus.” Sirius whispered no louder than a breath. You didn’t seem to hear him, your lucid moment clearly over; but Barty did.

“I promised Y/N I wouldn’t tell Lupin or Regulus.” He explained plainly, causing Sirius to groan.

“Then what are we supposed to do?”

Barty turned his face to glare at Sirius. “I promised Y/N I wouldn’t tell Lupin or Regulus.”

Sirius rolled his eyes. “I heard you, Junior. So, what are we going to do then?”

Barty let out a long-suffering sigh. “I promised Y/N I wouldn’t tell Lupin or Regulus.”

Sirius’ brows furrowed and he cautiously lifted his hand to press the back of it to Barty’s head, checking for fever of his own. Barty aggressively swatted him away.

“Are you quite alright, Junior? Is this a stroke?”

“I need you to listen to me very carefully, Black. Okay? Are you listening to my words?”

Sirius nodded at him as Barty grabbed Sirius by the shoulders and stared imposingly into his eyes. “I – Bartemus Crouch Junior – promised that sweet, lovely Treasure you call Trouble over there, that I – Bartemus Crouch Junior – would not tell Remus Lupin or Regulus Black. I promised her.”

Now, Sirius feels it’s important to note that it was currently maybe seven o’clock in the morning, and he’d only just stepped out of the shower after washing away a night of romping in the woods around Potter Manor with Moony as Padfoot last night to be told there was someone at the floo for him; in other words, he was fucking exhausted. And to add to that, he had one of his least favourite people tell him that one of the worst possible things happened to one of his favourite people. So, sue him for what he said next.

“I don’t understand.”

“Fucking son of a mother fucking cunt, I swear to that fucking muggle-religion-wizard-guy-that-caused-the-whole-brew-ha-ha-in-that-big-ass-muggle-tome I will shave that fucking head of yours and wear your hair as a wig; I cannot tell Lupin and Regulus.” Barty spat, though somehow managed to keep his voice low enough to not gain your attention.

“Yes, yes, yes. You promised her.” Sirius lamented. “You p- wait... you promised her. You promised her.”

“Thank Merlin and Morgana.” Barty groaned as fell to his knees in exhaustion, clearly more than thankful that Sirius had finally gotten it.

“I’ll be back.” Sirius announced and started towards the fireplace in the Slytherin common room in order to retrieve his brother.

Regulus looked up from the pages of his novel to survey Remus’ form again. His boyfriend laid on his back with his head propped up on two pillows and his eyes closed as the soft morning light filtered its way through the sheer curtains and painted his features in its warm glow.

Regulus knew Remus was likely exhausted and sore and perhaps feeling awfully sorry for himself right now, but Regulus wasn’t sure he ever looked more beautiful.

“You should take a picture; it’ll last longer.” Remus commented dryly, never bothering to open his eyes as a smile danced on his lips.

“Ha ha.” Regulus deadpanned, returning his gaze to his book with a blush taking over his face.

“You worry too much, love. I’m okay.”

“I know you’re okay.” Regulus argued.

“Yet you still worry?”

“Yet I still worry.”

Regulus heard Remus’ head turn against his pillow, and he looked back up to see Remus regarding him.

“Have you heard from her by chance?” Remus whispered as if fearing the answer he knew was coming.

Regulus knew it was you who Remus referred to; they’d been waiting quite impatiently for your owl for the past few days.

You had promised to write as often as you could - every day if possible – over the winter holidays. The last correspondence they had with you was four days ago as you told them of some family gathering at your home.

He hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he could tell he was caught at the disappointed sigh from Remus.

“No, mon loup. I’m sorry.” Regulus admitted.

Remus let out another sigh and leaned his head back down on the pillows, squishing his eyes shut as if the pain of not knowing how you were was more painful than the current aching in his bones.

“Hey, Reg?” Regulus heard his brother call from the door.

“He’s awake.” Regulus called back simply.

“How’re you feeling, Moons?” Sirius asked, walking towards the end of the bed with his hands in his pocket.

“Been worse.” Remus answered.

“I...” Sirius started, cutting himself off with a sigh.

“Spit it out, Sirius. We’ve not got all day.” Regulus drawled and put his book down. He couldn’t stop his heart rate from picking up when he noticed Sirius’ discontent, however; sudden flashbacks of Sirius standing in Regulus’ doorway begging him to pack his things and leave with him bombarding his mind.

“What is it, Pads?” Remus asked, seeming to pick up on his friend’s anxiety as well.

“I need your help.” He admitted. “It’s...it’s Y/N.”

Remus sat up all too quickly and winced at the cracking of his back.

“What is it? Where is she? Is she okay?” He asked, trying to free himself from the bedding that Regulus had tucked him into hours earlier.

“No, well, yes...she-”

“Where is she?” Regulus whispered in horror.

“With Junior. At Hogwarts.”

Regulus relaxed slightly to at least know you were safe at Hogwarts and with Barty, though that raised more questions than answers for him.

“How do you know that?” Regulus asked, all the while Remus continued struggling to dress himself despite his various aches and pains.

“Junior told me.” Sirius admitted, finally taking pity on his friend and helping him dress whilst his boyfriend sat their uselessly.

“Why did he tell you? When did he tell you?”

“This morning!” Sirius barked, clearly growing agitated, “listen, I just-”

“What happened to her, Sirius?” Remus begged, finally taking a moment to catch his breath and stare at his friend imploringly. “What happened to her that Junior told you and not us?”

Sirius swallowed thickly before he answered.

“She was bitten, Rem.”

All colour drained from Remus’ face and Regulus sat stock still.

“Was it me?!” Remus asked through a choked sob. This seemed to snap Regulus out of his uselessness and he reached for Remus’ shoulder to squeeze it affectionately.

“No, no. Moony, no one was there last night. I swear it.”

“What...why do you need my help? What do you need?” Regulus asked quietly, standing to pull on his own jacket and retrieving his and Remus’ wands from the dresser.

“We can’t get the wound to close, and she’s got a wicked fever that we can’t bring down. She’s barely lucid, she's lost an insane amount of blood, and the silver at the school didn’t work to close it and-”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Remus agreed breathlessly.

“Why not?”

“Too costly to give pure powdered silver to a bunch of students who make throw away potions – they only use what works in the brew but not in practice.” Remus explained, groaning as he stood and quickly transfigured his suitcase into a cane on account of his hip after the transformation.

“So, you need pure silver? Like... the ring!” Regulus whispered, hastily ripping the Black Family signet ring from his thumb and passing it to Sirius.

“We need to go now. She can’t afford to lose any more blood, and it should have been closed immediately.” Remus pressed, making his way to the door albeit a little shakily.

Regulus was sick with worry; for you, your life, your future, your family, for Remus and how upsetting this must be for him as well, but something still wasn’t making any sense.

“Why did Barty tell you?” Regulus asked as they stepped through the floo into the Slytherin common room, making a mental note to ensure that it was closed before the rest of the students returned from winter holidays.

Sirius grimaced slightly and turned to look at his friend who he was supporting as they followed Regulus to the dorm room.

“She...she made him promise not to tell you guys.” Sirius admitted.

Remus’ steps faltered and Regulus turned, ready to help Sirius in catching him, only to notice that he wasn’t falling but rather had stopped walking all together.

“Why wouldn’t she want us to know?” Remus asked mournfully.

“I never did hear why.” Sirius admitted, encouraging Regulus forward with a nod of his head.

The three of them entered the room to find Barty sitting on a low stool beside you with his pinky interlinked with yours. Your eyes were still shut tightly and your breathing was shallow, but Regulus could hear Barty talking lowly to you and your occasional responses.

“I like that song about the fighter, the writer, and the ruler.” Barty murmured quietly to you.

Your brows twitched as you gritted out “it’s Soldier, Poet, King.”

“Ah, right you are, Treasure.” Barty responded, looking over his shoulder at the new additions to the room. “You always know everything.”

“How is she?” Sirius asked as he dropped the signet ring inside the mortar and pestle and traded seats with Barty who began to grind it into powder, and Regulus and Remus moved to stand near the end of the bed to take in your form.

“Hanging in there, Black.” Barty responded to Sirius, though he looked at Regulus as he said it.

Sirius must have noticed Regulus’ death glare being pointed at Barty and opted to intervene.

“Hey, Trouble?” Sirius asked you gently, brushing some of your damp hair away from your forehead. You hummed in acknowledgement without opening your eyes.

“Why didn’t you want Remus and Regulus to know, sweets?”

You whimpered as your face morphed into agony, eyes finally opening to look at Sirius through fat tears.

“Remus will hate me.”

Remus actually whimpered at that, clearly itching to move towards you, but not wanting to interrupt you.

“Why would he hate you, sweets?”

“He hates werewolves.”

Remus’ head dropped in shame as Regulus rubbed soothing circle into his back.

“But he loves you, Trouble.” Sirius pressed, watching Remus all the while.

“Not anymore.” You sighed in resignation, closing your eyes once more.

“Always, dove.” Remus insisted. You squeezed your eyes tightly as if you were trying to convince yourself that he wasn’t there.

“Do you hear me? I will always love you. There is nothing that could ever happen that would make me hate you, okay?” He carried on, slowly making his way to the other side of the bed in order to curl up behind you and pull your back into his front.

You whimpered, though Regulus was sure it was less from physical pain and more in distress.

“What about Reggie?” You cried as Sirius continued rubbing his thumb across your forehead.

“It’s almost ready.” Barty interrupted as he began measuring out the silver and dittany.

“Reggie thinks the world of you, dove.” Remus murmured into your hair, looking over at Regulus imploringly.

“You’ve got a lot of people who care about you, Trouble.” Sirius added. “We’re not going to let you do this alone.”

“It’s done, Treasure. We’re gonna fix you up.” Barty said as he made his way over, keeping his eyes trained on Regulus.

“Dovey, this is going to hurt an awful lot, okay? But you’re so brave, you’re so brave and then you’ll feel all better, okay?” Remus spoke into your hair, keeping you pressed tightly to his form as you began to struggle against his hold.

“Regulus, you need to be brave for her.” Sirius ordered, looking as severe as Regulus ever remembers his older brother being.

What could Regulus have ever done to make you think it was at all possible for him to feel anything but love for you?

How could Regulus ensure that you never thought such things again?

“I’m right here, amour. Okay? You’ve got four of us here who love you, we’re not going anywhere.” He pressed, moving to take over Sirius’ place on Barty’s short stool as Sirius positioned himself close to your feet.

“I don’t want to hurt.” You cried, breathing becoming slightly erratic as Remus added more pressure in keeping your arms pinned to your sides.

“I know, amour. It’ll be over soon, okay?” Regulus tried, brushing hair away and pressing his lips to your overly hot forehead.

“You’re so brave, Y/N. We’ve got you, okay? Such a brave girl, come on babylove, you’re okay.” Remus chanted, looking over at Sirius as he pinned your ankles to the bed and Barty transfigured a stirrer in an applicator.

“Please. I don’t want to.” You begged.

“You’re so brave.” Remus repeated, pressing his mouth to the top of your head as his own tears fell into your hair.

“Do it.” Regulus insisted, not wanting to prolong this anymore.

Regulus nearly dropped his wand in his haste to throw up a silencing charm around the dorm room as your screams bounced off the stone walls in time with Barty’s first swipe of the ointment.

Regulus couldn’t hear the words spilling from Remus’ lips, but he knew that he was whispering sweet encouragements to you as he cried in sympathy. Sirius looked to be using all his strength to keep your legs pinned down as you struggled, and his eyebrows furrowed on your behalf as well.

“You’re okay, amour. You’re okay.” Regulus insisted for both of your benefits, watching as Barty applied the last of the paste to your leg.

“Now what!?” Barty shouted over your agonized cries.

“Breathe dove, breathe. The pain will fade, just breathe.” Remus coached, rocking the both of you gently back and forth as you sobbed.

“You’ve done so well, amour, so well. Ma courageuse fille; you’re so brave.” Regulus praised, taking both of your hands into his and pulling them from Remus’ grasp to press kisses to your knuckles. “Tu as si bien fait, tu es la personne la plus forte que je connaisse.”

It took some time and many more encouragements before your sobs decreased into pitiful hiccups and whimpers as you looked towards Regulus.

“You don’t hate me?” You asked pitifully.

Regulus used his thumb to wipe away the tears that were still falling as Remus caressed your arms.

“It never even crossed my mind, cheri. I could never; non.” Regulus insisted.

“I’m so sorry, dove.” Remus whispered into your head. “I’m so sorry this has happened to you.”

“Remus.” Sirius warned.

“Not because it makes her any less lovely, Sirius. But because she doesn’t deserve it.” Remus explained.

“I’m scared.” You admitted timidly.

“I know, dove.”

“Lucky for you, Trouble, you’ve got some seasoned professionals here.” Sirius added, nudging Remus’ foot.

“Can I start the animagus process now, Rem?” Regulus groaned, looking at Remus pointedly.

“I guess it wouldn’t be fair to make you sit out on full moons now.” Remus relented – he’d always hated the idea of putting the two of you in any undue danger, but he couldn’t deny Regulus of the two of you, nor you of Regulus; not when you would need him most.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Barty interrupted, moving his skeptical glance between the four of you. “You’re telling me that animagi can romp around with the likes of werewolves?”

Remus nuzzled his face impossibly further into your head as Sirius chuckled.

“Werewolves don’t care about animals. In fact, it makes them quite happy to have a ‘pack’.” Sirius explained.

Barty laughed conspiratorially. “Well, sign me the fuck up. Regulus, I’ll buy the first mandrake leaf; my treat!” He called as he grabbed his jacket and wand and headed for the door, likely heading to Hogsmeade for supplies in his excitement.

“Moony is not going to like him.” Sirius proclaimed flippantly, finally falling into a chair in exhaustion after Barty was gone.

“It’s not just about him, anymore.” Remus responded, pressing a kiss to your head. Regulus could tell your fever was reducing, though your cheeks were still flushed.

You had a lot to discuss; what happened, why it happened, and where to go from here. But for now, Regulus was just happy you were alive, currently safe, surrounded by people who loved you, and agreeable to him running you a bath.

558 notes · View notes

legacygirlingreen · 4 months

Text

That time of year again… // Sebastian Sallow x Reader/MC (NSFW)

Hi friends! I have been battling the flu for a week now so there’s a delay on strumming hearts pt 2 but I managed to scrap this together for those who celebrate Christmas! Also hella unedited so RIP.. anyways, Hope your day has been fantastic!

Screenshots in art by: @sinty2ek - seriously check out their page, it’s great if you aren’t already following 💚

Warning: smut (duh), Sebastian gets dom for a moment but overall is worried about her, loss of virginity, consent is hot, size difference, etc

Word count: 7,700

All characters are aged up and MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!

The first December after the events in Feldcroft, he had come down with a bout of dragon pox that landed him in the hospital wing for weeks. The second his finals had come to an end he wound up in a bed, with nurse Blainey rushing around him, and he didn’t realize what exactly was happening until the first of the year when he was released. In a way, he’d been thankful, that not really being conscious or alert through the worst part of the year.

That vile illness saved him from going to an empty home with too many bad memories to sulk and more than likely drink his uncle's firewhiskey. He had “come too” so to speak the morning of his birthday - New Year’s Eve or Hogmanay for the Scots - but in his house it had always been about celebrating himself and Anne. Knowing he’d be unable to grieve the loss of his sister from his life with nurse Blainey in the room he laid in the hospital bed trying by any means to distract himself.

She had come around several times seeing he was much better but still not quite healthy to be released. As his energy grew so had his restlessness. He was so grateful when his friend, the only one he had anymore, had so sweetly continued to try and attempt to see him. He had heard snippets throughout his stay from the nurse about how the girl had frequently attempted to come see him, and she’d caught the girl trying to sneak in a few times, firmly reassuring the hero of Hogwarts that dragon pox was no laughing matter.

It warmed his heart when he was finally awake at how the pile of books slowly started to accumulate, giving him a much needed distraction. She even slipped in a title to the stack he knew she must’ve stolen from the restricted section, and the thought of her puttering around amongst the ghost to get him comfort while sick, made him smile.

And on his birthday in the morning when he awoke he saw a small slice of cake alongside a neatly wrapped gift and a small note containing his name. Blainey had informed him how desperately the girl had begged to stay on the far side of the hospital just to see him and how upset she’d been handing off the gift and pastry before sulking back downstairs.

As sweet as it all was, he was somewhat grateful to the nurse for keeping the girl away. Not only would he never be able to live with himself should he be the reason she contracted the often fatal illness, but he honestly didn’t want to be seen like that.

He’d been quite honest with himself over that first summer holiday on his feelings for the girl. He had come to terms with the awful ways in which he’d treated her and decided her miracle of not turning him in and standing by him should never go wasted. In those hot months in feldcroft he decided that he’d never hurt her again. And perhaps one day he’d tell her how he felt.

Because as the first July without Anne and Solomon raged on as he tended the garden, all he continued to think of was her shimmering eyes dreamily staring up at his own in amazement as he showed her the undercroft. Or how silky her hair had shown in the moonlight that night they raided the goblin mine. How small she felt pressed against him when he’d pulled her to safety from that spider. How brilliant her smile was when they discovered the first of Isadora’s memories. Or how she held him so tightly the night before they left hogwarts in May when she’d found him crying in the undercroft…

But that former Yule where he laid in a hospital bed, covered in sweat, scabs and looking like death itself, he was almost more thankful that the nurse had prevented the girl of his dreams from seeing his current state. Sebastian had always been a bit cocky. And he knew that he had some baseline qualities to which made him attractive, despite the ones he tended to dislike. He often hoped his messy hair would be considered more charming in her eyes. Or she’d notice that he’d started shaving by purposefully leaving it a few days sometimes so she’d have to notice the dark hair adorning his chin. He found the few of his features he could be proud of and he was thankful that she’d not seen him sick when she’d left that sweet gift.

The girl had dropped off a blank, leather bound journal, simply explaining in her note how proud she’d been of him for not messing with dark magic and that she hoped he’d use the journal to vent his feelings, frustrations, discoveries and anything else as he continued to turn over a new leaf. It had been sweet and something he’d never done before but if he was honest in the last year he’d nearly filled the damn thing after he taped in her note to the first page.

That remaining school year and the start of the current left him following around her like a lost crup puppy. Although feeling a bit self conscious earlier on about his newly acquired dragon pox scars adorning his body and the few on his face, he quickly resolved the issue when she come to him with a potion to cure it that she promised she had done the heavy lifting with garreth on. It overall did the charm and returned his face and skin to its original state.

Anywhere she needed to go after that, he was there. She needed someone to hold books? Sebastian had two hands. She needed an escort through the forbidden forest to find a lost niffler? He was carrying the small creature back for her. She wanted company even on a night he was exhausted? He’d brave the lack of sleep and stay up with her.

At some point during the year she had come to him and confessed she hadn’t been sleeping well, professor Weasley and her head of house recommending she relocate to her room of requirement instead of a dorm so she wouldn’t disturb her roommates with the nightmares.

So every once in a while when he too was struggling to fall asleep he’d find a note slipping under his dormitory door and he’d be slipping off to the tapestry in the hall to make sure she was okay.

Deek had found them most mornings still awake by the fire just chatting and decided perhaps Matilda didn’t need to know everything. Not even on the rare mornings he found Mr Sallow’s arms wrapped around his dear friend as they both slept soundly in her conjured bed. As far as Deek was concerned both children desperately needed whatever sleep they got, and the hero of Hogwarts only seemed to sleep in the arms of that Slytherin boy with the brown eyes that never left her.

As they found themselves in their seventh year, Ominis eventually trickled back into their lives. Having seen the changes made by Sebastian, and the reassurance from the girl he truly had given up after the damage he brought, Ominis decided that his found family was still better than his birth family. Despite that, he still had obligations at Yule until he was of age, leaving the pair behind as he boarded the train in Hogsmeade in December.

Sebastian wasn’t looking forward to Christmas this year. Not that he truly had for a while - Yule always brought forth the nasty reminder of those who were missing - a number that was increasing for him by the years. But this was going to be the first he was actually conscious for after his sister left. Given the previous dragon pox year he wasn’t sure what was going to happen this year.

Almost as if sensing his nervousness going into the holidays she approached him during dinner the last day of their examinations as she sat down gently and leaned a hand over to place on his arm, startling him out of his deep thoughts while he stared at his mashed potatoes.

Hey Bash, are you alright?

He looked up with a small jump as he saw her brow furrowed and her gaze laced with concern. Her sweet voice caused that ever present stirring to arise in his stomach as he sighed and turned towards her, making her drop her hand from his bicep in the process.

“I suppose” he said after a moment looking down and seeing where her thigh was almost pressed against his own and where she had laced her hands together in her lap after she let go of him.

After a beat of silence she spoke again.

“You’re feeling sad about the holidays this year aren’t you?” She asked and he almost let out a small yelp at how wonderfully she was able to capture exactly what he’d been thinking without him even having to explain himself.

Looking back at her empathetic expression he nodded. Of course she was understanding. She had always been nothing but caring since the day he’d met her.

Sighing, she averted her gaze and grabbed one of his forgotten peeled orange slices off his plate and popped it into her mouth, slowly allowing the fruits somewhat bitter-sweetness to coat her tongue before she swallowed and looked back at him.

“This is the time of year I feel the most alone” she admitted as she looked back up at him from her seat on the Slytherin bench.

Sebastian recalled the times she had mentioned growing up in a muggle orphanage in London. How abysmally poor and mismanaged it was run. How professor Fig had come, lying that he was a long lost relative to the nuns before “bringing her home” as he explained to the young witch that she had accidentally wound up at a muggle orphanage instead of a magic one when her parents were discovered dead by non magical policemen when she was an infant.

Spending her first Christmas at Hogwarts when Professor Fig was still alive had been wonderful. she’d been allowed to travel to visit him and Ominis and Anne during the last Christmas he’d had at feldcroft with the professor just during the day. Sebastian also remembered fondly how happy she looked celebrating Yule with them before she returned to hogwarts for the rest of the holiday: not before giving him a quick kiss to the cheek and scurrying off behind the late man. It had been Sebastian’s first decent Christmas since his parents died.

Now the pair sat in the great hall carrying the weight of loss and loneliness as they went uncertainty into the holiday season.

“I don’t want to go back to Feldcroft alone this year” he admitted bluntly as he continued to peel the orange, handing her a slice as he ate another. As they silently ate the fruit he kept thinking about how he felt conflicted in returning. A part of him hoped Anne would show up again but he knew deep down it was unlikely.

“What if… what if you didn’t go back to Feldcroft? What if you stayed here… with me?” She asked quietly without looking up at him.

Sebastian had wondered if he should stay at the school given he had no family to return to, but he worried she see him as imposing as hogwarts truly was the only home she had.

“You want me to stay?” He asked, unsure if she meant it but hopeful she did want him there.

“Of course I would. I always want you around. I think it’s silly for us both to be alone during Christmas if we have each other we could be keeping company.” she explained as she finally looked again.

“What about our dorm rooms-“ he asked as she shook her head with a small amount of blushing working its way to her face.

“We can stay in the room of requirement. Professor Weasley was returning home this year so she won’t be checking in and last anyone heard you were going to feldcroft. Only one who would know is Deek and he would never tell a soul. That is, if you are interested…” she explained to him.

He almost stuttered in his reply, taking in that the girl was willingly offering him to stay with her for an extended period of time alone and unsupervised. Sure he occasionally fell asleep there when she invited him but never for multiple nights in a row and with the intention directly.

“You want me to stay with you alone?” He asked and she gently nodded.

“I would. We can conjure a tree and decorate it together in the main room. Take care of the beasts in the vivariums and sneak down the library to get books to read… it could be fun” she reasoned and he nodded.

“Alright. I think I would really like that. Only if you’re sure you are alright with it. I can also sleep on the settee in the main room-“ he offered and she shook her head, opening her mouth to speak before pausing and looking down.

“You can if you prefer that, but I -“ she trailed off as she looked at his wild expression before continuing as she tucked one of those stray hairs so often around her face behind her ear as she admitted, “I do sleep better when you are around… the nightmares don’t usually happen when you are with me…” she told him.

He knew the feeling. In fact he knew it so well that the only peaceful sleep he often found was in her room when they fell asleep after hours of talking together. He never knew how but eventually once he would calm her down and they’d talk, he would wake up the next morning with her nestled against his body as if during the night they had reached over to hold one another.

“I-“ he paused, raking his own hands in his hair as he also admitted, “me too. I think the only real sleep I’ve gotten all year has been in the room of requirement”

“So you’ll stay? With me?” She asked and he nodded.

“I’d love to”

————————

The next morning he’d slipped out of his nearly empty Slytherin dorm room with a small bag over his shoulder of the stuff he usually brought home. Some clothes that weren’t his school uniforms, a few books, a quill and some ink, some snacks, the few toiletries he had and the journal she’d given him the previous year. As he snuck down the empty halls he came across the door to the room or requirement, now revealing itself to him with no problem, before he pushed inside.

Once there he could see the always lit fire in the main room, the vivariums grand entrances, along with all her potting and potions stations. Something about the place always felt so inherently homie and incredibly authentic to her.

“Uh…” he looked around seeing the absence of the witch who had invited him, knowing it was really early in the morning and she possibly could still be asleep, but usually she rose earlier. As he went to check the small bedroom that had appeared a few months prior, the door opened behind him and she shuffled in carrying a small basket.

“Oh, you’re already here. I snuck down to the kitchen for some breakfast and I was going to pop by the dungeons later-“ she started to ramble as he looked at her clothes.

Most of the time she wore her uniform, as most students did, but when she wasn’t in her robes she usually looked a tad mismatched. Often finding random articles of clothing with protection charms while exploring, she wore a tacky blend of them. The girl also usually opted for trousers not skirts or dresses as exploring was easier when you weren’t “worried about the wind blowing up or fabric getting caught” by her own words.

Instead she stood before him in possibly the first time he’d ever seen her without trousers or one of those hideous wool skirts all the students wore. She had a white blouse with an emerald green dress overtop that had only a few white embellishments along the skirt. It wasn’t the most elegant of dresses but it certainly was beautiful, especially since he rarely saw her like this.

He set his bag down and walked towards her, and upon further inspection she also had her hair tied back - not an uncommon sight - but she’d left most of it down, only pulling the front strands out of her way as she tied it back with a bow.

Very different from how he usually saw her.

Upon realizing he had been staring she felt self conscious, asking him “how do I look?” As she awkwardly stroked the material of her skirt down with her free hand.

“You look beautiful” he said without a second thought before he looked at her face, something he’d done so often but as her eyes softened he realized he shouldn’t affirm she looked this way only because of the clothes or change to her hair.

“You are beautiful” he spoke when he found himself planted in front of her, boldly admiring her face and not the wardrobe.

She noticed his correction along with the implications it carried as she fell under the wonderful scrutiny of his gaze. As she did so, she turned to take in his appearance with his lack of the Slytherin robes, swamping them for a simple shirt and vest as he stood in front of her. Usually disguised by school cloaks she could see how wide his shoulders had gotten, along with the exposed skin of his forearms from where he’d rolled his sleeves up. The skin that usually laid covered, now proudly displaying the freckled skin below the light dusting of dark hair, as well as his veins that went into his hand.

“You okay?” She heard his voice ask gently as she looked up from his hands to his face once more.

“Sorry, yeah, I mean thank you-“ she told him as she moved past him and walked down the stairs of the main room into the back area. Sebastian didn’t question as he followed her down into the deeper parts of the room.

Once they emerged in the area he noticed there was a large tree in the middle of the room with some pillow cushions on the floor in front of the fireplace. He realized she must’ve been awake a while to have conjured a tree and made the cozy nest where they likely would read together during the day.

“You’ve been busy” he teased as she walked them over to the fireplace and lifted her skirt ever so slightly so she could settle herself on the ground comfortably.

“I just wanted you to feel as at homey as possible” she explained as he sat down next to her, his long legs stretching out in front of them. Looking between their bodies he noticed her hand sat atop one of the cushions on the floor and he carefully plucked it from the space between them.

As he ran his fingers over the delicate and soft skin of her hand he tried to ignore the way his cheeks flamed at his bold action.

“I really appreciate the effort but you don’t have to play host you know? I am just happy to spend time with you” he explained as he looked at her, giving a reassuring squeeze to her hand to truly affirm his words.

She didn’t respond as she stared at the way he continued to clutch her much smaller hand. He worried she would seem disappointed by his request to remain as laid back as possible so he in turn shifted the conversation.

“You said you grabbed breakfast?” He asked and she pulled her hand back to grab the basket, opening it up with a smile to show the goodies she had brought. As she continued to go through the options he couldn’t shake the way her hand in his own had felt like the most incredibly natural act in the world.

———————

After a day of reading, exploring the room, decorating the tree together, and just talking he was on cloud nine. Everything had felt so comfortable, so natural, as they fell into a rhythm alongside one another.

That was, until it was time for bed.

Once again he insisted if she preferred him to sleep on the sofa he would more than happily oblige, understanding that sleeping in the same bed carried heavy implications. She swiftly reminded him that they had indeed fallen asleep in the very bed in her room of requirement before. But for Sebastian, those moments had never been intentional, and to do so from the jump felt like a much deeper step.

To go to bed willingly alongside one another felt like the kind of thing reserved for married couples, certainly not friends of the opposing genders. And especially not a friend he often dreamed about kissing… as well as other more intense and vulgar things…

Regardless, her sweet smile and bright big eyes told him it was okay in her book, and who was he to question that. So as she slipped off into the small bathroom area to change for bed he stripped himself of his clothes and quickly threw on his own night clothes, tossing his dirty ones in his bag just as she returned.

Sebastian hadn’t recalled ever seeing the nightgown she wore. Usually she had something much thicker and denser but this one seemed… thin.

It was suddenly as if Sebastian’s mouth had lost all its moisture and he couldn’t help but stare as the silk she wore seemed to hug areas he usually wasn’t granted access to see.

Since when had her breasts been this full? Has she always had such an intense dip in her waist?

“Sebastian?” She asked him in mild concern as he stared distantly, his mind very much elsewhere as she came closer to where he stood slack jawed. When she found herself in front of him, he looked at her like a wild animal that had been caught by a hunter.

“I…” he trailed off as he took one more, very obvious, look down at her barely clothed breast. The view from up close confirmed his suspicions that she had forgone any form of camisole as the brief outline of her nipple shown through the silk.

“What’s wrong?” She asked gently, not fully comprehending his reaction.

“I… I think I may need to sleep out there” he said shyly as he pointed to the main area, his voice much more painned than he intended it to sound. At his explanation her heart fell as she couldn’t comprehend his reasoning.

“But why? Did I do something to upset you?”

“What?” He asked her as he looked at her hair which he realized was now completely down, something he’d never been privy to see before. It made him want to reach out and touch the long strands and see if they were just as silky as he imagined.

Quickly snapping his eyes back to her suddenly saddened expression he firmly said “You’ve done nothing wrong”. This further plagued the girl as she couldn’t place why exactly he was acting in this manor.

“I don’t understand. I thought you said you slept better when we were here together… Don’t you want to share the bed?” Her hurt expression cut through him as he realized she was still not understanding that his resistance was not due to anything about her personally… more or less it was about his lack of control in regards to his wandering hands should they lay in the same bed all night.

“Come here,” Sebastian explained as he sat on the edge of the bed, grabbing her palm and pulling her to do the same. She simply sat next to him as he turned to face her, his knee slightly framing her hips and he did his best to try and ignore how close they really were.

I don’t trust myself.

If she hadn’t watched him say it she wouldn’t have believed he muttered the words.

“What do you mean-“ she asked and Sebastian almost grew frustrated with the girl for her lack of awareness at how much of a beauty she was, along with the fact he was so irrevocably in love with her it pained him.

“I mean you are too bloody gorgeous like this that I don’t trust myself to behave like a gentleman” he let out with a frustrated sigh. He knew he shouldn’t get so worked up, especially not to show frustration at her, but the throbbing starting in his lower region was making it hard to fully concentrate on his emotions.

All he heard was her gasp, fearing she’d seen the arousal in his night trousers but when he looked up, all Sebastian saw was the girl cautiously clutching her hair trying to make sense of his words.

Closing his eyes, he ran his hand over his face. Why was he such an idiot? She probably thought him some sort of delinquent. She probably hated him. She-

She had turned her body to face him and placed a hand on his shoulder when he opened his eyes.

“Bash” her timid tone called out and all he could muster upon having her so close was an eyebrow raise to acknowledge he heard her speak.

What if I don’t want you to behave like a gentleman?

Sebastian wasn’t sure he heard her correctly or if he was about to wake up from another one of those wet deans where he stained his sheets dreaming about being buried inside her.

“You don’t know what you’re asking for” he reasoned, knowing how innocent in many regards she seemed. It wouldn’t surprise him if no one had explained the marital act to her at all.

Instead of replying she simply inched closer until she was directly in front of him. Sebastian anticipated her to stop but when she cautiously climbed on his lap his breathing stopped. He kept his hand firmly planted at his sides as she settled herself atop him, her hands resting on his shoulders for support.

“I do know what you’re referring to,” she said bluntly and her boldness made him question just how much he might know of her. Behind those innocent gazes perhaps she’d been a temptress this whole time and he was just to blind by his affections to notice.

He hadn’t realized she had lifted one of his hands until he saw her concentrated expression examining his right hand up close. She studied the calloused skin of his palm before placing his open hand along her waist. Suddenly he felt the warmth of her skin through the silk nightgown along with the beautiful dip of her curves that laid underneath.

“I thought, but you-“ he couldn’t think of an intelligent response as she looked at his face. This led to the both of them staring at one another in silence as he kept his hand firmly planted where she’d left it.

Leaning forward she placed her fingers lightly on his chin, noting the stubble growing from his face as she traced over it. He’d shaved it in the morning but she always enjoyed seeing the small, dark hairs when he stayed with her after nightmares.

“If I ask you to kiss me, are you going to run away Sebastian?” She asked him while continuing to trace her fingertips over his face in the areas his facial hair had started to grow.

Sebastian didn’t reply as his hand finally tightened and curved over her waist. Lifting the other, he placed it on her cheek gently as he let his eyes move to her own.

“Are you sure? If I’m honest I don’t think I can ever let things go back to normal if we do that” he admitted to her with a sigh.

Of course he wanted her. Wanted to be with her. Wanted to kiss her. Wanted to lay with her. But if this was just some Christmas Eve fun that never would go anywhere he couldn’t stomach it.

Instead of replying she simply leaned forward into his hand, smiling to herself as she felt the warmth of his palm against her skin. Sebastian took a shaky inhale at realizing she was signaling he could go ahead while she looked at him through her heavy lidded lashes.

Exhaling gently he leaned forward just enough to ever so softly press his lips to hers.

He could hear the way she inhaled sharply through her nose before he felt the slight pressure of her returning the kiss. It was cautious. Unsure. But still she continued to press on physically and metaphorically.

Sebastian let out a groan as he felt one of her hands tighten in his dark hair, her fingers weaving in and out of the locks along his sensitive nape. In response he pulled her closer to him by the hands firmly planted on her waist and cheek.

Feeling herself more tightly wrapped in his embrace she gained more confidence in the movements, shifting on his lap ever so slightly and letting out a gasp and breaking the kiss when she felt that beautiful ache between her legs at pressing upon his hard thigh.

She had touched herself before, sometimes rutting into a pillow to find relief, but to use the boys thigh in seeking that feeling once more she felt electrified.

Sebastian couldn’t help but feel the full extent of the throbbing in his pants, when he realized she was humping his thigh to get off. The girl he assumed knew little, quickly proving him wrong as her gasps and sighs carved into his neck.

“Hey..” he told her, moving his hand down to her hip to still her movement for a brief moment as she removed her blush covered face from the privacy of his neck.

“I need some guidance on where exactly this is headed” he asked her.

“You’ve always rushed unto everything with no plan before. Why do you need one now?” She retorted one more trying to find the friction she desired on his lap.

Sebastian let out a soft groan as her center moved over his erection and he paused as he considered her words.

“That’s different… I don’t want to be disrespectful or hurt you. I have read that sometimes intercourse can be painful for the woman and I would never want to cause you harm” he explained and she rolled her eyes, catching him off guard with her frustration.

“I’m not made of glass Seb” she told him before aggressively beginning to kiss the side of his neck. Teeth nipping, lips sucking and tongue soothing the skin as she once again resumed rutting her hips.

“But-“

“Oh Merlin, would you just let me do it” she said frustratingly as she pushed his shoulders back until he fell on the bed, as she crawled over top of his shocked form.

Sebastian barely had a chance to get a word in before she was unbuttoning his sleep shirt. He didn’t say anything as he helped her slip it down his arms upon undoing the buttons.

“Do you want me?” She asked him curtly as she looked down at his half naked form with a surprised gaze.

“I - of course “ he told her.

“Then act like it, Sallow.” She told him and suddenly like a fuse had been lit, Sebastian flipped the girl onto her back and started kissing her shoulders and collarbones with vigor. He hadn’t even realized that as he flipped her over he had pulled her nightgown down significantly but he brushed it aside as he kissed her body.

She grew warm at how suddenly the reservations left him body and he responded so well to her noises and gasps. Sebastian seemed to so easily locate all those spots that made her feel weak as he kept kissing her body.

Soon he was reaching for the ties holding up her nightclothes and she leaned up to help him remove it. As her fingers moved to undo the latches he grumpily pushed her hand aside to do it himself.

“Been wanting to unwrap you like a gift for so long now. I want to do it on my own,” he gritted out against the shell of her ear before removing the top of her dress, pulling it up and over her body and tossing it onto the floor.

As she shivered from the draft in the room, Sebastian looked down and realized she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. He assumed that even though she lacked a camisole she at the very least would have breeches, but no. She was fully naked as she lay underneath him.

“You sneaky little witch planned this didn’t you” he gritted out as he leaned down to take one of her pert little nipples in his mouth, groaning at the sweet taste of her skin along his tongue.

“I had hoped it could be a possibility…” she said through a whine as he flicked her now erect nipple with his tongue before moving to the other one.

When he successfully gave it the same attention he release it with a pop as he looked back up at her face hungrily.

“So that innocent routine was just an act?” He asked her as he moved back up her body and leaned his weight down on her. She could finally feel his arousal through his pajama pants and she shivered as he used his free hand to trace down her torso.

“Tell me what you hoped for… did you hope I would kiss you…” he trailed off kissing her now severely flushed skin before pulling back to look up at her through his thick lashes as he kept teasing. “Did you hope I would… touch you here?” Sebastian asked as he ran his fingertips ever so gently over the skin of her chest.

His index finger moved down painfully slow until it was right at the base of her opening and he looked into her eyes intently as he breached her walls with his finger, smiling as he asked “did you hope I would enter you here?”

Sebastian only brought his finger back out slowly as she whimpered at the loss of the stretch that she’d felt around his knuckles and upon hearing the noise he shoved it back in again causing her eyes to go wide as she clung to the quilt.

Shoving another finger alongside it, he continued to work her open so she’d be able to take him with ease. Curling his fingers and scissoring them within her, he took his time appreciating every noise she made and every pull her body made on his appendages.

He wasn’t done teasing the girl yet because just when she was nearing an orgasm he pulled his hand away to look at her exasperated expression with a grin as he shoved the soaked digits into his mouth and licked them clean.

“Well?” He asked her and she remembered vaguely he had asked her what she had hoped for.

“I wanted you to… be inside of me…” she admitted somewhat ashamed and he chuckled at her relapse into innocence.

“My fingers?” He eased as he brought them close to her opening once more before changing his mind and grabbing her hand from where it was still clutching the quilt and bringing it over his arousal before asking “or my cock?”

“Your… cock…” she said as if she was out of breath and he smiled down at her, suddenly breaking the trance he’d been in and softly stroking her messy hair away from her face as he laid down next to her.

“You sweet, darling girl” he cooed as he pulled her into his frame. “You may have whatever you desire” he told her before leaning up to passionately but delicately kiss her once more.

She carefully reached for the tie on his sleep pants as she undid the knot and pushed them off his hips. Sebastian reached down to loosen his breeches and pushed them off his body to assist her before maneuvering his way between her open knees, laying over her.

“I’m sorry if I got carried away…” he admitted, realizing that his brash actions may not have been what she wanted.

“Don’t be. I found it to be… quite stirring” she admitted and he laughed at her choice words. Caressing her cheek he leaned down to kiss the skin between her eyebrows before pulling back.

“We do this at your pace. Promise you’ll let me know if it stings” he asked her and she nodded, brushing off the concerns as she reached for his cock, only to have him palm his manhood with a slight groan as he shook his head.

“I mean it. I don’t want to hurt you.” He told her sternly and she looked up at his concern laced brow.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine-“ she said as she finally unwrapped his hand from his manhood, finally getting to feel the full size of him as she looked down in shock.

Sebastian was much larger than she imagined. Not that she’d ever seen one in real life before but, even from anatomical drawings she’d seen and the girlish whispers she realized he was much more endowed than she assumed.

“Oh…” she said as she looked down, losing her nerve as she saw the way his cock looked massive between their bodies and the way it pulsed under her scrutiny.

“We don’t have to do it if you are nervous” he told her as she tore her gaze from his manhood back to his face.

“I want to” she said firmly and he looked at her for any signs she was lying or feeling pressured.

“You’re sure?” He asked her gently, his thumb tracing over the skin of her chin as he held her face carefully.

“Just… go slow…” she told him, parting her legs further and reaching down to assist him.

Sebastian grunted as he felt her lining his head up with her opening and once he could feel they were properly aligned he let go of her chin to reach for her hand, holding it in his own as he encouraged her to look up.

“Look at me, don’t worry about what is going on down there alright? Just look into my eyes…” he offered and she nodded, pulling her gaze directly into his own as he ever so slightly pushed his hips forward.

Everything went okay for a few moments until her breath hitched and he paused, not tearing his eyes from hers as he stopped pressing in. When she looked as if she adjusted, he continued until the entirety of his head was inside of her, pausing once more.

He couldn’t help but sigh as he sunk into her, enjoying the warmth of her body around him as he parted her. Every so often he’d stop and ask if she was okay to keep going and she never told him it hurt but he could definitely see the discomfort at the new and what he imagined, intrusive, feeling.

However for him… it was like coming home, to a place he’d never known was so wonderful. Her body eventually opened up and accepted all of him and he found his mound of dark curls pressed against her own, slightly more manicured patch of hair atop her womanhood.

He could feel the press of her hip bones on his as he laid there, waiting for her to adjust to the fullness of his length within her body. Sebastian almost felt amazed at where it all had gone, as she was so small in comparison to him and he knew his cock well exceeded his classmates from their time sharing dorms and bathrooms.

“Do you think you’re ready for me to move?” He asked her with the softest tone he could muster despite feeling like he was going to burst free at any second.

“You’ll be gentle?” She asked timidly and he almost removed himself entirely at the tone she asked him with.

“I promise. I don’t want you to be in pain. Does it hurt now?” He asked her, not wanting to know the answer but needing to have it regardless.

“It’s moreso just… pressure? Maybe moving will help” she offered as an explanation and he nodded, ever so carefully pulling his hips back before slowly sliding back inside once more at a snail like pace.

Eventually his movements became more comfortable, confident, and controlled - as well as slightly faster.

At first her face scrunched up as she closed her eyes but after a moment she seemed to relax her eyebrows as her mouth fell open. Sebastian watched her reactions intently as she gave herself over to him.

Somehow he moved to an angle causing a pleasured noise to spill from her lips and he felt himself twitch knowing that she was slowly starting to feel good.

“Hey, I like seeing those pretty eyes Love” he said gently as he nudged her nose with his own, causing her to open them once more and blush up at him as he continued to press within her.

“There you are… so incredibly beautiful. You are an angel…” he whispered as he picked up the pace but kept his tone soft.

His words and his moments caused her to feel a stirring in her stomach that was similar to when she rode highwing and she would dive low.

“Sebastian…” She sighed his name as a mantra while she reached up to hold his cheek in her hand, the other curled around into his hair.

“My gorgeous witch… so lovely inside and out…” he continued to praise her as her eyes grew glassy at his sweet words and without thinking a tear rolled out of the corner of her eye, his thumb moving to catch it the second he spotted it.

“Did I hurt you-“ he quickly asked but she stopped him by leaning up to kiss him, her hips rising to meet his shallow moments as he groaned.

Pulling away she continued to hold him close as she whispered

I love you Sebastian Sallow…

Hearing her call his name like that, and saying she loved him, caused him to stutter in his movements and his cock begin to angrily throb looking for that final push of release.

He moved his hips much faster against hers as he leaned down and groaned out, “I - love you too… so much… uhhh fuck… need to… finish… where” he struggled to choke out as he kept his momentum while driving into her.

Realizing she was likely much further behind he had the foresight to lean his hand down and start playing with her nub, causing her back to raise sharply as she whimpered and clawed at his back.

“Need to pull, out-“ he grunted and she shook her head violently beneath him.

“No. Please. Don’t -“ she said through a loud sob, her body beginning to clench around him as she looked up at him fiercely saying “please finish inside…” she begged.

He didn’t need to ask twice after she gave him permission. Pushing harshly on her clit, she came with a scream and with that, her body pulled his cock so tightly that he followed.

As her body milked him for every drop he had he couldn’t help but feel the strong sense of pride running through his mind as he flooded her with his seed. He looked down watching her wide eyed expression as he continued to pump his load deep within her body, only slowing once he ran out of stamina before he collapsed on top of her.

Sebastian was spent as he laid on top of her chest, his face pressed against her sweaty skin and he slowly began trailing butterfly kisses across her neck at the same moment he felt her brushing his hair off his forehead to do the same.

Suddenly he heard the clock chime loudly in the main room, signaling midnight and he removed himself from the crook of her neck as he softened within her, his spill slipping out of her and between their thighs. It felt so overwhelmingly perfect and then he realized something.

“Happy Christmas” he whispered as he tucked her hair behind her ear and she looked up at him slowly realizing that he was indeed correct and they had made love on Christmas Eve through the official start of the day itself.

“Happy Christmas Sebastian…” she said, her voice slightly hoarse from the screech she’d let out and he leaned down to kiss her once more before pulling her body into his, neglecting the mess between them.

“Well, I for one think this Christmas is already off to the best start imaginable” he admitted before pecking her forehead and he smiled when she laughed, the chuckle causing both their bodies to shake.

“Of course you’d say that”

“What? I’ve got the girl I love in my arms. What more can a man want?” He asked her and he looked down just in time to see her face turn up to meet his.

“You love me?” She asked softly and suddenly it was his turn to chuckle.

“I think that what we just did goes to show that but yes, I do love you. Terribly so.” He admitted as he brought her closer into his arms.

“I love you too” she told him as he smiled, his eyes starting to grow heavy.

“I heard you the first time… although if you feel so inclined to repeat it, I can guarantee that’s not the sort of thing one grows tired of hearing” he told her as he drifted off to sleep holding her in his arms thinking about how much more pleasurable this was than going to sleep with dragon pox on Christmas.

THE END

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