Chapter Text
OVERTURE
Tom can’t move.
The box is still open in front of them, cadaverous, tissue paper spilling across the little wooden desk. The camera catches on the fluorescent lights—something Tom can barely tolerate on a normal day—shining a garish, sickly yellow.
The room feels too bright. Too exposed.
Harry shifts slightly, resettling his weight. He’s still cradling the box, and when he moves, his fingers jostle its contents.
“Tom,” Harry says again.
His throat is raw. Tom swallows, but it sticks, dry and abrasive as concrete.
“I—“
The word fractures. He tries again, clearing his throat, dragging in air through prolapsed lungs.
“I didn’t—“
This is ridiculous. This is cruel. How dare the universe offer up everything he ever wanted, only to pull it taut at the very last second—a string drawn too tight to play a single note?
His hands curl at his sides, nails digging into his palms, but he barely registers it. He’s too violently aware of everything else: the uneven grain in the floorboards, the electric buzz of ugly yellow light, the dizzy rattle of his own heart.
It’s unbearable.
“I didn’t want you to see that,” he says finally, looking away.
It would be far too easy, right now, to beg for forgiveness. He almost longs to fall apart, unfairly burdened by this new sensation—guilt is disgusting. Cloying and invasive, it taints even the best of moments.
How do people live like this?
And what if he doesn’t stop at sins of the past? He might confess to the second, poorly buried body, admitting to all the new mistakes he’s managed to make. Desperate for forgiveness, Tom could make it all so much worse.
He’s always had a talent for that. Especially where Harry is concerned.
I wouldn’t need the blog if I'd just had you, Tom thinks, a little unkindly.
He knows it isn’t Harry’s fault. It was always the world that got in their way. The carbon contents of the earth—hideous humanity—reserve their cruelty for what they cannot understand.
“That’s not—“ Harry shakes his head slightly. “That’s not what I’m asking, Tom.”
He lets go of the box carefully, as if it were delicate—a soft-skinned peach, liable to bruise—instead of the worst thing Tom has ever done.
He can’t help watching, pathetic as ever, as those hands gently resettle each sheet of tissue paper.
Everything about Harry Potter is lovely, but hands can tell you a great deal about a person. Money, luck, love—they're written in the lines of a man’s palms. And the calluses on Harry’s tell a beautiful story. It isn’t just love he wears so proudly, it’s dedication. A kind Tom understands better than anyone.
They’re so beautiful, too. Broad yet gentle.
These hands have cradled him. They’ve taken him apart and put him back together. They’ve strung a bow—and every one of Tom’s nerves—more times than he could count.
He’s imagined what else they could do. The backs of those knuckles carding down his nape. The pads of his fingers wrapped around Tom’s throat.
Tom would startle away from anyone else’s touch. His own father gave up on displays of affection long ago. But Harry would never hurt him. He’d hold just tightly enough to feel it, to know that Harry was here and that Tom was safe.
Harry looks down once more at the box. At the childish scribbling. The broken yet carefully mended glass, sparkling in the display.
“Come with me,” he murmurs.
Then, closing the lid, he steps away.
He doesn’t check to see if Tom follows. He simply moves, one foot in front of the other, with a quiet certainty that’s always inspired devotion. He doesn’t even bother locking the door, leaving it open against the hinge for Tom to trail along.
Tom has always known he’d follow Harry anywhere.
He’d walk the hot stones of hell if that meant they could stay together. And though, like Orpheus, he could never stop himself from looking back, not even Hades could keep Harry from him. Harry’s soul belongs to him.
There’s no force greater or more terrible than love. Not even the gods, with their careful strings of fate, could deny they were destined for each other.
But Harry isn’t a man who calculates fate. He’s all instinct and immediacy. The universe doesn’t happen to Harry Potter—he happens to it.
And love is not a force that Harry Potter fears.
It’s one he trusts.
So he leads them from the dorm, through winding corridors that feel longer than they should, and spiraling staircases just dark enough to trip down. Unlike Tom, he doesn’t seem frightened of where they’re heading.
Perhaps Orpheus was the wrong tale. Tom feels more like Icarus, stumbling blind through the labyrinth, unable to see the sky. Hadn’t he also come so close to reaching the sun?
These have been the greatest months of his life. He couldn't have dreamed up days like this. It was beyond even his wildest imagination.
Worse, this thing between them had become real. Not the beautiful fiction of Tom’s desire, nor the fragile architecture of his daydreams.
It was better than all of that.
Because, contrary to popular belief, Tom knows how fanciful he can be. The incident robbed him of denial, among other things. But no matter how much Tom Riddle loves to lie to himself, he has never needed to invent reasons to love Harry Potter.
The only fable is that he might get to keep this. That Harry might ever truly see him, the way he sees Harry, and love him anyway.
All of this—the defending, the intimacy, the shared space—it's so much lovelier than anything he could have invented.
And he’s so much worse for it.
Because real things end.
Lord, Tom realizes as he stumbles over another step, Marche Funèbre playing in his head. Going back to the way things were before would destroy me.
I think I could have told you.
That’s the most pathetic part.
If you had pulled me aside—just once—and said, “Tom, why?”
I think I would have confessed everything.
But if you, of all people, weren't curious… what was the point of explaining myself?
I still love you.
And I’m sorry that I do.
Because if this couldn’t kill my devotion, nothing could.
And you’re disgusted enough by my ‘hatred’—imagine how repulsive my affection would be.
OVERTURE
Practice room 23 is unchanged. The elation he felt the last time he was here—the fizzy, wonderful nervousness of performing with Harry—seems a million miles away.
In front of him are the same tall windows, the same warm wood. The piano, polished and waiting, sits in the emerging light, and Harry’s music stand rests in the corner, repertoire still open to their cut of Rach’s concerto.
Tom freezes at the threshold. Like the dormitory, everything here feels too honest. There are no shadows to hide in.
He can’t even think straight. The longer they stand in silence, the tighter the knot in his chest pulls.
He’s left frozen by the window, staring between Harry and the piano—the only two things he’s ever truly loved.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts, voice raw. “I’m so—Harry, I—“
“No, Tom.” Harry rubs his eyes, suddenly exhausted. “Listen. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine!” Tom shakes his head hard enough for Marche Funèbre to stutter in rhythm. “It was never fine! I swear, Harry, I didn’t mean to—I never wanted to hurt you. You’re the only person in the world that I—“
“Shh.” Harry’s voice is steady, calm. “It’s okay. Listen to me.”
He takes a breath, staring out at the old oak tree beyond the glass.
“I always liked you,” Harry begins slowly. “Before... everything. Did you know?”
Tom forgets to breathe. To blink. To worry, as he always does, about whether Harry will notice he isn’t blinking enough.
He can’t even shake his head. The ringing in his ears swells, drowning out Chopin’s funeral march entirely.
“I thought you were lovely. Different and... wonderful. No one else could understand what it was like to be different. Not like we did.”
Vivaldi’s Spring. That’s the song his heart is playing.
It’s the season for growing, after all, and Tom’s heart has expanded enough to attempt fleeing his skin.
Still, he has the absurd urge to shake Harry. Different is such an uninspiring word for better. Was Mozart different? Was Bach or Beethoven?
“To everyone else, being different was something to hide. Something shameful. But you never tried to hide it. Ever. And you were so—it was lovely.”
Lovely, on the other hand, is a perfect word. It splits Tom open, draining the worst of his fear, leaving something far more dangerous in its place. Hope.
“I always felt like you understood me,” Harry continues. “Like you saw something in me that no one else could. Like we were… lonely in the same ways. God. That sounds so stupid, doesn’t it?”
“No,” Tom says immediately. “It's not stupid at all.”
He’s thought the same thing, in a hundred different ways, for years. He just assumed he was alone in feeling it.
“When they told me you did it to hurt me, I—Tom, I didn’t know what to think. I started wondering if I was mad for feeling that way. Like I was special to you, or something.”
You are, Tom thinks. You taught even me how to love. How could that be ordinary?
“I mean, how silly does that make me sound?” Harry laughs weakly. “You barely spoke to me. I figured I made it all up. That you really did see me as some sort of rival, or whatever they said.”
His voice tightens.
“I held that against you. For years. Not what happened in the showers—I mean, that was odd—but feeling stupid. For thinking I was special, and building it all up in my head, like some kind of idiot.”
Harry scrubs his eyes.
“When people said that stuff about you, when they called you a creep, I let them. I didn’t do anything to stop it. And I’m so—Tom, I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”
“I did,” Tom whispers. “I absolutely deserved it.”
Tartarus opens somewhere near his heart.
I am everything they said I was. And worse. But you, he realizes, are still somehow better than all of it.
“No, don’t you see?” Harry shakes his head. “We just got off course. This... us being so… it would have happened anyway.”
He leans forward, smiling, as if he were sharing a secret.
“I always wanted to be your friend.”
In Tom’s head, Vivaldi erupts into canons. Tchaikovsky’s Overture bounces off the ceilings, ringing in painful elation. The joy he feels is almost too much to contain.
Ecstasy, Tom had learned, is bright and sharp. And in his experience, it is always threaded with guilt.
The past is forgiven, Tom thinks as the pit in his chest grows deeper. The one thing I thought we could never let go of is gone, just like that.
But what about the present? All the things I still refuse to tell you?
“Now.” Harry grins softly. “I believe I was promised another lesson.”
He gestures to the piano, face bright as the early sky, as if there’s nowhere he’d rather be. As if Tom is worthy of that kind of devotion.
Tom smiles back, dazzling—with all the deceit he’s perfected—and tries not to be sick.
The funeral march begins again.
Dean_Thom_Ass: You’re kidding me
Dean_Thom_Ass: The choices are Peeping Tom or Creepy Creevey?
Seamus_Finni_Gains: bit on the nose, yeah
GrangerDanger: Obviously this is good news! We’ve whittled it down to two!
Roonil_Wazlib: … what mione is leaving out of those exclamation marks is we’re stuck with the worst options possible
Seamus_Finni_Gains: wdym? reckon those are both prime suspects
Gin_andTonic: that’s the point, knobhead.
Gin_andTonic: if one of them was a rando, we’d already have our answer
GrangerDanger: What we need is a plan.
Seamus_Finni_Gains: well! i spose we can leave you to it!
Seamus_Finni_Gains: not like us knobheads would be any help, yeah?
Gin_andTonic: glad you’re self aware, at least 🙄
Seamus Finnigan left the chat
Dean_Thom_Ass: Just let us know what we can do to help, Hermione
Dean Thomas left the chat
Gin_andTonic: they’re definitely fucking
Ginny Weasley left the chat
GrangerDanger: Oh, for god's sake!
GrangerDanger: Why are we friends with these idiots??
Luna Lovegood left the chat
Roonil_Wazlib: c’mon, mione.
Neville Longbottom left the chat
Roonil_Wazlib: if you were only friends with people smarter than you
Roonil_Wazlib: you’d have no friends at all
Ron Weasley left the chat
GrangerDanger: Oh, that’s.
GrangerDanger: Actually rather sweet, Ron.
Hermione Granger is typing ...
GrangerDanger: Oh, Harry.
Hermione Granger is typing ...
GrangerDanger: I hope you’re okay.
Hermione Granger is typing ...
Hermione Granger is typing ...
GrangerDanger: I miss you.
Hermione Granger is typing ...
Hermione Granger left the chat