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Tom idly flicks through the pages of the Daily Prophet over lunch, scanning for headlines that would reveal any hidden strategy behind Grindelwald’s advancement in Europe, with the other half of his attention split on catching the smattering of conversation from the other 6th year Slytherins around the table.
He’d long prided himself on keeping careful tabs on his fellow Slytherins—the topics de jour, the subtlest changes in pecking order, any tidbits of gossip that he could file away for later use. Even when it looked like he wasn’t paying any attention, he always had an eye and an ear out.
After all, it had taken no small amount of effort—every last ounce of cleverness and charm and stubbornness that he possessed—to claw and scrape his way to the top of the Slytherin social hierarchy, but he finally won the respect and deference of the children of the most important families in their society, and it was the foundation on which he planned to build his base of power further down the line.
“—and of course Father’s estate manager has advised that we transfer the assets we hold in the Bordeaux estate to the Cayman-based accounts, since offshore tax havens are the least likely to experience disruption as the war progresses across the continent—” Abraxas, of course, pompously droning on about shit that no one else cares about.
“—Beauxbatons just announced they’ll open their doors to any mudbloods below the age of majority that don’t feel safe in the current political environment,” Druella dishes gleefully, “and I heard—"
But Tom never gets to hear what Druella heard, because she’s interrupted by a loud cackle from Walburga, “—Hah, can you imagine!? Blood filthy as shit staining the hallowed halls of Beauxbatons Academy? What a disgrace!”
Druella looks at her soon-to-be cousin with widened eyes, nudging her in the side and whispering furiously, “Don’t let Alphard hear you use such crude language, Wally dear, it’s unbecoming, and I don’t need to hear yet another lecture from Cygnus about you bringing shame to House Black—”
Walburga ignores her and continues on her tirade. “Of course, Beauxbatons is still leagues better than the shithole that’s Hogwarts. I still can’t believe we let in not only half-bloods, but actual fucking mudbloods,” she spits out, perfect red-painted lip curling up in disgust. “Why hasn’t anyone found a way to remove all the muggle-lovers from Hogwarts’ Board?”
Down the table, unhappily hunched over his plate eating lunch alone, new transfer student and social pariah Harry Potter glares over at them. Only Tom notices.
“Well, they have to go to school somewhere,” Nott points out, spearing a piece of steak pie. “We can’t just leave the mudbloods to their unfortunate muggle families, as much as we’d want to. Untrained magicians at such a volatile age could end up creating an Obscurus. No, someone needs to show them how to properly channel and contain their magic, even if they never end up fully integrating into magical society along with us.”
“Yes, but they don’t need to be educated here, in the same place as us,” Rosier says. “Walburga’s right. Set up a different school if need be. We shouldn’t be expected to take the same classes here at Hogwarts with mudbloods who are learning about magic for the first time. They’re holding the rest of us behind.”
Nott gives a firm nod. “They truly are holding us behind. They’re at a completely different level of aptitude when it comes to the Hogwarts curriculum, and the professors have to adjust their lesson plans to accommodate everyone else down to their level.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tom sees Potter looking increasingly incensed as the conversation progresses. He idly wonders what more it’ll take for Potter to have an outburst.
“Hey, mudbloods have some use here,” Tom says, with a sly glance over at Potter. “Dead ones make for great acromantula bait.”
That didn’t take long, Tom thinks, as Potter’s fork clatters down to his plate and he starts yelling at the group of friends sitting around Tom about how muggleborns are just as good at magic as purebloods and are, in fact, even better in some cases (at this, everyone sitting around Tom dissolves into laughter), and that everyone deserves to go to Hogwarts, regardless of blood status.
It appears that everyone at the table has found this to be funniest shit they’d ever heard, as they just continue laughing hysterically at Potter like they would laugh at a crazy person that’s having a mental episode and started spewing nonsensical things.
But Tom, this time, doesn’t laugh.
His expression darkens. He can’t have someone like that challenging his stance.
Even if Potter is an idiot, he is still a pureblood in Slytherin. That counts for something.
*
The next time Potter has an... unfortunate outburst is later that week in the Slytherin common room.
Ensconced in the safety of their own house, the Slytherins feel more at ease speaking freely amongst themselves without worrying about offending the pathetic muggle-loving sensibilities of other houses.
A few of Tom’s Knights start speculating about what exactly it would mean for Grindelwald to subjugate all the muggles in the world.
More specifically, to what extent wizards would be able to enslave them; if there’d be any mass population culling; and if so, when muggle-hunting would be made legal again in Britain, accompanied by rounds of raucous laughter.
Potter rises to his feet, red in the face, but this time he doesn’t shout.
Speaking rather quietly, with steel in his voice, he makes an impassioned defense for the human rights of muggles and why wizards should treat them with decency and kindness.
“Merlin, you’re such a freak!” Walburga shrieks, setting off another round of boisterous, cruel laughter from Tom’s group of friends, directed at Potter.
Potter walks out of the common room, trying with some effort to hold onto his dignity and keep his back straight, and he’s gone by the time anyone has a chance to recover from their laughter and throw a hex at his back.
Tom frowns.
*
Tom doesn’t yet know why it’s important, but he needs to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Potter. There’s enough that’s off about Potter that it grates on him and grates on him that no one else has seemed to notice anything deeply suspect.
Harry Potter—and all the anomalies and irregularities and suspicious half-truths clinging to him like a foul, noxious miasma—was like an inescapable thorn in Tom’s side throughout the fall term.
Notably, the circumstances of Potter’s transfer to Hogwarts never seemed to add up.
He claimed he was from the continent, yet did not speak any language other than English. He said his family was targeted by Grindelwald, yet did not know a single thing about Grindelwald’s political agenda.
But Dippet still let him enroll in their year, and curiously, he was sorted into Slytherin, even though he didn’t seem to have a self-serving bone in his body, nor a single ounce of self-preservation.
Also, the Potter clan—the actual ones, Fleamont and his cousin Charlus—had no fucking clue who Harry was.
*
Fortunately, it doesn’t take Tom very long to figure out the enigma of Harry Potter.
Potter’s mental shields are impenetrable, but Tom doesn’t need legilimency.
He could taste the magical signature hovering in the air around Potter like a golden, delicate cloud of thin-spun sugar.
The same magical signature that Tom recognizes from both his diary and the Gaunt ring, cloying and enticing and terrifyingly dark and so very familiar.
Obviously, Harry Potter is one of Tom’s horcruxes, just like the ring and the diary. And since Tom didn’t create Harry himself, he could only be from the future.
How far in the future, Tom doesn’t know. And given how hostile Potter is to Tom’s cause and everything he believes in, he can’t imagine that Potter is a willing horcrux.
Ergo, at some point in the future, Tom must have created a living, sentient horcrux out of this otherwise unremarkable human child, perhaps by accident, or perhaps to exact revenge on a political enemy.
And then said horcrux had traveled back in time to... do what, exactly? Defeat him?
How laughable.
*
The fact remains though, that Tom has a dilemma on his hands.
He can’t kill Potter, despite how infuriating he is, because he is still a horcrux, one of the few precious anchors of Tom’s immortality.
But he also can’t let Potter roam free spewing his atrocious opinions everywhere.
The only solution, then, is to convert Potter to his side.
*
Potter, unfortunately, has a stupidly rigid moral system and is terribly outspoken about it.
Tom tries to think through every angle where he can exert influence. The question looms large in his mind, until it’s all he can think about these days—how to subdue Potter, how to win him over.
He tries a few things on Potter, to no avail.
Potter couldn’t be bribed (Abraxas had tried); Tom’s impressive grasp of dark magic and the power and respect that he wielded as the heir of Slytherin were lost on him; and he did not respond well to intimidation, given how he had blasted Avery and Rosier halfway down the hall when they tried to corner him on Tom’s request.
What, then, was left?
*
Tom has a realization one day in Potions class. Potter is absolutely hopeless in Potions, so Sluggy had ended up pairing them up to brew the extremely caustic Skele-Gro Potion, hoping that Tom would be able to forestall any brewing-related explosions.
Tom sighs, reaching over to grab Potter’s wrist before he drops the wrong type of chopped lacefly wings into their potion.
Potter has a strange reaction, his face flushing and his breath growing uneven.
Tom, then, realizes that Potter is attracted to him.
How curious.
He experiments a bit more by stroking his fingers, quite gratuitously, along Potter’s uncovered wrist, scraping a nail over Potter’s sensitive pulse point, before Potter jerks his hand out of Tom’s grasp with a glare.
His pupils are large, nearly swallowing the brilliant green irises.
Tom is no stranger to using other people’s attraction to him to his advantage.
That, Tom could work with.
*
Of course, Tom uses magic to help.
He is limited, though, in the magnitude of responses he can induce. It couldn’t be anything too obvious, or Potter would catch on. Nothing that would mark too big of a change in how Potter currently thought of Tom.
But Tom could apply subtle changes, playing on the attraction that was already there, using the horcrux connection to his advantage, sending subtle feelings and emotions across that mental link that Potter would mistake for his own.
Tom would make sure Potter would feel a subtle surge of something good when Tom paid attention to him, and just the smallest touch of discomfort, something subtly bad, when he opposed Tom.
Potter really did seem the type to make decisions with his gut and not his brain.
*
After that, Tom makes sure that he and Potter are paired up in every class they have together, leaving Abraxas and Alphard and Theodorus and the rest of his classmates to scramble and figure out on their own how to reshuffle their groups of 2 and 3 in all the classes where they had spent the last few years trading favors and bickering amongst themselves over who would get to be partnered with Tom in which classes, which typically would have guaranteed them perfect grades in that class without doing any work themselves. Some small scuffles break out when no one wants to be saddled with Crabbe, but Tom can’t be arsed to care.
When Tom leans over to whisper instructions in Potter’s ear during Defense class, he tugs on the feelings of curiously and attraction and interest.
When he lets Potter copy off his Arithmancy homework assignment, he uses the chance to draw on more reassurance and trust than he’d normally be able to inspire in Potter, who’s otherwise perpetually suspicious of anything Tom has to say.
When he finds an excuse to brush a hand over Potter‘s fringe, letting his fingers linger on Potter’s temple for a second too long, he lets a good bit more of lust and raw attraction spill through.
And he adds just a twinge of discomfort when Potter opposes him. More insidious than overt. Not outright pain, nothing too strong or obvious, but the smallest bit of uneasiness, just enough for Potter to question, Why? What’s my gut trying to tell me?
*
A few months later, Tom’s plan is working surprisingly well. He hasn’t had as much time as he would have liked to invest in teaching his Knights dark magic and securing what he hopes will be their lifelong devotion and loyalty—all his planning and scheming is now fully occupied with thoughts on how to carefully and very imperceptibly nudge Harry to align more with Tom’s point of view and interests—but overall, Harry’s behavior was showing much improvement.
Tom, talking cheerfully about how his own grand plans for blood purity went beyond Grindelwald’s master plan. Harry, earlier, would have fought him tooth and nail over it. But now he listens without objecting, even if his expression remains skeptical. Tom reaches over and strokes Harry’s shoulder—friendly, innocent touches that direct the horcrux inside of Harry to respond to the will of its master, its creator, sending signals to Harry to just give Tom a chance—until Harry starts to look more relaxed and agreeable.
Tom, casually theorizing about how to prolong spells of torture before the subject ends up falling unconscious and ending the fun. Harry would normally have blanched and looked horrified. But now he falls silent, merely looking puzzled. Tom reaches over and brushes Harry’s cheek, watching it flush pink under his graze. He doesn’t even need to pull on their horcrux connection that time—that flush was all Harry, in his natural state of attraction to Tom.
Tom, demonstrating dark magic in the Slytherin common room, his eyes daring Harry to threaten to report him, and Harry stopping in his tracks, realizing there’s something in him that doesn’t want to waste all this effort arguing with Tom anymore. Tom lets a wave of endorphins surge through Harry to reward him for not provoking a fight. The net result is Harry feeling really good—satisfied and settled and a little bit turned on by how impressive Tom is when he casts complicated dark magic. He sweetens the reward by flashing Harry an encouraging smile, making sure his dimples are on full display, which makes the tips of Harry’s ears turn red. It’s almost cute.
One time, Tom must have gone too far in describing his grand vision without first giving Harry ample time and opportunity to get sufficiently adjusted to the idea of full eradication of the muggle race. But in the middle of loudly and publicly challenging Tom in front of his Knights, Harry stops in his tracks, a wave of doubt and nausea washing over him, as Tom makes something feel like needles poking out under his skin and dozens of tiny spiders crawling over his skull. By the time the wave passes, they’d moved onto other topics, and Tom knew he needed to more slowly introduce his more radical ideas to Harry.
That was the stick. And now for the carrot.
*
By the time that Tom could corner Harry in their shared dorm room, it was nearly a month after he had started with this particular phase of Harry’s conditioning.
It had taken Tom quite a bit of trial and error to figure out how—in fact, it had consumed him for a period of several weeks during which he couldn’t focus on anything else going on at school until he figured out how to work this tricky bit of Legilimency over their mental link—but he had finally worked out how to exploit their shared horcrux connection and send Harry false visions and dreams.
For a few weeks now, Harry had been waking up every morning to a rush of pleasure, soaked pajama bottoms, and Tom’s name a broken moan on his lips.
Tom would give Harry a knowing look in the morning as he drew open the bedcurtains. Harry would be blushing furiously and unable to meet Tom’s eyes, with the evidence of his wet dreams from the night before still smeared across his stomach. Dreams that Tom had been both the subject and the source of.
One bright weekend afternoon in the spring of their 6th year, when Tom had sent his yearmates out of their dorm room with an express order to not come back in until after dinnertime, he sends a wave of drowsiness over to Harry who’s reading by himself in a corner of the common room.
After Harry gives a sleepy yawn and packs up his books, Tom waits for a few minutes, then quietly slips out of his chair and follows Harry up the winding stairs to their room.
Harry’s already drawn the bedcurtains by the time Tom enters the room, glowing seafoam green in the muted late afternoon sun shining in through the lake.
Tom doesn’t hesitate to push Harry’s bedcurtains aside.
Inside, a disorientated Harry, abruptly shaken out of his afternoon slumber, makes a clumsy grab for his glasses by the side of his pillow and jams them onto his face.
Tom doesn’t give him any time to react. The only thing Harry has time to register is Tom, leaning in, dark eyes glinting, before Tom plants a hot, open-mouthed kiss on him and pushes him flat on his back on the bed, grinding down hard into him.
Tom doesn’t even need to manipulate Harry’s emotional state at this moment—he doesn’t need to send Harry a surge of pleasure and arousal—Harry’s own pent-up sexual frustration already got him there all on his own, his cock instantly rock-hard and jutting up against Tom’s hip by the time that Tom slips his hands under Harry’s shirt.
Harry moans into Tom’s mouth, panting and desperate, as Tom shoves his shirt over his head.
“Wait—wait wait—” Harry pulls back from Tom, shoving a hard hand against his chest.
Tom, in his annoyance, sends a rubber-band snap of pain to the underside of Harry’s balls, making Harry’s hard cock jump and twitch against his leg.
“What?” Tom snaps.
“Just—this is just a lot to take in—” Harry looks like he might be on the verge of some breakdown, his huge green eyes looking increasingly distressed and watery, “—one minute I was asleep, and the next minute, you’re in here, right here—I mean, I thought it was a dream—"
Tom sends a surge of want and longing straight into Harry’s veins, and he feels Harry shudder underneath him, trying to hold himself back from rutting up against Tom’s hard length.
“Harry, you’ve been thinking about this moment for a long time, haven’t you?” Tom responds, voice pitched low and persuasive, running his fingers along Harry’s fringe. He lightly brushes over Harry’s scar, which sends another full-body shudder wracking through Harry’s form.
Harry opens his mouth, and he looks like he’s about to object.
“Don’t lie,” Tom cuts in sharply, sending a spark of discomfort up Harry’s gut. Then he softens his voice and admits in a nice, soft undertone, “I wanted it too, I want you so badly, that’s why I couldn’t resist,” delighting in watching Harry shiver underneath him as he pulls the right emotional strings—plucks some, silences others—to convince Harry to let Tom fuck him.
He plants his mouth back on Harry’s again, shoving his tongue inside of Harry’s barely resisting mouth and grinding down hard on his cock.
Harry whimpers and moans under him, and all his words are muffled, and Tom thinks he hears some variations of “please” and “stop”, but it’s taken Tom many long months to condition the fight out of Harry, and it’s coming back to repay him in spades now, when it’s clear that Harry is frustrated and bewildered by his own inability to control the situation, but doesn’t have it in him to properly fight back and throw Tom off of him.
Tom continues send surges of arousal to Harry as he strips their clothes off, until Harry’s body is burning hot and feverish underneath him, and he keeps moaning like he’s going to die if he has to wait one more second for Tom to touch him.
Tom, smiling coldly, distantly, conjures a magically-constricting band on the base of Harry’s cock, and he touches Harry all he ways he begs for while sending more surges of arousal and heat running through Harry’s bloodstream, driving him madder and madder with the pent-up arousal and frustration.
No matter how hard Tom strokes him off, Harry can’t come, and tears well up and spill out of his eyes with the pain of being denied his orgasm, and Tom can’t even imagine the ache, the soul-deep longing for release, that Harry must be feeling in his cock—leaking all over Tom’s hand, angry, aching, straining—right now.
“That looks painful,” Tom remarks, glancing down to Harry’s swollen and flushed cock, tugging harshly and unrelentingly on it.
“Why can’t I come?” Harry cries, face reddened and splotchy, throwing his head back on the pillow.
Seeing Harry desperate like this—helpless and pinned under him and begging for his release—sends a thrill up Tom’s stomach.
“You can come on my cock,” he says mock-sweetly, smirking down at Harry, who responds by widening his eyes in protest. Even in the muted, dim light of late afternoon, Harry’s eyes look like glowing, bright pools of emerald liquid about to spill over.
“Wait - wait – but - but I—” Harry gasps breathlessly, biting back a moan and trying, futilely, to buck Tom off of him, but all it does is serve as even more stimulation for the slide of their cocks against each other, sparking immeasurably more pleasure between them than if Harry had just held still. “I - I haven’t ever done that, can’t we just—”
“I trust you’ll get the hang of it quite quickly,” Tom says dismissively, already casting lubrication and loosening charms on Harry, not paying attention to Harry’s protests and pleas to just let them take things more slowly.
He grinds his cock down against Harry’s, who cries out and spasms under him with the overwhelmingly pleasurable friction. Sliding his arms upwards along the bed until they’re positioned around Harry’s shoulders and head, he cages Harry to the bed. “You should relax, Harry,” he grins downwards. “It’ll feel so good once you relax, you know it will...”
A vein pulses on Harry’s temple with the exertion of trying to push Tom off, but it doesn’t matter—Tom can tell Harry’s not even really trying. He pushes downwards, sliding slowly into a wet, delicious, tight heat, tighter than anything he’s ever felt around his cock before, biting his lip to keep from moaning out loud in pleasure as he presses into Harry’s body—because that would simply be too embarrassing, to show that he feels just as affected and desperate as Harry does.
“Tom - Tom - wait - this isn’t how I—”
Harry’s protests are bitten off by Tom’s lips descending over his.
Tom is pleased to feel Harry’s hands come up to grip his back and his hips start moving on their own accord, bucking upwards to ensure that Tom thrusts against a sensitive spot deep inside of him, panting heavily and chasing a release that he doesn’t yet realize is not available to him.
“Why - can't - I come?” Harry cries out in frustration, tears spilling down his face, by now moaning more in pain than pleasure. “It hurts so bad – oh god, it hurts so much – I can’t keep – I need to—"
Tom wraps his hand around Harry’s cock and squeezes, which earns him another desperate moan and the most incredible clenching feeling around his cock as Harry seizes up.
“You’ll need to agree to something first,” Tom breathes in Harry’s ear, when he can next speak.
“Tom—fuck—whatever you did to me, just—”
“I want you to master the Unforgiveables.”
“What!?” Harry yelps. He looks so pissed off that he actually stills his hips, and Tom immediately regrets the loss of motion.
“You heard me.”
“What? No! That’s illegal,” Harry argues back.
Tom notices that Harry didn’t say it was wrong, only illegal. “Well, then, I guess we’re done here,” he shrugs, making a move to shift himself off of Harry.
Harry sets his jaw stubbornly and doesn’t stop Tom from pushing himself off.
Tom gives it 5 minutes, starting the process of languidly pulling his clothes back on, all the while sending more waves of painful and overwhelming lust flooding Harry’s every nerve ending as Harry writhes around and moans in agony on his bed, clutching at his aching bollocks, the spikes of pain from being denied his orgasm radiating out along his torso and forcing him to double over with stomach cramps.
Harry cracks in less than 2, begging Tom to come back and fuck him until he comes, and promising to learn whatever dark arts Tom wants him to learn.
Tom takes his sweet time crawling back on top of Harry and pushing himself back into that slick, scorching heat, velvet-soft around his cock, ignoring Harry’s pained whines to (—please, hnnggg god—Tom, ah, please let me—) come.
Tom doesn’t bother with giving a response. He continues thrusting roughly, blindly, into the hot-burning-hot body below his, slamming his hips against Harry’s, as far forward as he can go, bottoming out on every thrust.
A rush of power—of conquest—surges through Tom’s veins, and he feels the heat building in his spine, up and up and—
The white-hot surge of pleasure catches him by surprise—it crashes into him and he can feel his cock pulsing, throbbing, within that slick, tight heat—
And then he’s coming about as hard as he’s ever come before, nearly overwhelmed by the raw, physical pleasure—that indescribable rush from all his nerves lit aflame—but more than anything else, the feeling of triumph bursting like a firework inside his chest.
He collapses on top of Harry, with Harry’s still-hard cock trapped in between them, barely registering Harry’s indignant whimpers sprinkled with the occasional threat to gut Tom if he doesn’t let him come soon.
Only when his heartrate’s come down to the point where he doesn’t feel like his heart is about to explode out of his chest, does Tom remember to cast the spell to vanish the band around Harry’s cock.
When Harry finally finishes, the look of relief—blissful long-awaited relief washing over his face—it almost looks like he’s about to start crying again, face flushed and mortified and looking like his body had betrayed him.
It’s very tiresome, so Tom draws the curtains shut and leaves Harry to it.
*
Tom hears Harry sniffling in his bed at night.
Of course Harry’s conflicted. The emotional conditioning that Tom’s been applying removes some inhibitions and barriers, but it’s impossible to change Harry’s entire personality.
Tom waits 15 minutes and goes to soothe him.
Harry groans upon feeling Tom slip into his bed, but he lets himself be pulled inside of Tom’s arms.
When he slides a hand down the curve of Harry’s arse and slips a finger inside, he finds that Harry’s still slick and loose from earlier that day.
Harry gives a moan, soft and desperate, then stiffens within Tom’s hold and bites down on his bottom lip, looking furious with himself.
At the press of Tom’s second and third fingers inside him, slipping in easily, he tries to shove Tom off and hisses, “Tom, this is—this is wrong, you can’t just crawl into people’s beds and touch them all over without asking—"
“Wrong?” Tom laughs.
As if that could be a deterrent. He continues assailing Harry’s body, touching it everywhere that he pleases.
“You need to stop, Tom, this is really—ah,” Harry gasps as Tom presses his fingers, roughly, possessively, right over his prostate, “—ah, you need consent, you know—it really is a violation—it’s called assault, god, you’re such a wanker—” Harry tries to argue, but his cock, twitching up into Tom’s grasp, responding so beautifully to Tom’s touches, betrays him.
Tom bends down and whispers tauntingly in Harry’s face, “That doesn’t work on me, see? Stop trying to deny it—you know you want it too.”
In all likelihood, Harry doesn’t want it, given the lengths he’d taken to travel back in time and stop Tom.
But Tom makes him want it.
He sends hot, electric spikes of overwhelming arousal, until all of Harry’s nerves are absolutely fried, and his emotions are a tangled snarl of conflicting impulses, up until the second that Harry cracks and gives into that hot desire and everything that his body seems to want, just as Tom knew he would.
Tom shoves himself inside of Harry and fucks into him roughly again, but this time he’s gracious enough to let Harry come first.
When he’s done, he stays buried inside of Harry, wanting to see how long his cock can stay within this warm, tight, perfect spot that feels like it was made just for him.
“Everything you do is so fucked up, you’re the worst person I know, but why does it feel so right when I’m with you?” Harry mutters bitterly into the side of Tom’s neck.
Tom doesn’t bother to dignify that with an answer.
He gives Harry kisses on his brow and cradles his head within his arms and pats his hair and makes soft, shushing sounds in Harry’s ear, all the while sending a rush of relaxation and warmth and well-being flooding through his veins until Harry falls asleep.
*
Whenever Tom grows bored these days (quite often, ever since he’s known he could pass all his NEWTs cold since about halfway through 5th year), he now has a new outlet. A new way to amuse himself that he doesn’t see himself tiring of anytime soon.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to send a sharp surge of arousal in Harry’s direction, a prickle of interest, a curious tingle starting at the base of his cock and stirring it into hardness, like invisible fingers are stroking along the length of it.
Harry would shift uncomfortably in his chair, and Tom would touch his knee or the side of his neck or the small of his back just so, and then they’d invariably find themselves dragging each other into the nearest empty classroom or alcove, limbs tangled together, clashing against each other in open-mouthed kisses that feel more like establishing dominance than anything else.
Wherever the urge strikes Tom as inevitable, he never resists it. He’s found himself caring less and less about exercising impulse control these days anyway. After all, the most powerful people bend the rest of the world to their will.
His favorite thing, lately, is to push Harry until that thin strand of control holding him back snaps. To push Harry until he can’t hold back any longer and he loses all restraint and he flips them over til Tom is crushed underneath that heaving, breathless bulk of muscle and mass (most likely from Quidditch, he thinks... what position could Harry have once played? Beater, perhaps?) and then Harry pushes inside of him and it’s hot hot hot like the fireworks exploding in the sky on his birthday every year that sparks a glowing, white inferno inside of him that doesn’t die down even after Harry’s come is dripping out of him from between his legs when they’re both done and Tom is left feeling strangely bereft and only wanting more.
*
Tom needs to test out this newfound control over Harry in other ways. He makes plans to bring Harry down to the Chamber during their double-free period on a Thursday afternoon, brushing aside Alphard who’d been pestering Tom about sweet-talking Sluggy in letting them host some Ostara ritual before Hogwarts’ spring break, which, in Tom’s opinion, was just an excuse for the blokes in their year to get high on hallucinogenic magical plants and act like idiots for a night.
“Yes, of course, later,” Tom waves him off distractedly, consumed in thought about the afternoon he had planned with Harry—how he would finally get to show Harry the true draw of dark magic, the addictive rush of power and feeling of limitlessness that followed from casting the most powerful dark curses known to wizardkind.
He drags Harry towards the entrance of the girl’s bathroom on the second floor, telling him he has something to show him.
Harry doesn’t at all look surprised to be heading into a girl’s bathroom. Tom figures that if Harry is from the future, he probably already knows about the Chamber; in fact, the Tom of the future may have even taken him there to make Harry into his horcrux. It’s where Tom made his first two horcruxes, after all, so why wouldn’t he have continued that tradition in the future?
Harry follows him silently down the tunnel.
The Chamber was designed to bring in small animals from the Forbidden Forest to keep Slytherin’s beast well-fed for over a thousand years.
Tom draws on that spell now, bringing in rabbits and pheasants and deer from the forest and depositing them in the middle of the chamber floor.
“Harry,” he says, cocking his head and smiling warmly at the horcrux that his future self had created. “You’ve been judging me so much for using dark magic, but I want to give you a chance to try it for yourself, so you can judge me more fairly.”
Harry scoffs. Tom sends a sharp snap of exhilaration racing through Harry’s veins – the high emotional arousal from the idea of doing something forbidden.
Black swallows green as Harry’s pupils involuntarily dilate.
A few pushes more, and Tom knows he can wear Harry down.
He plays up Harry’s more noble feelings—his incredibly foolhardy need to protect and defend others weaker than himself—an instinct that Tom will never understand.
“If you don’t know what dark magic feels like—how to sense the unique magical signatures of these types of spells—how will you defend against it?”
Apparently, this type of idiotic reasoning seems to works for Harry, who is eventually convinced to try learning as much dark magic as he can for the sake of being able to fight dark magic.
(Stupid, Tom thinks.)
After Harry acquiesces, Tom makes sure they have the most exhilarating afternoon—the best experience, he hopes, that Harry’s ever had with casting magic—casting without any limitations, without restrictions.
He shows Harry his favorite spells that he’s taught himself over the years from reading banned texts like Secrets of the Dark Arts, as well as a few more he’s invented on his own.
Seeing Harry—his very own horcrux—cast spells that Tom invented—it feels personal, it feels deeply meaningful in a way that so very few things in Tom’s life do—Tom’s never felt such an ecstatic thrill before.
Their magic synchronizing astonishingly well together, he and Harry send curses swirling around the musty air of the chamber, crackling and electric. The forest animals are rendered apart with gruesome curses of physical destruction, Fiendfyre devouring their remains, and finally, the grand finale, Avada Kedavra to finish off whichever ones were left.
He makes Harry cast Avada Kedavra too.
Harry fails the first few times, but when it works, his eyes light up and glow eerily with an absolutely wild and exhalant kind of triumph, then his expression quickly shutters and he looks terrified with himself.
*
Harry Potter is again making a poor attempt to muffle the soft sniffles that escape the confines of his bed drapes, in the dead of night after all their other roommates have gone to sleep.
It’s been happening more frequently now, ever since they started regularly fucking. Or maybe ever since he’d started dragging Harry down to the Chamber after classes to practice dark magic. Tom hasn’t really kept track. It kind of all happened at the same time.
Another muffled whimper breaks into Tom’s thoughts just as he’s drifting off.
At this rate, he wouldn’t be able to get good sleep again for the rest of the year.
He sighs and goes over to comfort Harry the only way he knows how—by stripping Harry’s clothes off, and stroking his cock until it’s hard and straining in his grasp again, and then fucking him until he’s all out of tears.
He’s not sure what all of Harry’s self-recrimination is even about. Perhaps he still feels regret about getting involved with Tom, even though it’s been months by now?
Tom groans. He may as well ask Harry before they go to sleep. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks, heaving a sigh.
After a while, Harry speaks. “The one thing I could always trust is my gut, but these days...” he trails off. “I think everything you stand for—pureblood supremacy, using the dark arts to torture and kill, the eradication of muggles—is abhorrent, you know,” he says quietly, resolutely, “and I will never stop opposing you.”
That’s fine, Tom thinks. You won’t get very far.
(postlude)
Harry sighs, heavy and burdened, and buries his head into his hands.
It wasn’t supposed to go this far.
He’d just meant to distract Tom, to take his focus off building his base of power amongst the Knights and shift it onto him.
It worked, didn’t it, for Voldemort? Voldemort who should very well have left Harry alone, but instead grew singularly obsessed with defeating Harry Potter in particular that it had led to his downfall. Twice.
Harry, when he was flung back in time to 1944, didn’t have very many tools at his disposal to stop Tom Riddle’s ascent—he had no money, power, or connections, and certainly did not have an advantage over Tom in terms of magical knowledge.
But he did have knowledge of certain things that weren’t yet discovered in 1944. He knew, from the twins’ experiments with love potions for their shop, that Amortentia, when administered in one-tenth the normal dose and slipped in Tom’s morning coffee once every three days, induced a low-level fixation—a mild, addictive fascination that felt more organic and natural—rather than the all-consuming obsession and passion that was a signature of the potion.
In some ways, it was more insidious than the original dosage of Amortentia, since it didn’t bring about major personality changes that would set off alarm bells.
But all Harry needed was that initial push—the first spark of interest that would ensure he’d catch Tom’s eye. He needed Tom to become focused on him without questioning it—for his ambitions to center around owning and possessing and molding Harry, who’d continue to distract Tom by constantly opposing and arguing with him—and for Tom’s other plans to fall by the wayside.
It was risky to paint a target on his own back. But he needed to ensure that the building blocks of Voldemort’s ascent—the critical foundation that Tom Riddle had laid during his time at Hogwarts, gathering allies from families that would eventually become his most loyal supporters, the Malfoys, the Blacks, the Lestranges, amongst others—would be disrupted.
And it worked, for the most part.
Tom, this year, had barely paid attention to the Knights he had painstakingly spent the last few years gathering to his side—distracted by, and blind to, his increasingly all-consuming obsession with trying to control Harry.
On the other hand, Harry, for his part, had expected to like Tom, remembering the charming, well-spoken, and handsome boy he’d met from the diary.
But he wasn’t supposed to grow addicted to Tom’s touches, unable to resist the slide of Tom’s warm, bare flesh against his nearly every night. And he really wasn’t supposed to think that it was hot whenever Tom started talking about horrific things like subjugating muggles or joked about murdering people.
And he certainly wasn’t supposed to love the feeling of casting dark magic, the addictive thrum of it singing under his skin, sinking its claws into the cracked edges of his heart and growing into a living, breathing part of him that demanded to be fed with more dark spells.
Some days, he felt like his body and his emotions were out of his control—that he was losing himself—losing his sense of self, his moral compass.
It must have been the side effects of the dark magic. All the dark magic he’d spent the last few months immersed in, practicing and perfecting under Tom’s cajoling and tutelage, eating him up from the inside out. It was the price he had to pay for distracting Tom from his other plans.
That had to be it. What else could it be?
He hated it – he hated it – he hated it – until a switch flipped on, and he loved it.
He loved the feeling of casting all kinds of curses—destruction and torture and murderous intent all raining like hellfire from his wand—spending hours and hours down in their own secret world in the Chamber away from everyone else.
He hadn’t expected to actually like any of it. He wished, futilely, he didn’t constantly crave Tom’s touch, stoking a fire deep inside him, just as much as he craved the rush of power, the feeling of wildness, that swept him up when he cast one of the Unforgiveables.
Some days, his emotions and reactions were unrecognizable to himself.
It was incredibly disorienting, not knowing how he’d react to anything, not knowing if he could trust his gut.
Doing things that he knew were wrong but still felt so good.
But he was utterly isolated and had no one in this time and place other than Tom—was it any wonder that he was starting to lose it?
As long as he continued occupying the greater part of Tom’s attention and focus, then everything was going great, Harry reassures himself. Everything was going according to plan.