Chapter Text
They found him in an old house, under the stairs.
They were called in because ‘there was a big deal’. Rupert, an old Ministry worker and liaison between the international governments, was smoking and waiting for them when he arrived, surrounded by his workers that were looking rather worried. He said, “Eighty years later and Grindelwald’s still packing a punch stronger than I could dream of.”
“This is Grindelwald’s?” Ron said. Harry looked at the house for a sign of the hallows, Grindelwald’s symbol.
Rupert said, “We were called in to bulldoze this thing, but we’d rather not risk it if there’s something nasty sleeping in there.”
At his peak, Grindelwald had been incredibly powerful. Lucid and incredibly powerful. Anything that he had created could be deadly. “Okay,” Harry said, and ordered their team to secure the perimeter. The property was small, suburban, squatting in an old part of Germany. “Is there anything else I should know about this place?”
“Concealment charm wore off recently,” Rupert said. “On the documents too. Dated for 1945.”
Half an hour later, Harry gave up and called a German Ministry curse-breaking team to come in. They began to work on unravelling the front door. His own men were at the ready. Rupert’s workers had gone home, but Rupert was still there, just to oversee.
“How did you know this was Grindelwald's?” Harry asked him.
“The deeds are under your name. That's why we called you.“ Before Harry could say anything, he said, “They were under Grindelwald’s, then Dumbledore’s, then passed to you. Technically this is yours.”
“Clear!” someone yelled, and the front door swung open. “All enchantments and curses to keep something in,” Harry was briefed as they entered. "We couldn't have opened it otherwise. We should be on our guard.”
Another wizard sent forward a sweeping charm, suffusing the rooms with golden light. They searched the place high and low but found nothing. Dust created a carpet on the floor and then more. Nothing was inside the building. There were no stovetops, no sinks, no bookcases, no singular piece of furniture, even though there was a set of stairs that led into equally, utterly, empty rooms. There were no relics nor weapons being concealed, but a sense of magic hung throughout the place, heavy and bloated. No one could pinpoint where it was, not even Harry.
Until a shout broke out. “We need Healers! There’s someone in here, under the stairs!” They emerged in a swirl of disturbed dust, holding a boy no older than eighteen, completely bare. His face was pale and instantly recognisable. “He’s under stasis! We need him in a hospital and examination room, stat!”
Harry rushed outside and tried to breathe. Ron followed him out.
“Harry, you alright?” Ron said.
Voldemort had died six years ago. Harry had killed him in Hogwarts for the final time. “I’m hallucinating,” Harry said, frantically, just as they carried the boy out. Suddenly there was this thunderous noise, like millions of trees rustling, magic unfurling, and the house simply unravelled into ash. Everyone turned to look, and for a heart-stopping moment Harry thought that the boy would be gone too, but he wasn’t. In fact, he had started breathing, and his eyes had opened, dark and unseeing.
*
“It can’t be Tom Riddle,” Hermione said. She had paced the length of the room at least twenty times now.
“It might be,” Ron said.
“How?” Hermione rounded on him. "Harry destroyed all of his horcruxes. We all saw him die! Even if someone went and fetched him out of time, it wouldn’t make sense to just— put him in an old building!”
“The deed was under Harry’s name," Ron said darkly. “So someone wanted us to find him.“
“That makes even less sense! If they wanted to revive Voldemort, why put him right into the hands of the person who’d killed him last time?”
Harry rubbed at his head. There came a knock on the door, and the two of them fell instantly silent. “Auror Potter and Auror Weasley, sirs, the patient’s woken up.”
Hermione shot him a worried look as he got to his feet. “If he tries to hurt you two…”
“Then we know for sure,” Harry said. The Healers had told him that there were no lingering curses on the boy. The Spell-making department had an entire conniption over the stasis that Riddle had been under and the enchantments attached to him. Apparently they had been legendary. State-of-the-art. And it required a life source to run. The entire house must’ve been bound to him, like a battery.
Tom Riddle himself looked exactly as Harry recalled and chased away any of his lingering doubts. His face was simply unforgettable, no matter how much time Harry put between them, and it was marred with a small frown. “Hello?” he said, and sounded authoritative despite just waking up from an era of sleep in a hospital bed. “Who are you? Why am I here?” He glanced at the Healer that was monitoring his equipment.
“Auror Potter and Auror Weasley representing the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. You were found in an abandoned building. What do you remember? Do you have any idea what happened to you or how you got there?”
His expression did not change. "May I talk to somebody else first?”
“Absolutely,” Harry said. “If you give us a name, we’ll do our best to–“
“Dumbledore. Albus Dumbledore.”
Silence filled the room. “I’m afraid he’s dead,” Harry said.
Riddle did not say anything for a while. He just stared at Harry, and his expression shuttered like someone inside had quietly shut the blinds. Harry felt like a storm had started somewhere in his stomach. “We have reason to believe that you were in stasis for a long time,” Harry said. “What year do you remember it being?“
“I don’t know,” Riddle said, and Harry heard Ron cough lightly in disbelief behind him. Riddle’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s 2004,” Harry said. “Do you have any family or friends who you would like to contact to remain in their care?”
Truth to be told, Harry did not know what he would do if Riddle named a family that was still alive. But Riddle shook his head, so Harry nodded with as much curt professionalism as he could muster.
“Until you’re reacclimatised, you'll remain as my ward. If you would prefer another figure of authority to-“
“No,” Riddle said, and his original arrogant persona wrapped around him once more, though Harry noticed that he concealed his hands, which might’ve been shaking. “Do you think you could take me out of here yet? I’ve spent enough time in enough cramped rooms.”
After the Healer assured him that Riddle was, indeed, in decent health — stasis notwithstanding, and she mentioned magical malnutrition briefly and left him instructions to eat and rest — Harry left to pick up and fill out the necessary forms for taking in Riddle. He would be back for the boy himself again later. Ron went to fill Hermione in on the details. It occurred to Harry, when sending the paperwork to Robards, that he should find some clothes for Riddle to wear.
He needn’t have worried, however, because when he returned, apparently someone had already brought him some. Riddle was sitting atop the hospital bed, just looking at the sheets, smoothing them over with his hands occasionally. “Hey,” Harry said, even though he didn’t think that Riddle hadn’t noticed his entrance. “Let’s go.”
Riddle’s legs were lanky, coltish. It was a bizarre thing to notice, but there was nothing else to do in the elevator than look at him. Harry assumed he was around eighteen. He was much taller than Harry already, but had this look about him that suggested he wasn’t altogether familiar with his adult body. “You never gave us your name,” Harry realised.
“Tom,” Riddle said.
“I can call you Tom?” Harry said. His surprise must’ve shown, because Riddle looked at him.
“Yes,” Tom said, in a tone that suggested he thought Harry was odd. “That’s my name. Of course you may.”
*
Tom did nothing at Harry’s home but sit in the living room. He made no comment on the muggle furniture, nor the humbleness of Harry’s dwellings. He sat there for hours and looked out the window while Harry typed up reports to his superiors. He was a very unobtrusive presence, and he offered to help cook when Harry began making dinner, but Harry insisted that he was a guest. Tom returned to the living room seat, then, and when Harry came over to tell him that supper was ready, he found that Tom had fallen asleep. He slept in an odd way — he put his legs up onto the seat by his chest and buried his face into his knees.
Harry looked at him for a while, unsure what to make of all this, then went upstairs to fetch a blanket to cover him with and continue typing. This was a good time to get all of his procrastinated paperwork done. Tom woke soon after and seated himself at the table to eat. Harry went to reheat the stew he’d made.
“You haven’t asked me about anything. Aren’t you curious about what’s happened in the years when you were in stasis?” Harry asked.
“I will be, later,” Tom said.
Harry began to ladle him stew, but Tom insisted on doing it himself. Harry noticed that he ate very little.
“You didn’t even ask how Dumbledore died.”
“I didn’t need to ask. It was at Grindelwald’s hand, no?” Tom said. Harry stared at him, trying to parse what would possibly make Tom think that. Tom stared right back. He seemed perplexed by Harry’s shock.
“Grindelwald died in 1945,” Harry said slowly.
“That’s impossible.”
Harry did not want to pressure him, so all he did was shrug. But Tom had diverted all of his focus to Harry now.
“He couldn’t have died,” Tom repeated.
“Everything dies eventually.”
“Not everything.” Tom sounded very self-assured, but Harry knew his history inside-out. Tom Riddle had made his first horcrux at sixteen. There was no doubt that this past-Tom had already created one. Presumably this was at the peak of his ambitions, when he was all-loved at Hogwarts, gathering his army, and was achieving what wizards could never dream to achieve. Presumably this was also where the arrogance stemmed from.
“Are you talking about horcruxes?" Harry said. He could feel his own temper stirring.
He expected Tom to be surprised. Tom raised a cool eyebrow and said, “So horcruxes are common knowledge in this time. Then–“
“I mean yours, Tom,” Harry said. "Yours have all been destroyed.”
Tom said nothing. He had stopped eating. He was staring at his stew with great concentration.
“What?” he asked, quietly, clearly knowing that he was admitting to having horcruxes. “Was it Slughorn? Dumbledore? How could they– why would they–“
It hit Harry like a ton of bricks. This was eighteen-year-old Tom, one that had no idea what his future self would wreak. But why hadn’t this Tom considered the possibilities? All that ambition, surely it would have struck him that his future self would have–
“But you’re lying to me,” Tom said, lifting his eyes to meet Harry’s. “I only ever made one horcrux.”
Tom’s eyes were very dark. Then Harry remembered eye contact, Legilimens, the instant his mind exploded with razor blades. On instinct his hands flew up to clasp his scar, but it wasn’t the scar that was on fire, it was his mind. Tom was trying to rifle into it, tear through Harry’s mental barriers like a scorching hand. Harry hadn’t been prepared the first time, but on Tom’s second assault, he pulled all his years of training into a cold steel core and caged Tom in.
“I know this is how you’re used to doing things,” Harry growled. He was going to need to put down some ground rules. Tom was looking at him, his lips tight, eyebrows furrowed into concentration. “But don’t try to read my mind again. I’m not above hurting you if you do.”
Tom seemed to get over the hurdle of Harry’s Occlumency skills quickly, because he recovered and said, “But it can’t be true. I only made one.”
“The diary?” Harry asked acerbically. Tom no longer looked surprised whenever Harry revealed knowledge. But already Harry had gauged that Tom was too young, too inexperienced, to be the Dark Lord that he was truly familiar with. “You made six more, Tom. Don’t you remember being obsessed with making seven?”
Tom frowned. “Prove to me you’re not lying,” he said.
Harry had a Pensieve upstairs.
*
Tom did not talk much in the aftermath of witnessing glimpses of history. He’d pulled himself from the Pensieve after viewing only four of the Horcruxes being destroyed by Harry and skipping to their final duel at Hogwarts. He barely finished his stew, which had long gone cold, washed his dishes, dried them, and then mechanically returned to the living room chair and stared at the wall. Harry watched him for a while and then returned his own work. By now, the sun had fallen, and crickets had began to chirp outside. Harry sent a detailed message both to Hermione and Ron and then considered going to bed for the evening.
He massaged his head. He should have expected the attempted Legilimency. It was his own mistake for being off-guard. He got up from his laptop, stretched, and went to check on Tom. Tom was lightly dozing and both had his legs pulled up to his chest and blanket up to his chin, but he opened his eyes when Harry approached.
“I can show you the guest bedroom," Harry said.
Tom’s dark eyes caught what little light there was. Glistening sclera. “You killed me,” he said.
Harry’s wand was in his back pocket. Tom didn’t even have a wand. Tom was eighteen. Harry was twenty-four, and had killed him multiple times already. He was not afraid.
“What are your intentions with me now? Are you going to kill me again?”
Harry said, “I was planning to send you back in time.”
“I thought so,” Tom said. He looked up at Harry.
Suddenly, Harry, with a gut-sickening lurch, felt a flare of arousal simply because Tom Riddle was looking up at him. Nothing in his eyes even implied eroticism. Harry simply hadn’t slept with anyone in a long time. The low standard of a handsome boy looking up at him got him going. It faded within a second.
“But I’m not out of time,” Tom said, knowing nothing of Harry’s momentary lapse of all reason. “Grindelwald caught me when I was sixteen. I cast the stasis on myself.”
“What?” Harry said.
Somewhere inside, dreadfully, it began to come together.
“There was no time turner. There was no ritual. I was there the whole time,” Tom said. “All sixty-one years.”
“But you were in Hogwarts. Voldemort was active in that time.”
Tom tilted his head and regarded him.
“Unless—“ Harry said. “That was another part of you– another part of your soul– the horcruxes-“
“You know how a Horcrux is made, don’t you? You start with a murder to split your soul. But there’s more than one way to split someone's soul. Brute force.”
Suddenly, sixteen seemed very, very, young.
Tom’s soul had been split. Supposedly it must have already been fractured after he’d made his first horcrux so it was easier to break. But— “Grindelwald split your soul again,” Harry said. “Why?” To let it roam the world in an identical body so that Tom’s capture would go unnoticed? Grindelwald had been powerful enough to raise the dead. Harry wouldn't be surprised if he managed to create a body for Tom's soul to roam in. No wonder Voldemort had become so deformed at the end. The body had been wholly unnatural.
Tom said, expressionless, “To make room for his own. That’s why Grindelwald can’t be dead, you see. I’m his horcrux.”
*
Harry could not sleep that night. He updated his friends once more and began to seriously consider bringing the situation to greater authorities, but there was no one who was as familiar with Tom Riddle’s past as him. Harry was the best candidate — safety-wise, and mentality-wise — to handle him. The fact remained, however, that Tom housed a part of Grindelwald’s soul. It was the matter of not one, but two of the deadliest Dark wizards of all time and that both were somehow still alive. In a fashion.
Harry paced, and paced some more. If his memory of the functionality of horcruxes was correct, after death, the spirit remained tethered to the mortal plane, and would slowly, slowly grow in power, possessing small creatures. Voldemort had gained a jumpstart at the time because Quirrell and Nagini had found him. This meant that Grindelwald was probably drifting around somewhere. Sixty-one years.
There was still too much beyond that to think about. Tom had been in that house for a long time. The house had been so small, so empty, and he’d cast the stasis on himself. It must’ve been wandless magic. If he’d this was his soul split after his first horcrux — if the Voldemort that the world had so feared was only a part of his soul, Tom’s power was incomprehensible.
Harry sat up from bed abruptly. He got into his slippers and left his bedroom, which was heavily warded already, but he would want Hermione to come in tomorrow to add an extra ring. The stairs creaked as he came down them, and as he reached the guest bedroom and looked inside, he found that Tom was no longer in the bed. His insides froze to stone. He forced himself to calm down and think. Tom didn’t have a wand yet. He’d just woken up from a long stasis. He’d been sleeping all afternoon. There was no way he had regained enough power to escape Harry’s house without alerting any of the wards. The wards around Harry’s property were nigh impenetrable.
Harry stood at the base of the stairs, thinking about the way Tom had slept all afternoon. Then he stopped breathing altogether. He had a cupboard under his stairs. He’d found it awful when he first moved in and never put anything in there because all he could remember were the Dursley’s.
When he found Tom in the cupboard, curled up so he could fit, asleep — and it was absurd, really. Tom was much too big to fit in there, so much taller than Harry, and he looked so terribly uncomfortable. How could he possibly sleep like that—
Harry had to bite his own fist to stop himself from making a noise in the sudden maelstrom of unnamable, unfathomable emotion inside him.
*
Harry asked Tom over breakfast how Grindelwald had caught him. Tom said that he didn’t eat breakfast. Harry had forced toast onto his plate anyway, and now Tom was bound by politeness to finish it, or something else. Harry suspected that, like in his own youth, Tom could not bring himself to waste food.
“I was sent back to the orphanage every summer,” Tom said. “Dumbledore must have mentioned me — my probing into the Dark arts, my skills — to Grindelwald. He took me during a bomb raid. Mrs Cole would’ve just assumed that I died, and if I came back later, she would’ve assumed that I’d gone to a further shelter or been injured.”
No matter how he tried, Harry could not find his appetite. “That was why you wanted to find Dumbledore as soon as you woke up? Revenge?”
“He’s dead,” Tom said.
“You didn’t answer the question."
“It really doesn’t matter,” Tom said.
“It does,” Harry said shortly. “Because if you go murdering and hurting people, I’m going to kill you again.”
“Human beings have all form of coping mechanisms,” Tom said, with just a lick of anger. “Love is one. Hate is another. I find myself much more amenable to hate, as I’m sure you’re well aware. I clung onto hate to maintain me for two years before I cast a stasis on myself. Being robbed of a coping mechanism is no easy thing.“
He stabbed his toast with a fork, then ate a large bite out of it. Harry watched him eat.
“Do you want some tea?” Harry asked.
“Forget the damn tea.”
Harry went to put on the kettle to calm himself down. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he said. “You should be charged and trialled for the murder of Myrtle and involvement in illicit Dark arts.”
Tom glowered at the table. Harry poured him some tea. At least Tom was much more open than yesterday. It seemed that, after admitting the truth about the house, he was more argumentative. Perhaps he was trying to provoke a rise out of Harry.
“Stop trying to feed me.”
“It’s just tea,” Harry said, and poured himself a cup too. Tom watched him do it. Harry made himself tea nearly every morning. He’d made the switch from coffee a few years ago. It was simply something, he assumed, that happened as one aged.
However, there was something deeply pleasing about forcing Tom into doing things that were good for him that he reluctantly accepted. Harry did not know how to begin inspecting that urge.
“Do you really believe in the justice system so strongly?” Tom said.
“Yes,” Harry said, very calmly.
For a moment Tom’s hand clenched around his knife. Then, slowly, it relaxed. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” Tom said.
They finished the rest of their meal in silence. Since it was a weekend, Harry prepared to do the chores. He filled a bucket up with soapy water and fetched the mop. Tom did not question him. He’d just washed up on his own dishes and then lingered near Harry, in the kitchen, then the living room. Harry vacuumed the carpeted areas, such as the stairs and the guest bedroom. He used a cloth to wipe dust off the shelves. At one point Harry asked Tom if he wanted to help because Tom kept lingering in the periphery, and Tom said yes, so Harry had him clean the stovetops and the oven grates.
At noon, when they were preparing lunch (a potato salad, along with bread rolls), a knock came on the door. Harry had been expecting Ron and Hermione, so he invited them in. Ron sent a perplexed look at the Dark Lord chopping potatoes.
“We’re going to have to file a Ministry report so we can pull resources to start a search for Grindelwald,” Hermione said briskly, opening her laptop. She wasn’t an Auror; she was the Deputy Head of Magical Law Enforcement and had ties all throughout the Ministry’s sectors, such as the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes and the Department of International Cooperation. She was much more administratively capable than they were.
Tom glanced at them and asked Harry if it were alright to leave the rest of lunch preparation to him. Harry said that it was fine, so Tom retreated to the guest room to give them the illusion of privacy.
“I want to keep a lid on the horcrux situation,” Harry said.
“Absolutely not.”
“At least the identity of the horcrux."
Hermione shot him a sharp look, then relented and began to type. “As long as we can authorise it under your name. They’ll just assume that you came to it when you were going through Dumbledore’s things, which… isn’t far from the truth, I suppose. But they’ll be expecting you to have destroyed the horcrux.”
“I know,” Harry said. “I’ll figure it out.”
*
Some time later, Harry had Hermione up in his room, re-working his wards. He’d asked Ron to deliver lunch to Tom and check in on him, which Ron had grumbled but reluctantly accepted now that most of the discussion with the logistics was done. Hermione visibly relaxed once she crossed the threshold of his bedroom’s wards.
“Are you sure it’s safe to leave Ron down there?” she asked.
“The most he did was Legilimens me," Harry said. “Ron would be able to fight it off for long enough for us to get downstairs, but I think Tom’s smart enough to know that the consequences would be fatal anyway.”
“Harry,” she said, frowning.
“I know,” he said. “I feel bad for him, but not bad enough not to kill him. I wouldn’t send him to Azkaban. Instead I could deal with both birds with one stone. I’d destroy both the Horcrux and Voldemort.”
“They certainly wouldn’t be able to hold him at Azkaban,” Hermione agreed faintly. She scanned his wards up and down, then sighed and consulted some of the books she’d brought for this very reason.
“I think he’s in shock,” Harry said.
“Shock?” Hermione said. “I’m not sure it's shock.” She had been turning a page.
“Not shock, sorry. I think there’s some sort of…” He rubbed at his head. This last day had been frustrating. “Well, last night when I went to check on him he was sleeping in the cupboard beneath the stairs, for God’s sake.”
Hermione stopped and looked at him with a terribly concerned expression. “I’m really sorry, Harry. That had to have been upsetting for you.”
“It wasn’t really– it’s different.” Harry said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“If what he said was true, he was practically in solitary confinement for two years before he put himself under stasis,” Hermione said. “Did you know that a lot of people in extended solitary confinement go mad? There’ve been a lot of Muggle studies on that sort of sensory deprivation. Anxiety, panic, aggression, depression, and that’s not even starting on the physical damage. And worst of all, he’s young. It’s particularly damaging to juveniles because they’re developing.”
She turned around after he hadn't answered for some time to see him sunken into his chair. “On one hand I’m willing to kill him,” Harry said, exhausted, “and on the other– he was sixteen. ‘Mione, when we were sixteen…”
She looked awfully sad.
Suddenly overcome by terrible emotion, Harry said, “We were solving mysteries. We went to Hogsmeade and ate sweets. I had a Firebolt and I was playing Quidditch every weekend and getting to fly while he was in an empty room for two years. How can I think about that, Hermione? I just can’t."
"I'm sorry, Harry," Hermione said. "I'd tell you that you could try to focus on the other parts, but I know you won't. You're like that."
*
The couple offered to stay the night, but Harry declined, and soon after they left, Tom emerged. All he did was clamber onto the living room seat — it was huge, plush, personally Harry’s favourite — and sink in and close his eyes. He looked exhausted.
Harry looked inside the guest room to find that Tom hadn’t finished his salad. So Harry took it outside and put it next to his armchair and went to clean up everything else. He scrubbed the plates clean and then went to take the laundry out. He’d put his things into the washing machine earlier in the day. He’d need to get Tom more clothes at some point, he realised. Harry’s wouldn’t fit him.
When he came back indoors, Tom was watching him. “Why do you do all your chores by hand?” he asked. “You’re wasting your life.”
“I’m not in a rush to do anything,” Harry said.
“You could be furthering your occupation as an Auror. You could be developing a hobby. You could be reading, drawing, learning an instrument, acquiring a new language—"
“But would any of those really make me any happier?” Harry said. “I’m content as things are now. I’m content just to be.”
“You sound like Dumbledore.”
“Do you still have ambitions?" Harry said. He settled down into the seat opposite Tom and fixed him with a very level stare. “Is getting an Outstanding in all of your subjects still appealing? Or having a professor think that you’re so charming and clever? Or having people treat you like some sort of hero? Sometimes all those things fall away, Tom, and you’re happy enough with yourself to let yourself drift with the current.”
Tom gave a small snort of derision. "'Happy with myself’? Do you hear what delusion you’re spouting?”
Harry stood. Tom looked up at him again, a spark of defiance in his expression, and Harry felt that throb of pulse of entirely misplaced arousal. Whenever Tom looked up at him he just– he wanted–
Tom must've seen it in his expression, but he didn't smirk. Instead, he inhaled sharply as though shocked and parted his legs, just the slightest.
“Come on,” Harry said instead, tearing his gaze away. Do not. Do not. “I’m going to take you somewhere.”
*
Tom did not say much on their journey there, considering all Harry did was walk them outside the anti-Apparating wards, grab Tom’s arm, and vanish with a crack!
Upon landing on a paved road, Tom tried to rip his arm away from Harry, but Harry kept an iron-clad hold on him. “Tom,” Harry said impatiently. They were in public. “Behave.”
For some reason that made Tom still, although Harry could sense a silent tension in him. It was so unexpected that Harry jerked around to look at him. Tom was blushing, just the slightest, high on his cheekbones. Harry thought for a moment he was hallucinating.
“No one orders me,” Tom snarled, though the effect was somewhat diminished by the blush creeping up his ears. “You don’t have that sort of power.“
Harry glanced around. They were on a busy street. He’d taken them into the Magical shopping districts of London, but there were plenty of alleys that would serve him well. When he was looking, Tom jerked out of his grip and took off. With a crack Tom Disapparated, wandlessly. The fucker. Pity was the furtherest thing from Harry's mind right then. Tom manipulated pity. Harry, blood running so high and fast through his chest because this was beyond idiotic and utterly crazy for him to be allowing to happen, heart pounding at the thought of catching Tom Riddle, handsomer than he had any right to be, grabbed those threads of magic, felt their frequency, and Apparated instantly to follow.
He practically crashed into Tom; he had landed were somewhere in the wilderness (Albania, he recognised, somewhere deep in his bones) and seized him not just around the arm but by the shoulders and — while Tom was taller, he was just an eighteen-year-old orphan that’d grown up in the dregs of the Great Depression and the jaws of World War Two whereas Harry was a twenty-four-year-old Auror in his prime at peak magical and physical health — Apparated again, dragging Tom with him to slam him against an alley wall that rocked all the air out of Tom’s lungs.
Harry, half red-hot furious that Tom had tried to escape and half coldly calculated that he’d let Tom go, power laced into his tone reminiscent of the dragon he’d freed from Gringotts, bellowed, “DOWN.” Tom dropped to his knees so fast that his legs might as well have been cut.
Harry grabbed Tom’s face, curling his fingers under Tom’s jaw. “I told you to behave.”
Tom’s breath was coming fast. “I was quite well-mannered,” he said.
“I was going to get you something nice here, but I changed my mind.”
Tom just stared up at him, lips parted because he was panting so loudly. He was panting because he was so desperately aroused and his eyes wide and fixed on Harry. He grabbed Harry’s legs tightly.
Harry was straining the front of his pants but he was not– he was absolutely not going to tell Tom to something so vulgar as suck his cock here in a London alley.
Harry didn’t make a move, didn’t tell Tom to stop as he slowly slid his knee between Harry’s feet and — Harry wondered briefly if he'd lost his mind — but, unmistakably, began rutting up against his leg. It was hard to believe that he would be a Prefect and Head Boy, let alone a Dark Lord, when he was so flushed red and he looked so young and his panting had turned into small throat-noises that anyone else would describe as whimpers.
A voice much like Hermione’s was screaming with meek terror in Harry’s head.
Tom thrust forward, his hand clutching up higher on Harry’s thigh, closer, and Harry’s dick jumped at the touch, and he couldn’t hold back the race of his heart, his own laboured breathing when Tom struck up a rhythm humping Harry’s leg and his eyelids fluttered with the sensation. Harry could feel Tom’s erection, impossibly hard, pressed up and sliding against his calf. Harry didn’t do anything. He just watched, his grip on Tom’s face loosening, completely enthralled as Tom came to a peak. He buried his nose in the front of Harry’s trousers and Harry couldn’t help but buck forward, and Tom latched onto—
Harry’s pocket, his wand, Tom's hand, searching for it— and he could almost laugh at the hysterical notion of the double-entendre–
He flung Tom’s wrists off with magic and then grabbed him with his bigger rougher callused hands and threw Tom back, pinned him against the ground as Tom whined loudly and thrashed because he was coming in his pants like a touch-starved, inexperienced teenager, his mouth open and gasping and wet and just asking to be violated.
Harry’s head screamed a mantra that repeated something like ‘do not pull down your pants and jerk yourself off so you can come all over Tom Riddle’s face, do not, even though you want to mark his slandering cursing mouth and have it caught his fucking eyelashes and in his coiffed fucking hair–’
The Hermione-like voice in his head had risen to full-blown horror, at this point.
*
Tom had gone to sleep almost immediately after the incident. Harry had Apparated them back to his home and put him to bed and then sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his hands and his erection in dismay. He’d had a traumatised Tom Riddle in his house for just over one day and had immediately engaged in sexual relations with him. Harry had to transfer him away immediately. But that was dangerous because Tom was uncontrollable, would escape, and likely devolve into his old ways. Harry needed Hermione and Ron or someone to live with him to keep his impulses under control.
Harry did tend to get a bit rough in the sack, but the last he remembered, that was years ago with Ginny, and maybe the occasional tryst with a wizard or witch or both. But he was The Boy Who Lived. He had a reputation. And he’d just let the young Dark Lord hump his leg until he came, for fuck’s sake. He hadn’t known— he hadn’t realised just how much it turned him on when he had someone to debauch. The more prim, the more proper, the more fiery, the more untouchable, the better.
“Oh my god,” Harry whispered. “I’m depraved.”
He looked at Tom, sleeping, looking positively innocent, his hair now mussed, a streak of dirt on his ear, and immediately felt his dick pulse in his trousers. He hadn't come earlier.
Harry got up. He went to the kitchen to shakily pour himself some water and stare into his front garden for a while, trying to collect himself. Tom Riddle had just suffered from some form of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation for two years. He had woken up in the future, completely untethered. Any individuals that he could’ve sought revenge on (Grindelwald, Dumbledore) had already passed away. He could not return to the system without being discovered as a younger form of the previous Dark Lord. He would’ve been in emotional turmoil. Harry, the one responsible for re-acclimatising him, or killing him, had just suffered from a major brain aneurysm and replaced his logical faculties with libido instead.
An owl tapped at the window. It was carrying a manila envelope. Harry opened the window, thanked the owl, paid it a knut from a pot that he kept by the window, and took the envelope. It was from the Ministry. Harry’s gut sank. It was impossible, but his immediate thought was that somehow, someone must’ve found out.
He sat down at the living room table and opened the file. It was from St. Mungo’s. It was the detailed report of Tom’s state after they examined him.
Harry stared at it for a long time, then put it away upstairs, quietly.
*
Harry, unfortunately, did not stop fucking Tom Riddle. In fact, he made it notably worse, because as soon as Tom emerged from the guest bedroom, Tom asked, “What were you trying to buy for me in the first place?”
“A pet snake,” Harry said.
Tom looked genuinely surprised by that, as though he’d never thought about it. He didn’t know how to make himself happy, Harry had realised, earlier.
“What would’ve given you inspiration for that?”
His hair was wet. He must’ve taken a shower. Harry hadn’t bought him clothes. He was wearing the same shirt and trousers from earlier, but he soiled his underwear because he'd come in them. So he must not be wearing any now. Harry tried not to think about that and failed.
“Voldemort’s snake,” Harry said. "You saw her briefly in the Pensieve. Nagini.”
“Nagini?” Tom said. His tone clearly displayed recognition. Harry hadn’t realised that Tom knew of her so early. “You thought a simple garden-variety snake would be able to replace Nagini?”
“You liked talking to snakes when you were younger,” Harry said, and dismissed the clear invitation for an argument.
Tom stood at the head of the table, at a loss, before he sat in one of the chairs.
“Besides, I was going to pick up a Horned Serpent egg, not a garden variety snake.” He looked over at Tom, who was looking at Harry’s hair, which must’ve been a mess.
“Is Nagini alive?”
“No,” Harry said. “You made her into one of your horcruxes, so she died.”
“Are you accusing me of her death?” Tom shot back, temper suddenly flaring.
“It’s fact. She died because she was your horcrux. She wouldn't have been a target otherwise.”
“She lived because of me.”
Harry looked at him and didn’t meet his anger. Harry wasn’t in the mood to be angry. He was still thinking about the file he’d read earlier.
“I met her at Hogwarts,” Tom barrelled on. “She was a Maledictus and I’d just happened to run into her, and when she realised I was a Parseltongue, that when the blood curse stopped being controllable, I would be the last to ever understand her or talk to her. To her, I would be the last human left in the world. If she didn’t have that, she told me, she would simply kill herself before the blood-curse completed.”
He was trying to get a reaction out of Harry. Desperate, even. Harry realised suddenly that Tom must’ve felt rather bereft. Harry had witnessed him very vulnerable earlier and then had not acknowledged it. It could've seemed like abandonment. It must’ve been unsettling Tom.
“All those years trapped alone would've been very hard,” Harry said. Even if he'd meant Nagini trapped in snake form, he knew how Tom would interpret it. As him.
Tom’s expression immediately shut down. He stood from his chair and tried to return to the guest room, except Harry wordlessly lassoed him with magic and yanked him back across the table.
A series of spells erupted soundlessly and harmlessly in the shields that Harry Conjured around them. Tom made to rise, except Harry was already above him, pinning him down.
“I see you baiting for a fight," Harry said. “You beg for me to make you vulnerable and hold you down, but try to run as soon as we start talking about vulnerabilities. Do you not know how to open up unless it’s for sex?”
Tom opened his mouth and then said nothing. His eyes were so wide. His breath was coming fast and Harry could already feel Tom’s erection pressing up against his leg. “Or do you just have a thing for how much stronger I am than you?” Harry demanded. “I bet you’ve never experienced that, have you?”
There were wizards, two dead ones, that had been stronger than Tom, though, Harry thought uncomfortably. He didn’t know what was different. Maybe he’d get Tom to tell him, in time.
The hips beneath his bucked. Harry ground them down and watched as Tom’s head fell back.
“You’re going to turn over,” Harry said.
Instantly Tom resisted — and now the resistance wasn’t just for show, lights exploded around them, Tom’s legs lashed out, hissing curses from between his teeth. Harry deflected them and tried to control the damage to his house at the same time, except Tom was writhing, trying to plant his hand in Harry’s face to erupt some sort of flame curse. But Harry had defeated the Dark Lord every year of his life. He was not going to be stopped by one troublesome child.
Harry locked Tom’s legs, then his arms, and bit the back of his fucking neck, viciously hard, and instead of the next curse, Tom cried out and rutted back against Harry, who was hard as all depravity against Tom’s backside. Somehow the bite turned into apologetic sucking and kissing, but somehow Tom was still moaning and twitching every time Harry bit and was enjoying himself too much to keep up the pretense of fighting anymore.
Tom’s trousers were yanked down — he really wasn’t wearing underwear — and, with a quick charm that he used usually when he was jacking off to wet his hand, Harry drove his fingers into Tom with no other warning. A lightbulb erupted in the next room; Tom’s face was pressed against the tabletop, his vulgar mouth gasping for air, pretty face flushed because Harry was fucking his perfectly round arse with two long fingers. Harry drove them in hard, watching the way his arse bounced each time Harry’s palm struck it because he was sinking in every last inch of his fingers. And Tom was so loud, his voice an octave higher and breathier than usual, crying out and moaning.
Then Harry yanked up the back of his shirt and grabbed the back of Tom’s neck with his other hand, stilled all motion, and snarled, “How did you get all these scars?” Because Tom’s back was littered with scars, all over, neat and striped and methodical, just as described in the report he had received by owl earlier. “Who did this to you? Grindelwald?!”
Tom tried to rock back on Harry's now-unmoving fingers, but Harry pressed harder on his neck and then leaned in and bit, hard.
“Fuck!” Tom yelled.
“Tell me!”
“I did it,” Tom gasped, “I did— the enchantments on the house were all tied to me — I thought— if I died or weakened myself enough I would be able to get out— but it never worked — the Horcrux didn’t let me—“
Harry drove his hand back in with a furious, hammering rhythm that he knew was pounding Tom’s prostate.
Tom cried out again, and then came all over Harry’s table.
Harry did not stop fucking him then. In fact, Harry kept on going until Tom got hard a second time and began begging until Harry put just the tip of his cock into the tight squeeze of Tom’s entrance and jacked himself off until he came harder than he’d ever before, completely bowled over by his orgasm, filling Tom with his come and wanting nothing more than to put his fucking seed into this young terrible wizard forever and ever, have Tom dripping with his come while he tried to be so arrogant and bold and beautiful in front of other people.
And afterwards, immediately, felt savage and guilty as all hell.